If our date is correct, then there is something else that we have to factor in.  Around 1500 BCE people living around the Mediterranean experienced one of the most cataclysmic events in history:  the eruption of the Santorini volcano in modern Greece.  This eruption may be another crucial clue for decoding the Biblical Exodus.

This is the island of Santorini.  700 kilometers from the Egyptian coast, across the Mediterranean.

Here it is, in relation to Avaris (which is actually about 900 kilometers away from Santorini):

Santorini’s eruption is more often called the Thera eruption, since Thera was the old name for Santorini.

It is literally the mouth of a volcano.  Some 3500 years ago, Santorini was destroyed by one of the worst volcanic eruptions in human history.  When it erupted, the volcano essentially brought to an end the Minoan civilisation that once flourished here.

Well, that is one of the theories, at least.

It sent an ash cloud that measured some 40 kilometers straight up an 200 kilometers across.  The sound of the eruption circled the Earth some ten to twelve times.

DR. CATHERINE HICKSON, GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF CANADA:

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JAMES CAMERON:

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PROF. AMOS NUR, STANFORD UNIVERSITY:

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Here you can read about another lake that sometimes turns red, Lake Kutunu in Papua New Guinea:

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The first thing that happens in such circumstances is that the water becomes devoid of oxygen and all living things in it die.  The fish then begin to float in the polluted waters, rotting in the sun.  The only things that do not die are frogs.  Unlike fish, they can hop out.  And as it turns out, Biblical plague number two is a frog infestation.

As we’ve just seen, the disturbing of the thermoclines can cause fish to die off.  So if we assume that such a thing did happen in the Nile (even though it can’t), then it is indeed reasonable to assume that there would be a lot of fish and such critters dying off and of frogs leaving the water.  However, I suspect that the Egyptians would have pretty much ignored the frogs as they’d have been too worried by the plague of turtles, water lizards, hippos, and especially the giant Nile crocodiles that would also survive the event and come ashore.

The lack of clean water then leads to lice, flies, and bacterial epidemics among humans and domesticate animals.  Not surprisingly, Biblical plague number three is lice.  Plague number four is flies.  Plague number five is an epidemic.

Of course, it would take quite a while for lack of clean water to lead to those things.  And also, the Bible specifies that those three plagues affected the Egyptians but not the Israelites.  If the entire river was polluted, why would the Israelites be spared?

Plague six is boils and blisters on man and beast.  Can an earthquake-induced gas leak explain this kind of outbreak?  Let’s go back to the 1986 disaster at Lake Nyos, Cameroon.  At the time, people living along the lake developed strange boils and burns.  It turns out the carbon dioxide mixed with air put people into a kind of coma, reducing circulation to the skin and causing the kind of boils described in the Bible as plague number six.

First off, don’t you think that in this case it would have been the

The Ipuwer Papyrus specifically states that Egypt was struck by a strange hail made of ice and fire mingled together.

And that’s a total fib.  The text says nothing even remotely like that.  Not only does it not mention a hail of fire and ice, it doesn’t mention hail or ice at all.  The very closest it comes to saying anything remotely like what Jacobovici claims is the line,

Hit by earthquake storms and their consequences, the Egyptians were now going to experience the last phase of the Santorini eruption, or what the Bible calls plague number nine:  darkness.

This is the way it probably worked:  during the months before the eruption, seismic activity in the whole eastern Mediterranean was causing the African plate to grind under the European plate.  Seawater was then turned to steam that bubbled up through the magma.  This in turn caused the pressure to build and erupt through weak points in the surface, triggering several small eruptions leading to a major blow-up.  When the final eruption came, it created an ash cloud almost 40 kilometers from top to bottom and 200 kilometers across.  When the ash cloud reached the Nile delta, it engulfed the Egyptians in what the Bible calls a palpable darkness.

Too bad that the big thick ash cloud headed out over Turkey and the Black Sea, not out over Egypt. . .

DR. CATHERINE HICKSON:

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On the fateful night of August 21st, the villagers at Nyos went to sleep.  They couldn’t have know that the carbon dioxide gas which had turned the lake blood-red was now reaching a critical point.  As the people of Lake Nyos slept, the top of the lake was keeping the carbon down like a cap on a pop bottle.

But then the earth rumbled and a landslide took place, sending rock into the water, disturbing the surface pressure, and releasing the gas.  The gas then rose to the surface and then like some alien monster emerged from the water.  Droplets formed on it, turning the invisible gas into a visible fog.  The fog then rolled across the water and across the land, suffocating everything in its path.  And as suddenly as it appeared, it disappeared, dissolving harmlessly into the atmosphere.

The next day, those who had been sleeping on higher ground woke up to find some 1800 people dead.  Hundreds of cattle and small animals also dead.  All around there was deathly silence.

And all of the dead stuff leaves evidence.  Lake Nyos and Lake Monoun not only left piles of dead animals all over the surrounding landscape, but also left thick layers of sediments of dead aquatic critters (even little tiny plankton).  That’s how it was discovered that Lake Kivu and the place in Germany had limnic eruptions, even though in the case of the latter it has been 50 million years since the last one.  And there’s no sign of such a thing having happened on or around the Nile.

After the death of the firstborn, pharaoh finally relented, letting Moses take his people out of Egypt.  According to the Bible, what made pharaoh give up was the selectivity of the death:  the fact that it was only male firstborn who died.  It was this selectivity that demonstrated to him that God himself was involved.  How can we account for this?

Well, Egyptian firstborn males had a privileged position.  They were the heirs to the throne, property, titles and more.  They slept on Egyptian beds, low to the ground, while their brothers and sisters slept on rooftops, sheds, and in wagons.  The Israelites, sitting up at their first Passover meal, did not feel a thing while the low-traveling gas suffocated the privileged Egyptian males sleeping in their beds.

Here we have Jacobovici simply making stuff up again.  There is absolutely no evidence that I have ever seen anywhere indicating that the eldest son slept on a bed while everybody else slept on the roof or in wagons (the Egyptians of the time didn’t even have wagons).

Most poor people in Egypt didn’t have beds at all.  They slept on mats.  And during the hot nights the entire family would sleep on the roof, while during the cold nights the entire family would sleep indoors on the floor.  So either everybody would be on the roof and the eldest sons wouldn’t be gassed, or everybody would be on the floor and everybody in the whole family would be gassed.

In the homes of the middle-class and upper-class, everybody in the family (not counting the servants) had beds.  Houses often had many beds in them.  Some of the bigger houses even had special rooms set aside for guests, and those rooms had beds in them.  Of course, this was back before air conditioning really existed, so even the rich would sometimes sleep on their roofs to stay cool.  The eldest sons would not be pleased to be forced to sleep indoors every night.  It would not be a privilege.

And we’re supposed to believe, by the way, that not even the parents, including the head of the family, were permitted to sleep in a bed.  I suppose that on cold nights, they all were supposed to sleep on the floor.  Yeah.  I can easily imagine the pharaoh sleeping on the floor while his eldest son slept in a bed.

Also, Jacobovici’s idea requires the entire region to be perfectly flat, and for everybody who slept indoors to sleep right at ground level.  First off, Egypt of the time did have their own versions of apartment buildings.  Egypt was a very constricted nation, being a little narrow strip of land along the banks of the Nile with desert on either side.  Habitable places were scarce, and every square meter of land that could be used to grow crops on or to graze livestock had to be used for that purpose.  Living space tended to be just as much at a premium in ancient Egyptian cities as it is today in Manhattan or Tokyo.  So they built upwards as well as outwards.

Then there’s the matter that habitations were built up high, due to the Nile’s flooding.  Some houses were built on stilts or raised foundations.  Cities tended to be built on hills.  And, as is usually the case in cities around the world, how high you were in social rank determined how high up the hill your house was.  The upper-class lived near the tops of the hills, the middle class a bit lower, and the lower class at the lowest parts.  Slaves, aside from house servants, would have been the lowest class in all senses of the phrase.  So for the carbon dioxide to have reached the firstborn sons of the middle and upper classes (whether they slept in beds or on the roofs), the gas would first have had to totally flood the lower classes and the slaves.  The Israelites would have been among the first people affected, and even sitting on the roofs of their slave quarters would not have saved them.

Pretty much every single horse, cow, goat, chicken, rabbit, hippo, crocodile, fish, and so on in the region would have died, of course.  Not just the firstborn males.  Most of these critters would have been in the lowlands outside of town.

This conclusion is backed by the archeology.  At Avaris, professor Manfred Bietak has found mass graves dating to before and during our date for the Exodus.  The earlier graves are classic examples of ancient epidemics that killed men, women and children.  But at the time of the Exodus, the mass grave that he found has only males in it.

PROF. MANFRED BIETAK:

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The Bible says that pharaoh’s son also died during the plague of the firstborn.  Since we claim that Ahmose is the pharaoh of the Exodus, we should be able to prove that Ahmose’s son died young.  Searching in the Cairo Museum, we found Ahmose’s son.  The prince had died young:  he was only twelve.  For the first time ever, we can put a face and a name to a victim of the Biblical plagues.

Ah, yes, that proves all of Jacobovici’s arguments.  It was unheard of in ancient times for children to die at the age of twelve or younger!

JAMES CAMERON:

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But which lake is the Bible referring to when it describes the parting of the reed sea?  Using our dates for the Exodus, we tracked down an ancient artefact that records the precise location of Yam Suf.  It also provides us with the first archaeological evidence for the parting of the sea.

We found a hieroglyphic inscription on a granite monument [the El Arish monument] that tells the entire story of the Exodus from the pharaoh’s point of view.

First off, Jacobovici