In this episode Trent presents the archaeological and historical evidence that supports the Bible’s descriptions of the Patriarch narratives (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob), their enslavement in Egypt and eventual escape through the Exodus.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
(singing) If you’ve listened to past episodes of the Counsel of Trent podcast, you know I’m a fan of the Exodus narrative and various films that are related to it, classics like Cecile B. DeMilles’ The Ten Commandments, with Charlton Heston, your portrayal of Moses. That’s iconic. And of course, Dathan played by Edward G. Robinson. You know, “Where’s your Moses now, eh?”
But my favorite though, of course, is Prince of Egypt, which you have voice talents like Val Kilmer. Jeff Goldblum is a delightful portrayal of Aaron in the Prince of Egypt, “Moses, the Pharaoh and the chariots, they’re gaining on us. Must go faster, must go faster.” So the Exodus is something that I’ve always enjoyed reading when I go through it in scripture, though it is one of those Bible stories that is frequently challenged. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today here on the Counsel of Trent podcast, arguments for and against the historicity of the Exodus narratives.
I cover this a little bit in two videos on my Counsel of Trent YouTube channel. If you’re not subscribed there yet, I highly recommend you go and seek it out. Counsel of Trent, just search Counsel of Trent at YouTube, go and be a subscriber there where I rebut videos from a atheist YouTube personality who goes by the channel name Holy Koolaid. I think his name is Thomas Westerbrooke, I think is his name? In any case, he created a series where he tries to debunk biblical history. He says, “Nothing fails like Bible history.” And at the end of this podcast I’ll probably play a short clip from my interaction with him on what I think is easily his most audacious and outrageous claim, where he tries to say the Bible is wrong, when he himself is actually flat wrong when he calls it out.
But he does a lot of work. He seems like he’s studied a fair amount of Egyptian culture in history, at least enough to make a short YouTube video, and he’s actually traveled to Egypt and the Holy Land for these videos. But the arguments he raises are pretty standard ones that have been around for decades, really since the middle of the 1970s, when scholars were putting forward a more minimalist understanding of the Exodus and of Israelite history as a whole. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
And by the way, if you want to help me make more videos like that, if you want to help me create these resources and get access to our bonus content and sneak peak, I think this week I’ve got my bonus content. I got my special video on how I travel for 16-hour plane flights. So you can see all my secrets behind that, because I currently am in Australia right now giving talks on pro-life here at a conference in Sydney.
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Now let’s talk about these kind of skeptical views related to the Exodus. So when you go back in the early part of the 20th century, up to the middle part of the 20th century, a lot of biblical scholarship had a generally open or positive view of the historicity of the patriarchal narratives of the Exodus.
It was agreed that you didn’t have extra biblical confirmation of people like Abraham or Isaac or Jacob. There was no non-biblical artifacts that bore their names as individuals, for example. But the biblical accounts were situated and describe the correct time period in the latter part of the second … the later part, I should say, well, the earlier part of the second millennium B.C. And that seemed to be reliable. That began to change, though, in the 1970s with the work of scholars like Jonathan Van Seter and Thomas L. Thompson. Thompson, today, I think he’s still around. I think he’s actually one of the few people who argues that Jesus never existed, which isn’t a surprise because Thompson was also a leading figure back in the latter part of the 20th century, arguing that the patriarchs, Moses, David, that these figures did not exist, or at least they’ve been heavily mythologized in Jewish materials and materials of the Hebrew Bible.
Here’s interesting backstory on Thomas Thompson. According to Wikipedia, Thompson was raised as a Catholic, got a bachelor’s degree in Duquesne University. Then after he was in Oxford, he went in Tubingen, where he studied for 12 years under Kurt Galling and Herbert Haag. Was a professor at Dayton University and University of Detroit. He then studied Catholic theology at the University of Tubingen. His dissertation, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham, was completed in 1971 but was rejected by the faculty. One of his examiners was Joseph Ratzinger, then Tubingen’s Professor of Systematic Theology, and later of course, Pope Benedict XVI. Thompson considered submitting his dissertation to the Protestant faculty, but he left Tubingen in 1975 without a degree, and his dissertation was published in 1974 by De Gruyter Press. De Gruyter Press is a press I come across every now and then when I need a very specific academic monograph for my own apologetic work. I think if you look in my book, Hard Sayings, I’ve got a few sources published by De Gruyter that are in there.
It’s funny, you know you write a lot of books when you’re doing the end notes for the books and you see the … And that’s always the bane of my existence when I write my books is doing the end notes and citations because I should be a good boy and do them as the book progresses, but I always put it off. So at the very end I have a solid week of filling out the end notes and double checking them to make sure that they’re right. So you know you’ve written a lot of books when as I’m filling it out I say, “Oh, Wm. Eerdmans, that’s going to be Grand Rapids, Michigan.” When I hear the press’s name, “Oh, Crossway,” or whatever, “that’s going to be Wheaton, Illinois.” And I can already fill in the city, because when you do MLA citations for books, what is it, I think you have to do city, state, publisher, year. And so every time I write a book I get my crash course in MLA again and get all those citations out.
Which by the way, when you read my books, feel free to peruse the end notes. I had a lot of fun with the end notes in Hard Sayings because there was a lot of minutiae and details that I didn’t want to bring up in the main text because I didn’t want to bog the reader down. But for some of my things, like when I wrote about slavery in the Bible and the development of slavery from the Old to the New Testaments, I also interacted with an atheist scholar, Hector Avalos, but I saw in the texts, I had enough to deal with just with the topic itself, explaining it to people.
Hector Avalos has a lot of unique objections to how Christians approach passages in the Bible dealing with slavery. So in Hard Sayings, you’ll notice, if you have a copy, pick it up and go to the footnotes there. There’s a lot of paragraphs, full paragraphs in the end notes where I start, “This has been argued as such, but Avalos says, but here is where Avalos is incorrect,” for example. So do me a favor, check out the end notes in my books every now and then. I always have a lot of fun. Sometimes I hide little jokes and funny things in there. I did that more in my earlier works. Now I’m trying to be more of a professional as I do these things.
So let’s talk then a bit about this argument that Thompson and Van Seters put forward in late 1970s that a lot of people have embraced today, saying that the Exodus is not historical, the stories about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are not historical, and we shouldn’t trust these accounts in the Bible. They’re ahistorical or even unhistorical. Well, how should I talk about this? First, if we’re going to talk about the Exodus, I think we have to talk about the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, because they form the reason why Israel, why the Hebrews ended up in Egypt in the first place. And part of when you talk about these accounts, there’s evidence here for its authenticity a lot of people don’t take into account, namely the embarrassing aspects of these stories.
First, one thing that’s embarrassing about them is that they show the patriarchs engaging in all kinds of unethical behaviors. I mean, Jacob is a liar and a schemer. He stole Esau’s birthright by impersonating his older hairier brother. You see Abraham and Isaac. Abraham doesn’t trust God and chooses to sire a child with his maidservant Hagar, which is where of course, Ishmael came from. There’s all these embarrassing stories about these individuals. They are not described in lofty terms, which lends credence to the historicity of these older oral traditions that saved the very unsavory aspects of their character for people to pass on to.
Also, even worse, in many of these accounts, they break laws that were later inscribed in Levitical code. Some people will say, “Oh, well, the story of Abraham and Isaac, that they went and they pretend that their wife is their sister and lie about it, and then a pharaoh takes her into her court or her harem,” that’s not that implausible of a story. People will say, “How could the same pharaoh have been tricked twice?” Abraham tells Pharaoh, “This isn’t my wife, it’s my sister,” because Abraham’s worried he’s going to get murdered for the Pharaoh to steal his wife from him. And then Jacob does the same thing with his wife. But it may not be the same pharaoh in both accounts. Many times pharaohs had the same dynastic name that was shared, so it could be a son or another relative related to a pharaoh or a ruling figure in Egypt and Israel.
Plus also coincidences happen, like the building of the Hoover Dam, for example. The first person to die and the last person to die in the construction of the Hoover Dam was a father and son. So sometimes these historical coincidences do happen. But even more striking is the fact that in these accounts, if these are just making up the patriarchs, you’re just making up the patriarchs, as a later Israeli author trying to say, “Oh yeah, this is our history,” you’d want to make up the most healthful history you could for your people.
But what do we see in these accounts? We see Abraham and Isaac, they break … In the Levitical law codes, you cannot marry and engage in relations with your half sister, but that is what happened with Abraham. He said, “This is not my wife, it’s my sister.” And you know, Pharaoh says, “Why’d you lie to me?” “Well, she’s technically my sister. She’s my half sister.” Now that later became … That kind of union became illegal under the Levitical law codes in Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20, but it was not illegal at that time because God had not given that particular prohibition on marriages at that time in salvation history. And yet for a later author, you would think he would want to stay away from all of that and say, “Hey, even Abraham followed the Levitical law, even though it was not given to him, at least the parts about grave sexual immorality,” for example.
And finally, the stories about the patriarchs describes them as outsiders. Israel always had to contend with Canaan and all these other warring tribes and lands saying that they didn’t belong here, this is our rightful land. And people saying, “It’s not your land. This is not your land given to you. You’re outsiders here.” And that is what the stories in Exodus and Leviticus and Deuteronomy portray. They show Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, this is the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Well, Abraham wasn’t from the promised land, he wasn’t from Canaan. He was from Ur of the Chaldeans, hundreds of miles away in modern day Iraq. And yet the story of the patriarchs shows them being individuals who were called by God into the promised land, not people who grew up there and could rightfully call it their homeland based on ancestry.
Now, some critics will say, “No, the accounts of the patriarchs are not authentic because they contain anachronisms,” all right? So they contain descriptions that are unhistorical, that a later author accidentally put in. My favorite example of this is when, if you read a history of the Revolutionary War that talked about aerial bombardment, well, you know it’s not a reliable history because that’s an anachronism. There was no aerial bombardment during the Revolutionary War.
Examples that people give with the patriarchs is they’ll say, “Well, it describes camels and camel bones that were found in Israel showed that the camel was not domesticated until the 10th century, which was hundreds of years after the patriarchs allegedly live.” But that doesn’t show that camels were not domesticated before that time. Just because camel bones are found in the 10th century, dated to the 10th century B.C. in Egypt, they could have existed earlier as domesticated animals. Most animals are not preserved. Their remains don’t last for us to find them. It’s a rare thing to find.
And we have evidence for early camel domestication during the time of the patriarchs. There are cave drawings of camels in caves near Aswan and [Gazeri 00:13:12] in Upper Egypt which have been dated to the third millennium B.C. Martin Hyde did a whole study on the use of the camel, the word camel in the patriarch narratives, and he says, “It may refer, at least in some places, to the Bactrian camel,” so not the Dromedary camel with one hump you see at the zoo usually, but to the Bactrian two-humped camel that migrated from the mountainous areas of Iran, which is from the area where the patriarchs originally heralded from.
And I talk about other alleged anachronisms in my book Hard Sayings, but one thing that’s interesting as you get closer, past Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, even to Joseph, Joseph is the figure who gets the Hebrews into Egypt for the Exodus because he was kidnapped. He was sold by his brothers to Midianite or Ishmaelite, that probably refers to the same group of desert traders, to these desert traders who he was enslaved and then taken into Egypt where he became a high-ranking official. And then his family later joined him in Egypt in order to escape a devastating famine that was really hurting people throughout all of the surrounding areas.
What’s interesting, though, is the absence of anachronisms here. For example, Joseph is sold to the Ishmaelites for the correct slave price, about 20 shekels, whereas a later author would have gotten the price wrong because it was inflated. It would have been about 30 shekels for the later author’s time, but the price he was sold for is correct. It’s not anachronistic. And Joseph is said to have lived for 110 years in Egypt, which shows that there is a very old Egyptian core to the story, because Israelites believed that the ideal age for a person was 80 years of age. If you read in the Psalms, a strong man will live to his 70s or his 80s. That was the ideal amount of time you could live.
What’s funny is some people think that everybody in the ancient world dropped dead at around 35, and that’s not the case. The average lifespan for someone in the ancient world, it’s skewed by child mortality. So many children died before the age of five, something probably close to about 50% or 60%. Very, very high numbers. But if you could survive past the age of five or six … And I think about this today with my own kids. I mean, my own little son, Matthew, he just turned five. He’s going to be six soon. He’s so much different than when he was a toddler. He’s like my little man around the house. You know that with a five or six year old, man.
If you can even get to, especially the age of six or seven, you can start taking on responsibilities and really keep your wits about you. If you can make it past the first five years of life, you actually have a decent chance of growing to a venerable old age. It was not unheard of for people to be 60, 70, or 80 years old. Now, of course, life was no picnic after the age of five, but the average lifespan is usually driven down by the extremely high number of infant and child mortality that was present.
But so with Joseph, they say he lived to be 110 which is not a Hebrew tradition. That was an Egyptian tradition. Egyptians believed 110 was the ideal lifespan, but that was kept in the discussion of him. Also, we know it was not uncommon for Semitic peoples to have leadership positions in ancient Egypt. For example, the Egyptian king, King Khety Nip Kare describes in a document called the Instructions of Merikare, he talks about Semites, so people are the descendants of Shem, Semitic people from Israel, Canaan, that area, how they were invading in the Nile Delta searching for food in the mid-second millennium, which fits with Genesis’ description of a famine at the time.
Also, there are inscriptions and records after the death of Pharaoh Seti II. This is around 1200 BC. There was an official who was born in Syria who was elevated to chancellor. So we see that his name, it was a Syrian name, so he was a Semite. Much the same way, there was a Semitic name for a man who served as the vizier, a kind of chancellor under Pharaoh Hatshepsut. That was in the 15th century B.C. So it’s not implausible for Joseph to be someone who found favor with the pharaoh in Egypt and rose to a high-ranking position in the Egyptian household. It also happened during that time and afterwards to have people with Semitic names serving in roles in Egyptian households and even in the palace, in court itself with pharaoh. And in fact, as I talked about in my video with Holy Kool-Aid that you can check out online, modern DNA evidence links … ancient Egyptians were closer to Middle Easterners in their DNA composition than with Nubians or other people who lived in Sub-Sahara Africa.
Likewise, when we look at the Egyptian records, we see cave drawings showing Asiatic slaves, Semitic slaves, settling in the Nile Delta region in the Goshen, being forced to work. Now, people will say, “Well, where’s the archeological evidence for the Hebrews, the Israelites living in the Goshen?” Well, the Goshen was an area that is in the Nile River Delta, so it flooded constantly, and over the years the topsoil is replaced over and over again. It’s not a great place to preserve archeological artifacts. And if you did find artifacts, it could have belonged to the Hebrews, just not had their names on them, so it’s not something that we would necessarily notice.
Another question … I’m not going to go over everything, by the way, that I cover in my video, so if you want even more on this topic, I would recommend go to Counsel of Trent YouTube. I mean, you might be saying, “Hey, only three episodes a week of the Counsel of Trent podcast? What will I do with myself?” I’m trying hard just keep to a schedule of a weekly rebuttal video. Right now, they’ve been long rebuttal videos, so maybe I’ll do even more periodic videos for shorter rebuttals.
But everybody keeps sending me videos, hour-long videos, two-hour-long videos of Protestant pastors going at the Catholic faith. And it takes at least three times as long, at least twice as long to rebut them, because I have to play what they have to say, and then I respond to what they have to say. So I have a lot more in my video responding to Holy Kool-Aid. Go and check it out. Just search Counsel of Trent podcast, or Counsel of Trent on YouTube, and you will find it and click the subscribe button so you don’t miss any future videos. And of course if you support us at trenthornpodcast.com, that’s how we’re able to make all these fancy fun videos.
So I talk about the evidence here, but let’s talk about the pharaoh during the Exodus. Some people say, “Well, if there was a pharaoh, who was he?” And he’s not named in the Exodus account. It’s kind of a way to slight Pharaoh. It’s like in Exodus, God reveals His name. We learn the name of God. We don’t get to learn the name of the pharaoh because he’s not as important as God.
There are two … Most biblical scholars were focused on two different chronologies. The older, more traditional chronology, which puts it more in the 16th century B.C., I believe is Thutmose III, which fits kind of more for a more traditional biblical chronology. However, a lot of biblical scholars and even non-biblical scholars usually like to propose that Ramses II was the pharaoh during the Exodus. And he lived, he reigned for the majority of the 13th century B.C. And in fact, we actually have … Here’s a piece of evidence I didn’t get a chance to cover in my video, but there is evidence during this time of unrest in Egypt, unrest over their control of their colonies in Canaan, and that Ramses’ firstborn son had died. His name was Amun-her-khepeshef, Amun-her-khepeshef, I believe. I once again apologize to all my Egyptian friends if I mispronounce anything. Every podcast, I think I apologize to some nationality for mispronouncing things.
So we have evidence that the person who succeeded Ramses II in his throne was not his firstborn son, that his firstborn son had actually died. And it was a more distant relative, which of course lends corroboration to the biblical account of the plagues. The plagues are all things that happen in Egypt all the time. You had frogs, you had locusts. You could have dust storms that would shroud areas in complete darkness. You could have microbes that turned the Nile blood red even. So these are all things that are not … Now, of course, God can do miracles. There’s nothing that says these weren’t miraculous accounts, but they’re also not implausible things. These are all things that you would see in ancient Egypt as being devastating and be expected in a kind of plague that God would send down upon the Egyptians. But the final plague of course would be something supernatural, all the death of the firstborn. And there is evidence that Pharaoh’s firstborn son died.
But when we move forward then in the Exodus and we’re talking about that, there’s other evidence. People will say, “Well, no, the Exodus account isn’t reliable because it says something like a million people left Egypt and that’s …” I mean, they could have formed a line going from the Nile River Delta to the promised land and the first people to get to the promise land in that line, the people at the back of this million person line would still be in Egypt.
Now I agree, I think a million is too large of a number. I think the biblical texts, I think it’s Exodus 12:37, mentions this and talks about … A lot of translations say 600,000 Hebrews left, and then women and children with them. The word [foreign language 00:22:23] is the Hebrew word there. That probably refers not to thousands, but it can also refer to clans or tribes or fighting men or families. So there’s probably not 600,000 people, but 600 clans, 600 families, and the word [foreign language 00:22:39] is used later in the Hebrew Bible to refer to fighting units, clans, things like that. That’s a more manageable number and an understandable one to make sense of the account.
Also, we do have evidence, though, of Egypt. And so if we put this with Ramses II in the 13th century, at the end of the 13th century, one of Ramses’ successors, King Merneptah, erected a Stele. A Stele or Stela … You know, A Streetcar Named Desire, Stella, which by the way is wonderfully parodied in a Simpsons episode where Marge auditions to be in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Ned Flanders is one of the characters.
Remember my pinball brain, everyone, when something pops up, it’s ding, ding, ding. All kinds of connections will be made. I think actually later in this month, I’m going to give you a tour into my ping … I’m sorry, ping pong … pin ball type brain. I’m doing a free for all Friday. Let’s see. Yep. It’s not tomorrow. That’s going to be trying to stay alive in Australia, but a week after that I’m going to do a free for all Friday called Wikipedia surfing, and you’ll see how my mind works when you can just jump from idea to idea to idea and you will learn how to do the same.
So in the Merneptah Stele, a large granite monument with Egyptian hieroglyphics on it, that has been dated to about 1207 B.C. And people who say that Israel was something that the Bible is just completely made up, well, in 1207 B.C., we know that a people group named Israel existed because on the Stele it says that King Merneptah “laid waste to Israel. His seed is not.” And this isn’t even a moderate scholar, someone like William Dever, who is not as much of a minimalist as Thomas Thompson, but he’s not conservative either. He doesn’t believe in the majority of the Exodus account, but he believes there’s a historical core of the Joseph tradition that can be traced back to Egypt.
Dever says this, so he’s a moderate, he’s not a very conservative scholar. He says, “The name Israel on the Merneptah Stele is followed by a different sign,” a different hieroglyphic sign, “man plus woman plus three strokes.” So there’s a man, a woman, and three strokes after the name Israel. This refers to peoples in contrast to nation states or their capitals. In other words, to an ethnic group.
And as I said in my book, Hard Sayings, since ethnic groups are often named after people they came from, this Stele provides early evidence for the existence of a person named Israel, from whom the ethnic group Israel originated. And I said in a footnote, remember what I said in the footnotes, how that I get to have more fun there? So Hector Avalos, he’s a very, very critical Old Testament scholar. He’s an atheist, extremely critical of the Bible. In fact, he wrote a book called The End Of Biblical Studies, saying that biblical studies are basically nonsense.
And so what I write in this footnote, I say that Avalos claims this isn’t, even though most scholars admit this is evidence that Israel as a people group existed in the 13th century, which would have been shortly after the Exodus if it was under Ramses II, and so they came into conflict with their previous overlords in skirmishes and battles in the land of Canaan. And in fact, the Egyptians describe a group of people who always gave them trouble in that region, a group of Semitic people called the Habiru, the Habiru. Does that sound familiar to you? The Habiru people? Habiru, Hebrew, the Hebrew people? Now, Hebrew and Habiru are not synonymous. Habiru just means like dusty and nomad, so not all Habirus are Hebrews, but we’re pretty sure that all the Hebrews would have fallen under the category of Habirus, these kinds of nefarious desert traders and nomads raiding areas and trying to settle from place to place to provide for themselves. They were a nomadic people group, not some kind of a nation state or anything like that, and we have evidence of this in a non-biblical source from the 13th century BC.
So I write in my book, I say, “Avalos claims this is not … the Merneptah Stele is not proof a group related to the patriarch Israel existed because the Egyptians could have erroneously imposed the name Israel on the group they defeated, just as Columbus imposed the name Indians upon Native Americans.” As I say though, this seems unlikely, given the Hebrew roots of the name Israel. So we would expect that … Indians is a fantastically wrong name for Native Americans cause you’re referring to India, the Indus Valley, way far away from modern day Native Americans. It doesn’t have a connection to modern Native Americans like the Iroquois, the Cherokee, different indigenous tribes in the U.S.
But Israel, Israel, meaning to struggle with L, with God, is a very Hebrew word, and it seems unlikely, given the Hebrew roots in the name Israel and the antipathy ancient Jews would have had toward fashioning an origin story based on a foreign power’s misunderstanding of their heritage. This is something that Israel embraced and continues to embrace to this day, and not being something that was just mistakenly imposed upon them by their former oppressors in the land of Egypt.
So I hope that was helpful for you all and well, we got some time. I want to give you a little tip. If you haven’t checked out the videos yet, I strongly hope you will, and that you’ll go to trenthornpodcast.com to support us to keep these videos coming. I will play for you a clip from these videos. This deals with the claim that Holy Kool-Aid, Thomas Westerbrook, makes when he says that the book of Joshua is totally wrong because it describes Israel fighting the Amorites and God slaying the Amorites with hailstones. And Westerbrook thinks this is just ridiculous, this kind of a detail, and I show him to be incorrect on that account. So I’ll play that so you can get a tidbit of how our videos are going on the channel. But be sure to check it out, CounselofTrent on YouTube.
The five armies of the Amorites don’t want to be destroyed, so they joined forces to stop him. God doesn’t like this at all, so he launches hail at the Amorites, killing more of the enemy with hail than Joshua’s entire army managed to slaughter. Now, if you’re not familiar with how hail works, let me put that into perspective. In the United States, in 1995, the costliest hailstorm in history hit Mayfest. Over 10,000 people were caught in the open with softball-sized hail. Only 4% of them were even injured, and not one single person died.
No fatalities reported that night in Fort Worth, but plenty of injuries.
That’s because dying from hail is extremely, extremely unlikely. And in the last 20 years, only four people in the entire U.S. have died from hail.
Look where the citation is from. It’s from AccuWeather. I want you to remember that for when we talk about this.
Compare that to about 6,700 who drown in bathtubs over the same timeframe. If God’s going for a miracle, why not just rapid fire some bathtubs at the Amorites? Oh, and incredibly, none of Joshua’s army was hurt by this hailstorm slaughterfest that they were right smack dab in the middle of.
So, the argument is that this detail from the account in Joshua is obviously made up or wrong because hail doesn’t actually kill people. Look, there was this big hailstorm in Texas a few years ago and nobody died. Well, the reason that hail doesn’t kill people in the United States today is because we have a lot of access to shelter. We have homes with sturdy roofs. Even if you’re away from your house, like if you’re out at the outdoor festival, if it starts hailing, you can run to your car and you can get into your car and you’ll be safe from the hail. It’s going to dent up the top of your car a bunch.
I used to live in the Midwest and I’ve seen what hail can do to vehicles. I’d hate for that … what it would do to my skull if it was doing that. And the hail is coming down in that Texas festivals so much, it was actually cracking people’s windshields and breaking them, and people were injured. The injuries from that hailstorm were from the glass of the windshields breaking, from people who were huddled in their cars. But that means, so they were cut a little bit by glass, but imagine if they had been outside.
But, and this is what baffles me about this part of a Westbrook’s video, it takes two minutes of research on the internet to see that hail has been extremely dangerous in the past and even up to the present day in developing countries where you don’t have access to good sturdy shelters or places to take refuge from hailstorms. For example, back during the Hundred Years’ War in 1360, on Black Monday, there was a hailstorm that killed a thousand English soldiers in Chartreuse, France. So a lot of them probably died from skull fractures from these large hailstones, and hail can weigh as much as two pounds, if you get a bad enough hailstorm. If a block of ice the size of a grapefruit hits your skull, you’re not going to be doing so well.
And not even that. Even if it’s not the hail, you had people who might, in terror, which happened in the Amorites, possibly, in terror run off of cliffs or down gullies, be stampeded by horses or by one another. So here is an historical occurrence in battle like what we see in the book of Joshua where soldiers are killed by a hailstorm, and a large number of them, a thousand troops.
Here’s another example. In Roop Kund, India, there is a lake called the Skeletal Lake, and they’ve discovered hundreds of skeletons around this lake. And people wonder, “Well, what caused all of these people to die?” Well, here’s the story from Atlas Obscura. It says that, “Among Himalayan women, there is an ancient and traditional folk song. The lyrics describe a goddess so enraged with outsiders who defiled her mountain sanctuary that she rained death upon them by flinging hailstones hard as iron. After much research and consideration, a 2004 expedition came to the same conclusion. All 200 people died from a sudden and severe hailstorm.”
This is dated, I think, to 850 A.D., maybe it’s B.C., but this was several centuries ago and these people were all around this lake. They were caught in a hailstorm, and they know this because when you look at the skeletons, you see that they suffered things like skull fractures, but the indentations on the skulls are not caused by any known weapons available at that time. There are these divots that were caused by being impacted by hailstones. Now, later research has shown where Roop Kund, India, the Skeleton Lake, that some of the skeletons there were not from that catastrophe but from some other disaster, but they still say a large number of them were killed in a sudden and freak hailstorm.
Finally, remember when I said, “Remember AccuWeather”? I’m pretty sure this is the article where Westbrook got that statistic. “In the U.S., hailstorms resulting in the loss of human life are quite rare because we have shelter. No one keeps record of hail fatality. Since the year 2000, only four people have been killed by hail.” So he said he got it from AccuWeather and if this is the article he got it from, I’m baffled, because this is the paragraph before it in that same article, and it says, “The World Meteorological Organization reported that the highest mortality associated with a hailstorm, a modern hailstorm, happened near Moradabad, India, on April 30th, 1888. The deadly storm killed 246 people with pieces of hail as large as goose eggs, oranges and cricket balls.” That’s on par with what’s being described happening to the Amorites here in this section of Joshua.
So I just don’t get it how he would quote this here, but then completely gloss over this here because what is ancient Canaan going to be like? Is it going to be like Dallas, Fort Worth in the year 2019 or whatever, or is it going to be more like Moradabad, India, in 1888? It’s going to be more like the latter. So I was just baffled by that. So yeah, he’s just wrong when he says that if you’re a skeptical atheist, there’s nothing wrong with accepting that many of the Amorites were killed in a freak hailstorm. That happens not infrequently in history.
So thank you so much for being able to listen to that, to this podcast. I hope it edified you. If you would like more on this topic, I would recommend some good resources. James Hoffmeier has a great book on the Exodus tradition and the wilderness tradition, so look up James Hoffmeier, Israel and the Exodus and Israel in the Sinai. He’s a great resource there. I also recommend the work of Kenneth Kitchen. He’s an excellent Egyptologist and Old Testament scholar. Wonderful. I would highly recommend.
I can’t see it from here. There’s another book,a collection written shortly after Thomas Thompson called Essays on the Patriarchal Narratives that I also would recommend, and of course my book Hard Sayings, where I distill all of this together for you to read in one single place. I hope it’s helpful for you. Thank you all so much and I hope you have a very blessed day. Pray for me as my talks continue here and I recover from my 16-hour transpacific flight and then continue here in the land down under, in Australia. Thank you all so much and hope you have a very blessed day.
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