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00:00Tonight, a deeper look at astonishing mysteries in the Book of Exodus.
00:08The burning bush, the ten plagues, the parting of the Red Sea.
00:13What can the modern mind make of such an incredible series of events?
00:17Were these divinely inspired phenomena, or do they have a more earthly explanation?
00:23The Bible explicitly says that God uses the wind to help Moses free the people.
00:30Pyramids were destroyed, bodies were floating down the Nile.
00:34Weather phenomena, climate shift, natural disasters, all of these could have played a role in the story.
00:41Now, we'll explore the top theories regarding three legendary events from the Old Testament.
00:47Moses encounters what we call the burning bush.
00:50How can a plant be on fire and not be burned up?
00:55What could possibly have caused these ten deadly plagues in Egypt?
00:59How could Moses and his people have walked across the Red Sea on dry land?
01:06Is it possible some of these famous Bible legends aren't parables, but rooted in fact?
01:13The Old Testament Book of Exodus tells the story of Moses, the great Hebrew prophet who led his people out of slavery in Egypt.
01:41Exodus also depicts some of the most dramatic events in the Bible, events that have sparked the human imagination for more than 3,000 years.
01:53Moses is directly involved in all of them.
01:57The stories about Moses in the book of Exodus, in the Hebrew Bible, are probably the best known stories that are in the entire Bible.
02:06Moses is born to a family that's enslaved.
02:09The challenge is that the king, the pharaoh of Egypt, at the beginning of the story, has ordered that all male children of the Hebrews, the Israelites, need to be killed.
02:20He's worried that they're becoming too numerous, and that if they are too numerous, that they will eventually rise up and overthrow the Egyptians.
02:29So, baby Moses has to be saved from Pharaoh and from the soldiers that might want to kill him.
02:36Now Moses' mother hides him for three months, reaches a point where she can't hide him any longer, so she builds a basket and puts him in the reeds along the banks of the Nile.
02:49She placed the basket near the place in the river that Pharaoh's daughter typically went to bathe, on the stage of that, for this dramatic rescue.
02:58Pharaoh's daughter comes down to the river and she goes to bathe and hears his cry and decides to take him in.
03:05In fact, Pharaoh's daughter decides to raise Moses as her own and even hires his real mother to help with the raising of the child.
03:14As far as anyone is concerned, Moses is now a member of the Egyptian population.
03:23He is raised as an Egyptian. He spends his life as a prince.
03:28But he's also aware of his heritage, and that becomes the tension as the story begins, the choice he has between Egypt and his own people.
03:39Exodus recounts a moment in Moses' life where he sees a Hebrew slave being beaten by an Egyptian man.
03:48He decides to take justice into his own hands and kills the Egyptian man, essentially in cold blood.
03:56When the Egyptian court found out about this, Moses knew he was going to be executed.
04:01And off he goes, out of Egypt into the wilderness.
04:04He abandons everything that he grew up with and flees to the desert to this place called Midian, which is in the northwestern corner of what today would be Saudi Arabia.
04:16This is a major change of fortunes for Moses.
04:19He has gone from being an Egyptian prince to an exile.
04:23He is essentially out there in this sort of hilly territory.
04:26He is a shepherd.
04:28He's tending these sheep.
04:29And something dramatic happens to him that he never would have expected.
04:34He ends up coming to this mountain.
04:36It's Mount Horeb, which is the mountain of God.
04:40And while there, he encounters this incredible, miraculous site.
04:45He sees something he cannot explain, and that's a bush that is burning without being consumed.
04:54And he goes a little bit closer to see what it is, and he hears God's voice speaking to him from out of this bush.
05:00The voice of God tells Moses that he needs to go back to Egypt and save his people from the Egyptian pharaoh.
05:08Moses is going to be the guy who brings the Israelites out of Egypt.
05:15Moses returns and demands that Pharaoh let the Hebrews go.
05:20Unsurprisingly, the Pharaoh is not particularly inclined to release the Hebrew people.
05:25God doesn't like this and sends a catastrophic series of plagues.
05:30And after that, the Hebrews are allowed to leave.
05:34But Pharaoh changes his mind, and he sends a massive army to recapture all of them or kill them.
05:43This leads to the greatest miracle of all, in which God miraculously parts, opens up a passage through the sea for all the Israelites to cross through.
05:56The Egyptian army follows them, and it's at that moment that God slams the door shut by having the sea drown all the Egyptian soldiers that were following them.
06:08After they've safely crossed the Red Sea, Moses and his people continue north and east until they reach the Promised Land, which is now the country of Israel.
06:18For religious followers of the Bible, they've been celebrating this story for many millennia.
06:23The burning bush, the ten plagues, and the parting of the Red Sea.
06:27It's a story that has been the center of understanding God as a liberating God, as a God of theological belief.
06:34They believe that these are fundamentally supernatural events that need to be accepted on faith.
06:41And this is rooted in the Judeo-Christian belief that God, as the creator of the world, also has complete dominion over all nature.
06:50In recent years, more technological advances have allowed researchers to investigate the Exodus mysteries through a more scientific lens.
06:59The first miracle that we see in the story is that of the burning bush.
07:04Is there any scientific explanation for this?
07:07Could this have actually happened?
07:09The burning bush is really a key point in Moses' story.
07:13This is where Moses hears, for the first time, the voice of God booming out of this bush, telling Moses what he's supposed to do.
07:21The big paradox, the big mysterious thing that happens here, is how you can have a bush that's consumed by flames without completely being destroyed.
07:31Is there any plant that would burn without being fully consumed?
07:36And it turns out that there actually is one. There's a plant called Dictamus albus.
07:41This is a plant that's found across northern Africa, and it's called the burning bush or gas plant.
07:53And what makes it so distinct is that it can look like it's caught on fire.
07:58In hot weather, old flowers or sea pods on the plant emit an oil that can ignite.
08:04This results in a vapor burn, which makes it look like the plant's on fire, even though it's perfectly harmless to the plant itself.
08:13Which could be a way of understanding how Moses saw a bush that wasn't consumed by flames.
08:20Others have doubts about this at a couple of levels.
08:23First of all, you need a source of ignition. This is not just going to self-combust, so what is that source of ignition?
08:29For some scientists, there's the possibility that this bush was ignited by lightning.
08:36After all, Moses hears thunder, but another question surfaces.
08:42This bush doesn't burn indefinitely. It turns to ash.
08:47And so the length of time for this bush to burn isn't consistent with the biblical text.
08:55The English physicist, Colin Humphreys, comes up with a really interesting idea.
09:00He says, what if it's not a gas plant? What if, in fact, there's actual natural gas here?
09:07Because remember, Moses is in the land of Midian. That's Northwest Arabia.
09:12Arabia has some of the richest natural gas and oil deposits in the world.
09:18Mount Horeb is located on the Arabian Plate, between the African Plate to the west and the Eurasian Plate to the east.
09:33When these plates collide, it can lead to all kinds of seismic and volcanic activity.
09:38Any of these earthquakes could open up small fissures that would allow natural gas to escape.
09:43You've got natural gas coming up. And is there, for example, a lightning strike that ignites this natural gas?
09:50So what Moses sees as a bush that is burning, it's a natural gas flame that's been ignited by natural conditions.
09:58But Humphreys believes the burning bush was not Dictamus albus, as others have suggested.
10:05One theory that Colin Humphreys advances is that it's an acacia tree, because the ways in which this tree burns could be very similar to what we hear in the story.
10:17That the wood becomes carbonized. It becomes essentially like charcoal.
10:21And so you'll see an ember, something that'll burn, something that'll glow red hot for hours.
10:26And so this could well have been what Moses was seeing.
10:29According to this theory, the burning bush can be traced to natural phenomena, even if Moses himself would have seen this as miraculous and attributable to an all-powerful unseen God.
10:42Another issue is that Moses has spent four decades out here.
10:46He's pretty much seen the wilderness as the wilderness is.
10:50It takes a lot after 40 years to see something and go, I've never seen anything like that before.
10:56I've got to go see what that's about.
10:58And that leads me to believe this is something not quite on the grid of normal expectation.
11:07In the book of Exodus, God's voice, coming from a burning bush, commands Moses to lead the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt, changing the course of Judeo-Christian history.
11:17But what did Moses actually experience that day on Mount Horeb?
11:23Some scholars think Moses might have used a more traditional age-old method of contacting the divine.
11:31For millennia, human beings have used psychoactive plants to enter into or encounter the spirit world.
11:39Psychoactive plants have been around since the beginning of religion.
11:44People who experience these psychoactive episodes based on these naturally occurring plants tell of what can only be defined as spiritual encounters.
11:57Many native cultures still use psychoactive plants today.
12:01They believe that through these plants, spiritual leaders can enter into trances, combat evil spirits or disease.
12:10They can even control the weather.
12:12Cultures have made use of psychoactive materials as a way to contact the divine, to be in relationship with their ancestors, to rethink the relationship with the natural environment.
12:24This is the idea that our physical world is paralleled in a spiritual world.
12:31And that if there's something wrong in the spiritual world, it affects the physical world and vice versa.
12:37If someone else can look into that spiritual world, they can see what's wrong and they can tell us what to do.
12:43Maybe out there alone in the desert, surrounded by sheep, Moses did the same thing.
12:55One psychologist has come up with a pretty controversial theory about how Moses could have seen a burning bush.
13:02Dr. Benny Shanon at Hebrew University has suggested that this is what was going on at the burning bush with Moses.
13:10He was actually experiencing one of these psychoactive substances and had one of these mind-altering experiences when he thought that he was communing with God.
13:22We call these substances entheogens, from the Greek, God within.
13:28For cultures that use them, entheogens are believed to be the source of true knowledge.
13:33In 2008, Dr. Shanon writes a controversial paper comparing Moses' burning bush encounter to experiences induced by ayahuasca.
13:45Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic tea that's made by brewing a blend of plants that are psychoactive when you combine them.
13:53This has been used in mostly South American cultures, as long as there's been South American religions.
14:00And it's understood to be a spiritual or divine encounter.
14:06What Dr. Shanon has recognized is that there are two plants on the Sinai Peninsula where Moses encountered the burning bush that can also induce powerful visions.
14:17These would be the acacia plant and Syrian root.
14:21Is it possible that Moses out there in the desert could have been involved with taking an entheogen?
14:29A psychoactive substance certainly would explain the specific miracles that Moses is asked to perform in front of the burning bush.
14:39In the Exodus story, God gives Moses a demonstration of his power.
14:45He tells Moses to take the walking staff, the rod in his hand, and cast it to the ground.
14:51And when Moses does it, it turns into a snake.
14:55Dr. Shanon points out that experiences like visions of serpents, fire, or a light you perceive to be God are common among cultures that use ayahuasca or other hallucinogenic plants.
15:09Critics of this theory know that while we have great evidence of the use of ayahuasca among indigenous peoples in South America going back to 900 BC,
15:19there's little evidence that Middle Easterners are making their own hallucinogenic brews, even though the plants were available to make them.
15:27The only evidence which some people could point to is there is an interesting passage in the writings of the Roman Jewish historian Josephus.
15:38Josephus describes the ceremonial headpiece worn by the high priest of the Jerusalem temple.
15:46The plant depicted on this ceremonial headpiece is henbane.
15:52It's a plant that's known to have psychoactive properties.
15:57It's a flower that contains the powerful hallucinogenic agent scopolamine.
16:02While there's no hard evidence that Moses is ingesting mind-altering plants in the wilderness,
16:08some believe it's the best explanation for the fantastic visions and supernatural things he sees.
16:15In the book of Exodus, Moses wins the freedom of his enslaved people after God ravages Egypt with a series of ten terrifying claims.
16:28It starts with the Nile being turned to blood, and then the land is overwhelmed by frogs.
16:35These frogs are everywhere. Then there are midges. Then there are stable flies.
16:40Then you have the death of the livestock. Then you have boils on people.
16:47After boils, there's hailstorms like never before. After hailstorms, there's locusts.
16:54After that, there are three days of darkness upon the land.
16:58And finally the tenth, probably the worst, all the firstborn sons of Egypt die.
17:04Is it possible that these plagues really happen? And if so, what might have caused them?
17:12Beyond the Bible, there are ancient sources that document series of natural catastrophes that did devastate the land of Egypt.
17:21The Greek historian Herodotus dates the exile of the Hebrews from Egypt to around 1570 to 1550 BCE.
17:31Now that's during the reign of an Egyptian pharaoh whose name was Amos I.
17:36Amos I is someone who is known to have been the pharaoh at the time when something called the Tempest Seelate was produced.
17:44It lists the cataclysmic events that have happened in Egypt. You get it from the word Tempest.
17:51The Tempest Seelate records a series of tremendous rainstorms that caused drowning and destruction of the temples and of other buildings around at the time.
18:01But it's not just that. After that, there's a period of darkness.
18:04And after the period of darkness, the temple stele goes on to say that there are dead bodies floating in the Nile.
18:11So it's an interesting thing that there are various kind of elements in the Tempest Seelate that seems to possibly tie into what we know about the plagues.
18:20There's another piece of external attestation that really supports this account of the plague.
18:25And that's a poem that's written by an Egyptian scribe by the name of Apur.
18:30Apur's poem dates from maybe 1600 to 1300.
18:34So it covers the right kind of period. And it talks about a series of catastrophes that happened in the land of Egypt.
18:41The admonitions describe the river being full of blood with dead bodies floating along the water.
18:50It is a tremendous period of disruption.
18:53A catalog of natural disasters, some of which look exactly like the Ten Plagues story.
19:01But many scholars wonder, if the Ten Plagues were as catastrophic as the Bible says they were,
19:07why would they simply appear in the Exodus account and these two small sources, the Tempest Stele and the Apur Papyrus?
19:16One reason there's not more documentation of the plagues could be the Pharaoh himself.
19:22No leader wants to record all of the failures in their reign.
19:27No ruler wants to say, and then these ten terrible things happened while I was in control.
19:34If God is on the Egyptian side, this looks really bad for the God of the Israelites to defeat the Egyptians.
19:41Some experts believe the first of the ten plagues is a catalyst for many of the plagues that follow.
19:48The first of the ten plagues is known as the river of blood.
19:52In the story, Moses strikes the Nile and it turns to blood.
19:57The Puer's poem notes that the river turned to blood and that there were many dead bodies in the river.
20:05As to whether the Nile literally turned to blood or just looked that way, scientists have their theories.
20:12The American epidemiologist John S. Marr has speculated that this first plague was the result of a catastrophic algae bloom.
20:22When the Nile turns red, we're probably talking about a red tide or an algae bloom.
20:28And we have accounts of these in both ancient literature and in modern literature.
20:33We know that when you have an algae bloom, it causes problems.
20:44A red tide is when there's a microscopic algae bloom.
20:47The algae release substances into the water that causes the water itself to take on a reddish tint.
20:54Red tides are very deadly.
20:56These algae multiply in large enough numbers that they actually manage to suck the oxygen out of the water.
21:03So it's deadly for fish.
21:05Red tides cause large fish kills around the globe.
21:10Between March and April of 1998, a series of red tides in Hong Kong killed 150,000 tons of fish, wiping out half of their fish stock in just four weeks.
21:23Conditions in Egypt at the time may have been perfect for a red tide.
21:28If there was a dry period in Egypt, this could cause the Nile to be a bit sluggish.
21:35And this is what generates a red bloom, basically the formation of this red algae, which can kill all of the fish.
21:42The book of Exodus talks about this plague saying that the fish in the river died and it smelled so bad.
21:51This is exactly what you would expect to see when you have the red tide and then the horrible smell that comes off the water when you have this amount of dead fish.
22:01The massive amounts of dead fish could have set off a series of ecological disasters, which would match accounts of the first six plagues.
22:11The red tide might be the cause of the frogs coming up onto land, and they can't return to the water because it's contaminated.
22:23The frogs are ultimately going to dry out in Egypt, in the desert, and they're going to die.
22:28And when they die, what do we expect to happen?
22:32You're going to get these frogs beginning to decompose.
22:35And so you might expect to see gnats, and then you're going to see flies.
22:41So plagues of gnats or plagues of flies, which were themselves kind of contaminated or carrying toxins in their bodies,
22:48could have stung or bitten the livestock, causing the livestock to die, and biting or stinging humans, causing boils in them.
22:58So this theory of the red tide could account for up to six of the biblical plagues.
23:05But we have four more plagues to go.
23:08What if there was a hailstorm?
23:10That's the next plague.
23:12What if that hailstorm leaves the ground moist?
23:15All of a sudden, now you have the plague of locusts breeding on the wet soil.
23:21Recent history suggests those locusts may have led to the ninth plague,
23:26three days of darkness.
23:29Locust swarms are enormous.
23:30They can cover vast tracts of land.
23:33In 1875, people witness a swarm of Rocky Mountain locusts flying over the Great Plains.
23:41It blocks out the sun for five whole days.
23:45You're talking about 500 square miles of insect invasion,
23:50insects that are eating 400 million pounds of plant products.
23:55You're talking about an annihilation of the food resources within Egypt.
23:59Some scholars suggest that this massive damage to Egyptian food crops
24:04could have led to the tenth plague, the death of the firstborn of Egypt.
24:10Locusts would have left feces on already damaged plants.
24:14Conditions were such that Egyptians would have to keep in their storehouses damaged and wet crops.
24:22Some scientists argue these wet crops produced mold and that from this mold developed mycotoxins that, when ingested, killed.
24:34Some scholars believe this ripple effect would go on to have devastating consequences for Egypt's firstborn sons.
24:41In patriarchal cultures such as Egypt, firstborn sons take pride of place.
24:46They're the first who are going to inherit their family's wealth.
24:50And so they enjoy special treatment, special privileges.
24:54The firstborn son is the one that you take care of.
24:57The firstborn son is your heir.
24:59The firstborn son is the one that you would feed and feed first.
25:03And so, not surprisingly, if the food supply, the grain, becomes contaminated,
25:08then the firstborn sons would be the ones who would die because they're the first ones being fed this.
25:13Ingesting mycotoxins can lead to death even as quickly as in a few hours.
25:19This could have given the impression of a systematic death of the firstborn child in every Egyptian family.
25:26But it is entirely possible that these plagues are just a series of horrible but yet naturally occurring ecological disasters.
25:37But there also could be a very different kind of explanation,
25:41a cataclysmic, earth-shattering event that could be linked to all of these ten deadly plagues of Egypt.
25:49Thousands of years after the events in Exodus supposedly occurred, many questions remain.
25:57To find connections to the Exodus stories and known historical events,
26:01modern scholars are turning to science and geology to explain events like Egypt's ten plagues.
26:07Some believe these notorious events began with just one cataclysmic natural disaster.
26:19We don't actually need to go all the way back to antiquity to know how catastrophic a volcanic eruption could be.
26:30The best example of this was a huge eruption that took place on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa in 1883.
26:39This volcanic eruption on Krakatoa is 10,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.
26:51You have five cubic miles of rock, earth, sand that is blown out of this volcano, blasted out.
27:00There's a vast volcanic ash cloud that covers many places on earth, blocking out the sun for long periods of time and producing these really spectacular red sunsets.
27:13Perhaps another enormous explosion 3,300 years earlier set the stage for the entire sequence of Egyptian plagues.
27:23Somewhere between 1600 and 1500 BC on the Greek island of Thera, now known as Santorini,
27:33you have this extraordinarily powerful volcanic eruption.
27:40This eruption known as the Minoan eruption was five times more powerful than the Krakatoa eruption.
27:48This eruption could have produced tsunamis 200 feet high, causing death and destruction.
27:56It caused tidal waves to absolutely devastate all the surrounding areas of the Mediterranean, wiped out cultures and civilizations.
28:07Many experts believe this cataclysmic event could have also wreaked havoc in ancient Egypt.
28:12Massive clouds of ash would have been unleashed that could have floated all the way to Egypt.
28:20These clouds could have contained cinnabar, which is a toxic mercury sulfide that would have been extremely deadly.
28:29This mercury sulfide would have increased the acidic nature of the Nile, would have also changed the color of the water, would have made it blood red.
28:38And then we go back to that domino effect.
28:41The fish die in the water because of the ash, turning it acidic.
28:47That then causes the frogs to leave.
28:50That then causes the insects to feed on the rotting carcasses of the fish and other animals in the river.
28:58They would then go out and bite the livestock, but also biting people.
29:03And several things could have happened based upon those bites.
29:07Livestock could have experienced blue tongue virus or African horse illness, which would have killed them off.
29:16Stable flies would have bitten animals and humans, resulting in itchy boils.
29:22You also have the acid rain from the ash falling on the skin that has already been exposed by these insect bites.
29:31And that leads to the boils.
29:34This volcanic eruption would also account for the other plagues because you have hail described as one of the plagues.
29:41Well, this is the volcanic rock, the ash that's falling on the earth, would have been the hail of the seventh plague literally falling from the sky.
29:53Any kind of a fall of volcanic ash like this would have caused basically acid rain.
29:58That acid rain falling down onto the crops would have caused the kind of moist environment that was necessary for locusts to breed.
30:07You then could very well have the darkness.
30:10You'd either have the locusts blotting out the sun or the ash from the volcano blotting out the sun.
30:17So either way, you have those plagues covered.
30:20That extended period of darkness would have then caused the growth of toxins in moldy crops,
30:27which would cause widespread childhood death.
30:30And there's the tenth plague.
30:31So you have these plagues in the same order explained through this volcanic eruption.
30:39This wouldn't have been recorded in the historical record as volcanic activity.
30:43It occurred so far from Egypt that Egyptians would have only seen the damage and not have known the source.
30:51The people who would have experienced these harrowing events would have had no clue that this is coming from a volcano 700 miles away.
30:59The natural inference for them is that this is a heaven sent divine judgment.
31:06Critics of this theory say this doesn't work out because there's real problems with the timing here.
31:11That this eruption in Santorini actually takes place much earlier than what happens around the events of the plague.
31:18Actually, if you take a look at it, we think that the events of the Exodus are taking place somewhere from like 1446 to around 1200 BCE.
31:30The eruption at Santorini, that's maybe 1500.
31:34Well, there's not a whole lot of difference between 1500 and 1446 BCE, right?
31:39So you're looking at maybe, you know, 54 years there.
31:41That's nothing in the scale of the ancient world.
31:43It's one of the Old Testament's greatest escapes, the parting of the Red Sea.
31:53The parting of the Red Sea is one of the most dramatic events in the Bible.
31:58Here's Moses and the Israelites fleeing from Pharaoh and Pharaoh's army.
32:03They come to the sea.
32:04Well, how are they going to cross the sea?
32:06The Israelites see the Egyptians coming and they're just thrown.
32:11Why would Moses bring them out of Egypt only to have the Egyptians kill them?
32:18Moses takes this concern to God and God says,
32:22Not to worry. I have this under control.
32:25You're going to take your staff and split the sea.
32:28So Moses does as God instructs.
32:32Moses extends the staff and the water divides.
32:37So the Israelites can walk across on dry land.
32:41The Egyptians follow them and once the Israelites are safe on the other side,
32:46the water collapses and drowns Pharaoh's army.
32:49Some people think this is a myth.
32:52For others, this is an accurate description of the power of God.
32:55But yet, this story would come across as so miraculous because the Red Sea is massive at points 1,500 feet deep.
33:07To be able to split that would require a massive amount of power.
33:13But what if there was another explanation?
33:18Some scientists argue there is a scientific way to understand what took place.
33:24For some, the Minoan eruption on the island we now call Santorini doesn't simply explain the ten plagues.
33:33It can also be used to explain the parting of the Red Sea.
33:43This theory is based on a rather widely held notion that there might actually be a mistranslation in English Bibles.
33:50That the parting didn't actually occur at the Red Sea.
33:54In Hebrew, the phrase that's usually translated as the Red Sea actually is two words, the yam suf.
34:02Now, yam is easy. That definitely refers to a sea.
34:05The question is whether we've gotten suf right by saying that that's red.
34:11The other translation of suf is actually more like reeds, which would mean we're not talking about the Red Sea, but the Sea of Reeds.
34:20A body of water that was much, much shallower than the Red Sea would have been.
34:24The location of this Sea of Reeds is also subject to debate.
34:31There is one location in Egypt which could be a candidate for something called the Sea of Reeds.
34:37And it's called Lake Bala. It actually doesn't exist anymore because in the 19th century, with the building of the Suas Canal, it just kind of got obliterated.
34:44But during the time of Moses, this would have been a substantial shallow lake.
34:51According to this theory, earthquakes triggered by the Minoan eruption would have caused the Nile Delta to slide off the African continental plate.
35:01This would have led to massive disruptions of land, causing shifts with water moving from higher ground to lower ground.
35:08So you have the people crossing over the Sea of Reeds, which is very shallow water.
35:15And then with this catastrophic movement of this continental shelf and the Nile Delta waters pouring into it, that that would have caused the waters to come rushing back in and devastate the Egyptians who were trying to cross.
35:28And in the story, we have the Egyptian army drowned in a massive wave.
35:33There are some geologists who think that this happened because of the Minoan eruption.
35:39Others think it happened a couple of hundred years later with another volcanic eruption in the Aegean Sea.
35:46Experts have identified an underwater volcanic eruption near the island of Yali in the Aegean Sea, right about the year 1450 BCE, which would also place it in a window of time when you can imagine the exodus in.
36:01So here you've got a volcanic eruption happening in a place at almost exactly the same time as the exodus story.
36:12This would have also produced significant seismic activity that would have shifted the water and would have given the impression of the lake being split.
36:21It could have also triggered a series of tsunamis that would have drowned the Egyptian soldiers.
36:29So ultimately, we can say that it's a well-founded theory, but we simply don't know if this is in fact what happened.
36:38And of course, there are other natural forces besides earthquakes with the power to part the sea.
36:43The parting of the Red Sea is one of the few events in Exodus in which the Bible explicitly states that God draws upon nature to deliver his people.
36:57In Exodus, it says that Moses stretched out his hands over the sea and God caused a strong wind to come from the east to blow over the water all night until dry land appeared.
37:08It's this wind in the text that blows all night that separates the water, allowing the Israelites to walk across the land.
37:18We see that there was this massive, intensive, and somewhat prolonged event as described in the text.
37:26In the ancient Near Eastern world, where you don't have science that is allowing you to explain these natural phenomena, you simply yield fully to the theology.
37:35And now I think we can do a little bit of both.
37:38And we can begin to unpack maybe how the manipulation of naturally occurring events, things that the Egyptians and Israelites had experienced before,
37:46create the fundamentals for this story.
37:49Some meteorologists recently conducted a study suggesting that the parting of the Red Sea might be attributable to something called a wind set down.
38:06When you have a very strong wind blowing persistently for many, many hours,
38:11it can literally take the water of a lake and displace it, move it from one shoreline to the other so that you dry the surface on the upwind side and pile up water on the downwind side.
38:27You see this regularly in Lake Erie, where water levels around Toledo, Ohio might be 16 feet higher than around Buffalo, New York.
38:37Atmospheric modeling of a wind set down looks exactly like the story in the book of Exodus.
38:44The Exodus narrative talks about a strong wind and a strong wind that blows for hours, which is precisely what you would need for a wind set down.
38:53Atmospheric researcher Carl Drews notes that there are four aspects to a wind set down.
38:59One, it takes hours of a strong wind blowing.
39:02Two, it exposes the bottom of a body of water.
39:08Thirdly, the effect is greater in shallow water.
39:11And fourthly, the event can be reversed in minutes.
39:15They ran a computer model to see what's the strongest wind that people can walk through because you have a strong wind, but you still have to be able to walk through this wind.
39:24And so with a 63 mile an hour wind blowing for 12 hours, you would have the condition for people to be able to walk across this distance that would take them approximately four hours to escape.
39:38We have at least one example of this wind set down phenomenon that took place in 1882 in the Nile Delta, where folks observed sustained wind blowing the water to such a degree that one day they were fishing and the next day it was simply mud and almost dry land.
39:54People end up walking on the bed of what was formerly water right where they had been fishing the day before.
40:02But the parting of the sea is just half the story.
40:06Exodus tells us that at the end of this crossing, the waters return and the Egyptian chariots and soldiers are completely overwhelmed and drowned.
40:17In many ways, this is even harder to understand than other parts of the story.
40:21If this is occurring at daybreak, as the story says, how is it that the Egyptian army doesn't suddenly see massive waves coming towards them?
40:31Why don't they try to get to safety?
40:35And if their chariot wheels are stuck in the mud, why don't the Egyptian soldiers just get up and run?
40:41For some theorists, the only way to understand the Exodus account is to surmise that the Egyptian army didn't have time to escape.
40:48Leading us to believe that it was a very immediate event.
40:52You might be a religious believer or not, but science has demonstrated that, at least at some critical moment, natural phenomena could produce the kinds of things we find in the Exodus story that would have aided the liberation and survival of an entire people.
41:10The incredible events in the book of Exodus full of awe and mystery still capture the human imagination, whether divine interventions, natural events or both, they are among the most enduring legends in human history.
41:28I'm Laurence Fishburne. Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.
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