Tagged: Dr. Lennart Moller

Still enjoy Moeller’s book

Even though it’s been out for over a decade now, I enjoy Lennart Moeller’s book, The Exodus Case, more than ever. The book argues convincingly for an Exodus accurate to the Biblical account and verifiable by archaeology – with the main problem being that folks have simply been looking in the wrong places before.

I know TV producer Simcha Jacobovici, star of The Naked Archaeologist on History International, has proposed a more recent and trendy theory and is not in favor of Jabal al-Laws as the mountain of Moshe, but frankly Jacobovici’s record for being accurate is a bit shakey and nowhere nearly as deeply-founded in research as Moeller’s theory.

As we enter the part of the Torah cycle where we read once again through Exodus, I am reminded of again of Moeller’s book and just how well-done it actually was. It still stands, for me, as a standard by which to measure other books on the Exodus topic – even though it is the book of Sh’mot itself that is the final authority.

One thing’s for sure, Moshe and the children of Israel were not the beneficiaries of any modern travel deals in their flight from Egypt, although the provision of haShem certainly covered every eventuality.

Parting the Red Sea

When the children of Yisrael fled Pharaoh and followed Moshe and haShem out of the land of Egypt, they had no idea where they were being led. They knew it was not going to be anything as casual as going on Orlando vacations, to be sure, but I doubt they realized just what sort of trials awaited them.

One of the first such trials arose when they came to an apparent dead end. As Torah describes the scene, they had the Red Sea in front of them, impassable land to either side and Pharaoh’s army behind them. There was no escape, from a human perspective.

What this week’s Torah portion brings to mind is the ongoing debate over the path of the Exodus. There are as many different opinions as there are folks involved in Exodus studies. Perhaps more.

The current and trendy option is to re-translate the Red Sea into the Reed Sea, and suggest a route on the northern coast of Egypt, into the lands just south of Yisrael. The borderline minimalists who suggest this, then, are faced with geographic problems that include the fact that the destination lands suggested by their route theories were not outside of the land of Egypt or out of Egyptian control. One cannot flee the land of Egypt by going into lands they control militarily.

The same goes for Simcha Jacobovici’s route theory and Mount Sinai location on his recent History Channel program, The Exodus Decoded. While his theory benefits from taking the claims of Torah seriously, his location holds the same flaws as the northerly Reed Sea routes. It does not take the Yisraelites out of Egyptian-controlled territory.

Also, the most traditional location in the southwestern area of the Sinai Peninsula suffers the same problems; it was territory under Egyptian control and has the further problem of not having the geographic features described in Torah, as well as that the Egyptian military guarded the area, which was at the time being used for Egyptian mining purposes.

The location that best serves as the crossing point is the Gulf of Acquba location suggested, among others, by Dr. Lennart Moller in his book, The Exodus Case, and further explored in the 2001 documentary The Exodus Revealed. The gulf is part of the Red Sea, and fits all the geographic features described in Torah.