[RECITAL OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS]

According to the Bible, Moses wrote the Ten Commandments on stone tablets and placed them in a golden box:  the Ark of the Covenant.  He then built a portable temple at the base of the mountain, a tabernacle.

The following model of the Holy Tabernacle has been created to the exact specifications provided in the Book of Exodus.

[DESCRIPTION OF THE TABERNACLE]

I just wanted to point out that the inclusion of a menorah in the computer-generated depiction of the first tabernacle struck me as a bit. . .odd.  Considering that menorahs commemorate an event that happened over a thousand years later.

No-one knows exactly what the Ark of the Covenant looked like.  The Bible claims that it was designed by God himself to house the Ten Commandments.  Based on descriptions in the Book of Exodus, people have attempted to reconstruct it, complete with gold carrying poles and a golden cover crowned by birds.  Whatever way it looked, it is clear that it was an exquisite work of gold.

The Bible says that a tribe called Dan helped to craft the golden ark.  Is it a coincidence that Homer calls the people buried at Mycenae Danaoi?

Probably.  Especially since there has been absolutely nothing to link the Mycenaeans with the Israelites.  And

JAMES CAMERON:

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Here is history that we do actually know, solidly:

Ahmose I became pharaoh of Thebes, a land subservient to Hyksos-ruled Lower Egypt.  The Hyksos had come from the east some uncertain amount of time (at least a century) earlier, and by the time of Ahmose were oppressing every other ethnic group in the area.  They were also polytheistic, just as pretty much everybody else at that time was; at Avaris they had a great big temple dedicated to Set (and Egyptian god whom they adopted), for example.

Thebes started skirmishing with the Hyksos during the reign of Ahmose’s father at the latest.  When his father died, Ahmose and his brother Khamose took up the fight.  Ahmose ended up becoming pharaoh in the early 16th Century BCE, and he successfully besieged Avaris (Khamose had tried and failed previously).  Ahmose defeated the Hyksos and chased them out of Egypt by force of arms.  He then followed them to make sure that they kept running, fighting several battles with them all the way well into Syria.  Obviously, the Biblical Exodus doesn’t include Moses being chased by Pharaoh all the way to the Euphrates.

Ahmose started rebuilding Egypt and its empire, and his successors continued the job.  A stash of hundreds of official letters from various parts of the Egyptian empire, dating from the 14th Century BCE, show that there was no sudden influx of newcomers showing up in Canaan and taking over.  Archaeological digs all through the region also show that everything in the area just continued the same as normal.  It isn’t until the 13th Century BCE that there are signs of a new group moving in; this is part of the reason why many Biblical scholars think that the 13th Century BCE is the date when the Israelites arrived in Canaan.  The date also matches the first ever records of a group or a people called the Israelites.  The date also matches some Biblical information that Jacobovici ignored, Exodus 1:11.  In that verse, it is mentioned that the Israelites build the cities of Pithom and Ramses. . .and we know that the city Ramses (Pi-Ramesses Aa-nakhtu) was built on the ruins of Avaris, many generations after the Hyksos Expulsion.  The Israelites built the city that was built long after the Israelites left?  Not likely, unless the ancient Egyptians had time machines (hmm. . .perhaps the movie Stargate was more true than we realise?).

So there is literally no evidence that links the Hyksos Expulsion to being the Exodus, and there is much evidence that the two events are different.  Most evidence about the Exodus dates it to several centuries later.

There is a theory that, while the departure of the Hyksos and the departure of the Israelites are totally unrelated, the arrival of the Hyksos in Egypt and the arrival of the Israelites are connected.  Nobody really has any clear idea of how the Hyksos arrived.  Some people think that it may have been as a conquering horde.  Others think that they arrived as a gradual migration and simply supplanted the Egyptians by numbers.  If the latter, then it’s not too far-fetched to supposed that other Semitic people might have sort of followed on their coat-tails.  If the Hyksos migrated to Egypt to get away from some problem in their old homeland (such as a famine), then why wouldn’t other groups who also were facing the same or similar problems follow them?

That connection is all entirely conjecture, of course.  But it is possible, and there isn’t any evidence to argue against it.  Unlike with many of Jacobovici’s ideas.

Whoof.. you’ve been busy…

But yes.. the ‘computer re-creation’ of the ‘third stele’ is completely bogus. They flipped the tails, etc. Talk about making your data match your conclusion..

Robin Bobcat - 27 May 2010 11:04 PM

Whoof.. you’ve been busy….

Heh, I didn’t do it all at once.  I started doing the research shortly after Dave introduced me to the documentary, whenever that was.  And then I gradually poked along at it when I had nothing else going on.

I’d originally thought that I’d just write up a short review, mentioning the things that he’d faked or messed up in the program.  But then I kept finding more.  And more.  And more.  And when I finished, I realised that I had about 60 pages of notes.  I considered for a bit whether or not to post all of that as it seemed a bit much, but then I figured that the whole purpose of this forum was revealing hoaxes and trickery and fakes.  So I went for it.

But tell us what you really think of the program, Acci.  

(Sincerely, thanks for all of the info, I promise I’ll take the time and read everything you’ve written.)

Good job! You really did your research and I apprciate your effort. You show why Christians and others should be educated about their beliefs and if one does not know something, that one should be willing to look up the data

daveprime - 28 May 2010 02:13 AM

But tell us what you really think of the program, Acci.

Not enough scantily-clad young women.

I am an ex associate - 28 May 2010 03:29 AM

Good job! You really did your research and I apprciate your effort. You show why Christians and others should be educated about their beliefs and if one does not know something, that one should be willing to look up the data

I’m always fine with Christians referring to the Bible when explaining their beliefs.  After all, the Bible is the basis of their beliefs.  But I really do find it amazing (and I get rather annoyed by) how many of the Christians referring to the Bible don’t really know what the Bible says.  It’s like Jacobovici here, when he does things such as say, “The Bible tells us that the Israelites were in Egypt for 200 years” when the Bible very plainly states, repeatedly, that it was twice as long.  If people are going to use the Bible as the basis of their beliefs, they ought to at least find out what the Bible says first!

Accipiter - 27 May 2010 10:28 PM

Whoa, wait, what?  Okay, first off, the Nile delta is known for its being a very long, gradual slope down under the sea to the bottom of the Mediterranean.  You’re not going to get too impressive of a mudslide on such a gradual slope.  Also, the edge of the African plate is tucked up under the Aegean and European and Turkish plates.  It has the weight of those plates holding it down.  Third, the shifting of the delta would have been towards the edge of the African plate, not away from it.  Assuming that this was indeed to change the center of balance of the African plate, it would make the northern edge of the plate drop, not rise.

Imagine what Jacobovici is describing like this:  a see-saw is in a playground.  On the very end of one side, a kid is sitting.  About halfway from the end of the other side sits a much bigger kid.  The end with the big kid is also wedged under a picnic table.

The see-saw is the African plate, the big kid the mass of the Nile delta, and the picnic table the European and other plates.

According to Jacobovici, the bigger kid starts sliding towards the end of his side of the see-saw.  That’s the Nile delta sliding down deeper into the water.

This then results in the side of the see-saw the bigger kid is on rising up higher.

That’s what Jacobovici’s mechanism for the parting of the Yam Suf is, that let the Israelites cross the sea.

I guess that Jacobovici never played on see-saws when he was a kid, and thus never learned the way levers and mass and physics work.

I think that the images you used are flawed.  If the bigger kid slid out along the teeter, then the end would indeed go down.  If, however, the teeter itself represented the land, and the bigger kid slid forward on it, then it would, indeed, rise.

Here, Dave, I’ll draw it out using a rough sketch of the actual plates and silt and whatnot, rather than by familiar playground analogy.  Prepare to be overwhelmed by my artistic skills. . .

For Jacobovici’s theory to work, it has to go like this.  He imagines the silt all piled up along the edge of the African Plate, like this:

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An earthquake causes a lot of the silt to slide down, removing a lot of mass from the edge of the African Plate:

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With that mass moved off the plate, the African Plate then rises up on that edge.

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That is the scenario Jacobovici is describing in his theory.  Unfortunately for his theory, the actual geography is not like he imagines it being.  This is how things are really set up there:

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This is how it would look if the silt slid down:

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It isn’t moving any mass off of the plate’s edge.  In fact, it is moving mass further from the plate’s center of gravity and closer to the plate’s edge.  And where the African Plate is meeting the European Plate, the African Plate is going under the other one.  So if the African Plate did move due to silt shifting, the only way it could move would be sinking downwards.  Which would, in Jacobovici’s scenario, have made the Reed Sea become even deeper rather than have made it possible to walk across.

Ah. Okay.  That makes perfect sense.  The teeter-totter analysis seemed to have the physics wrong, that’s all. (I kinda got it before, but seeing how the plates interconnect helps.)