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00:00Exodus
00:14A Biblical tale of miracles
00:18Catastrophes
00:21History changed by the hand of God
00:25From the burning bush to the death of the firstborn
00:29Scholars and enthusiasts pursue natural explanations for supernatural events
00:35In laboratories, desert sands, and on volcanoes
00:39Will these theories provide proof that the miracles actually happened?
00:43What's the real story of Exodus?
00:47Is it possible that it never happened at all?
00:59Exodus
01:09A 3,000 year old Biblical story
01:13Of terrible plagues
01:17The parting of the Red Sea
01:21The Israelites freed from slavery in Egypt
01:26The Book of Exodus is central to Judaism
01:29Christianity
01:30And Islam
01:31The faith of billions
01:33A story endlessly retold
01:37Around ancient campfires
01:39In sacred texts
01:41And on film
01:43The question is
01:45Did Exodus really happen
01:47As the Old Testament describes?
01:49I believe the events recorded in the Book of Exodus
01:51Are true events
01:52There is no scientific proof
01:54For the story of the Exodus
01:55I don't have proof
01:56But I do have evidence
01:58The stakes are high
02:01The conflict over lands in the Middle East
02:05Can be traced all the way back to the Old Testament
02:10For centuries
02:11The epic events of Exodus
02:13Have driven people to search for explanations
02:16For evidence
02:18Scientists and enthusiasts
02:21Have attempted to decipher miracles
02:23Using techniques from the traditional
02:25To the bizarre
02:27But the evidence remains tantalizingly slim
02:32Ruins unearthed in Egypt
02:34Revealed that ancestors of the Israelites
02:36May have lived there
02:37Before the time of Exodus
02:39Then an Egyptian engraving
02:42From 1207 B.C.
02:44Placed the Israelites in Canaan
02:46Present day Israel
02:48What happened in between is unclear
02:52Except in the Old Testament
02:55Three thousand years ago
03:00Egypt is at the height of its power
03:03Pharaoh has enslaved the Israelites
03:07Now they must build Egypt's cities
03:10And great monuments
03:12He fears the growing Israelite population
03:16He decrees that their firstborn sons
03:20Shall be put to death
03:21A desperate mother tries to save her child
03:27Adrift in the river
03:31The infant is rescued by Pharaoh's daughter
03:34The child is named Moses
03:38And grows up in the royal household
03:41One day Moses defends a slave
03:47From a vicious beating
03:48By killing his overseer
03:50Now he must flee for his life
03:55Years pass
03:58And then alone in the desert
04:00He witnesses a wondrous event
04:02A bush burns but is not consumed
04:06From the bush comes the voice of God
04:10God commands Moses to confront Pharaoh
04:16And demand freedom for the slaves
04:25Moses walks through the desert
04:26Alone to challenge Pharaoh
04:28The most powerful person on earth
04:31Moses demands freedom for his people
04:37Pharaoh says no
04:42In response
04:45The God of the Israelites unleashes an apocalypse
04:48Of natural disasters and disease upon the Egyptians
04:51To save Egypt
04:55Pharaoh is forced to free the slaves
04:57God guides the Israelites out of Egypt
05:01Parting the Red Sea
05:03Raining manna from heaven
05:05And delivering them to the promised land
05:07Changing the course of history
05:10Could this ancient epic be historically accurate?
05:14Could these miracles be real?
05:17There is a long tradition of investigators searching
05:20For scientific explanations for biblical miracles
05:23Cambridge physicist Colin Humphrey is among them
05:27He thinks he can demystify the burning bush
05:31The Bible describes Moses as seeing a bush that was burning
05:35And the bush wasn't consumed
05:37So there must have been some external source of energy
05:40I have a theory this might have been due to a natural gas leak
05:44Underneath the burning bush
05:45Because we know natural gas is common in the Middle East
05:47We're going to see if we can reproduce the burning bush that Moses saw
05:50With this natural gas experiment
05:52So I'm going to turn on the natural gas
05:55Humphreys begins the demonstration
05:58And you see the flames have lit up of the barbecue
06:03And they're leaping through the bush already
06:07The most common bush in the desert is the acacia bush
06:09And we know that if you burn in the acacia bush you get charcoal
06:12Rather than crumbling, charcoal retains its shape
06:16So this is really good
06:17Even though the flames are leaping around it
06:19The branches are still keeping their shape
06:22I think they're gradually turning to charcoal
06:24And so if this bush turns to charcoal when you burn it
06:27Then it retains its shape for a long time
06:30And so I believe that was the burning bush that Moses saw
06:33So we've reproduced scientifically what Moses may have seen
06:38Plausible perhaps, but hardly proof
06:41When it comes to the miracles of Exodus
06:44Explanations abound
06:46From the sublime to the ridiculous
06:49Perhaps one of the most daunting tasks for biblical investigators
06:54Finding natural causes for the plagues that fell upon the Egyptians like hammer blows
07:00When Pharaoh refused to free the Israelites
07:03Heaven's wrath descended
07:06The ten plagues began
07:08The water shall turn to blood
07:14And the fish that are in the river
07:16Shall die
07:17The description sounds familiar to epidemiologist John Marr
07:23He's seen millions of fish die in red waters
07:27From a profusion of microscopic algae called red tide
07:32And when you look at it you don't see the individual algae
07:39Which are microscopic
07:40But collectively they turn the water red
07:43They occur today around the globe
07:46But they're almost always associated with salt water
07:49Marr had no leads
07:51Then in 1995 something strange happened
07:55In a coastal river in North Carolina
07:58A billion fish dead
08:01The water red
08:02The cause unknown
08:04But then researchers found the culprit
08:07A deadly microorganism called Fisteria
08:11Fisteria was labeled the cell from hell
08:15Because it killed millions if not billions of fish
08:19If that occurred in North Carolina in the 1990s
08:23Why couldn't it have occurred in Egypt 3,000 years ago?
08:26For some who believe that science can explain the plagues
08:30The red waters mark the beginning of a seemingly logical chain of events
08:35Behold I will smite all thy borders with frogs
08:41Into thine house and into thy bedchamber
08:44And into thine ovens
08:45What explanation could there be for this population explosion?
08:52A natural check on frog populations are fish
08:57Now if the fish were to die
08:59Frogs would have come onto the land at the same time
09:03Millions of them
09:05The bible says the frogs were everywhere
09:08And then they died
09:11And they gathered them together upon heaps
09:16And the land stank
09:18God had just begun to unleash his fury
09:23More plagues were yet to come
09:26Did each one set the stage for the next?
09:29A chain of misery, illness and death
09:32A red Nile leading to the death of fish and frogs
09:41Did not convince Pharaoh to free the Israelites
09:44It was a decision he would live to regret
09:49And then outbreaks of insects descended on the Egyptians
09:53The first of the insect plagues was lice
09:58They infested man and beasts
10:01All of the dust of the land became lice throughout all the land of Egypt
10:05Lice in man and in beast
10:08But something is wrong here
10:13No one species of lice attacks both humans and animals
10:17And two simultaneous outbreaks would be unlikely
10:21In biblical times the word for lice
10:24Described any tiny blood sucking insect
10:27What tiny insect as small as lice
10:30Feeds on both humans and animals?
10:33For entomologist Jeff Lockwood
10:36One particular insect stands out
10:39A biting midge
10:41These guys, culicoides
10:43Culicoides are blood feeders
10:45Their mouth parts are like tiny swords that slice open the tissue
10:49And cause a pool of blood that they feed on
10:51Thousands and thousands, millions of these
10:54Would have driven the Egyptians absolutely crazy
11:01The fourth plague was an even nastier insect pest
11:07There came a grievous swarm of flies into the house of Pharaoh
11:11And into his servants' houses
11:13And into all the land of Egypt
11:15The land was corrupted
11:17By reason of the swarm of flies
11:19For Lockwood
11:21Two consecutive insect outbreaks had to be more than a coincidence
11:25Think back to the second plague
11:27What we have is a bunch
11:29Heaps of dead frogs
11:31A dead frog does double duty to produce a fly outbreak
11:33If they're dead, they're not eating the flies
11:35And if they're dead, they're certainly producing habitat that's good for flies
11:39In this scenario, red toxic water could have led to dead fish and frogs
11:45Whose rotting bodies bred hordes of insects
11:49And then the Egyptians watched their livestock die all around them
11:53Cattle, horses, camels, oxen, and sheep all were destroyed
11:59There is no disease or very few diseases that could afflict all those livestock simultaneously
12:07So we have to look for some common cause
12:09If it's not a common disease, we suspect that it's a common carrier of disease
12:13Lockwood's prime suspect
12:15The biting midge of the third plague
12:17A common carrier of many animal diseases
12:21A midge outbreak could have spread gruesome animal diseases like blue tongue
12:25And African horse sickness in epidemic proportions
12:29The midge is just an absolutely ideal explanation
12:33One common midge that's capable of transmitting diseases sufficient to sicken basically all of the Egyptians' livestock
12:41Lockwood sees a pattern emerging
12:45The plagues may be connected
12:47Dead fish
12:49Then frogs
12:51Then insects
12:53And now dead livestock
12:55Each plague may have emerged from the previous one
12:57Ecological pieces are now falling into place
13:01Lockwood looks to the sixth plague
13:03A disease that affects both humans and animals
13:07To see if it too was triggered by an earlier plague
13:11It shall be a boil breaking forth with blains upon man and upon beast
13:17There are several bacteria such as anthrax that can cause lesions and boils
13:23Something had to spread the bacteria among the victims
13:27And do it quickly and efficiently
13:29What would have carried it to both humans and animals?
13:31Let's think back to the fourth plague
13:33The flies
13:35It's house flies versus stable flies
13:37In a test to find the best disease transmitter
13:41We're going to use this yellow dye to mark the house flies
13:45The orange dye, the stable flies
13:47The dye is going to substitute, in our case, for the bacteria
13:51Lockwood sacrifices his arm to science
13:53Testing to see if either fly will transmit the dye to his skin
14:07In moments, the first stable fly attacks
14:11Yup
14:13Yup, he's starting to feed there
14:19Boom
14:21And you can imagine what the Egyptians
14:23Or I can imagine what the Egyptians would be suffering
14:26If they were covered in these flies
14:28The stable flies leave the most powder and break the skin
14:34They've left powder all over the place
14:36They're all over me and biting
14:38The stable flies are probably the guilty party
14:42What we have is an ecological domino effect
14:48Something goes wrong with the river
14:50It drives the frogs onto land
14:52Outbreak of insects
14:53Midges, which then carry diseases to the livestock
14:56We have an outbreak of flies, which carries boils to man and beast
15:01Some scholars think the first six plagues form a series of interconnected natural events
15:07But what about the rest?
15:09At this point in the story, God had severely punished Egypt
15:19Still, Pharaoh refused to free the slaves
15:23God was not done
15:27The next four plagues formed another chain of devastation
15:32Crop destroying hail gave way to ravenous locusts
15:42And the locusts went up all over the land of Egypt
15:45The land was darkened
15:47And they did eat every herb of the land
15:49There would have been more locusts in a swarm than there were humans on earth at the time of Exodus
15:55Imagine the Egyptians
15:58A cloud of locusts descends
16:00Not only does it begin by eating the wheat
16:02But soon the locusts move on to clothing
16:05Leather goods, baskets
16:07Anything that's organic and not moving
16:09Becomes food for these insects
16:12And they devour, in a sense, the countryside of Egypt
16:16The locusts consumed the last of the food supply
16:20Starvation loomed
16:24The ninth plague, darkness
16:28Some speculate it was a terrifying sandstorm that blocked the sun
16:33Then, the tenth and final plague
16:38At midnight, the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt
16:43From the firstborn of Pharaoh
16:45Under the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon
16:49Here was death parsed out in a way that seemed to defy scientific explanation
16:56How could something have killed the Egyptians on a massive scale and spared the Israelites?
17:03Epidemiologist Martin Blaser has a grim suspicion about what happened
17:08When you have a disease that affects both humans and animals
17:12Short time, a lot of people affected a lethal disease
17:15The list of possibilities is very small
17:17Bubonic plague fits everything
17:20Bubonic plague is spread by the bites of fleas
17:23Carried into human homes by rats
17:26In the 14th century, black death wiped out one-fourth of the population of Europe
17:35Blaser examined old death records
17:38He found that in some European cities
17:40Plague killed Jews at only half the rate as the rest of the population
17:45He suspects the Jews had been doing something that protected them
17:50Something that had also protected them in Biblical times in Egypt
17:54Some custom that prevented disease
17:57Like the dietary laws against eating pork
18:00Pigs can carry a 30-foot tapeworm called tinia
18:04That can end up in humans
18:06Causing disability and death
18:09Blaser focused on another ancient Jewish tradition
18:13Every spring, Jews were required to clean out their stored grain
18:20This law was so strict that even non-Jews living among them had to observe it
18:26The Jews were empirical thinkers
18:29And a long time ago they figured out the relationship between grain and plague
18:35Eliminate grain, keep rats under control
18:38By minimizing rats and fleas
18:41Blaser believes the Israelites may have protected themselves from plague
18:46The Egyptians, however, had no such ritual
18:50Blaser thinks this was their undoing
18:53The stage was set for Egypt's own black death
18:57Or was it?
18:59There is nothing in the black death scenario that would account for such selective killing
19:04The death of the firstborn only
19:06There is no disease that we know of that just affects the firstborns
19:12So I take that that it's a metaphor for a disease that kills one out of every three or four people
19:19John Marr believes the Biblical account may have been literal
19:23He set out to track down a more selective killer
19:27The tenth plague was almost inexplicable
19:31I was stumped
19:33Then Marr heard about a contemporary case of children dying suddenly
19:37Investigators at first suspected a mold had killed the children
19:42This gave Marr an idea about the tenth plague
19:45It was due to a toxic mold
19:50His theory, grain saturated by hail storms and stored in darkness
19:55Would have been susceptible to mold
19:57Rare molds can wreak havoc on human health
20:01And can even cause internal hemorrhaging
20:04With little else to eat
20:06The Egyptians may have resorted to moldy, toxin-laced grain
20:10Death would come suddenly
20:13With no visible cause
20:15As if the victims were touched by an angel of death
20:19Still, why the firstborn?
20:22Marr found his answer
20:24The final piece to the puzzle
20:26In an Egyptian tradition
20:28During the times of famine
20:31The eldest
20:33The oldest Egyptian child
20:35Would be given
20:36A double portion of food
20:38In order to stave off starvation
20:40Instead of saving them
20:43It killed them
20:45The Bible paints a gruesome picture
20:49The firstborn Egyptian children died
20:52The rest of the population starved
20:55And was ravaged by disease
20:57Pharaoh was defeated
21:00He wanted the Israelites
21:04And their God out of Egypt
21:06He told Moses to take his people
21:10And leave
21:12The plagues came to an end
21:16Using science imaginatively
21:21Does produce some possible
21:23If slightly far-fetched
21:24Natural scenarios
21:26For the supernatural plagues
21:28But did they happen at all?
21:31Why do Egyptian sources never mention them?
21:34Could something else have weakened Egypt?
21:36Something that might have encouraged an exodus?
21:39On this point
21:41The Egyptians are not silent at all
21:43They say that death came from across the seas
21:47Powerful empires decline for many reasons
22:00The Bible tells us the plagues ravaged Egypt
22:03And gave the Israelites the chance to escape
22:06Archaeologist Eric Klein is not persuaded
22:10Rather than the plagues
22:12I would look more to human intervention
22:15Klein looks at the archaeological record
22:17To see what might have weakened Egypt
22:20Scholars have deciphered powerful evidence
22:23That Egypt was attacked by mysterious invaders
22:26From across the Mediterranean
22:28They call them the Sea Peoples
22:31The attack of the Sea Peoples
22:41Was probably the Egyptians' worst nightmare
22:44And they are the fiercest warriors
22:46That the Egyptians have faced
22:47And the Egyptians tell us
22:49That the Egyptians were able to stand
22:53And even that was a pyrrhic victory
22:58Because the Egyptians were so weakened
23:00That they were never the same ever again
23:02Although the Egyptians never mentioned the plagues
23:06They did document these attacks
23:08In pictographs on the mortuary temple of Ramses III
23:12Archaeological finds match these writings
23:16I see no need for divine intervention
23:19When human intervention can explain it just as well
23:23If not better
23:25Weakened by these attacks
23:27Egypt might have lost control of the Israelites
23:30But did they flee?
23:33If so, where is the evidence?
23:36For that, we need to retrace the steps of their escape
23:40The Bible says that 600,000 men and their families
23:45Traveled through the desert for 40 years
23:48Archaeologists would expect to find traces of such a large group
23:53If the biblical numbers are correct
23:55And you've got 2.5 million people wandering around for 40 years
23:58I would want to find entire landscapes denuded
24:02I'd want to find hundreds of sheep and goat carcasses
24:06The bones
24:07I mean, even if they didn't ask for directions
24:09You know, wandering for 40 years
24:11There would be something
24:13The search for a trace of this epic migration has turned up nothing
24:18Archaeologist Jim Hoffmeyer believes the reason
24:21Is that there were far fewer Israelites than the Bible says
24:25And a much smaller group would have left behind
24:28Much less evidence to be found later
24:30One of the enduring images of the movie The Ten Commandments
24:34Is these millions of people coming out of Egypt
24:36And rushing into the deserts of Sinai
24:40Hoffmeyer attributes this misleading image
24:43To a misunderstanding of the Hebrew word Elif
24:47The Bible says the number of men with their families
24:49Who left Egypt is 600 Elif
24:53The word Elif can be translated three different ways
24:56It can be translated thousand
24:58Elif can also be translated as a clan
25:01The third option is that it's a military unit
25:04Which I think is a more plausible scenario
25:07According to Hoffmeyer's interpretation
25:09Instead of 600,000 men in their families
25:12There were as few as 5,000
25:14We're talking about a few tens of thousands
25:19Certainly not hundreds of thousands
25:21Adding women and children, making it millions
25:23Whether tens of thousands or millions
25:26No evidence of their passage out of Egypt has been found
25:29The Israelites were trying to get out of there as fast as they could
25:33They weren't carving monuments along the way
25:35Saying follow our trail
25:37That rapid movement of people is not going to leave
25:40The kind of tangible archaeological evidence
25:42That one might expect
25:48Whether millions or thousands
25:50The fleeing Israelites were about to encounter
25:52A seemingly impassable barrier
25:54The Red Sea
26:00Pharaoh had changed his mind
26:02About letting the Israelites go
26:04Pharaoh had changed his mind about letting the Israelites go
26:22Pharaoh's army descended on the Israelites
26:32And trapped them by the shore of the sea
26:36Across the waters was freedom
26:38But they had no way to get there
26:42Again, Moses heard the voice of God
26:45Lift thou up thy rod
26:47And stretch out thine hand over the sea
26:51And divide it
26:54And the children of Israel
26:55Shall go on dry ground through the midst of the sea
26:59The Egyptians pursued
27:01And went into the sea after them
27:04And the waters returned
27:05And covered the chariots and the horsemen
27:08And all the host of Pharaoh
27:11There remained not even one
27:13There may be no image of God's intervention
27:18In the affairs of man
27:20More powerful than this one
27:22Could it have happened?
27:24Perhaps more than any other miracle in the Old Testament
27:28The parting of the Red Sea has intrigued scientists
27:32Back in Cambridge
27:34Colin Humphreys thinks he knows how the Red Sea parted
27:38I believe the parting of the Red Sea occurred as described in the Bible
27:40And I believe there's a natural explanation of how it happened
27:45And we've set up an experiment here to show how this works
27:49The Bible says that Moses stretched out his hand over the Red Sea
27:54And a strong east wind forced the waters of the Red Sea back
27:58The Israelites went across with water on their right-hand side and their left-hand side
28:02And they walked across on dry land
28:03The biblical description of the parting of the Red Sea is just a very precise description of a mechanism called wind set-down
28:12Wind set-down occurs when a strong steady wind literally blows water aside
28:18If there's a ridge of land in the water it can expose that ridge of land
28:22Sometimes new theories require unconventional experiments
28:27This is the parting of the Red Sea experiment
28:33This leaf blower represents the strong east wind which blew the Red Sea back
28:38This water trough represents the Red Sea itself
28:42And these stones represent the land bridge that the Israelites crossed
28:47Let's see if it works
28:48Far above the river
28:49Let's see if it works
28:51Anyway let's go
28:52To the end of the water
28:54This one comes a little bit
28:56To the end of the water
28:58The water is a little bit
29:01To the end of the water
29:02The water is a little bit
29:04The two angles of the water
29:06The water is an ответ
29:09The water is a little bit
29:12The water is a little bit
29:15Oh, I think that's just amazing.
29:30That was fantastic, I think.
29:32It worked even better than I thought it would.
29:34Now that we've stopped, you can see the water completely covers the land bridge.
29:38This corresponds to drowning Pharaoh's army, chariots and horses,
29:42just as described in the Bible.
29:45Humphrey's theory is hardly the only explanation of how nature could have split the waters.
29:53Geoarchaeologist Floyd McCoy is thinking bigger, much bigger.
30:01Floyd researches tsunamis at the University of Hawaii.
30:06He says a tsunami might have created a land passage for the Israelites across a lagoon.
30:12Although we think of a tsunami as a lot of water, what comes before is the disappearance of water.
30:18Sometimes you get a warning that a tsunami is coming.
30:24Sometimes that ocean disappears, and that's called drawdown.
30:27Remember what a wave looks like.
30:30It's sinusoidal.
30:32Bottom, top, trough, crest.
30:35If the trough comes in first, that's drawdown, the ocean disappears.
30:40Here's the ocean into a broad lagoon.
30:47This giant wave coming ashore has a crest and a trough to it.
30:54This is the water receding from here to here.
31:00The lagoon is there no more.
31:02And provides ground that the Jews could perhaps have used in their exodus out of Egypt.
31:08And then that will be followed by the crest coming in.
31:12And suddenly the place is awash.
31:14And it would wipe out anybody pursuing the Jews.
31:19There's drawdown.
31:20Picture that a hundred times bigger.
31:24And that wave coming in, much bigger.
31:28There comes the crest of the wave.
31:30For all of this to happen, so that there's time for this group of people to get across this lagoon.
31:39It's a big lagoon.
31:42It's got to be a pretty big tsunami.
31:45A big tsunami needs a gigantic event to set it off.
31:49An earthquake.
31:51An asteroid impact.
31:52A volcanic eruption.
31:55So where did a wave like this come from?
31:57Well, there's Santorini.
31:59One of the giant eruptions in human antiquity.
32:03Santorini erupted with a force of over 24,000 megatons.
32:08Okay, here's Santorini.
32:10North is this way.
32:12Heading down this way is Crete.
32:14And that direction, Egypt.
32:16This was an island.
32:18There was a large island that sat in here.
32:20Right here.
32:22So here's this big eruption.
32:24Plume.
32:25Rising up here.
32:2640, 50 kilometers up.
32:27It collapses.
32:29But the debris falling, hitting these slopes here.
32:33It shoots down the slopes.
32:34Right.
32:35And into the wood.
32:36Into the water.
32:37Pyroclastic flows.
32:38And when it enters the water.
32:39Tsunami.
32:40Exactly.
32:41Pyroclastic flows.
32:42Sudden huge slides of volcanic ash and debris falling into the water.
32:47Have been shown to trigger tsunamis.
32:49Computer modeling reveals that the Santorini tsunami would have headed directly towards the Nile Delta.
32:56A possible location of the Exodus journey.
32:58The issue is the dates.
33:01When did Exodus happen?
33:02And when did this eruption happen?
33:04We don't know.
33:07And there's a timing issue here.
33:10How wonderful that this suddenly happens just when you're there to allow you to cross.
33:15And then the crest of the tsunami comes washing in and to take out the bad guys behind you.
33:22And that's stretching it a little bit.
33:27As an explanation for the parting of the Red Sea, a tsunami is a long shot.
33:33But could another volcanic effect provide a more compelling answer?
33:38A smoking gun, so to speak?
33:44When it comes to the parting of the Red Sea,
33:47volcanologist Steve O'Meara has spent a lot of time thinking about lava.
33:52For him, Hawaii's Kilauea volcano is a window into the biblical past.
33:57When an underwater volcano may have been the source of the Israelites' escape route across the sea.
34:06Imagine the Jews reaching this massive land bridge formed by lava.
34:12Here we have Earth being created before our eyes.
34:16You see the lava flow going into the ocean on a new bench of land.
34:22This is a very highly unstable platform of land.
34:28The bench will not last for long.
34:31This whole area can fall in just a matter of minutes.
34:36Massive collapses have occurred here in Hawaii, almost in the blink of an eye.
34:52The Red Sea forms part of the Great African Rift System.
34:58The entire region has an explosive volcanic history.
35:02Although we're seeing a very small lava flow,
35:07you have to, in your mind, scale this up to a massive volcanic eruption 3,200 years ago.
35:14It enters the water, the water boils, it disappears.
35:17It's enough to choke valleys and cause land bridges.
35:20In O'Mara's scenario, an underwater eruption could have created a temporary unstable lava bridge.
35:28The surface layer of lava cools quickly when it hits the water.
35:32The Israelites could have crossed over this new land.
35:36But what's amazing about this lava, even though it's so hot that I have to keep walking away right at this moment,
35:41that if I'd had to, and save my life, I could wait, walk over this lava in 10 minutes.
35:46This new, unsupported land could have quickly disintegrated.
35:51And then, when the Egyptians were on the chariots, sorry, it's very hot.
35:57The Egyptians were on the chariots and they tried to cross the same bed, the lava gave way.
36:05The collapse of this land bridge would have plunged Pharaoh's army into the sea.
36:08It makes sense. The volcano's the only thing that makes sense.
36:13The Bible is just filled with volcanic references, and especially in Exodus, from the plagues to the parting of the Red Sea,
36:23and seeing pillars of fire, and mountains quaking, and the voice of God, and burning bushes, all of this.
36:30Just imagine, just imagine, you come up here and you see this, and you were not a scientist.
36:34We were no scientists back then.
36:36Listen to it. It's talking to you.
36:38It's written in the Bible, God says, I am the rock.
36:47There you are.
36:49If a volcano, a tsunami, or a gale-force wind saved the Israelites,
36:56it would still have required miraculous timing, and it still left no evidence.
37:00For some who read the Bible as the literal word of God, the lack of evidence could simply mean we've been looking in the wrong place.
37:10They point out that there is no agreement on the route the Israelites took out of Egypt.
37:15The Bible's description of the journey is vague.
37:19God led the people about through the way of the wilderness of the Red Sea.
37:22It does state the Israelites started in Egypt and ended up in Canaan, present-day Israel.
37:30Different theories about how the Israelites crossed the sea require different routes.
37:37Wind set down requires a shallow body of water.
37:42Colin Humphreys proposes a route across central Sinai.
37:45The tsunami theory only makes sense if the Israelites took the northern route along the coast.
37:55The lava bridge could have formed across the Red Sea at the Gulf of Aqaba,
38:02the most likely place for volcanic activity in the region.
38:06If there are clues hidden in the desert, it would help to pin down the Israelites' route.
38:11Jim Hoffmeyer believes most researchers are looking in the wrong place because something got lost in the translation.
38:20Literally.
38:22The Hebrew yamsuf literally means sea of reeds.
38:26When the Greek translators took the Hebrew yamsuf and translated into Greek, they translated it as Red Sea.
38:34Red Sea instead of Reed Sea.
38:35So we've been stuck with a faulty translation for over 2,000 years.
38:43Finding this Reed Sea is no easy task.
38:47The Nile Delta was a very different place 3,000 years ago.
38:51Sea has become land and land sea.
38:55Marshes have dried to desert.
38:58New cities and farms are now erasing history.
39:01But geologist Steve Mosher has discovered a window into the past.
39:06The best tool that we have for looking at the ground in ages past is imagery from the 1960s.
39:16Recently the government declassified spy satellite imagery.
39:20So these negatives were shot back in the Cold War era.
39:26These high resolution images taken to spy on the Egyptian army in the 1960s showed the desert before the recent onslaught of development.
39:34Stripped of its modern veneer, the undisturbed land reveals its secrets.
39:38The dark areas suggest the locations of ancient bodies of water.
39:44One of them could have been the Sea of Reeds.
39:47To confirm his suspicions, Mosher tests soil samples from the area.
39:52I want to try to figure out by looking at the texture and looking at the fossil content, the shells that are in it, what kind of environment was.
39:59Was it a swamp? Was it a stream? Was it a lake bed? Or was it some kind of a marine lagoon?
40:08Mosher has been collaborating with Jim Hoffmeyer.
40:12From the satellite photos and the soil tests, they discovered traces of an ancient body of water called Lake Bala.
40:19Hoffmeyer suspects this is the Bible's Sea of Reeds.
40:26This is our Balakh, our Yom Suf, our hypothetical Yom Suf. All in here is all this dark area.
40:32The lake itself may not be any older than 5,000 years.
40:36Well, that's old enough for our purposes.
40:38Sure, sure.
40:40Although Hoffmeyer has unearthed the remains of two Egyptian forts near this lake bed, he has found no Israelite artifacts.
40:46Is it conceivable that 3,000 years later, evidence remains hidden in the desert?
40:54Most archaeologists think not.
40:57But one man thinks he has found something.
41:00A sort of holy grail of Exodus archaeology.
41:03Evidence of Pharaoh's army and miracles showered down upon the Israelites.
41:16When it comes to Exodus, Bob Cornuke thinks he might have found that elusive holy grail.
41:22Actual artifacts.
41:24His investigative techniques are driven by his detective skills.
41:28And his faith.
41:29I've been researching and investigating the Exodus route for about 20 years now.
41:34Searching for the real Mount Sinai in Egypt.
41:37Searching for the Ark of the Covenant.
41:39The crossing site of the Red Sea.
41:42When I was a police investigator, the crime scene spoke to me.
41:46Little pieces of evidence would tell me what happened there.
41:47And now I look at the Bible and try to figure out what happened thousands of years ago at the dawn of history.
41:54And based on the evidence that I've seen, I believe that it happened exactly as the Bible said.
42:00We used the Bible as a compass, as a road map and a guide.
42:05And that gave us a pretty good indication where the route probably was.
42:08Like the investigators before him, Cornuke has his own idea about the route the Israelites traveled.
42:15Along the wide beach of the Sinai Peninsula to here, turning back and then crossing right here.
42:23God says in Isaiah 51, I will build you a roadway through the sea.
42:29That's another clue.
42:31Right here at this location, there was an underwater land bridge that went right to the sea.
42:35These are shots of ships that have gone aground out there.
42:41Cornuke believes the shallow reefs here are the most likely place for the waters to have parted.
42:47And this is the beach.
42:48I took a picture of where they would have been on the shore.
42:52You can see where the children of Israel would have been all bunched up.
42:56And then the mountains cup around them.
42:58They had nowhere to go except into the ocean, right here.
43:00If Cornuke is right, this is where Pharaoh's army would have been destroyed.
43:06And here, we hit what for him is the ultimate pay dirt.
43:10We went there and started digging into the side of the cliffs, hoping to find something.
43:16And out of the cliffs started falling hundreds of pieces of bronze.
43:19Let's say that the Egyptian army did drown here.
43:23This is a man-made object.
43:28It's tubular and shaped.
43:31You can see where it's kind of rounded.
43:33It could be an arrow shaft or some other clasp that was on a soldier's uniform or even on a horse.
43:39I think it's very provocative to think that this is from the Egyptian army of Pharaoh.
43:44Cornuke's colleagues also explored the desert where they believed Israelites wandered.
43:50They discovered what they believed to be handcrafted stones.
43:55Not just a couple, but hundreds, almost thousands of these were found laying all over the ground.
44:02What could they be?
44:03The Bible talks about manna being ground on stones.
44:07According to the Bible, manna is food from God.
44:10It rained down from the sky to feed the Israelites in the desert.
44:15Could these be the very stones that ground the manna for the children of Israel during their sojourn in the desert?
44:21I think it's highly possible.
44:23Has he found the Holy Grail of Exodus archaeology?
44:27Actual evidence?
44:29Scientists are extremely skeptical.
44:32Cornuke hasn't released these finds to the larger scientific community,
44:36so there's no way to judge his assertions.
44:40Kara Cooney, an expert on ancient Egypt, has seen extraordinary claims come and go.
44:47I don't think there's much validity to people finding a piece of bronze in the Red Sea and then claiming,
44:53this is the piece of bronze that, or a piece of bronze that came from Pharaoh's army during the Exodus when they were wiped away.
44:59How are you going to test that bronze? It's not an organic piece of material. How are you going to date it?
45:02How are you going to tie it to Ramsey's army?
45:06Any time you have a new discovery, some new information, it takes a long time for people to shift over and start looking at it,
45:13and even longer for them to accept it.
45:16If anybody actually found Pharaoh's army or bits and pieces of an Israelite encampment, it would be front page news across the world.
45:26The fact is, not a single artifact has been found that could be definitively linked to the biblical Exodus.
45:35If the parting sea, the burning bush, the plagues did happen, they appear to have left no traces.
45:43There's no way to confirm even that the Israelites were slaves in Egypt.
45:47There is only one source for the story of Exodus, the Bible.
45:54For many scholars, the silence of the Egyptian sources is telling.
45:59I want two or three separate sources before I will believe what any one source says.
46:05And frankly, there is no Egyptian written text saying anything about the Exodus.
46:11Some argue that the Egyptians simply wouldn't record such an epic embarrassment.
46:17I wouldn't expect Ramsey's to, in any historical records, to say,
46:21oh, by the way, I let these Hebrew slaves get away because I was having some troubles.
46:26Perhaps not on monuments for public display, but the Egyptians were meticulous bureaucrats and did keep unflattering paperwork.
46:34You do have Egyptian documentation of bad things happening, of civil war, of unrest, of foreign incursion, of people coming in and taking Egypt over.
46:45And yet you have no evidence for this massive upheaval of the Pharaoh and the destruction of his entire army.
46:52You would expect to find that.
46:53Looking at Exodus solely through the lens of science, we know only a few hard facts.
47:04Ruins suggest that people of Semitic origin may have lived in Egypt around 1600 B.C.
47:11About 400 years later, an Egyptian tablet states a people called Israel lived in Canaan, present-day Israel.
47:19What happened in between, the time Exodus supposedly took place, is a mystery.
47:27Scientific explanations offered for the many miracles of Exodus, though intriguing, take us no closer to proving it happened.
47:36And the archaeological and historical records remain resolutely silent about these epic events.
47:42We do not have a single shred of evidence to date.
47:47There is nothing, archaeologically, to attest to anything from the biblical story.
47:54No plagues, no parting in the Red Sea, no manna from heaven, no wandering for 40 years.
48:00The most likely reason that we're not finding any evidence for the Exodus in Egypt is that it didn't happen the way that the Bible said it did, or that it didn't happen at all.
48:09But even skeptics admit that precious grains of truth might lie at the heart of the narrative.
48:17Perhaps it was born among the small groups of nomadic people who traveled between Egypt and the land of Canaan.
48:23I think there's a very good chance that what actually took place was a series of migrations, waves of migrations, if you will, over three or four hundred years of people leaving Egypt and making their way up to Canaan in ones, twos, threes, maybe even tens, hundreds at the most.
48:46The story of the nomads' journeys was perhaps told and retold, passed down from generation to generation until it became an epic.
48:58Despite the lack of evidence, the story of Exodus endures. It helped shape the modern world.
49:04The tale of the liberation of a people and the triumph of their one God over many has resonated through the ages.
49:15Revealed word? Revealing mythology? The truth of this story can only be answered in the heads and hearts of each individual.
49:23But surely the questions are worth asking.
49:28We have yet to find any indication from any kind of archeological source that it actually took place.
49:34For people who have religious convictions, they don't need proof.
49:39It all boils down to this is a supernatural event and you can't explain it in any other way.
49:46Ultimately, the power of Exodus lies more in faith than in science.
49:51There's no real scientific proof that the Exodus took place, but as a Christian or as a Jew, you shouldn't need scientific proof to be a person of faith.
50:01Faith doesn't need to be scientifically proven, nor should it be. It's faith.
50:06Perhaps, someday, the wilderness will reveal some bit of incontrovertible evidence that Exodus happened.
50:15But for now, the desert keeps its secrets.
50:18There is now all its secrets.
50:38You