Timothy P. Mahoney - Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus

When Timothy Mahoney asked Nobel laureate and former President of the State of Israel, Shimon Peres, a person whose life has been devoted to the building of that nation, to characterize the legacy of the Exodus, he replied with no reservation that it was the experience at Sinai. Take away the Ten Commandments and we are out of business. And we can add, take away the Exodus and we lose Sinai and with that the basis for all the absolute authority of those ten world-shaping concepts. So crucial are they to the fabric of humanity that they are engraved on the walls of the United Nations.

I have often heard the naive argument that there are no absolutes. Even in nature, the argument goes, we have the laws of relativity. Really? Are you not aware that the laws of relativity are entirely based on an absolute: the constant speed of light? Absolutes abound in nature and they also need abound in human relationships.

Humanity has the habit of not learning from history, and so it repeats itself.

Take away the Exodus and with it the Ten Commandments and humanity is out of business. Weve seen that failed experiment time and again. The French Revolution embodied the warped wisdom of the Enlightenment that human reason alone is supreme. In doing so, it abandoned those absolutes and in their place instituted what was referred to as the cult of reason. Within a decade of that debacle, the Revolution devoured its own leaders and thousands of others. Records from that awful era of terror relate the attempt to develop a poison gas that would make the killing of counter-revolutionaries more efficient. Humanity has the habit of not learning from history, and so it repeats itself.

Moses Maimonides, the 12th century theologian philosopher, taught in his youth that all must believe in a God that is active in the universe. In his later years he realized that belief is inadequate and taught that all must know that God is active in our lives, and can know this truth by observing events in the world.

This project, aptly titled Patterns of Evidence, is a game changer. It changes belief in the validity of the biblical Exodus into knowledge of that historic event. It does this by abandoning unquestioned accepted wisdom and replacing it with actual data gleaned from the era in question. When those data fall into a pattern, truth emerges. In this case, the Exodus. This is exactly the scientific method.

Scientific discovery is based on observing patterns in nature. I drop an apple; it falls to the ground. I drop a feather; it falls to the ground. I pour water; it flows down. Ive discovered an invisible, ubiquitous force in nature gravity. I cannot see gravity, but its effect is consistent and predictable. That becomes a known law of nature. Matter in any form attracts matter in any form.

In parallel logic, Mahoney and his colleagues have studied biblical passages and compared them with archaeological discoveries. Point after point revealed an absence of evidence for an Exodus in the era of Ramesses II. And yet as is often quoted in archaeological research, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So perhaps Ramesses was the pharaoh of the Exodus, but the evidence was lost or destroyed. That might have been their conclusion until this team abandoned that ill-conceived and preconceived notion and looked elsewhere in history. There, data point by data point revealed concordance between biblical wisdom and archaeological discoveries. No longer was there an absence of evidence.

In the fifth book of the Bible, Deuteronomy, chapter 32 verse 7, Moses urges us to consider two sets of evidence, the patterns of which demonstrate the presence of a Force, call it God if you like, that is active in this magnificent universe within which we dwell. Moses tells us to remember the days of old; consider the years generation by generation. Remember the days of old: all ancient commentary relates this to the flow from the creation of the universe as a burst of energy to the appearance of humankind. Then the second half of Moses charge to us: consider the years generation by generation: look for patterns of a God active in human history, generation by generation.