Video Evidence 10 Plagues Occurred Again Documentary
Plagued past No Doubts, a Filmmaking Detective Turns to the Exodus
What if information technology is all true — Moses parted the waters, 10 plagues fell on Egypt, the Israelites took a mass journeying out of Egypt? Simcha Jacobovici, an investigative reporter and filmmaker, contends that he has assembled a compelling case for the veracity of the biblical story of the Exodus. He unveils his theories in a ninety-infinitesimal documentary chosen "The Exodus Decoded," to exist broadcast at 8 p.1000. Lord's day on the History Channel.
Mr. Jacobovici, an Emmy-winning documentary maker, directed, produced and narrated "Exodus Decoded," based on six years of enquiry and three years of filmmaking. The $3.5 meg film was broadcast on the Discovery Aqueduct in Canada in April and was shown in State of israel in July at the Jerusalem Moving-picture show Festival. He made front-page news in both countries with the film.
Amid his attention-getting ideas is that the Exodus occurred more than than 200 years earlier than nigh scholars believe. He suggests that the biblical plagues and the parting of the Ruddy Sea can be attributed to a volcanic eruption some iii,500 years ago in what is modern Greece. And he believes that he has located the lost Ark of the Covenant (in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens) and identified the real Mt. Sinai (Gebel Hashem el-Tarif in Northeast Sinai, shut to the border of modernistic Israel).
"How did nosotros do information technology?" the tall, bespectacled Mr. Jacobovici asks at the start of the motion-picture show, which includes special effects and onscreen musings by the executive producer, James Cameron, who wrote, directed and produced the 1997 film "Titanic." "By tracking downwardly experts from a multifariousness of disciplines who rarely, if ever, talk to each other. None of them fully subscribes to our take on the story, but many possess critical pieces of the puzzle, and what emerges will challenge even the most skeptical."
Mr. Jacobovici, who lives in Toronto, was making the media rounds in New York for the United States debut of "Exodus Decoded." Amongst his other film credits are "Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream" and "Quest for the Lost Tribes." And now Exodus. Mr. Jacobovici knows that most scholars remain skeptical of his ideas and that there is not a single archeological artifact supporting the story of Exodus.
"The curt version is that it all started with my very beginning motion picture about the blackness Jews of Ethiopia,'' Mr. Jacobovici said in an interview, fresh from an appearance on "Today." "Information technology was the first time I saw that conventional wisdom is not necessarily correct,'' he said, referring to the fence he kicked off with "Falasha: Exile of the Black Jews."
Mr. Jacobovici, a 53-year-old Israeli-born Orthodox Jew and a father of 5, said he was not grinding whatsoever particular ideological ax in his new film. "My question was simple,'' he said. "Has anybody checked the biblical account in its totality?"
He argued that a reporter examining a biblical story was no dissimilar from a detective solving a murder. "We don't expect a DNA guy to solve a mystery,'' Mr. Jacobovici said of the credentials needed to investigate a story usually left to disciplines like archaeology, geology, history and Jewish studies.
"Exodus Decoded" makes no chiliad theological pronouncements. It ends past request viewers to decide whether the events depicted in the Bible are acquired by nature or divine intervention.
Mr. Cameron, who met Mr. Jacobovici through a mutual friend, said he had always been fascinated past archeology and history. (In the 2003 IMAX documentary "Ghosts of the Completeness," Mr. Cameron actually journeyed to the submerged Titanic wreck.) Mr. Jacobovici'south project and so excited him, Mr. Cameron said, that he helped him to shape it and convinced him to narrate information technology.
"What Simcha was able to demonstrate, quite definitively, is that the Exodus took place," Mr. Cameron said. "When you get into the miracles, that'due south more than conjecture." He said he believes that Mr. Jacobovici "takes risks and makes leaps that academics tin't make."
James One thousand. Hoffmeier, a professor of Well-nigh Eastern Archeology and Old Testament at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Sick., is one of the academics interviewed in the picture show. He said that Mr. Jacobovici does not make his case. Some of his testify — nigh natural disasters, for case — has been presented and knocked down before, Mr. Hoffmeier said.
In the terminal 20 years the debate near the historic accuracy of the Bible has heated up, said Mr. Hoffmeier, who is now at Oxford University teaching a course centered on the biblical Exodus story.
"It's become such a hot topic in academe that it has trickled down into the pop civilisation, " Dr. Hoffmeier said in a telephone interview from England. "I have been on 5 or vi shows where the producer is putting forth their theory about Exodus," and such shows often generate more than contend, he said.
James Kugel, a old professor of Hebrew literature at Harvard, wrote in an email interview from Israel: "Personally, I would exist thrilled if Mr. Jacobovici's enquiry had really succeeded in establishing the veracity of the biblical account of the exodus from Egypt, since archeologists and modern scholars of the Hebrew bible are generally so skeptical about information technology.
"Merely I'm agape he hasn't really addressed the main arguments that the skeptics advance. Those arguments cover a multifariousness of unlike bug: credible contradictions inside the biblical account, the absence of any external documentary or archeological support for an exodus involving the large numbers of people reported in the Bible or for the entry of such a group into Canaan, besides every bit the logistical difficulties that the exodus equally described in the bible would have entailed."
Mr. Kugel said that the lack of bear witness for an exodus does not mean that there wasn't 1, and that he believes there was one. If "Exodus Decoded" gets people thinking nigh the Bible, Mr. Kugel added, so much the better.
Mr. Jacobovici'due south unifying theory, amid his many other conjectures, is that the eruption of a volcano on the Greek island of Santorini indirectly created the conditions for the plagues that were recounted in the Sometime Testament. He theorizes that the earthquakes and other gas and volcanic eruptions caused darkness, for example, by spewing ash and as well created a seismic disruption that parted Lake El Balah — non the Red Sea — and engulfed the Egyptian ground forces. Carbon dioxide vapors killed the first-born Egyptian males who were sleeping on the basis, every bit opposed to the younger children who slept high upwardly or the Jews who were sitting upright for Passover, he said.
He also offers proof, he says in "Exodus Decoded," for the idea of a mass exodus of Semitic slaves from Arab republic of egypt. Egyptian history shows that the Hyksos who ruled the walled city of Avaris were Semites similar the Israelites and that they left on a mass exodus known as the "Hyksos Expulsion."
Near scholars say that the Hyksos left Egypt hundreds of years earlier Moses was born. Mr. Jacobovici theorizes in the film that if the Hyksos are the Israelites, information technology would alter the engagement of the Exodus (now believed to be around 1270 B.C.). He is then seen finding artifacts (a wall painting, writing in a cave) that he says back up the idea of Moses leading the slaves to freedom.
In the stop, Mr. Jacobovici said, people will have to decide what they want to believe. He said that his documentary deepened his own faith. He triple-checked his facts, he said, and welcomes a debate about the prove.
"I'thou not in the theology business organisation," he said. "I'thou a filmmaker."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/17/arts/television/17exod.html
0 Response to "Video Evidence 10 Plagues Occurred Again Documentary"
Post a Comment