Is The Exodus FACT or FICTION? - Lecture by Michael Jones

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:06]All right. So, we're going to be talking about the Exodus. I'm sure that's something you're all interested in because you're here.

[00:00:12]Uh, exactly. Uh, this is a very, very important subject. It's probably the most cataclysmic event in the Bible in terms of, uh, uh, scope and how many people it would have affected in the ancient world. Uh it's probably the one of the most important event in terms of the Old Testament, most pivotal event.

[00:00:34]And we are told constantly by scholars there is no evidence it happened. Now why is that? Well, quite frankly, it's because they're looking in the wrong time.

[00:00:47]Uh if we uh look at this for example, this is just a rough timeline of what's going on here. So people go to first kings 6:1 which says in the 4th80th year after the people of Israel came out of the land of Egypt in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel in the months of Ziv which is the second month he began to build the house of the Lord.

[00:01:11]Now as you'll see it says 480th. If you check the Septuagent which is the Greek translation it says 440.

[00:01:19]So let's just go on the Septuagian dates, but you can kind of get this just a general timeline here. As you can see, Solomon started building the temple 966.

[00:01:29]Go back 440. It place it at 1406 or 1446 depending on which version of the Old Testament. And so everyone's like looking there for an Exodus and then critical scholars laugh and say, "Ha, well, no evidence because there's no evidence of an Exodus there.

[00:01:49]And they're correct. There is no evidence of an exodus around this time.

[00:01:54]But as I said, that's not when the Exodus happened. Even according to the Bible, we need to remember something is like numbers are not always meant to be literal.

[00:02:07]We very much so in the ancient world, less so today, but if I told you my wife is a 10, that you would not think that's her age. Okay, it's pretty common in the ancient world. Numbers were often used symbolically, especially in genres. So, in poetry, also in an ancient genre called temple dedication inscriptions.

[00:02:35]So, let's uh look at some examples here.

[00:02:37]So, this is a um from Assyria. says to cultine inerta I the first declared 720 years elapsed from the initial construction of the temple of Ishtar to his own construction scholars are pretty much in agreement it was not exactly 720 years same with in Egypt s something else as well now Egypt's important because that had cultural influence on Israel says he the first rededicated the temple of Seth in the 400 year on the fourth month on the fourth day when it was built. But the temple was actually about 460 years.

[00:03:17]So you see the the issue here is that they're using symbolic type numbers in temple dedication inscriptions.

[00:03:25]What was Solomon doing in in the book of Kings? A temple dedication.

[00:03:30]We should expect him to also be doing something similar like this. not using a chronological number but using just a symbolic number. And if you think about it, if you take 40* 12, 12 tribes, 40 years, very important number in the Bible, you get that. So that's most likely what they were doing is they were using symbolic numbers.

[00:03:56]Also, we need to also talk about this as well.

[00:04:00]So I want you to think about this. Moses was said to be 80 at the start of the Exodus.

[00:04:06]Okay? He's supposed to spend 40 years in Midian, right? So, he's 40 years in Egypt, 40 years in Midian. God then sends him back 40 40 years or so until he dies. What does Exodus 4:20 say? So, he's been he's 80 years old. Okay? He's got two sons.

[00:04:26]Exodus 4:20 says, "So Moses took his wife and his two sons and had them ride on a donkey, and they went back to the land of Egypt."

[00:04:34]That poor donkey, two full-grown boys and a woman on them. Wow.

[00:04:41]Very unlikely. 40 years is often used in the Bible to just refer to an unknown time period.

[00:04:49]About 40 years or so. Very common in the Old Testament literature. Not in the New Testament per se, but in the Old Testament very common to just use 40 to be like some unspecified time.

[00:05:03]And this is of course what uh scholars like Ernos Ernest Null says for what happened before his time. The round figure of 40 years indicates that it was a long long time of unknown extent.

[00:05:15]This is just how they sort of said yeah a couple years ago.

[00:05:20]Yeah, it took a couple years. You know, you might say, "Yeah, about a week ago I went to church. You better have but it wasn't exactly a week ago." Similar kind of thing. And they did this more hyperfocused in the Asian world. So that needs to be noted as well.

[00:05:39]So when do scholars who believe in historical Exodus actually date it?

[00:05:44]Basically around the year of 1265.

[00:05:49]This is the estimated time of Joseph. So you know around the 1550s or so you have Abraham in about this time 1800s to like 1750 or so based on the time things happening around the same time period.

[00:06:04]So this is just a general timeline. Now why do they say this 1265?

[00:06:09]Because a very important verse in the Bible it says that they built for Pharaoh store cities Pam and Ramise.

[00:06:17]Now Ramise is a very important city. We know when it was built. It was built around the year 1300 BC.

[00:06:26]No one disputes that. No one. Some try to say that well it was also the city of Avaris. No, that's not that's false.

[00:06:34]Avarus and Ramise. P Ramise were two different cities separated by about two kilometers. So they were not the same.

[00:06:44]Now if Israel built Ramisees they obviously still had to be in Egypt by around 1300 BC to build that city.

[00:06:57]So that's roughly the time of of that.

[00:06:59]So we would expect them have an exodus time frame after sometimes of pramis.

[00:07:05]However, let's add another piece of data in. So this is called the mptilea. It dates to around 1,200 or so. Uh it's a steel of the Pharaoh MPA raiding through Canaan. And he says he mentions Israel was in the land of Canaan at that point.

[00:07:23]He says Israel was there. Okay. So let's go back down to our timeline here. If P Ramisees is built around 1300, the MPA says they're in Canaan at this point. We can just definitively date the Exodus to this time frame, right? After the Pamizes is built, Israel's there, but they have to be in Canaan by around 1200 or 1208 BC. Pretty simple. So, because of that, we can definitively align the Exodus using biblical data and archaeological data to point out that the Exodus had to happen in the early 1200s BC. So that's why I said like 1265 for example, sometime in there because they still need 40 years of wandering and they're in Canaan. Boom. Make sense?

[00:08:14]Pretty simple. So we know roughly when the Exodus happened. So is there any evidence of an exodus in this time?

[00:08:21]Well, there definitely is. But let's first start. It says, remember, it tells us that Jacob and his family settled in the land of Gan. And in Gan, the area of Gan, there is a city called Avarus, 2 kilometers south of where P Ramises would be built.

[00:08:38]So circumstantially, we're in the right area.

[00:08:42]Now, what do we know about this city of Aris in this area of Gan? Well, we know a lot of good, really interesting stuff about it. So, uh, one of the leading archaeologists, Manfred Beek, you're going to hear me cite him a lot here. He notes this area received an irregular but nonetheless continuous flow of Asiatic immigrants who contributed distinctive Asiatic elements to the life and customs of the local population.

[00:09:12]And of course, as you know, that's where Joseph and his family settled. What he notes is that basically Avarus saw a steady flow of aatics coming into that region going back hundreds of years. This is just the area Semites would move into and settle. It would be the Varus region in the land of Gan that you slowly started to settle into that region.

[00:09:39]So basically if I want to shout this on a timeline so roughly about here or so aatics decide to start moving into that land of goan and avarus. So we see this commonly coming in coming in Joseph and his family come about this period in this pink area here uh and then they you know start settling and taking over that area for a long time but it was a common thing to happen. Now as you can see here I have separated middle kingdom an intermediate period here and then new kingdom. The middle kingdom is when the Egyptians ruled. They ruled Egypt. The new kingdom is when the Egyptians ruled.

[00:10:20]This middle period is when Semites ruled. They were called the Hixos and nobody in Egypt liked them because they were not Egyptian.

[00:10:31]Uh so at some point the thieves in the south, the came down and they they fought against the Hixos in the north up around Gan.

[00:10:40]Their capital was Avarus and they kicked them out. They they defeated them. They took over. They established the new kingdom. Okay. Now again, let me just go back here. What does Exodus one say?

[00:10:54]There was a new king over Egypt who did not know Joseph.

[00:10:59]So this seems to align with what we see already. So again, the Hixos are ruling.

[00:11:04]They like Joseph. The new kingdom takes over. They don't know Joseph, which would make sense. They're far in the south. They come up to the north. They kick out these Hixos rulers. Uh people that would have you that would have known Joseph, the kingdom Joseph would have served under, and they established the new kingdom of Egypt.

[00:11:23]Now, what happened when they took over?

[00:11:25]But we know they started to enslave the Semites that lived in that area.

[00:11:33]So one uh general he says when they took Avarus he took three captives and made them slaves.

[00:11:41]So they didn't kill them all. They didn't kick them all out. Most of the population there was enslaved.

[00:11:50]Uh the rulers of the Hixos were kicked out. the elites, they were sent and they went to Jericho. Okay. Uh but as far as we can tell, most of the population there was enslaved by the Egyptians.

[00:12:04]Again, aligns very nicely with what Exodus 18 tells us. New king arose and enslaved the Hebrews. So, what else will we know about this? Well, Manfred Beek says they were not treated well. Uh there's evidence that ritual executions were conducted on young males there at the site. are not being treated well at all. And of course, as I said, he also notes most of the population just stayed there and served their new overlords.

[00:12:32]Served.

[00:12:33]So, as far as we can tell, most of the Semites there uh stayed on in Egypt serving as slaves, not being treated well.

[00:12:47]So, so far so good. getting some stuff lining up with Exodus here in terms of the order of events.

[00:12:55]But we also see other interesting stuff about the people living there. So this is coming uh from uh James Hoffmire who's an Egyptologist.

[00:13:05]He says nomadic shepherds are also attested later at Tel Davo. Okay, that's the site of Avaris after the abandonment of the palatial area in the mid 18th dynasty. their signature being sheep in inter in interments where the sheep were carefully buried. It is not inconceivable to think of such pastoral groups that were the protohebrews.

[00:13:28]In other words, we see smitic people there serving as slaves, not being treated well, who were also shepherds.

[00:13:38]Sounds very much like with what we're getting at here.

[00:13:42]Also a very interesting feature about this site, the site of Avarus, they found no pig bones there. So the Semites did not enjoy swine.

[00:13:53]Very interesting there. They had a taboo against pig.

[00:13:58]Now let's go back to what of course Exodus says. It says, "They ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves uh and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick in all kinds of works of the field." Well, what do you think slaves were doing in Egypt? We know they weren't building pyramids, for example. Those were done by hired Egyptian workers. A lot of the monuments, again, were done by hired workers.

[00:14:29]What did the slaves in Egypt do? Well, they could serve in households. They could work in the fields or they were in often involved in brickmaking. This is a tomb of Rickmir 1460 BC and it shows us that slaves were involved in the making of bricks in Egypt. So, they'd make the bricks. The bricks would be used in construction.

[00:14:52]They sort of used as like the uh proto manufacturing areas. They make your bricks. They grow your food. They send them to the Egyptians to do more uh higher uh skilled labor kind of stuff.

[00:15:05]Uh we also see for example this is called the Lou leather roll from about the time of Rams Ramse's and it refers to uh foreigners being used as slaves to make bricks. Okay. So what do we see so far?

[00:15:21]We see that a new king took over.

[00:15:24]Semmites in the north, the land of Gan were enslaved, involved in brickmaking, treated harshly, and they were shepherds. So far so good, right? Okay.

[00:15:35]But what about an Exodus? What happened to those Semites?

[00:15:41]So what where we know they're living in Avarus? Did they just stay there for thousands of years?

[00:15:47]What happened to Avarus? That was the city where the Semites lived.

[00:15:52]Well, avarus was basically in use for a long time and then one day we don't know they just people stopped living there.

[00:16:02]Manford Btech just says a West Semitic population living in the Eastern Delta for quite a length of time from the late 12th century until the Ramiside period.

[00:16:13]Now the Ramiside period is around the 1200s.

[00:16:17]So basically there's semmites living there and then in the 1200s they're not there anymore.

[00:16:24]Where did they go?

[00:16:28]So he notes for example this is a very detailed uh quote but here's basically what he says. Says basically you have all these semites living in there. Then he says, "From the time afterwards when everyone was in ruins, we have evidence of scattered Ramiside burials, burials of domestic animals such as dogs." In other words, this was a populated city of Semites. The Semites are no longer there.

[00:16:53]And then the Ramide Egyptians start using it as a grave site. For some reason, they needed a new large grave site. Why? We don't know. Those burials have been disturbed by agricultural cutting into within the past thousand years. But what we do see is that the Ramiside Egyptians started using this giant area that Semites used to live at as a giant graveyard.

[00:17:22]Very odd coincidence that they all of a sudden needed a graveyard.

[00:17:29]Uh just another quote from Manfred Beech. He says major parts of Avaris served as a site for the cemeteries of P Ramises during the Ramzide period. The tombs as I said have been largely stripped bare and destroyed by agricultural activity of the last h 100red years. So basically again you have Semites living in Avarus through the new kingdom up until the time of Ramisees II. All of a sudden no one's living there anymore. And the native Egyptians turned that entire site into a massive cemetery.

[00:18:06]Why did they need a massive cemetery?

[00:18:08]Well, there was an exodus that occurred.

[00:18:11]There would have been a lot of dead bodies lying around. So, where did they go? Where do these Semites go? Well, we would say they went on through the Sinai, right? This is where we would say they've gone. But you know, very smart people, people much smarter than me have told us there is no evidence of a massive migration of people moving across this, right? Haven't we all been told that? Why have we found no evidence of a mass migration of people moving across to the Sinai? Does anybody know?

[00:18:41]Well, it is where they were. Definitely where they were. Real real simple. Real simple. We haven't looked.

[00:18:48]Okay. And this the truth of it all. So Richard Elliot Freeman says, "Skeptics have asserted that we've combed the Sinai and not found any evidence." That assertion is just not true. There have been no major excavations in the Sinai.

[00:19:04]So why have we not found any evidence of a mass migration of people? No one has bothered to check yet.

[00:19:11]Also, even if we did look, there's no saying we would actually find evidence.

[00:19:16]you know as uh for example Bruce Kalpern notes you know giant land armies which cross that terrain we don't have any evidence of Ramazies moving thousands upon thousands of troops across that you know 3,000 years ago that's just not the kind of evidence that's going to be left behind for 3,000 years just you know weather elements they're going to change things however we know that during the wandering period what was built the ark of the covenant Right now, this is a very interesting feature I want to just briefly talk about here.

[00:19:53]How do we know that the Ark of the Covenant was built around this time period?

[00:19:59]Well, it would need to match customs from that time period right now. Like, for example, look at the church we're in. Do you think this was built yesterday?

[00:20:07]No, of course not. Because the stage would be bigger. There'd be fog machines up front here. There'd be, you know, moving lights. No, this church was built over 100 years ago. It was built during the customs of the time in the 1800s. We can we can clearly see styles and architecture around that are not going to fit with modern church designs, right? So, we can date churches based on times, right? That's the point. Well, the Ark of the Covenant, the same thing happened in Egypt. Furniture would update over time. We can tell when furniture was being built because customs changed over time.

[00:20:47]So David Faulk, who's an Egyptologist, says the Ark of the Covenant as we know it from the Hebrew Bible is steeped in the culture and context of its time.

[00:20:59]Egyptians were really into Egyptian ritual furniture. Something like this Zabar for example. They loved Egyptian ritual furniture. And so they had but the end because they you know just like we update customs and the way we build stuff over time so did the Egyptians. So the ark of the covenant as it most likely would have looked would have been something like this. The poles are actually at the bottom. People sometimes you put them at the top probably not likely. Probably would have been down here. This is the most likely way based on what the Bible says what the Ark of the Covenant would have looked like and it would have been steeped in the Egyptian ritual culture of its time.

[00:21:39]So let's talk about this. So Egyptian ritual chests were used for transporting sacred objects. Okay. Uh Egyptian sacred furniture often had long removable poles attached to the base.

[00:21:55]Often they were wood boxes covered with gold inside and out. They had a sacred cloth draped over and they had a lid that would be something like what we call the mercy seat.

[00:22:05]So the ark's deconstruction and its dating of its symbol suggests the ark was made no earlier than the reign of King Ahmed Hoteep II, so early 1300s and no later than the end of the 20th dynasty. In other words, whoever built the ark would have lived roughly around the 1200s or so in that general time period.

[00:22:30]Now, if I were to ask you, let's do a comparison here. So, we live in America, Mexico to the south, Israel was north of Egypt. I want you to build me a couch using the customs of Mexicanstyle furniture of the 1700s. Who could do it?

[00:22:50]No Google, no libraries.

[00:22:54]If the book of Exodus is not reliable or it was written much later in Israel, they would never have designed the ark the way it's designed.

[00:23:05]Would never have done it. They would that been incredibly hard to get accurate. But based on the best available understanding of what we found in modern archaeology, the ark lands solely in the 1200s or so around that time period. And even non-Christians will acknowledge this. So Scott Nogle doesn't believe an exodus happened. Says exactly how and when the object became an an aperture of Israelite cult is difficult to say since biblical texts mythologized the ark's creation. Nevertheless, archaeological evidence suggests that the late bronze age provides the best opportunity.

[00:23:42]So even he acknowledges someone who doesn't believe the exodus happened. Whoever designed this mythological ark, it's based on a time period of the 1200s. What are the odds, ladies and gentlemen? I don't know.

[00:23:59]So, let's move on. Now, let's talk about the conquest because again, we had Semites in Egypt around the 12 late 12 or the early 1200s and they left. They abandoned Avarus. So, where did they go?

[00:24:12]Well, we would say there was a conquest of Canaan. Do we have evidence of that?

[00:24:17]Well, let's go into this a little bit here. So, if the Exodus happened around 1265, we should expect to find a conquest around 12:25, right?

[00:24:27]So, that's where we got to look around that time period. Right now, what we are told by the experts is there's no evidence of a conquest either because we don't see massive cities being burned.

[00:24:38]We should be seeing city after city destroyed, burned, plunder by the Israelites coming in. And we don't see that. Case closed. No conquest. Right.

[00:24:50]I'm sorry. What does the Bible say though? Does the Bible say they burned city after city after city after city?

[00:24:58]No, does not. It says three sites were burned.

[00:25:03]So, real quick, do they burn Jericho? I Hor.

[00:25:11]Those are the three. What he does say though is that what he does say is he says basically you're going to inherit that land. You're going to live in houses you didn't build, live in cities you didn't build, reap from vineyards you did not plant.

[00:25:28]This is says this in Deuteronomy and Joshua over and over again. So if that's the case, we shouldn't expect to see any major changes in terms of the structures of Canaan, right? They just moved in and they took over things. That was the goal of the conquest. And again, they only built they only burned three cities.

[00:25:52]Jericho, I and Hazor. Now, what about these cities? Were they burned?

[00:26:00]Well, for the longest time, we've heard there's no evidence of Jericho.

[00:26:04]I have some good news, though.

[00:26:07]The latest reports on Jericho from the leading archaeologist there, Lorenzo Niagro, has published a little bit of research within the past two years, past few years. First in 2020 and then in 2023, and I assure you, you're going to want to see what the latest reports on Jericho have to say.

[00:26:26]They are very nice. So, I'm going to get to that. You will see some of the latest research on Jericho today. You guys ready? All right. But first, I was going to give you the back backstory of Jericho. So, the first person to excavate Jericho was John Garang. He went there and he said there was a destruction of Jericho around 1400.

[00:26:49]Though he didn't really do much and then Kathleen Kenyan came. She said, "Well, there was a destruction, but it was actually around 1550."

[00:26:58]All right. So, no evidence of an conquest during the time of Joshua that we've established.

[00:27:04]Now, here's the issue, though. When she went there, she discovered a cyclopian wall right there. Now, what is that? This is the wall that was destroyed in 1550.

[00:27:19]Now, a cyclopian wall is what you would expect. It's just a single wall. Single wall. Now, that's a problem because doesn't it say something interesting in the book of Joshua?

[00:27:34]It says Rahab lived in the wall.

[00:27:39]Nobody could live in a cyclopian wall because it's just a single wall. What we need to look for with Jericho would be a casemate wall.

[00:27:48]Because a casemate wall, like here's your inner city from a bird's eye view.

[00:27:52]You can build rooms because it's two walls with enough uh space for rooms in between them. You can here's a here's a picture of what we can see in terms of casemate walls from the ancient world.

[00:28:04]You can see there was room to sort of get inside those places. Casemate walls.

[00:28:10]That's what should have been at Jericho when Joshua came through.

[00:28:14]Also an important thing about it as well is that that 1550 destruction, the one that Kathleen Kenyon found, the one that early daters of the Exodus are desperate to try to turn into Joshua's destruction doesn't work because whoever destroyed that wall use ramperts. They use battering rams. Did Joshua use battering rams? No, he did not. The walls came tumbling down. They didn't have to use any batter ramps.

[00:28:44]So, back to the timeline.

[00:28:47]So, even if this destruction could be redated, it's not Joshua's destruction.

[00:28:53]It can't be because again, it's the wrong wall. It's the wrong destruction.

[00:29:02]Cannot be Joshua's destruction. But was there another destruction? Maybe.

[00:29:08]Well, Garang actually said thought there was two destructions when he went and looked there. People don't realize this.

[00:29:14]He said, "Though in general the remains of this building and even its destruction layers were well preserved, it was found unfortunately to have been disturbed in places by the foundation of a stout building a still later date. It now made clear that the pottery proper of this middle building belonged to a second phase of the late Bronze Age."

[00:29:35]So he when he went there he yeah he found that early destruction but he said there's even evidence of another destruction that happened later. There were two destructions. So someone destroyed it early they rebuilt the city and then someone came back and destroyed it again. So two destructions there.

[00:29:51]Now what happened again after the 1550 destruction? The cyclopian wall the one that was destroyed with battering rams the people there they rebuilt on top of it. uh they refurbished the with a mud brick wall. So they built a new mud brick wall on top of the surviving crest of the cyclopian wall.

[00:30:13]So they built a wall destroyed build a new wall on top of it.

[00:30:18]And you can see that in the data here.

[00:30:20]So here's the cyclopian wall fell out.

[00:30:23]And then you can see this other wall they started building on top of it.

[00:30:27]So two walls.

[00:30:31]Now what does Lorenza Nigro say?

[00:30:35]So he says bronze layers were heavily cut by leveling operations carried out in the iron age. Now what does that mean? So what it means is Solomon when he built up Jericho he started digging in to Jericho disturbing the layers there cutting in and changing stuff removing evidence of anything that happened. So it's not that when we look there we find evidence of a destruction. It's not that when we look there, we find no evidence of a destruction. It's when we look, the layers that would tell us about a destruction are missing because they were disturbed by later builders, which is unfortunate to say the least. But it's not that we haven't found anything there. It's that Solomon, the Byzantines, the Romans kept building on top of Jericho. kept building and they kept digging and digging down into the late bronze layers removing any evidence of what happened there. So we just don't know what happened to this walled city.

[00:31:34]But Lorenzan Nagra also notes something interesting. He says after the late bronze city was there it was it disappeared and it was and it was replaced by a small rural village. So Iron Age one was detected in a few places on Spring Hill.

[00:31:52]uh ceramic material was dated to the 11th century and may be related to the royal village that rose out of the ruins of the late bronze city. So let me explain what this means in terms of a timeline. So let's go through this. So 1550 the first destruction the cyclopian wall comes down. Okay, they rebuild it with a new mud brick wall. Okay, exodus comes in around 1265.

[00:32:17]1225 is a conquest. This mud brickwalled structure disappears.

[00:32:22]We don't know what happened to it.

[00:32:25]Okay. And what happens after this period? There's just a small village there.

[00:32:32]So the walled city is gone and all that's there is a small village.

[00:32:37]That's basically the new story of Jericho.

[00:32:42]Hopefully if they keep studying it, they'll find an evidence of a destruction.

[00:32:47]Uh but again, this does at least fit with the biblical timeline, does it not?

[00:32:51]Fits very well with it. You have an Exodus, a conquest, you have a walled city and that's gone. It's no longer there in the 1100s and the 1000s. So something happened to that walled city.

[00:33:04]Unfortunately, again, because Solomon, Helenistic, and Byzantine rulers kept digging in that area. They removed evidence of those late bronze layers.

[00:33:12]But that doesn't mean it contradicts. In fact, this is very consistent with the biblical timeline. Now, so according to the latest reports, Jericho can now fit with the biblical account.

[00:33:25]Finally, let's talk about I the site the scholars generally say that I was is at tell.

[00:33:36]Now, they'll say things like, well, we have no evidence of any destruction there during the time of Joshua.

[00:33:44]But the problem is is that the Bible doesn't describe I as a giant city like Gibian or a giant fortress like Jericho.

[00:33:54]Okay, it describes it rather small.

[00:33:59]Joshua to only took a small number of men to ambush it at first and then it says when the men of I chased him there was not a man left in I or Bethl that did not go after Israel.

[00:34:11]So it kind of treats I like a small outpost for Bethl which was the real city but I had to be taken first. Now what's interesting though is that Israel Finkelestein for example he actually says we do have evidence Bethl was destroyed at this time by invading Israelites.

[00:34:33]Again Finkelestein does not believe in an Exodus but even he admits yeah Bethl seems to have been destroyed around this time. It appears to be by you know what would be called invading Israelites.

[00:34:45]And of course we also have to note something about I. What does I mean in Hebrew?

[00:34:51]It means ruin heap of stones.

[00:34:55]It does not mean massive walled city.

[00:34:59]It seems that it was a ruin that the Bethlites used as sort of like an outpost of their main city. This is just a smaller sort of outpost used for defense warning. And so that is what I simply was.

[00:35:16]Kenneth Kitchen reminds us something about the biblical account. He says it still needs to be remembered also that the entire area of Etel has not been dug. Fully eroded parts of course can never tell us anything. The Hebrews may well have taken Bethl after I, but the narrative uh is focused on I. So again, the point of the narrative is just to focus on I, this smaller area.

[00:35:42]Now, you might still be upset, but let's talk about a couple other things. So, first off, I want to point out that in Israel, 7,000 sites have been found, but only 4,200 have been surveyed.

[00:35:57]Only oh 150 have been partially excavated and only 26 sites have become major sites and only a fraction of what has been excavated has even been published.

[00:36:09]In other words, we got to drop this myth that we've combed Sinai, we've combed Israel and we have found no evidence of anything there.

[00:36:20]Well, that's just simply not true. We haven't looked as much as people like to think we have. We've looked a lot but not as much as we should. But even with that, there is some interesting evidence that there were occupants at eye around 1200.

[00:36:35]So it seems as though someone with so Joseph Callaway notes that we have this destruction in the really early Bronze Age and it becomes this ruin, but then people are occupying it around 1220 around the time of the Exodus.

[00:36:51]So again, we don't have evidence that's not inconsistent with the biblical data here.

[00:36:57]Now, after I it says they built an altar on Mount Bal and for years, scholars assured us there was no evidence of Joshua's altar until somebody decided to go look and he found an altar right right where it should be right there on Mount Ibal right there. And then immediately the historians were like, "Well, that's not that had to be some sort of like tower or outpost or something, right?"

[00:37:23]Well, the the archaeologists who went there said, "By our site is a cultic center." Uh the more than 50 installations containing either animal bones or ashes or pottery vessels seem irrefutable evidence of the cultic nature of the site.

[00:37:40]Uh and today now after a couple decades of debating about this uh an Kibru says the consensus today tends to support the cultic interpretation of the early iron one site if not the biblical one.

[00:37:57]In other words, people are now in agreement that what we're looking at here is Joshua's altar or at least it aligns really well with it.

[00:38:08]So when do they date this altar being built?

[00:38:12]Basically around 1200 or so slightly 1240 or ended 1200 or so.

[00:38:21]It lines really well with the time of Joshua. Now have you ever noticed something interesting in the Bible? They build this cultic site on Mount Ibal and Joshua and then you never hear about it again.

[00:38:32]How come? Well, they moved the cultic site to Shiloh Knob and then eventually Jerusalem.

[00:38:39]Well, what h well what happened to I it seems that it was actually abandoned.

[00:38:44]That would align with the biblical record. They stopped using it, right?

[00:38:47]They used other sites for the ark of the temple and for sacrifice. It was really only in use during the time of Joshua and shortly after. Well, this is what we see in the biblical data here as well.

[00:38:59]So again, now we have another key point that aligns with our biblical data here.

[00:39:05]Let's talk about the last city that was destroyed, Hazor. Now Hzor was in the north and it says the Israelites burned it. No one disagrees with that. So they went through, they burned this city to the ground.

[00:39:20]Yeah. So what do we see in the archaeological record here? So well, this is basically the city. This is where the elites would have lived, the upper city. This is a lower city where the poor would have lived. Uh very very big m city, very massive city compared to Jericho and others as well. Here's an aerial view. This is again this is the upper city here where they're excavating and this is the lower city down here.

[00:39:42]Very very big city in the ancient world.

[00:39:45]So what does the archaeological record show? Well, it says there was a fierce confl confflaggeration. Basically it burned. He marked the end of the Canaanite Hzor. Across the site, a thick layer of ashes and charred wood in places three feet deep attest to the intensity of the blaze in the northern Galilee city.

[00:40:07]Within the walls of Azor's palace, the fire was especially fierce. The unusual amount of timber used in the construction of the building and the large quantity of oil stored in huge pithoy throughout the palace provide proved a fatal combination creating an inferno with temperatures exceeding 2,000 350 degrees Fahrenheit. In intense heat, the palace's mud brick walls vitrified, assault slabs cracked, and clay vessels melted.

[00:40:35]Now, not only was the city burned, but its its idols, its gods were mutilated.

[00:40:44]So, somebody came in and decided to not only just burn the city, but they also mutilated and destroyed a lot of the idols there.

[00:40:56]So, what they say is whoever burned the city also deliberately destroyed stat the statues in the palace. Among the ashes, we discovered the largest Canaanite statue of a human form ever found in Israel, carved from a basalt block that must have weighed more than a ton. The three-ft tall statue had been smashed into nearly a 100 pieces which were scattered in a six- foot wide circle, the head and the hands of the statue, and several others were missing, apparently cut off by the city's conquerors.

[00:41:28]So, who could have done this? who could have destroyed the city and burned the pagan idols or destroyed the pagan idols.

[00:41:35]Well, would the Canaanites have done this? Let's say there was a an internal rebellion. The poor rose up and defeated the elders, the the rulers and all that.

[00:41:45]They wouldn't have killed their own gods. They wouldn't destroy their own god. They would have brought curses upon themselves. Can't be the Canaanites.

[00:41:52]Was it the Egyptians? The Egyptians would raid through Canaan destroying whatever they wanted. Well, as you can see, some of the gods there were Egyptian gods.

[00:42:03]The Egyptians also would not destroy their own gods.

[00:42:07]Could it have been invading Philistines?

[00:42:09]We know they started living on the coast around this region. They came from the Aian Greek world. Well, they never made it this far inland. There's no evidence Philistines moved in.

[00:42:19]So, what do the archaeologists say?

[00:42:22]This leaves us with the Israelites is what they say. At the end of the day, when we look at the the the possible people who could have destroyed this, the most likely candidate who destroyed Hzor would be the Israelites.

[00:42:35]When was the destruction? In the 1200s, late 1200s around the same time that Mount Abbal elar is being built. Jericho suddenly goes missing. Same issues as well.

[00:42:49]So, when we look at all this data, we have couple sites that are aligning quite well. But what about Shiloh?

[00:42:56]Well, when we look at the timeline of Shiloh, Shiloh was being used by Canaanites around this time and then someone stopped. They started to fizzle out around 1400. And then all of a sudden around 1200s, the Israelites started to use it. That's not coming from me. That's coming from archaeologists like Israel Finkelstein who doesn't believe in an Exodus. But he says these are the most important building remains of iron one Shiloh indicating developed construction techniques and agricultural concepts already at this early stage of Israelite settlement.

[00:43:30]So somebody resettled and started using Shiloh around the same time as the conquest happens.

[00:43:38]Now we know the Bible mentions dozens of sites during the book of Joshua, right?

[00:43:44]So when Kenna's kitchen went through all these sites, he's finding them in the archaeological record.

[00:43:51]So these sites are being used, settled.

[00:43:54]So for the most part, Joshua is mentioning numerous sites that seem to align as being occupied during the time of the conquest.

[00:44:04]Now, I've not even gotten to the best part. I'm going to give you the best piece of evidence for the conquest here.

[00:44:12]If there was a new group of people moving into J into uh Israel, we should expect the population to increase, right?

[00:44:20]Well, scholars are pretty pretty much unanimous on this. During this time, there was a population explosion in Canaan.

[00:44:26]Dozens of new sites came out of nowhere almost overnight. Dayo new sites. All of a sudden, there's all these new people.

[00:44:35]We don't know where they came from.

[00:44:39]So Mazzour says intense archaeological surveys or archaeological surface surveys revealed an entirely new settlement pattern in Iron Age 1.

[00:44:49]Hundreds of new small sites were inhabited in the mountainous areas of the upper and lower Galilee in the hills of Samaria and Ephraim in Benjamin in the northern Ngev and in parts of central and northern Trans Jordan. Much of this activity can be related to Israelite tribes though the ethnic attribution in some of these regions is still questioned.

[00:45:11]So to give you kind of like an understanding.

[00:45:14]So take for example Ephra area. Okay. It went from very few sites to 131 occupied sites.

[00:45:24]Uh in Manasseh 200 new occupied sites.

[00:45:29]Here's the chart. So late bronze age you can see in Judah zero Benjamin zero iron 1 18 52 frame goes from 4 to 102 Manasse 32 to 147 19 to 77 20 to 46 32 up and up and up numbers don't lie you can dispute about oh this site that site numbers tell a really interesting story you go from 88 sites to 678 almost as if within a generation that kind of stuff doesn't happen unless a new people have moved in from another region.

[00:46:11]So just in terms of timeline we see that population was actually depleting and then all of a sudden around the same time that we aligned the conquest population explosion very very odd. Also, what's very interesting about these new Canaanite sites, these new Israelite sites in Canaan, they didn't eat pig, no pig bones.

[00:46:37]Brook Halpern says prior to the prior to and during the sea people's settlement, Canaanite sites reveal low levels but real levels of pig consumption. The early Philistine layers conversely indicate a very high level of pig consumption, but the Israelite sites of the highlands disclose an amount complete absence of pig, showing in addition a general preference for sheep over goat.

[00:47:00]So these brand new sites that just came out of nowhere, they didn't eat pig.

[00:47:07]What do we remember about avarus back in Egypt?

[00:47:10]They also didn't eat pig.

[00:47:14]So we have a a correlation here.

[00:47:17]No pig in Avarus, no pig at these new Israelite sites in Canaan.

[00:47:23]Very, very odd coincidence. And again, we have a account in our Bible that tells us why we would find this correlation. This stuff is predicted by the Bible. This is what we should find and it's exactly what we find.

[00:47:39]So just to recap again when we look at the timeline, middle kingdom, new kingdom, new king over Egypt, Exodus here, conquest here, and what does the Egyptians even say?

[00:47:51]Yeah, Israel's in Canaan. That's where they are around the time they should be there. So let's look at the data. Let's just look do a quick summary here. This is this is the evidence we went through.

[00:48:06]So we saw a smitic population at Avarus which indicates shepherds.

[00:48:11]The Semitic population was enslaved and not treated well. Egyptian evidence shows foreign slaves involved in brickmaking.

[00:48:18]No pig bones found in a virus. The virus was abandoned during the Ramside period.

[00:48:24]Again roughly about here. This is when a virus is about abandoned.

[00:48:30]The ark of the covenant fits with late Bronze Age Egyptian culture.

[00:48:34]There was a population explosion roughly once generation later in Canaan and then Mepa steel confirmed Israel was in Canaan at this point. The new settlements lacked pigbones aligning with what we saw about those people who abandoned Ovarus.

[00:48:51]Shiloh was resettled with distinct Israelite features. There was a small cultic site found on Mount Abal. Roughly 30 sites from the book of Joshua have been found.

[00:49:02]Hzor indicates a fiery destruction and the idols of Hzar Hzor were mutilated in an Israelite fashion and Jericho went from a fortified city to a small town.

[00:49:18]Here's a simple question.

[00:49:20]If you don't think an exodus happened, how do you explain all this?

[00:49:27]So, okay, you could say maybe the maybe the virus was abandoned, but those semmites were just dispersed throughout Egypt. Yeah, there was a population explosion in Canaan who also lacked pigbones. But those people were just, you know, they came, they were living in the lowlands of Israel and they moved into the highlands, even though we have no evidence of that.

[00:49:46]And maybe, yeah, Hzor was destroyed. It was destroyed by uh Egyptian or Egyptians or maybe Canaanites who were trying to sick and tired of being treated harshly by their rulers. You can explain all this stuff away or you can account for all this data with one explanation. There was a biblical exodus.

[00:50:07]Which do you think is a simpler explanation?

[00:50:12]This. This is why when I keep asking atheists to debate me on the Exodus, they won't do it because they know I can make a philosophical case that this all this data can be explained in a simple parimonious way by just pointing to an Exodus.

[00:50:34]So there's even more data I don't have time to cover. If you want more, I have three videos on my YouTube channel. I do the Exodus, the wandering period, and then the conquest.

[00:50:45]Lot of data. This is just the tip of the iceberg. I go into more cultural similarities you're going to find that align with all this. There's so much more data out there. Uh, and at the end of the day, people who deny the Exodus are just not being honest with the data that we do have or they're looking in the wrong time period or they're just being they haven't actually looked and they're just making claims that they don't know anything about. There is so much evidence for the Exodus, but we have to look in the right time period. It's the late date, the 1200s, the 13th century.

[00:51:20]And with that, I can take any questions you might have. Thank you.

[00:51:38]presentation. Um, so in my cursory study of like the extra biblical evidence for the Exodus, um, I came up across a group of people called the Hobbyiru people.

[00:51:50]Yeah. Um, I was curious if you see the link there. Obviously there's seems like there's a linguistic connection between the word like Hebrew and Airiu. Um is that is that like a tenable position you see the link there?

[00:52:02]>> So hobbyiru was a general term in the ancient near east. So we're just talking about the term. It just referred to outsiders downcast sometimes mercenaries. It's used for many different meanings. So you could make the claim that maybe the Hebrews were a type of hobby. Maybe there's a linguistic connection there. But not every reference to Hobbyir would be the Hebrew. There were many hobby long before Moses. Uh you can make the case that maybe that's how it started out.

[00:52:30]Abraham was a wandering hobby and then that slowly became a term within Israelite culture just to refer to the Hebrews because Habiru or Biru more more specifically refers to outsiders. So people go to the Amarna letters which are around the 1300s and they go ah this might be the Hebrews. It isn't. Those are because they're doing the Habiru or the Apiriou in the Amarna letters are doing stuff Joshua didn't do. They're up by Biblo. They're doing stuff down in Sinai. Uh they're doing stuff all over.

[00:53:01]They're mercenaries. It seems to have been hired by uh other people to help attack and take over regions. But yeah, you can make the case there could be some sort of like slow connection.

[00:53:11]Abraham starts off as a au wandering kind of like an outsider and then the Israelites just sort of adopt and change that term over time but that's very debated just so you know.

[00:53:25]>> So I was wondering how large was ours?

[00:53:28]What kind of population could that support?

[00:53:31]>> Yeah, there's different estimates. Some will say 25,000 to like 30,000 or so. uh some will uh David Folk for example he's an Egyptologist I've worked with on this presentation he says it could have supported a population around 100,000 or so something around maybe 100 to 200,000 there was a big temple dedicated to set there or um Baal that um the Semites lived around and that would correlate with Joshua because what does Joshua say at the end you know stop worshiping the gods that your fathers worshiped in Egypt So yeah, we would it kind of fits with the biblical record, but yeah, something around there. And people say, well, doesn't the Exodus say there was like 4 million? This is probably exaggerated or symbolic numbers. I don't think it was 4 million left Egypt. Uh if you read Heroditus, for example, or Josephus, they're always taking what the numbers were and they're just blowing them out of proportion. It was common in the ancient world to blow up numbers. So when we think there was like an army of 100 thousand, they're saying there was like millions. It's just common of what they did in the ancient world. Uh so yeah, that's what I would say to that.

[00:54:40]It's probably 50 to 200,000 maybe or so was the actual total of the Exodus.

[00:54:46]Yeah.

[00:54:47]>> Hey Mike, great great presentations.

[00:54:49]Thank you for that.

[00:54:50]>> Um so some conservative biblical scholars would obviously take issue with your date of the 1200s.

[00:54:57]>> Yeah, they can be wrong. It's okay.

[00:54:58]>> Yeah.

[00:54:59]Um, so I wonder what you would do with uh the the evidence that they put before with the sole inscription in Sudan around 1400 says it says nomads the god of Yahweh. Uh, and also the alternative site of Etel being kerbet alakir which is like a kilometer I don't know which direction uh which shows a destruction layer around that time. So just curious what your thoughts are on those if you have any.

[00:55:29]>> Yeah, there were destructions happening all the time in Canaan. If you just find the destruction doesn't mean you can say that that's it. They need to make a stronger case that that all aligns with their case for a 1400 conquest. Uh I wouldn't be opposed to there being a destruction there. That doesn't prove their case though. Uh that so with the with the nomad destruction that works against them though. So there's a temple in northern Sudan that says that there are these uh nomads of Yahweh, the Shashu of Yahweh, and it would happen around 1400s or so.

[00:56:03]The problem is it says they were living in the region of Adam.

[00:56:07]What does the Torah say? They didn't go through Adam. They went around because they weren't allowed to go through. So that doesn't that's another problem for them.

[00:56:17]They think it helps them. It doesn't. it actually works against them. Whoever these people were, they could have been the Israelites because the Israelites didn't go through Adam.

[00:56:27]So again, that's another issue. Now, Egyptologists aren't even sure if that's a reference to Yahweh. They that's most don't think it is. They think that's just a similar sounding word. And so, we get excited, but most Egyptologists like, "Yeah, I know the Egyptian that's not Yahweh." Uh our earliest inscription of Yahweh is still the Moabitete steel.

[00:56:50]Uh it does it's not Yahweh there. Uh but if it is who lived in Adam, the children of Esau, I would have no problem with saying the children of Esau worshiped Yahweh. So yeah, not a problem there.

[00:57:02]It's not Israelites though. So this again doesn't this another problem for the early date. Early date proponents think helps them and they just don't know what the actual data is on that.

[00:57:15]>> Yeah. Thanks for the presentation. Mike, quick question. Have you uh dialogued any with Eric Klein's work and his uh uh his hypothesis that the uh the conquest of Canaan was just the results of the sea peoples of the uh of the 12th century and then where he's regarding uh the Israelites later moving in peace meal uh to fill in the void left by the destruction of Canaan.

[00:57:40]>> Yeah, I I have seen a little bit of that. Uh it's just kind of speculative.

[00:57:44]Uh but it wouldn't wouldn't be a problem because the book the Torah says that Yahweh is going to send like a hornets's nest before them to disturb the people.

[00:57:52]So if the Philistines were going around doing that, weakening up the Canaanites and the Amorites in the region, it fit with the biblical account. He says, "I'm sending a hornets nest before you." So that would again align with the biblical data of all this chaos happening in the region. Makes it a lot easier for the coming in Israelites.

[00:58:09]>> Yeah. You need to debate him just like you did Lawrence Krauss. That would be a big >> Yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean, I'm happy to do that kind of stuff, but I mean, no one's taking up my offer up for a debate on the Exodus, you know.

[00:58:22]>> Hi. Uh, thank you so much for that.

[00:58:24]>> Thank you. Um, I just wanted to know you you cited Finkelestein there earlier and I believe his hypothesis for a lot of the stuff you just explained is is like a peaceful settlement type of thing where you have the gradual moving in of the Israelites into the land of Canaan.

[00:58:41]>> Um, couldn't most of the data points you showed there be explained by something like that or do you think your explanation fits better? And if so, why?

[00:58:50]Kenneth Kitchen points out the main problem with Finkelstein or Dver and their arguments is they say that where the first thing you ask is where do these people come from this peaceful settlement. So what they say is that in the lowlands of Israel. So let me um go back a little bit and show you just kind of a map here.

[00:59:08]Okay. So what they say is like down in this region there were all these people down in this region here living as nomadic shepherds. And then one day they decided to move up and settle make all these new regions completely undetected. We have no evidence of any of this massive am I mean again go back to the sites 88 to 678 sites. That's a massive amount of people we have no evidence for. We do have evidence in Egypt though as I pointed out. So with that right then and there what's the best explanation where these people came from? no evidence of anyone in this region down here that moved up and took this. We've evidence of a site abandoned a generation earlier in Egypt that could account for all this of people moving in. So that's the first problem.

[00:59:59]Uh the second problem is again uh the destructions like for example Jericho uh again no destruction layer but we have the walled city missing. The destruction of Azor uh doesn't fit with that. there is some violence happening in this region that we can find for example. Uh again lack of pigbones why do these people all suddenly decide to lack pig bones very odd issue there. So yeah you can try to make the data fit. My argument is always going to be against Finkelstein is what's the best explanation what can account for all of the data. So if we go back to our list all of this is best he can account for some of this. I'm not going to deny that. He definitely can.

[01:00:40]But all of it, no. I think the best explanation is going to be uh that these people came from Egypt and resettled.

[01:00:46]There was some violence. We don't again we don't say what the destruction it was just massive endless violence. There was fighting but a lot of that fighting is going not going to leave like you're not going to see evidence of that like when Joshua fought against the five Amorite kings. What kind of evidence is that going to leave behind? Battles don't leave evidence that lasts 3,000 years.

[01:01:05]Because when you do have a battle, you go onto the side, you go onto the battlefield, you take up all the swords, the valuable armor, you're not going to leave it bare beat in the ancient world.

[01:01:14]You're going to use that kind of stuff.

[01:01:15]And then animals will come in and eat the dead bodies. So a lot of that evidence of just them fighting, not going to be left behind. The evidence can be left behind is cities that were burned and abandoned like Hazor.

[01:01:27]>> Hey Mike, thank you for your presentation and thank you for your YouTube channel as well. Great help.

[01:01:32]>> Um, couple of questions. One is you mentioned that 40 is constantly used in the Old Testament figuratively to represent kind of an indeterminate number. Would you also say then the that the Israelite wandering wasn't actually 40 years? And um my second question is this. Why do you think there's a lack of curiosity to continue to explore the Cyani region?

[01:01:57]>> So I'll answer the second question versus funding, government restrictions, uh where do you look? I mean it's this that stuff costs money and even this big baron Sinai which you're not even sure you're going to find anything. Why invest? Again you're you're this is not the kind of evidence this could be left behind for generations. That's just an unfortunate thing. Even if we look we may not find anything but that doesn't mean it didn't happen because again they're just moving across the region very briefly. Uh with the first question uh what was that again >> about uh the Israelite wandering? Is it literally 40 years?

[01:02:33]>> It had to be around that because what does God say? That generation that came out of Egypt has to die off. When they're all died off other than Joshua and Caleb, you guys can go in. So, uh, it had to be around that. I mean, if it was 41 39, I don't think the biblical authors would have cared. They would have just used the round number. They were very much into that kind of thing.

[01:02:53]But it had to be generally that.

[01:02:56]Perfect. Thank you.

[01:03:03]Where' Tyson go? Tyson.

[01:03:16]All right. Dismissed.

[01:03:20]>> Oh, what is it? Hold on. Another question.

[01:03:22]>> Yeah. So, um I I watched um this thing and um it said um there were like reefs that looked like um the the shapes of um of >> I'm going to sit down for this one. Oh, that one. Yeah. There's no cherry wheels under the Red Sea.

[01:03:42]>> Yes.

[01:03:42]>> And what's And you say about >> Yeah. So, you guys know that the Titanic's going to be gone in 50 years, right?

[01:03:51]The metal giant boat is going to be gone because that's what the ocean does to things. You think chariot wheels are going to last the wooden chariot wheels are going to last 3,000 years under the Red Sea? No, they're not there. That was made up by Ron Wyatt in the in the 1980s. Who lied because he said he had scuba diving equipment to go to the depth to look there. That technology didn't exist at the time that he said he went down. So, he's a liar. You hear about anything that Ron Wyatt says, he's a liar. Ron Wyatt is the guy who said that he went to Israel and God told him there was a special cave just for him.

[01:04:26]And in that cave, he would find the ark of the covenant and the altar. And Jesus's blood would be on the altar and the ark of the covenant because Jesus was crucified just above this cave. And the blood dripped down on there. And by the way, the blood was still alive. Uh, and um, then he went and got the blood DNA tested and confirmed it was from a man 2,000 years ago who only had 24 chromosomes. I kid you not. And then he put those results in there and then God told him to seal seal up the cave because no one could know about it cuz he was but he could see it cuz he was special.

[01:05:00]Then that was it. That so this guy is a con man liar. Don't believe anything he said.

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