Original subtitles

- [Tim] I never thought I would he caught up

in a story such as this,

because I live on the other side of the world.

On one hand, it's exciting to be making a film

that searches for the truth about the Exodus.

On the other hand, I must admit,

I'm a reluctant participant.

I never wanted to go to the Middle East.

I never wanted to be involved in controversy

because it means taking on the giants

of archaeology, religion and tradition.

But what I've found might shock and surprise you.

You can decide if it will change you,

like it has changed me.

- [Voiceover] The Exodus of the children of Israel

from Egypt and their journey to the Promised Land

is one of the most influential and important stories

in all of world history.

- [Benjamin] The stories in the Bible

are the most powerful narratives ever told.

It's not a coincidence that this book has held

the imagination of mankind for thousands of years

because the stories are remarkable.

- It's the most amazing book, if you think about it.

It's a book that covers about 4,000 years of history

and it really is the first history book

until the time of the Greeks.

Herodotus was supposed to he the first historian

but in fact I think Moses was.

- [Shimon] He remains, without any competition,

the greatest legislator of all time.

And as for the Ten Commandments

that he brought down from Sinai,

it is the foundation of our civilization.

Take away the Ten Commandments

and we are out of business.

- [Voiceover] Yet, against the idea

that the biblical account is true,

voices across our culture and around the world

are raised in protest.

These voices say that the biblical narrative

is nothing more than a myth, a fairytale.

And their antagonistic claims appear to he supported

by the findings of modern archaeology.

- [Israel Finkelstein] The Exodus did not happen

in the way that it is described in the text

on the background of the 13th century BC.

- I don't believe there was a single event

that we can call the Exodus,

archaeologically or historically.

- [Michael] It's 24 minutes past the hour

on the Michael Medved show, your daily dose of debate,

and right now, debating some of the most important

questions with Rabbi David Wolpe, who leads

one of America's largest Jewish congregations.

In 2001, Rabbi Wolpe created a national furor

when his Passover sermon challenged

the historical reality of the Exodus.

Rabbi Wolpe, what did you say?

- I said that the Exodus certainly didn't happen

the way the Bible depicted it, assuming that it was

a historical event in any description.

I think that if you look at it scientifically,

it's virtually indefensible to make the Bible's case.

But you also have to understand that your faith

isn't based on splitting seas or archaeological digs;

it's based on something much deeper.

- But if these are not facts, if this is a fairy story,

if this is fabricated somehow,

doesn't that undermine the religious meaning?

In other words, doesn't that change things?

- The extent to which it has a historical core

is very hard to say, but my deeper conviction about it

is that it's a story that,

whether it was true, it is true,

and those are two different things.

- That seems to he evading -- - Well, in other words,

things that aren't facts can he truths.

- What part of the Torah

would you grant

to be based upon historical reality?

- I can't tell you. I don't know.

I don't know and, although it may irk people, I don't care.

- [Voiceover] If the leading scholars agree

with the most outspoken atheists and agnostics,

if even some rabbis agree with the most skeptical

archaeologists that there's no evidence at all

that the Exodus ever really happened,

then what are the rest of us supposed to think?

If none of it happened,

then the two religions of the Bible,

Judaism and Christianity,

are both based on a gigantic lie.

It was the type of question that troubled

a filmmaker from Minneapolis named Timothy Mahoney.

As he probed more deeply, little did Mahoney realize

how far his journey would take him.

- [Tim] The more I looked into the Exodus,

the more I realized its significance.

I knew I had to investigate this story for myself,

and the first step was to explore whether there was

any hard evidence for the Exodus at all.

I began my journey by traveling to the very place

the Bible says it happened: the ancient land of Egypt.

I was raised as a Christian and I remember hearing

amazing stories from the Bible as a child,

and I believed them.

Stories about an ancient family of shepherds,

the sons of Jacob, who came from a foreign land to Egypt.

They were enslaved by the pharaoh,

then miraculously delivered out of Egypt

and journeyed across the desert

to conquer the Promised Land.

But, as I grew older,

I was challenged to lose those beliefs.

Now I just wanted to know the truth.

- [Voiceover] The Exodus is believed by most scholars

to have occurred in the reign of Ramesses II.

Ramesses was Egypt's greatest builder king.

Were these mighty monuments

built on the sweat and toil of Hebrew slaves?

- [Tim] If experts say there's no evidence

during the time of Ramesses,

why do they think he is the Pharaoh of the Exodus?

I'm no historian, so I had to find a way to visualize

how the history of ancient Egypt

related to the events of the Bible.

The thought came to me to imagine a Wall of Time

extending back to the earliest moments of civilization.

On the first level, Egyptian history,

and above it the events recorded in the Bible,

and at the bottom, a timeline of absolute dates,

an immovable base to gauge the events of history,

with great pylons marking every thousand years.

- [Voiceover] Over the course of 2,000 years,

Egypt experienced three great periods of power.

It began with the Old Kingdom,

with its great pyramids of stone.

Then came the Middle Kingdom,

the highpoint of art and literature.

Finally, the New Kingdom,

with its vast empires that dominated foreign lands.

These great periods of power were followed

by dark periods of disunity and weakness.

Ramesses II was a pharaoh of the New Kingdom

who ruled a grand empire

and filled Egypt with his monuments.

There is one crucial passage in the Bible

that leads many to chain the Exodus event

to the time of Pharaoh Ramesses,

in what is known as The Ramesses Exodus Theory.

-A key to that theory is the building

of the city of Ramesses mentioned in Exodus 1:1 I;

the Hebrews are making bricks to build the city of Ramesses,

or the storage facilities of Ramesses.

- [Voiceover] Professor James Hoffmeier

is one of the few Egyptologists

who has written extensively on the biblical Exodus.

- This important city, which we know Ramesses II built,

it's being excavated even as we speak

and continues to he studied.

This city has a very brief history.

By around 1100 BC, the city's gone.

It has a very narrow history of no more than 200 years.

So, the question is, if this building project

that the Israelites are involved in,

is Ramesses ||'s Delta residence,

then we have no escape but to say

this is an important chronological marker,

and that can only be somewhere in the 13th century BC.

- [Tim] Dates in the BC period

can be confusing to work with because they move

in the opposite direction to modern AD dates.

The farther back you go in time, the bigger the BC number.

So the Ramesses Exodus Theory places the Exodus

about 250 years before 1000 BC,

or at about 1250 BC.

I wanted an Egyptian perspective,

so I went to see Mansour Boraik,

director general of antiquities for Luxor,

one of Egypt's most important archaeological sites.

I asked Mansour if he was in agreement

that there was no evidence for the early Israelites

or the Exodus in Egypt.

- [Tim] Well it wasn't as if I hadn't heard this before,

but I was still hopeful of finding something

in the ruins of this magnificent civilization.

What I really needed, though, was physical evidence

of the cultural group that the Israelites were a part of:

Semites, coming down to live in Egypt

from a land called Canaan.

- [Voiceover] The problem is that no archaeological evidence

has turned up for these Semites

in the city built by Ramesses II.

- Him] But then, I heard of something

that seemed astonishing.

New archaeological discoveries of a city and a people

that appeared to match the biblical story,

made at the very location of the city of Ramesses,

where the Bible places the Israelites.

- [Voiceover] Mahoney would he interviewing

one of the world's most respected Egyptologists.

Professor Manfred Bietak and his Austrian team

have been digging in Egypt's delta

for over 3|] years at the site of Avaris.

Avaris lies directly below the southern sector

of the city of Ramesses.

- [Tim] I asked Manfred to tell me

about these exciting new finds.

- [Tim] This sounded exactly like the Bible.

Pharaoh gave his blessing by allowing the early Israelites

to freely settle in the best part of Egypt.

Once there, they and their flocks

prospered and multiplied greatly.

This was just what I was looking for.

So I asked him,

could these foreigners he the early Israelites?

- [Tim] I was stunned when Manfred said

it was a weak affair.

Why couldn't these he the Israelites

when they match the Bible's story so well?

- [Tim] What Manfred was telling me

is that the physical evidence of these people

is centuries too early to be connected

to the events of the Exodus.

This is profound,

because no Israelites in Egypt means no Exodus,

and no Exodus means that the foundation

of Judaism is a myth.

And for Christians, it means Jesus Christ

and the writers of the New Testament got it wrong

because they all accepted the reality

of Moses and the Exodus, and built their teachings on them.

I returned home from Egypt.

I wanted to be open-minded,

but as I replayed the interview in my thoughts,

a cold chill came over me.

All my life I had believed the Bible's stories to be true.

I know some people say

you don't need any evidence, just have faith.

But if there's no hard evidence for any of it,

had I been believing in a lie all this time?

And what about my kids and grandkids?

What should they put their faith in?

Whether you believe these stories or not,

isn't it important to know what's really true?

The more I thought about it,

the more I realized I couldn't stop now,

no matter how hard it would he.

I made a decision.

I had to go back to Egypt.

- [Voiceover] Mahoney arranged to meet with one

of America's leading Egyptologists, Professor Kent Weeks.

He rediscovered KV5, the tomb of the sons

of Ramesses II in the Valley of the Kings.

He brought up a crucial issue

when considering the problems with these events.

-[Kent] Ramesses II as the Pharaoh of the Exodus,

how can we prove that?

Chronology doesn't really help.

The chronology of Egypt is still a bit ambiguous.

Correlations between Egyptian chronology

and that of other cultures

in the ancient Near East is even more confusing.

We don't know precisely when the Exodus happened.

Some people say it was Ramesses II.

It makes nice theater because he was

a great powerful ruler, everybody knows his name,

he built fantastic monuments.

Everything really is appealing

to have him he the one to choose.

- Because he'd be a very large opponent, wouldn't he?

- He would he indeed.

So, yeah, pick Ramesses II as the pharaoh of the Exodus,

but other Egyptologists disagree.

Almost any pharaoh could he the pharaoh of the Exodus,

if we can prove there even was an Exodus.

- [Tim] But if Ramesses wasn't the pharaoh of the Exodus,

then who was?

Looking for the Exodus in a different time

or reign could be the solution.

Maybe Ramesses is the problem?

I found Mansour's openness refreshing.

- [Tim] It was clear, I needed a new approach.

What might even he considered a scientific approach,

beginning by taking a closer look

at the details of the biblical story.

- [Voiceover] The oldest accounts of the Exodus

were written down in Hebrew,

in the first five books of the Bible known as the Torah.

- [Tim] I asked Rabbi Manis Friedman,

a member of Judaism's Orthodox branch,

to recount the ancient stories of the Bible

from these sacred scrolls.

In order to test the Exodus fairly,

I wanted to know what the story was actually claiming.

- [Manis] The story of the Exodus

begins before the Israelites leave Egypt.

It begins with Abraham

when God brings him to the land of Canaan

and makes a covenant with him

and, in that covenant, spells out the entire Exodus.

The Lord said to Abraham, “All this land you see

“I will give to you and your offspring forever.

“Go, walk through the length and breadth of this land,

“for I am giving it to you.”

On that day, the Lord made a covenant,

a formal promise to Abraham.

He said, "To your descendants, I give this land."

God led Abraham outside and He said,

"Look up to heaven and count the stars, if you can.

"So numerous will your offspring be."

And God said, "Your descendants will he foreigners

"in a country not their own.

"They will he enslaved and oppressed.

"But I will judge the nation they serve as slaves,

"and afterward they will come out

"with great possessions and return here."

- [Voiceover] According to the text,

the events of the Exodus were not a historical accident.

They were directed by the God of Abraham

every step of the way.

- [Tim] As my team and I looked more closely

at this account, we could see that

these biblical events formed a sequence,

a sequence that could guide the entire investigation.

I imagined the six steps of the biblical sequence,

the major events of the Exodus story,

running parallel to Egyptian history, starting with:

the arrival of Abraham's descendants in Egypt,

their tremendous multiplication,

their descent into slavery,

the judgment of the nation that enslaved them,

their deliverance and exodus out of Egypt,

and, finally, in Canaan,

their conquest of the Promised Land.

If the Exodus really happened,

there are elements in the story that are so big

that you'd think some remnants of evidence

would've been left behind, somewhere in Egypt's history.

We knew science solved problems

by looking for patterns of evidence

and a truly scientific approach looks for those patterns,

no matter where they exist.

I set out to see whether a pattern

matching this sequence could he found,

starting with the first step,

the "arrival" of the Israelites in Egypt.

- The book of Genesis tells us

that the first descendant of Abraham to arrive in Egypt

was his great-grandson, Joseph the son of Jacob.

Joseph's brothers had sold him as a slave,

to a caravan of traders who brought him down to Egypt.

Then, in an amazing turn of events,

he rises to become the highest official in Egypt,

he saves the country from a terrible famine,

enables his father, Jacob, and his entire family

to settle in the best part of the land,

a place called Goshen.

- [Tim] My objective was to see if any specific evidence

had been uncovered of this Semitic family-group

arriving in Egypt, as told in the Bible.

So, far I had none. - So far, not.

We only know we have some evidence of shepherds --

So far, not.

- [Tim] I was stuck.

But that was soon to change, when suddenly,

something was telling me to go to my library

and search out a book given to me a year earlier,

that I had never read.

What startled me was that this author had answers

to the very doubts that Beitek had raised in me.

He had spent his whole life exploring the Middle East,

a man familiar with the mysterious inscriptions

and hieroglyphs of the pharaohs,

and what they might reveal about the biblical stories.

- [Voiceover] David Rohl, author, historian

and Egyptologist is an agnostic,

someone who remains unconvinced of the existence of God.

Yet, he clearly sees archaeological evidence

of the biblical Joseph, Jacob and the early Hebrews

in the Nile Delta region of Egypt.

Rohl believes that many Egyptologists

have missed evidence for the Exodus

because they have been looking for it

in the wrong time period.

While most scholars think that the events

of the Exodus happened in the New Kingdom,

David Roh|'s view would put the Exodus

in an entirely different period,

the earlier Middle Kingdom,

where he claims evidence for the Exodus can be seen.

- [Tim] I wanted him to explain why he had come

to such a different conclusion than Manfred Bietak

about Joseph and the early Israelites.

Tell me, who is Manfred Bietak?

- Manfred Bietak is probably

one of the greatest archaeologists alive today

and he's dug up one of the most important sites

in the eastern delta, a city called Avaris,

which is in the land of Goshen, which the Bible calls it.

And I believe this is the place

where Joseph and his brethren lived.

- Well, I went to see Manfred Bietak - [David] Right.

- and that's not what he said.

He said there's no evidence of this at the time of Ramesses.

- Exactly right. Most scholars will say,

if you look at the city of Ramesses,

there are no Asiatics there, there are no western Asiatics

living at that particular city.

But dig down a hit a little bit deeper

and you do find a city full of Asiatics.

- Yeah, but the Bible says it happened

at the time of Ramesses. - [David] Uh-huh.

- What are you saying?

- [David] I'm saying that this particular mention

of the city of Ramesses, the building of Ramesses,

is what we call an "anachronism".

It's something that's been added

into the text later by an editor.

So what the editor is basically saying is,

this is the place where the Israelites built the store city

and we know it today as Ramesses.

Well, in the ancient times, it was called Avaris.

- Okay, so the people would know the area, the region --

- The people of the Bible would've known

where Ramesses was, and where therefore

their ancestors actually built the city.

- [Tim] I also found that the Bible in the book of Genesis,

uses the word "Ramesses" hundreds of years

before Pharaoh Ramesses or his city existed,

to describe the land where Joseph's family settled.

So, if the name Ramesses in Genesis

does not refer to the time of Pharaoh Ramesses II,

then why should the mention of Ramesses

in the book of Exodus be any different?

- [David] Now, this Avaris is the city

which lies under the biblical Ramesses.

Ramesses of the New Kingdom,

Avaris of the Middle Kingdom, the 13th Dynasty.

It lies underneath the city that's mentioned in the Bible.

So, when Bietak digs up a huge population

of Semitic speaking peoples with Semitic culture,

living in this city of Avaris for several hundred years,

and then, at the end of the period, these Semites all leave,

depart with their belongings and abandon the city,

whatever Manfred says, that to me

sounds awfully like the Israelites.

- Well what he told me was that there was no connection.

- [David] Well, look at the evidence that you've got here.

Right at the beginning, at the heart

of this community at the end of the 12th Dynasty,

we see a Syrian house appear.

The Austrians call them Mittelsaal houses.

This type of house is found in North Syria,

the area where Abraham came from.

It's exactly the same style of house

you'd expect Jacob to build for himself in Egypt.

And we know that the Israelites sought their brides

from Harran in that region.

They all went back to get their brides from there.

So, the culture that turns up in Egypt

at the end of the 12th Dynasty

seems to have come from North Syria originally.

- [Tim] So, what is the connection with Joseph at Avaris?

- Well after this house of Jacob, if we can call it that,

is built, eventually it's flattened,

and on top of it an Egyptian palace is constructed,

Egyptian architecture this time.

However, the occupant was not Egyptian.

The palace had courtyards, colonnades, audience chambers.

There was even a robing room.

it obviously belonged to some high official of state,

who was very, very important to that state,

because when somebody gets a palace like this

given to them, it means they've been honored

for what they've done for the state.

Now, in the garden behind the palace,

the archaeologists found 12 main graves

with memorial chapels on top of them.

- [Tim] You have 12 graves? - [David] We have 12 graves.

- But why would that be significant?

- Well, think about it: how many sons did Jacob have?

- He had 12. - How many tribes were there?

- Twelve tribes. - Exactly.

And what's also amazing is the palace had a facade,

a portico with 12 pillars.

So you've got 12 sons, 12 tribes, 12 pillars, and 12 tombs.

- Interesting. - Yeah. Is that all coincidence?

Now, one of these 12 graves was very special,

because it was a pyramid tomb.

This in itself is extraordinary because only pharaohs

and queens had pyramid tombs at this time.

Yet the person buried in this tomb was not a king.

Even so, he was honored with a king's burial.

And, inside the chapel of the tomb, was a statue.

What we know from the statue is that this man had red hair.

He had pale yellow skin,

which is how Egyptians depict northerners.

He had a throw stick across his shoulder,

a unique symbol of office made for this Asiatic official

living in the land of Goshen.

And on the back of his shoulder,

we see the faintest remains of paint,

colored stripes from a multicolored coat.

And that matches exactly

with the story of Joseph in the Bible.

The multicolored coat is a gift,

which shows that he was the favorite of the father.

And it almost becomes his insignia, this coat.

It’s the thing we remember about him most of all.

- Do you know of any other statues

of a Semite of this kind in Egypt?

- There is nothing else like this

in the whole of Egyptian history, nothing at all.

- [Voiceover] David Rohl is not the only one

to see a connection with Joseph at Avaris.

Mahoney went to see Professor Charles Aling,

an Egyptologist who has also investigated

the events of the Exodus and its connection to Egypt.

- Would it be unusual for a tomb to have a statue!

- No. It's unusual to have one this large.

This would he probably twice

the size of a normal human being.

- [Tim] What does that tell you when the statue's larger?

- That it's a very important person.

Now of course, this is not a pharaoh’s tomb or a palace,

but the man who lived there, you can identify

his nationality by looking at the fragments of the statue.

Three things: the hairstyle he has,

which we often call the mushroom hairstyle;

and then, secondly, the weapon he carries

over his shoulder, called a throw-stick,

which we would associate with like an Australian boomerang;

and then the coloration of the skin, the skin is yellow.

All those things indicate that this would

have been a Syro-Palestinian.

- [Tim] Dr. Aling, do you think this is Joseph?

- Either it is Joseph, or it's somebody that has

a career remarkably the same as Joseph did.

It's just an incredible thing

to find this at this time period.

- [Voiceover] The Exodus was a story

about the birth of a nation.

It was time for Mahoney to go to Israel.

This gave him the unique opportunity

to meet with Israel's president, Shimon Peres,

and hear his perspective about the character of Joseph

and his rise from slavery to governing Pharaoh's court.

- [Tim] If you look at the way the story is written,

God chose him for a mission!

- [Manis] With God's help, Joseph was able to save Egypt

by warning of a coming calamity.

Seven years of plenty would he followed

by seven years of terrible famine.

Pharaoh is so impressed that he puts Joseph

in charge of preparing for the famine,

and makes him second in command over the entire country.

- He managed to achieve this by foretelling

or explaining the dreams of Pharaoh

about cattle coming out of the water of the Nile.

First of all as seven fat cows and then seven lean cows

come out and devour the fat cows.

It's an extraordinary story, but the clue here is that

these cows are coming out of the Nile.

It's the Nile itself which is the cause

of both the plenty and the famine.

- [Tim] If David's interpretation is right,

then the regulation of the Nile may have been key

in planning for the coming famine.

- [David] There's a canal, or a waterway,

that connects the Nile to the Fayum basin,

which is a large lake area, which has the name Bahr Yusef,

which means the waterway of Joseph.

This goes back thousands of years, as far as we can tell.

- Why do you think that that canal has that name!

- Because I think he made it.

I think it was under his instructions,

as vizier of Egypt, that that canal was cut.

And it was cut to divert half the water

from the Nile into the Fayum basin.

You then get back to the situation where

the water levels are just right for growing crops.

- Can you see it today? - It's still in use today.

And the construction of this water diversion system

is dated to the same period

as the early settlement at Avaris.

- Joseph gathers up all the grain

during the seven years of plenty in Egypt.

He gathered as much as the sand of the sea.

And then the famine comes to the entire region,

and only Egypt has hread.

So everyone comes to Joseph for what they need for survival.

When their money runs out, they sold their animals.

When that ran out, they sold their land,

and eventually they sold themselves.

So Pharaoh, hy the end of the seven years,

owns everything in Egypt.

- [Voiceover] Mahoney wanted to know

if there ever was a time in this era

when a dramatic shift of wealth and power

occurred between the people of Egypt and the pharaoh.

He went to Pennsylvania

to see an archaeologist who's spent many years

studying the Exodus and the Conquest.

His name is Dr. Bryant Wood.

- [Bryant] When we look at Egyptian history,

we find something very significant

happened at this exact time.

Egypt was divided up into areas called nomes,

kind of like districts, all over the country.

And the leaders of these nomes

had tremendous wealth and tremendous power.

We get to a point in Egyptian history

when suddenly that all changes,

and all the wealth is concentrated with the pharaoh.

What on earth happened here?

If you read the Egyptian history books,

there is no explanation for it.

They don't know what happened, how it happened.

I mean this was a tremendous socio-economic change.

- Well, what do you think happened?

- [Bryant] Well, we have the answer in the Bible,

and it's Joseph's famine policy,

and he brings the wealth into Pharaoh,

and it fits exactly with Egyptian history.

- [Tim] David believes these events occurred

during the reigns of two important Middle Kingdom pharaohs.

- [David] This key time is during the co-regency

between Senuseret III and his son, Amenemhat III.

I believe this is the time of the famine

and that Amenemhat was Joseph's pharaoh.

Amenemhat is depicted with worry lines.

His ears are turned out so that he can listen

to the concerns of the people.

He's not depicted in the usual bland way that you see

on all the other statues of past and future pharaohs.

And I think this is an indication that, in his time,

Egypt was experiencing serious problems.

And, guess what! He builds his pyramid

right next to Bahr Yussef, the "Waterway of Joseph".

- [Voiceover] The amount of archaeological evidence

matching the first step of Arrival in the biblical sequence

seemed overwhelming to Mahoney.

The syrian-styled house that appeared in the Delta

along with a palace fit for royalty

whose occupant was a high Semitic official

from the Canaan area, who wore a multicolored coat.

The Waterway of Joseph,

contemporary with the rise of Avaris.

The end of influence and wealth for the regional governors

as the power of Pharaoh reached new heights.

Yet these events converged at a time

when the statues of the pharaohs were depicted

in a unique care-worn way,

the tell-tale signs of a kingdom in distress.

- Well, why is it we've never heard of these finds?

- [David] Because in the scheme that's used by scholars

to date all these events, they're way too early.

They're much too early to he Israelites.

I'm basically saying, why not call a spade a spade?

- [Voiceover] At the pyramid tomb of Avaris,

excavations revealed one other important piece of evidence.

- [David] The crucial clue for me,

which says to me that this man

with the multicolored coat is Joseph,

is found in the story of Exodus.

When Joseph is on his death bed,

he tells his brethren that when they leave,

they must take his body with them to the Promised Land.

What matches the story even more incredibly

is that pyramid tomb was empty

when the archaeologists found it.

There was nothing in it at all apart from

a few fragments of this smashed statue.

There were no bones, there were no mummy beads,

no coffin wood, nothing. It was cleaned out.

- [Tim] So it was a grave robber! - Not a grave robber.

What grave robber is going to take the bones?

Bones are intrinsically of no value whatsoever

and nobody takes the bones.

Only people who are treating the body

with reverence take the bones.

The body was taken out

and all the grave goods were taken out.

I think this is the tomb of Joseph,

the pyramid tomb of Joseph,

honored by Pharaoh with a colossal statue,

that when Moses decided to take the people out of Egypt,

he made sure he fulfilled that promise to Joseph,

to take the body out of the tomb and take it to Shechem

and bury him in the Promised Land.

- [Voiceover] This location, photographed in the 1800’s,

is where many believe Joseph's hones

were finally laid to rest

in the ancient town of Shechem in Canaan.

The city is known today as Nablus on the West Bank,

where this tomb has been at the center

of much political and religious tension.

- [Tim] The Exodus is surrounded

hy controversy on many levels.

Even David Rohl suggesting specific evidence of Joseph

and the early Israelites‘ arrival in Egypt

is archaeologically controversial

because he looks earlier in time

than what is conventionally accepted.

But, at this stage, I didn't care.

I was determined to stick with the guidelines

of the investigation, looking for a pattern of evidence

wherever it might exist.

- [Voiceover] Then David Rohl began to tell about

the remarkable expansion that happened at Avaris,

which fits the next step of the sequence.

What the Bible describes as

"exceedingly great multiplication."

- [Manis] So Joseph dies,

and his brothers and their entire generation.

The Israelites are multiplying and they're fruitful,

exceedingly, until they fill the land.

- We see a virgin land with no population at all

and suddenly a small group of Semitic people settle there,

a dozen houses or so, about 70 or 100 people, all told.

And over a period of maybe three or four generations,

it becomes a very large city,

and it's one of the largest cities in the ancient world.

This city is a city of foreigners in the Egyptian delta

and it's been allowed by the Egyptian state.

At this stage, there's no slaves involved here.

We're talking about Semitic peoples coming in,

living here, bringing their flocks with them and surviving

in such a way that they become quite rich and wealthy.

- We do know that there was a large

Semitic-speaking population,

probably came in from Syria, Canaan

sometime in the early part of the second millennium BC.

Their remains have been found at a number of sites.

We have tombs that are clearly those of foreigners, Semites.

We can tell this by the pottery, by the kind of weapons.

These are not Egyptian-type daggers.

They have donkeys, in some cases, buried with them.

This was not an Egyptian practice.

We can't say for sure that any of these were Hebrews,

but we probably couldn't distinguish a Hebrew

from a Canaanite in Egypt, culturally speaking, anyway.

- [Voiceover] Mahoney traveled to Bristol, England

to meet with a scholarwho had information

about the expansion of these people in the Delta.

John Bimson is a Professor of Dld Testament

at Trinity College, Bristol.

He specializes in biblical history

and its related archaeology.

Bimson sees a clear connection between

the growth of Semitic sites in the Delta

and the biblical account.

- [Tim] How many sites would there have been!

- You've got a good many settlements, 20 or more,

which would fit the land of Goshen,

where the Bible says the Israelites were settled.

Many of these have not been fully excavated yet.

- [Tim] That are similar to the Avaris site‘!

- [John] We don't know whether they're as big.

Until people start digging there,

the Avaris site, of course, no one knew

how big that was until excavation began.

So there could be a lot of stuff in the ground

waiting to be discovered and to throw a lot more light

on this period of Asiatic settlement.

- [Voiceover] The only time that the archaeology

shows massive numbers of Semites living in ancient Egypt

is in this earlier period around the Middle Kingdom.

This is strikingly different from

the New Kingdom and the time of Ramesses,

when there is no evidence of this.

when there is no evidence of this.

- [Tim] The question is, does the Middle Kingdom

also contain evidence for the next step

of the biblical sequence: "slavery”?

- [Voiceover] Cecil B. DeMille portrayed

this slavery in two of his famous films,

both called The Ten Commandments.

Although Hollywood likes to focus

on the Israelites moving large blocks of stone,

the Bible never mentions this.

- [Manis] A new pharaoh arises,

and he doesn't remember Joseph.

He enslaves the people because they're becoming

too numerous and becoming a threat.

So he puts them to work and embitters their lives

building store cities of Pithom and Ramesses

and makes them create bricks out of mud and straw.

- [Tim] It was intriguing to see this type

of construction in different parts of Egypt.

Were any of these bricks

molded by the hands of Israelite slaves!

However, Mansour was quick to remind me

that these types of mud bricks are present

throughout Egypt's history

and don't prove any connection to the Israelites.

But is there any slavery evidence

matching the Bible at Avaris,

the older city beneath Ramesses?

David, what does the archaeological record

reveal at this location?

- [David] We've got a situation of prosperity

followed by a lack of prosperity and a shortage of life.

We begin to see in the graves of these people

Harris Lines in the bones,

which indicate shortage of food and nutrients.

These people suddenly have become impoverished

and they're dying at an age typically

of between 32 and 34 years.

So how do we explain that?

What is the mechanism that we would understand

why these people only lived to such a short age?

And the obvious answer is slavery.

- The descriptions of slavery

was so horrible,

downhearted.

To take a whole people and make from them

an inhumane group of men,

working so hard.

They wanted to free themselves.

- The Bible then tells us that the more

the Hebrews were oppressed, the more they multiplied

and the more they spread throughout the land of Egypt.

Pharaoh gives the order

for all the baby boys who are born

to be thrown into the river by the Egyptians.

It was during this time Moses is born,

and in fear for his life, his mother hides him in a basket

and floats it among the reeds of the river Nile.

(baby cries)

But God is watching over baby Moses,

and Pharaoh's daughter comes down to bathe in the Nile.

She finds him, adopts him, and names him Moses,

which means, "drawn from the water".

- [Tim] Is there anything in Egyptian archaeology

that might reflect this biblical detail,

the killing of Hebrew infant boys?

- [David] At this particular point, we start to see

an increase in the number of infant burials at the site.

Now normally, in a typical Middle Bronze Age cemetery,

we'll get something like 25% of burials of infants.

In this particular case, the figure jumps up

to an extraordinary figure.

-[Tim] David directed me to the dig reports from Avaris,

where Bietak’s team referred to what they called,

"an extremely high mortality rate of newborns."

When all the children's graves

aged 10 and younger were identified,

it was found that nearly 50% died

in the first three months of life.

Okay, maybe this was just an epidemic

that hit the newborns especially hard.

But when the graves of those who made it

to adulthood were examined, it was seen

that there were 60% females to 40% males.

The reduction appears to have been

in the male side of the population.

So could this massive increase in infant burials

at Avaris be evidence for the killing

of the male Israelite children?

It's an intriguing thought,

but it made me sad to think of what it could have meant,

the murder of thousands of innocent boys.

- [Voiceover] For generations, the Exodus story

has given hope to people around the world

in their quest for liberation,

inspired by the freeing of the slaves

from the most powerful nation on earth.

But were the hopes and dreams of all those people

merely based on a myth?

- [James] Who would invent a story

about our ancestors were slaves?

I, that, just, just, you know, I can see people saying,

“Our ancestors were princes.

“Our ancestors were great merchants.

“Our ancestors were something wonderful

"and glorious and noble,"

But, ‘We were slaves.”? Why?

I mean, if you are going to dream up a story,

surely you'd come up with a better one than that.

- [Tim] And if none of it happened,

how do you explain an Egyptian papyrus

with a list of slave names that seem to come

right out of the pages of the Bible?

- There's one particular document which is quite amazing.

It's called the Brooklyn Papyrus and this actually

is a list of domestic servants from one estate.

We have maybe up to 100 people listed as slaves in Egypt.

When we look at those names,

70% of them are Semitic names,

and you can literally pick off Israelite names in there:

Menahem; Issachar and Asher, the names

of two of the tribes of Israel;

Shiphrah, one of the Hebrew midwives in the Exodus story,

a name that appears in this document.

These are Hebrew, Israelite slaves

and they're in a papyrus from the 13th Dynasty.

Not from the 19th Dynasty, not from the time

of Ramesses II in the New Kingdom,

but from the 13th Dynasty, the Middle Kingdom.

- What does this mean to you?

What does it say?

- This is real evidence for the time

when the Israelites were in Egypt as slaves.

It's when you get a text,

suddenly you've got history.

Archaeology, you have to interpret.

When you have a text, this is something very different.

- [Voiceover] This slave list is predominantly female,

which matches the grave evidence from Avaris.

- [Manis] The fact that they continued to multiply

despite the oppression, despite the slavery,

despite the boys being killed,

it just shows that there was a divine plan here at work

and that this whole event was miraculous.

- [Tim] The thing that I'm puzzled by is

why so many Egyptologists ignore the Brooklyn Papyrus.

- Although everybody recognizes

that this list is a list of Semitic slaves,

and everybody recognizes that the names appearing in here

are also Israelite names, these can't be the Israelites,

because it's the wrong time period.

The Israelites are much later in history.

So these people we're seeing here

in this Brooklyn Papyrus cannot be the Israelites.

- So that's why they disregard it?

- So they put it to one side

and say it's another coincidence.

- [Voiceover] So there appears to be strong evidence

matching the Multiplication and Slavery steps

of the biblical sequence.

Indication of a rapid expansion

of the Semitic population at Avaris,

the only time in Egyptian history that there is evidence

of Semites dominating the Delta like this.

These Semites begin free, powerful and prosperous,

but then succumb to impoverishment and malnutrition.

There is a sharp rise in the number of infant burials.

Near the end of this period comes a list of slaves,

many with Hebrew names.

And all this occurring 400 years earlier

than would be expected with the Ramesses Exodus.

- [Tim] But what if all these finds

in the Middle Kingdom are not a coincidence

and the Exodus actually did happen

much earlier than the reign of Ramesses?

To see if that's the case,

I would need to look more closely

at the details of the biblical story concerning

the next step of the sequence; the judgment of Egypt

and the Israelites‘ deliverance from bondage.

- [Voiceover] The Bible records that Moses

fled to the land of Midian.

After 40 years of living as a shepherd,

Moses first encountered God.

- [Manis] Moses sees a bush from the distance,

and it's on fire, but it's not being consumed.

So, curious, he approaches to see what's going on

and God says, “Don't come any closer.

“Remove your shoes, for this place is a holy place.”

God said, “I have surely seen the oppression

“of my people who are in Egypt,

“and I have also heard their cry.“

like a shepherd rescuing his sheep, God commands Moses

to go back to Egypt and tell Pharaoh,

“Let My people go, so that they may serve Me.“

Moses comes to Pharaoh.

Pharaoh does not listen, refuses to let the people go,

and God sends the first of a series

of spectacular plagues against the land of Egypt.

- James] In Exodus chapter 5,

the God of Israel says, “Let my people go.“

Pharaoh says, “Who is the Lord‘!

“Who is Jehovah, who is Yahweh

“that I should listen to him!”

And so we have setting up there this contest.

Who really is the god to be obeyed?

Who is the one in control of things?

And, in the Egyptian view of things,

Pharaoh was the god of the Egyptian state.

He was responsible for cosmic order.

He was responsible for the proper flow of the Nile,

the rising of the sun,

the fertility of the fields and so on.

And now we have the God of Israel, the God of Creation,

of the Bible, who's saying, “Now, wait a minute.

“That's not what you do.

“I’m the one who controls all these things.“

So He begins with the Nile

and ends in the ninth plague with the sun.

And these two things that Pharaoh is said to control

are completely outside of his control.

- [Manis] God protected the children of Israel

from these plagues, while the rest of the land

was being devastated by them.

To where Pharaoh's servants themselves pleaded with him,

saying that this was the finger of God

and that Egypt was being ruined.

But Pharaoh would not relent.

He knew that Egypt depended

on the work of these foreign slaves.

- [Voiceover] In Israel, Mahoney also had the privilege

to speak with the Prime Minister.

Although seen by most as a political figure,

Benjamin Netanyahu was also an author

and historian, like his father.

- [Tim] Tell me about the effect the Exodus has had

upon civilizations in the last 3,000 years.

- Moses was the greatest revolutionary of all time.

Remember that in antiquity there were grand empires

that were based on one principle and that is slavery,

and Moses challenged that twice.

He challenged it by taking his people who were slaves

in bondage in Egypt and freed them

and took them to their Promised Land.

But he also challenged it by providing a code,

a moral code for mankind that said

that it is not the king or the emperor

that decides the law, there's a higher law

and these were absolutely revolutionary ideas.

- [Voiceover] The text then says that God sent

the tenth and final plague to force Pharaoh's hand:

the death of the firstborn of man and beast.

The Lord told the Israelites

that each household was to slaughter a lamb

and mark the doorposts with the blood of the lamb.

And on that horrible night,

death passed over all the homes marked with blood.

But in every home that wasn't marked,

all the firstborn males died.

(loud crying and wailing)

There was crying and wailing in every Egyptian home

because each family had lost someone.

- [Manis] The tenth plague,

the death of the firstborn, affected everybody.

Even Pharaoh's firstborn died that night,

and the will of the people, the Egyptians,

was completely shattered.

The tenth plague broke Pharaoh's defiance of God,

and he finally let Moses and the people go.

But then, Pharaoh changes his mind,

pursues the Israelites with his army,

and, at the sea, God parts the waters

so that the Israelites can escape,

while it destroys the entire Egyptian army.

- [Voiceover] Every year, Jewish families

from around the world celebrate the deliverance

of Israel from Egypt during the Passover feast.

Records confirm that the Passover

has been observed for thousands of years.

Many believe it is difficult to explain

the origin of Passover if there were

no real event on which it was based.

While in Jerusalem, Mahoney went to speak

with Rabbi David Hartman,

the founder of the Shalom Hartman Institute.

- [David] Each year, we celebrate

the Exodus as if we were there.

We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt

and we dramatically celebrate the Passover Seder

as if we are participants.

So there's always a renewal, always a renewed giving,

a new spirit into the Passover Exodus story.

Because in remembering the Exodus,

we remember that in the dark conditions of history,

God, the Lord, had in some way made possible,

through Moses, our liberation.

- [Voiceover] But what about those

who think the Exodus never happened?

Noted Israeli archaeologist, Israel Finkelstein,

specializes in the ancient history of the land of Israel.

In his infiuential book, The Bible Unearthed,

he has argued that the Exodus did not happen

in the manner described in the Bible.

He proposes that it was based on vague memories of events,

written down for political motives centuries later.

- Do you believe in celebrating the Passover?

- [Tim] What do you say to people

who are concerned with the idea

that these stories didn't happen as they were written?

- [Tim] Rabbi Wolpe has said

that Professor Finkelstein's work

has greatly influenced his thinking.

- The idea of the Exodus and the Revelation,

however you configure it,

it is central to the Jewish tradition.

But I think that doesn't mean that you have to believe

that the Torah gives a historical account of it.

I don't think the Torah is a book of facts.

It's a book of meaning.

- [Jim] However, John Bimson shared a very different view.

- John] History and theology

are tightly intertwined in the Bible.

If you took away the historical basis,

then you've really deprived it

of a lot of its theological truth.

So much of what the Dld Testament says

about the character of God and His purposes

in calling Israel are intertwined

with this story of these people coming out of Egypt

and entering the Promised Land.

So history and theology

are tightly intertwined in the Bible.

- [Tim] After more than a decade of searching,

this is what it comes down to.

Is the Bible's account true history,

or is it simply the traditions of a devout people?

If the judgment happened as described in the Bible,

Egyptian society would have collapsed.

Loss of their agriculture, loss of their first-born sons,

loss of their slave-force, and the loss of their army.

In fact, Moses recorded that Egypt was still suffering

from defeat 40 years after the Exodus.

- [Voiceover] Critics are quick to point out

that there is no such record from Egypt

of supernatural judgment and devastation.

But others believe there is an Egyptian document

that actually gives an eyewitness account

of the plagues and chaos surrounding the Exodus.

Mahoney went to Holland to meet

the curator of the Leiden Museum,

where this significant papyrus is housed.

But Egyptologist Maarten Raven sees no evidence

for the Exodus in this document or anywhere else.

- The story of the Exodus is described in the Old Testament.

It's part of the national history

of the Jewish people, or so they say.

We have no independent evidence

that this is a real historical event.

We can believe it because we believe in the Bible?

There are no Egyptian sources that describe it.

There are no other documents.

There are no archaeological sources

that could prove this took place as a mass exodus.

- [Voiceover] Raven's position, again,

is that of most Egyptologists today.

But there are some scholars who suggest

that descriptions found in this Egyptian document

bear a remarkable resemblance to the plagues of the Bible,

only from an Egyptian point of view.

Written by a scribe named Ipuwer, the papyrus known as

“The Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage“

poetically describes a series of calamities

and the chaos that followed.

- [Maarten] Ipuwer, we don't know who he was,

but he was obviously somebody in a position

to address his majesty, the king.

There's only one copy of this specific text

and that is here in the Leiden Museum.

It's a very, very vivid report,

or would be report, of what happens to Egypt

when the central power falls away.

- [Tim] Many believe a collapse of Egypt's power

is exactly what would have happened

due to the plagues of Exodus.

And as I compared the book of Exodus

to the writings of Ipuwer,

I too was intrigued by the similarities.

-To convince Pharaoh, God says,

“Take some water from the Nile and pour it on the ground,

“and as it hits the ground it will turn into blood.“

- [Egyptian voice] Behold, Egypt is fallen

to the pouring of water.

And he who poured water on the ground

seizes the mighty in misery.

- [Manis] And all the water in the Nile turned into blood.

And the fish of the Nile died, and the Nile reeked,

so that the Egyptians could not drink water from the Nile.

- [Egyptian voice] The River is blood.

If you drink of it, you lose your humanity,

and thirst for water.

- [Manis] All the livestock of the Egyptians died.

(thunder cracks) Fire ran down from heaven

and the Lord sent hail upon the land.

Even the flax and the barley were smitten.

- [Egyptian voice] Gone is the barley of abundance,

food supplies are running short.

The nobles hunger and suffer.

Those who had shelter are in the dark of the storm.

(thunder rumbles)

- I see no connection between the papyrus of Ipuwer

and the story of the Plagues of Egypt.

It is, in a way, in a very indirect way,

an eyewitness report of a historical period.

It pretends to be such a report, but in fact it isn't.

- At midnight, the Lord struck down

all the firstborn in the land of Egypt,

from the firstborn of Pharaoh, sitting on his throne,

to the firstborn of the captive in the dungeon.

- [Egyptian voice] Behold, plague sweeps the land,

blood is everywhere, with no shortage of the dead.

He who buries his brother in the ground is everywhere.

Woe is me for the grief of this time.

- And there was a great wailing

throughout the land of Egypt,

for there was not a house without its dead.

- [Egyptian voice] Wailing is throughout the land,

mingled with lamentations.

- All the time we have to convince ourselves

that this person can't have seen all this.

He imagined it, or he had received this information

from other similar propagandistic literature.

- Because it's so fantastic?

- [Maarten] Yes. It's very fantastic.

But he hasn't seen it, he just imagined it.

Don't confuse this with the message of the Bible,

the Ten Plagues. That's quite a different story.

Whether this happened or not is irrelevant.

It's a beautiful literary document,

and again, yes, God was angry

and punished the Egyptians,

but this is just a literary cliche.

- [Voiceover] The influential Egyptologist,

the late Miriam Lichtheim,

ruled out the possibility that the papyrus,

The Admonitions of Ipuwer,

referred to a real national calamity.

Agreeing with other scholars, she stated the following:

- [Miriam] The description of chaos in the Admonitions

is inherently contradictory,

hence, historically impossible.

On the one hand, the land is said to suffer from total want;

on the other hand the poor are described as becoming rich,

of wearing fine clothes, and generally of disposing

of all that once belonged to the masters.

- [Iim] However, when you read the biblical account,

it becomes clear how this apparent

contradiction could have happened.

- [Manis] Moses told the Israelites to ask the Egyptians

for silver and gold jewelry, and for clothing.

- [Egyptian voice] People are stripped of clothes.

The slave takes what he finds.

Gold, lapis lazuli, silver and turquoise

are strung on the necks of female slaves.

- [Manis] The Lord gave the people favor

in the sight of the Egyptians,

so they gave them whatever they asked.

Thus, they plundered the land of Egypt.

- [Tim] The very point that Miriam Lichtheim viewed

as “contradictory“ and therefore “historically impossible“,

is the very point that most specifically

matches the biblical text,

but Maarten remains unconvinced.

He revealed to me the main reason why.

- It's out of the question that

this can refer to one and the same event.

Conventional chronology has it

that the Exodus took place somewhere

during the Ramesside Period in Egypt,

maybe around 1200 BC.

Whereas our papyrus, when you look at the grammar

and the literary figures,

et cetera, there's no question

that it was composed in the Middle Kingdom

and it is 600, 700, 800 years earlier.

- [Tim] But I realized that all the other evidence

I had looked at was also converging

in the Middle Kingdom, not the time of Ramesses.

And was it just another coincidence

that this document was originally composed

in the only period when Egypt's delta

was dominated by large numbers of Semites?

It became obvious to me and my team

that if people look at the wrong time in history

for evidence of the Exodus, they won't find any.

So Ramesses is a giant, standing in the way

of connecting this evidence with the Exodus.

And for over 50 years, all the books,

all the television programs,

and all the university professors who've been

convincing the world to dismiss the Bible

have been doing so based mainly on this one issue,

chronology, the dates assumed for the Exodus,

and the lack of evidence at the time of Ramesses II.

But if it happened long before his time,

then it means they're all wrong.

Wrong about the pharaoh,

and perhaps wrong about the Exodus never happening.

- [Voiceover] Rohl took Mahoney to see the replica

of a monument erected just a few years

after Ramesses‘ death, by his son Merenptah.

It's important because it shows that Ramesses

could not be the pharaoh of the Exodus

because in his time, Israel was already a nation,

established in the land of Canaan.

- [David] So this is the famous Merenptah Stela,

or what we call the Israel Stela.

And it actually belongs to the King Merenptah.

Up there at the top you can see him, facing the god Amun.

And he lists, in a poetic form,

all the different conquered nations,

the nations that are at peace.

But right at the bottom, we have three crucial lines,

because this is where we find a link to the Bible.

Let's read it together, okay?

We have the two reeds, that's the sound “yee“ or “ee“, okay?

Then a bolt, which is “s“, an “r“, a mouth,

an “e“, an “ah“, and an “l”, Is-ra-el.

- [Tim] Israel. - Israel.

This is the only time that we see this name

on an Egyptian monument.

After the name “Israe|“ are these two figures here,

these two seated figures of a woman and a man

and three strokes underneath.

These three strokes mean plural.

So it means the people or nation of Israel.

And then this is the interesting bit.

It says, “Fekty bin peret f.“

“Israel is laid waste, his seed is no more.“

- [Tim] Well, does it mean that they were literally no more?

- No, it's a sort of poetical way of saying

they'd been overcome, defeated. - [Tim] Or pacified?

- Yeah. All these phrases here above are like that.

It's a poetical phrase, effectively.

- [Tim] How significant is this then,

to the story of the Exodus?

-Well, for me it's very important,

because if we're talking about Ramesses II or Merenptah

being at the time of the Exodus of Moses and Joshua,

this just does not fit the pattern.

It's not tribes wandering around the Sinai,

lost in the desert or, you know,

during the wandering periods of Moses and Joshua.

They seem to be a political entity.

- [Voiceover] This monument doesn't fit the idea

of Ramesses being the pharaoh of the Exodus

because it was written shortly after his death

and it recognizes Israel already existing in Canaan

as one of the significant powers of the day.

And that shouldn't be because the Bible says

that the Israelites did not even begin to conquer Canaan

until 40 years after the Exodus.

So Ramesses could not have been

the pharaoh who let the Israelites go.

Then Mahoney got a lead about another inscription.

Charles Aling brought him to see his colleague,

historian Clyde Billington, who has extensively researched

this newly-discovered find.

- Besides the Merneptah Stela,

there's another reference to Israel.

It's called the Berlin Pedestal.

It's in the State Museum in Berlin, Germany,

and this is something that's just now

being studied and discussed by scholars.

- [Voiceover] On the base of this Egyptian statue,

they showed Mahoney name rings,

each representing an enemy defeated by Pharaoh

in the region ofCanaan.

- [Tim] So would these have been captured people?

- Realize that pharaohs all the time exaggerate,

to say the very least.

- [Tim] So is he b_ragging? - He's bragging.

- [Tim] Okay. - He's bragging.

He's saying, “I’ve conquered these people.

“I control these people.“

This is the one that's caused all of the excitement

because you have, again, a bound enemy,

so telling you that these people

are enemies of the Egyptians, and the name down here,

that while it's partially broken away,

has been reconstructed, and it's the name “Israel“.

And this dates to around 1360.

This makes the late date of the Exodus an impossibility.

This is 100 years earlier.

- [Charles] This is a very crucial

evidence that we see here.

- [Voiceover] This name ring demonstrates

that Israel had already left Egypt

and was in Canaan as Egypt's enemy

a century before the Ramesses Exodus date,

so obviously Ramesses could not have been

the pharaoh of the Exodus.

As another test to see whether Ramesses

really was the Pharaoh of the Exodus,

Mahoney would need to find out if there were any signs

of major problems during this famous king's reign,

such as a sudden collapse of power,

that would match the biblical judgment of Egypt.

- I don't see any evidence that during

the reign of Ramesses II there was

a significant decline in the strength of the army,

_ in the economic well-being of the country.

I don't see anything in the

succeeding reign of Merenptah either.

- [Tim] So you're saying there was some type

of stability that was formed?

- There was a great deal of stability during this period,

had to have been for a lot of these things to have occurred.

- [Tim] But there's more.

It came to my attention that the Bible itself

contains a passage that's been largely ignored.

It gives a date for the Exodus hundreds of years

before Pharaoh Ramesses ruled.

Yet it clearly says it was 480 years

from the building of Solomon's temple

backto the time of the Exodus.

- [Voiceover] Most scholars agree that King Solomon

began his reign in 970 BC, so 480 years before this

would place the Exodus around 1450 BC,

200 years before the Ramesses date.

Yet the popular view continues to be

that the Exodus occurred in the time of Ramesses.

- [John] It's a date that is based on

very flimsy indicators, but this is where

the majority of scholars look, almost out of habit really.

Earlier periods have just dropped off their radar.

- [Tim] And would you say that's the bottom line

of why they don't find any evidence for the Bible?

- I would, and I find it deeply ironic. (laughs softly)

- [Tim] If I'm going where the evidence is strongest,

then I've got to look beyond the Ramesses Exodus Theory.

And that's really encouraging,

because it means that the events of the Exodus

can be shifted 200 years earlier.

But my challenge isn't over,

because this new biblical date, around 1450 BC,

still leaves the events separated

from the Egyptian pattern by 200 years.

I was determined to find an answer for this,

and to do so, I would continue to explore the pattern

that seemed to exist in the earlier period.

- [Voiceover] Is there any indication in the Middle Kingdom

of the next step of the Bible's sequence:

a massive and sudden exodus

following the death of the firstborn?

Rohl told Mahoney about something amazing

that was found at Avaris.

- We find an extraordinary thing happens.

The archaeologists who've been digging this area

suddenly find lots of pits in the ground.

And in these pits are bodies,

and they've been tossed into these pits.

They're not buried formally.

They have no grave goods or anything like that.

These bodies are tossed on top of each other.

They're lying strewn.

You have hands and legs crossing over.

What is happening here? What is going on?

Bietak thinks its actually

some sort of plague that's happened.

A dramatic event where suddenly

they have to bury people very quickly

because of contamination of the living population.

So it's an emergency burial.

And then, all of a sudden,

all these Semitic peoples who were living there

suddenly get up, they pack their bags

and they leave and the whole mound is abandoned.

And we don't know for how long, and it just falls to ruin.

Now, isn't that just like the story of Exodus?

- [Voiceover] 120 miles to the south of Avaris,

another similar abandonment

was uncovered at the town of Kahun.

Excavators found a walled and guarded settlement,

which supported a large Semitic population.

They also found documentation of slavery.

Mysteriously, the inhabitants here

seemed to have disappeared overnight.

According to Professor Rosalie David,

the town's abandonment was “sudden and unpremeditated“.

Their goods were found in the streets

and houses of Kahun exactly where they were left,

before being buried by the sands of the desert so long ago.

- [David] One of the great moments in Egyptian history

is the collapse of Egyptian civilization.

When these foreigners invade, these Hyksos rulers,

come in and destroy the land and the Egyptian native rule

is completely suppressed, Egypt is on its knees.

That's what we see in the archaeological evidence

of this period and it only happens once

in 1,000 years of Egyptian history.

If we can link this to a very famous tradition

told to us by an Egyptian priest called Manetho,

he wrote a history of Egypt in the 3rd century BC,

and what we end up with is a story like this:

in the reign of a king called Dudimose,

one of the last kings of the 13th Dynasty,

in his reign, God smote the Egyptians.

And God here is singular; you would expect to see

“and the gods“ smote the Egyptians, but you don't.

You see “God“ smote the Egyptians.

And then, because of the smiting, whatever the smiting is,

foreigners, “people of obscure race“,

invade Egypt from the north and they conquer the land,

“without striking a blow“ is the term.

Now why? Because God smote the Egyptians.

Something had happened to devastate Egypt,

which made them unable to defend themselves

and these marauding hordes took over the whole country.

And we call this the Hyksos period

and they enslaved the Egyptians.

But the point is they could have defended themselves,

they had a mighty army,

except for the fact that God had smitten the Egyptians.

- [Voiceover] The earlier pattern of evidence

for the Judgment and Exodus steps includes:

a Middle Kingdom papyrus that describes events

remarkably similar to the biblical plagues;

grave pits filled with bodies, hastily buried;

mass abandonment at Semitic sites in Egypt;

an Egyptian source, outside the Bible,

stating that a powerful god acted in Egypt's history,

delivering a deadly blow,

which led to an invasion by foreigners;

and all this coinciding with the only collapse

of Egyptian society in 1,000 years.

- [David] You look for a collapse in Egyptian civilization

and that's where you'll find Moses and the Exodus.

- [Tim] But what about the final step of that sequence,

the conquest of Canaan,

the land that had been promised

to Abraham and his descendants?

Would the earlier pattern of evidence

continue there as well?

- [Manis] The children of Israel leave Egypt.

They travel to Mount Sinai where they received God's law

and made a covenant to be His people.

Then, after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness,

Moses transferred his authority to Joshua

and ascended the heights of Mount Nebo,

and there he died.

The Israelites had been waiting centuries

for the promise to be fulfilled,

and now it was Joshua who would lead them

in their conquest of Canaan.

- [Voiceover] The land of Canaan

was very different from Egypt.

It was a land ruled by many independent city-states

with names like Hazor, Jericho, Hebron, and Arad.

The history of these cities has been divided

into two major time periods: the Middle Bronze Age,

matching Egypt's Middle Kingdom,

when they were thriving and fortified by high walls.

Then a sudden destruction and burning came upon the land,

leaving those cities in ruins and bringing in

a new period known as the Late Bronze Age,

matching the time of Egypt's New Kingdom.

Archaeologist Norma Franklin

represents a large group of scholars that sees no evidence

for a biblical conquest of the Promised Land.

- As an archaeologist, I hate to disappoint people,

but we have no evidence for a single mass migration

of people from one country, over a period of 40 years,

wandering and coming into another country.

There is destruction, amazing destructions.

None of them actually fit one another.

They all happened within 100 years, but not overnight.

Not what you'd expect in --

You know, Joshua didn't live that long,

(laughs) if he existed, okay?

- [Tim] This is a serious problem for the Conquest

if it really happened in the Late Bronze Age.

But, again, what if it happened

in the earlier Middle Bronze Age?

It seemed only logical to begin

by looking at the key site of Jericho,

the first city the Israelites are said to have destroyed.

And we know exactly where that was.

- [Voiceover] Major archaeological excavations at Jericho

began with a German team in the early 1900s,

led by Ernst Sellin.

This was followed by a British team,

headed by John Carstang, in the 1930s.

At the time of their digs, both Sellin and Carstang

believed they had uncovered a layer of destruction

that matched the biblical story.

However, things took a dramatic turn

when Kathleen Kenyon dug at Jericho in the 1950s.

She demonstrated that there was no evidence

for a destruction of Jericho matching the biblical account

because she dated the demise of the city much earlier.

A wave of skepticism began to sweep

across the field of archaeology.

In an instant, Kenyon's discoveries at Jericho

had undermined the entire Exodus story.

- [John] She was expecting that if there was

any evidence there at all it would be

in what we call the Late Bronze Age

and it simply isn't there.

If the Israelites had arrived in the 13th century,

they would have found almost nobody there,

no walls to collapse.

It just wouldn't have fitted the biblical narrative.

So her excavations helped to compound

this very negative view that was developing,

not just from Jericho, but from other sites as well.

- [Tim] Is there a time when Jericho was destroyed

where the walls fell down or it was burned?

- [Tim] But David Rohl sees things differently.

- If people are telling us that there was no Jericho

at the time that Joshua conquered the Promise Land

and therefore Joshua is a piece of fiction

and therefore the Conquest is a piece of fiction

and then probably Exodus is a piece of fiction as well,

if that's the case, why don't we ask the simple question,

“Well, when was Jericho around?

“When was Jericho destroyed?“

and start from that point of view.

- [Manis] The Conquest began

with the Israelites crossing the Jordan River.

Joshua sent men to spy out

the massively walled city of Jericho,

and there they met a harlot named Rahab,

who reported that all in the land had heard

what God had done for the Israelites

and they were terrified.

Rahab hid the spies and aided their escape to the mountains.

-What evidence do you see matching the conquest at Jericho?

- [Bryant] First of all, we're told

that Jericho was fortified.

When the archaeologists dug the city,

particularly Kathleen Kenyon,

when she did her work in the '50s,

discovered that the tell that the city's built on

was surrounded by a great earthen rampart.

- [Voiceover] Excavators found that Jericho

was protected by a brilliant defensive system.

At its base was a stone retaining wall

more than 15 feet high, with a defensive extension wall

of mud bricks rising higher still.

Beyond this was the rampart, a steep slope

covered with a slick surface of white plaster,

where attackers would have been exposed

to arrows and sling stones from above.

At the top of this rampart was the main city wall,

also made of mud-brick,

this one more than 25 feet high and 10 feet thick.

- [Manis] Imagine the dread

and the desperate panic of the people of Jericho.

Day after day, for six days, the people of Israel

are walking around their city with the Ark of the Covenant

and the sounding of ram's horns.

Then, on the seventh day,

they encircle the city seven times,

and the priests give a long blast on their horns.

The people let loose with a mighty shout.

The walls come tumbling down,

allowing the Israelites to climb up into the city,

taking it and commencing

the conquering of the land of Israel.

- [Bryant] Well, when the city met its end,

these mud brick walls collapsed

and they actually fell down

to the base of the stone retaining wall.

Kenyon describes it very clearly

and in detail in her excavation report.

And then we're told they set the city on fire,

and that's exactly what we find:

Jericho was massively destroyed by fire.

Kenyon said it was very clear that within the city,

the walls of the buildings had fallen as well

and she says that the walls

fell before the fire.

And so we have the sequence that we read in the Bible:

first the fallen walls,

and then the city being set on fire by the Israelites.

- [Voiceover] Excavations at the site uncovered

clear evidence for a massive destruction by fire

with a very thick burn layer of extremely high temperatures.

This caused Kenyon to attribute the burning

to an enemy attack and not fires

that would result solely from an earthquake.

- She claimed that the city was destroyed

around 1550 BC by the Egyptians.

Well, there's absolutely no evidence that the Egyptians

were ever in the Jordan Valley at this time period.

- [Tim] So because Kenyon dated the destruction of Jericho

150 years before the Israelites were supposed to be there,

she made no connection between

the destruction and the biblical account.

But, once again, this date fits

the earlier pattern I'd been seeing.

- Within the city, a very unique discovery was made.

Both Carstang and Kenyon found

in the houses that they excavated

many jars, full of grain, that were stored there.

- [John] The store jars in the city were pretty full.

That suggests the harvest

had only recently been gathered in.

And the details in the biblical account

point to an event that happened sometime in the spring.

And, down there in the Jordan valley,

spring is when the harvest was gathered in,

the grain harvest.

- When the Israelites crossed the Jordan,

the first thing they did was celebrate Passover.

Well, when is Passover?

Again, the spring of the year.

- [Voiceover] The full jars also indicate

that if this was a siege, it was very short,

unusual for a strong fortified city such as Jericho.

- And that matches the biblical account

because the siege was only seven days,

otherwise the people inside would have consumed

a lot of that grain if it dragged out for months.

- Was the grain found all over the city?

- Yes. In every house that was excavated

they found jars of grain.

- [Voiceover] There was one other intriguing detail

at Jericho that fits the Bible remarkably well.

It had to do with the promise made to Rahab.

- She actually lived in the city wall,

and after hiding the spies, they promised her

that she and her family would be protected

when they attacked the city, and they kept their promise.

She had marked her home with a scarlet cord,

which she hung out the window.

- [Voiceover] But if her house was built into the city wall,

how could it have survived?

- [Tim] I came across the actual archaeological report

that the German excavator of Jericho,

Ernst Sellin, had published in 1913.

He was the first to conduct a major excavation of the site,

and I could see that his work was impressive,

but now seemed to have been forgotten.

Here were detailed plans and photographs,

including one part of the site,

which echoed the Rahab story in an unexpected way.

- The Germans found that in this one short stretch

on the north side of the city,

there were houses built on the rampart,

between the lower city wall and the upper city wall,

and some of those houses were built

right up against the lower city wall.

They found that the city wall did not fall in this area.

So that provides an explanation for how the spies

could have saved Rahab and her family

because God brought the wall down

everywhere else except where her house was,

and we have archaeological evidence to back that up.

- [Tim] What if people say, “Well, you're biased.“?

- I think everybody in the field is biased,

(laughs softly) one way or another.

I admit my bias.

However, I cannot make up the evidence.

I cannot plant it in the ground.

I have analyzed it and compared it to the Bible

and I see, wow, it matches exactly.

That's science: look at your evidence

and come to a conclusion based on the evidence.

- [Voiceover] Archaeologists have uncovered:

a city with high fortification walls that fell down;

evidence that the city was intentionally

burned after the collapse;

storage jars filled with charred grain,

evidence of a short siege in springtime;

and a section of houses within the wall,

miraculously preserved, just as in the biblical account.

According to the biblical account,

Joshua spoke a curse against anyone

who would rebuild the city of Jericho,

and the archaeology shows that, after the destruction,

the city of Jericho was indeed abandoned for centuries.

But, of course, this is all happens

in the wrong time in the view of most scholars.

Bryant Wood believes that Kenyon

misdated the pottery at Jericho,

resulting in a wrong destruction date.

He, along with Charles Aling, believed that

the Conquest occurred around 1400 BC,

using the conventional dates for Egypt and Canaan.

However, David Rohl and John Bimson have a different idea.

They propose that Kenyon came to a wrong destruction date

at Jericho because the dates assigned

to the Middle Bronze Age are not correct

and these dates for history need a major adjustment.

Regardless, all these scholars agree that Jericho

was destroyed in a manner that matches

the story of Joshua and the Israelites.

But there's more to the conquest than just Jericho.

Spies had reported that Canaan was a beautiful land,

flowing with milk and honey.

But it was also filled with great, fortified cities

that had walls reaching up to heaven.

One by one, they would fall to Joshua.

- [Manis] Then Joshua turned north

and headed for the city of Hazor.

Jabin, king of Hazor,

gathered all the kings of the region against Israel.

Joshua captured Hazor and struck its king with the sword

and Joshua destroyed Hazor by fire.

- [Voiceover] Israeli archaeologists at Hazor

found a massive burn layer

from the same time as Jericho's destruction.

They also found something else.

- We found tablets in the Middle Bronze Age palace

belonging to a king called Jabin,

and that's the name of the king that Joshua

actually stuck his sword into in the story.

- [Voiceover] This is the cuneiform tablet

containing the name of Jabin,

found in remains of the palace in ancient Hazor.

- [Tim] So you have a connection

between the Bible story and these tablets?

- We have a name that's identical.

We have a tablet coming out of the ground

with the name Jabin on it, and in the story of Joshua,

Joshua killed King Jabin of Hazor. - Wow.

- [Voiceover] But, when looking for the Conquest

in the expected time period,

archaeologists have found no evidence.

In fact, many of these sites were not even occupied

throughout the entire Late Bronze Age;

no high walls; no massive destructions;

only a series of burned-out and empty ruins.

This has been a key factor in the current skepticism

over the biblical account of the Conquest.

- [Tim] Again, maybe they've been looking in the wrong time

for evidence of the Israelites entering Canaan,

because when you look earlier in the Middle Bronze Age,

all these cities were occupied,

and they were guarded by high walls,

and, amazingly, they all suffered major destructions

in the same short period, just as described in the Bible.

- When you put those cities side by side,

the biblical account and the archaeology

match extremely well.

I think we have enough destroyed and abandoned cities

to say this fits the sequence of events

the Bible is describing.

There's a high probability

that we're looking here at Joshua's Conquest.

- [David] The whole thing, from the beginning

of the sojourn in Egypt, to slavery,

Moses and the Exodus, the Conquest of the Promised Land

is all there in one nice neat line, but it's way too early.

- [Voiceover] Rohl, Bimson and others suggest that

this problem didn't start with the Bible,

it began with Egypt.

They propose that early scholars

developed its dating incorrectly,

and that new information requires

that the events of Egypt's history be shifted forward

on the timeline by centuries.

- [David] And all of a sudden, these things

that are too early become contemporary

with the events in the Old Testament.

They sync up again. Everything links together.

- [Tim] I was so excited to hear of this possibility.

It would explain why all the evidence

has been consistently earlier.

But could the history scholars created for Egypt

really be off by centuries?

- [James] I'm very much against chronological revisionism.

Very good, very competent historians

have been working for decades and decades

on Egyptian chronology and Near Eastern chronology.

There's still more work to be done,

but I don't see a possibility of moving things centuries.

- I'm not into this business at all,

and I think that we know enough to say that

we maybe wrong 10 years here and 10 years there,

but there's no way to change, to shift centuries.

I mean, forget it. I think that we are on solid ground,

so there's no need to look for different centuries.

- [Tim] What was I supposed to do now?

Hoffmeier and Finkelstien represent mainstream opinion,

and I can't simply ignore it.

The fact is, the majority of scholars,

even believers in the Bible, won't allow the evidence

I've seen to be connected to the Exodus.

It's just too early.

This is the biggest giant of all,

standing in the way of solving this problem.

But the biblical pattern was so strong

that I just couldn't let it go.

- [Voiceover] Mahoney's researchers uncovered a lead

that led him to Oxford University.

Dn St John's Street is the Griffith Institute,

one of the greatest storehouses

of Egyptological documents in the world.

He was here to review the writings

of the late Sir Alan Gardiner,

perhaps the greatest specialist in reading hieroglyphs

in the 20th century and he had a great hand

in uncovering what we know today.

- [Tim] I was moved as I looked through his personal notes.

In some ways, I was following a path

that he had helped to clear.

After a lifetime of searching, Gardiner wrote something

that directly impacted the question I was dealing with.

- [Sir Alan] It must never be forgotten that we are

dealing with a civilization thousands of years old

and one of which only tiny remnants have survived.

What is proudly advertised as Egyptian history

is merely a collection of rags and tatters.

- [Tim] If all we have are rags and tatters,

how sure can we be about the dates?

Alan Gardiner said that what we have is rags and tatters.

Is that still true today or do you think that's changed?

- No, I think that basically is true.

What's interesting about the source material

from ancient Egypt, though, is that those rags and tatters

are more numerous and of a more varied kind

than almost any other civilization on the face of the Earth.

You name it, every kind of material

imaginable has come down to us;

not complete, but tantalizing rags and tatters.

And it's a wonderful thing to have all of this material,

but it's also extremely frustrating because it means

there's that much more room for argument and doubt.

- [Tim] Kent Weeks made no indication

that he'd be in favor of anything as major

as shifting Egypt's history by centuries.

But the reality is, a shift wouldn't just affect Egypt,

because the archaeological dates for Canaan

and the surrounding region

are all dependent on Egypt's history.

- [Kent] When all is said and done,

it's the Egyptian chronology that underpins

everything else that's being done

throughout the rest of the known world.

It's a big responsibility and it's one of the reasons

that people look at it so closely

because in terms of reconstructing ancient history,

a lot hinges on the answers.

- [Tim] So if Egypt's historical dates

are not that certain and need adjusting,

then Canaan's history would also require

the same kind of shift, because they’re connected.

But a lot of people don't want to do that.

- [John] No, no, no, because Egyptian chronology

has been assumed to be fixed now

for a very long period of time.

So the whole idea of taking it apart and starting again

is an anathema to most Egyptologists.

- [Tim] Uh-huh, because it would undo

a lot of their books, wouldn't it?

- Well it certainly would, yes. (laughs)

- [Voiceover] But there's mounting evidence

that the current reconstruction of Egyptian history

has major problems that have nothing to do with the Bible.

- There's a whole host of reasons for being skeptical

about the current Egyptian chronology,

and some of them to do with Egypt itself,

but a lot of them from outside Egypt,

which a number of people are beginning to look at.

- [Voiceover] Other good scholars maintain

that you don't need to change Egypt's timeline

in order to see evidence for the Exodus.

James Hoffmeier believes textual clues in the Bible

point to the Exodus happening

at the 1250 BC Ramesses date.

Bryant Wood and Charles Aling believe

the Exodus occurred around 1450 BC,

using the conventional dates for Egypt and Canaan.

They believe a case can be made for Israelites

living in Egypt prior to that time,

and later Israel appearing as a nation in Canaan.

So an Exodus of some kind must have taken place.

- [Tim] But the only place that I saw a pattern

matching all the steps was in the Middle Kingdom,

not the New Kingdom.

And if that's not a coincidence,

it would require some kind of major change.

Either the Exodus happened long before 1450,

or the dates for Egypt's timeline are off.

- [Voiceover] The debate over the dates

of ancient history is intensifying.

While the conclusions of those who support

major adjustments differ in their details,

they're all of the same mind that

these things are worth investigating,

and that chronology is not yet fixed and is not yet final.

Researchers like Rohl and Bimson

believe the main problem lies in these

lesser-known dark periods of Egypt's past.

They think scholars have miscalculated their lengths,

causing distortions in the dates

for everything before them.

The biggest suspect is this very long third dark period,

which new information suggests

has been over-inflated by centuries.

If it were reduced, the history of Egypt

would need to move forward in time.

- [Tim] For many years, I was intimidated

by the giant of Egypt's dating.

But what made me take a second look was when

I learned that it's been necessary to insert gaps

into the histories of all the surrounding civilizations

in order to match the dating of Egypt's third dark period.

Yet the archaeology of these cultures

does not seem to support such gaps.

Something was wrong.

- [Voiceover] What might history look like

if the dark periods were adjusted the way

that some scholars believe the evidence demands?

- [David] What's not changing is the Bible timeline,

because that's not affected by it.

If you're changing the Egyptian timeline,

you're moving it against the Bible timeline.

So, all of a sudden, things that were not

in the right time period between the two

are suddenly lining up in a different way.

And that's the exciting bit,

because that's when we suddenly start

to find evidence for the biblical story.

- [Tim] It's startling to think

how significant this could be.

Because chronology, the dates assigned to these events,

is the thing being used to convince the world

that the Bible is just a fairy tale,

but look at the pattern:

evidence matching Joseph

and the early Israelites‘ arrival in Egypt;

their tremendous multiplication;

their descent into slavery;

the judgment and collapse of Egypt;

the deliverance and exodus of the Semitic population;

and finally, in Canaan, evidence matching

the conquest of the Promised Land.

I know there's a lot of disagreement over the dating,

but what strikes me is that if you

put all the dates to the side for a moment,

what emerges from the archaeology is this pattern

that matches the Bible every step of the way,

and doesn't that deserve to be taken seriously?

But for now, those who hold to established conventions

will not allow these connections to be made.

I'm not an Egyptologist, I'm a filmmaker.

And I'm not endorsing any one dating theory out there.

I'm just searching for the truth.

Because isn't that what the pursuit of both science

and faith should be, a search for truth?

- [Mansour] At the end, the audience,

the people themselves, they will judge.

They will know if you are a scientific man,

a logical theory, or you are exaggerating

or you have some story from your own mind.

- [Tim] Are these findings just an exaggeration?

Or is looking for the Exodus at the earlier date

the key step in bringing the Bible

out of the shadows of myth

and into the light of true history?

People wonder why they haven't heard about this before,

but what I found out was that

a lot of people don't want to talk about it.

Archaeologists, people in the media,

no one's willing to actually tell this story,

and I had to ask that same question of myself:

was I willing to follow this story to where it really led?

But there is something to these ancient stories

and we just felt that, “You know what?

“We just have to let people know what the truth was.“

- [Voiceover] After the Israelites left Egypt,

it is written they miraculously crossed a mighty sea

and traveled on to Mount Sinai.

No trace of their journey has ever been found.

But, if there really was an Exodus,

then the mountain was somewhere out there.