Significant Find by the Israel Antiquities Authority

[Anomalocaris]

There were no significant environmental effects in Egypt from Santorini.

I mean, yeah...people can make shit up...but Judah didn't get hit hard by Santorini, either.

Crete? Greece? Turkey? Different story.

Not having ash clouds blown over your head or tephra falling on your land doesn't mean not getting hit hard.

Santarini eruption was comparable in magnitude to the 1814 eruption of mt. Tambora in Indonesia. The global climactic effects of tambora eruption, half a world away from Egypt, caused some of the worst famine in egypt's recorded history.

Certainly santorini eruption has the capacity to totally screw up season, rainfall, temperature, flood pattern , and cause dramatic visual changes like color of sky and sunset, in Egypt in the following few years.

[Minimalist]

Took a few moments to find this.



Egypt is in the 0.1 cm ring for the ash fall ring.

Egypt was already in the Second Intermediate period so one can't tell much from political instability. They may have suffered economic loss because a number of their commercial partners were utterly wrecked. I don't know if that is the stuff of legends, though.

[Anomalocaris]

Well, as far as I know, no ash from Tambora fell on egypt at all, the eruption being 12000 miles away, still the aerosol the eruption put into the air changed the weather in egypt enough to kill several million egyptians.

Tambora and Krakatau also caused dramatic and unsettling visual effects to occur in the sky around the globe for several years after the eruptions has ended. For example it can create sun sets where half the sky turns blood red while sun itself turns green or blue. It can also keep the horizon glowing bright red long after sunset, like a huge forest fire is burning just beyond the horizon. These effects would undoubtedly have also attended the Santarini eruption, which was easily larger than Krakatau and at least as large as Tambora.

I think direct experience or collective memory these kind of stunning, and for the time inexplicable, visual effects in the heavens, coupled with dramatic changes to long accustomed seasonal temperature, rainfall, and nile flood patterns, could certainly inspire superstitious chattering yokels to concoct memorable, and opportunistically self-serving and self-justifyin, superstitious explanations like Moses' plague.

It is deeply depressing that 3000 years later, so much of humanity is still beholden to some yokel's fancy from 3000 years ago.

[Minimalist]

still the aerosol the eruption put into the air changed the weather in egypt enough to kill several million egyptians.

Do you have a source for that? I can't find anything on it.

[Confused Ape]

The the last ten lines make no sense in a historical sense. Canaan WAS Egyptian. There was no need to conquer it and there is nothing to suggest that he was quashing a rebellion. Why would the Egyptians attack their own vassals? Further, all this strong hand of Ra shit is missing.

It almost reads like an after action report. "Yes, his majesty defeated the Libyans but losses were taken in Canaan where vassal towns were defeated" (by the Sea People? Attacking from the Mediterranean on the Egyptian flank?). It is not so glorious a victory in Canaan but the Egyptians are left holding the field...burned though it was.

I've been doing a bit of googling. First of all, nobody is really sure about who the Israelites are. One bit of confusion struck me as rather interesting, though.

Merneptah Stele Significance

While alternatives to the reading "Israel" have been put forward since the stele's discovery – the two primary candidates being "Jezreel",[8][9] a city and valley in northern Canaan, and a continuation of the description of Libya referring to "wearers of the sidelock"[a] – most scholars accept that Merneptah refers to "Israel". It is not clear, however, just who this Israel was or where they were located.[c] [b]For the "who", if the battle reliefs of Karnak show the Israelites, then they are depicted in Canaanite costume and Merneptah's Israelites are therefore Canaanites; if, on the other hand, the Karnak reliefs do not show Merneptah's campaigns, then the stele's Israelites may be "Shasu", a term used by the Egyptians to refer to nomads and marauders.[13]

I then went to the list of Pharaohs.

List Of Pharaohs

Akhenaten, who introduced a monotheistic religion, reigned 1352–1334 BC. Merneptah (listed by his alternate name - Banenre Merenptah) reigned 1213–1203 BC.

I then found an article on a Christian website which turned out to be useful because it lists different theories about the so-called conquest of Canaan by the Israelites.

Apologetics Press -The Conquest of Canaan: How and When?

Second, the combined efforts of George Mendenhall and Norman Gottwald introduced and popularized the “peasant revolt” theory that actually redefines the ethnic origin of the Israelite nation. This model suggests that there was no external conquest of Canaan; it was an indigenous liberation movement among depressed Canaanite peasants living in the countryside. These peasants, who formed the lowest level of their culture’s highly stratified social order, engaged in an egalitarian rebellion, overthrew their urban overlords, and became “Israelites.”

This would explain why Merneptah's Israelites are depicted wearing Canaanite costume.

Second, there are reputable archaeologists who feel that these theories are inconsistent with the evidence. Abraham Malamat, for example, argued that the archaeological evidence demonstrates that a number of Canaanite cities were destroyed, and subsequently settled, by the Israelites (1982, 8[2]:24-35). Additionally, Yigael Yadin, the late distinguished archaeologist, suggested that the picture painted by archaeological finds is consistent with the biblical portrait: fortified Canaanite cities were destroyed and replaced by a new culture (1982, 8[2]:19). Though these archaeologists were/are committed to a late date of the conquest, and allowed for some errors in biblical details, their interpretations of the physical evidence support the general outline of the biblical presentation of the conquest.

I then did some speculating.

We know that a number of tribes in Canaan eventually got together, called themselves Israelites, adopted a monotheistic religion and eliminated rival religions. What if these tribes decided to make a move when Merneptah was involved in a big campaign in Libya?

Back to the stele theories.

Similarly, if Merneptah's claim to have destroyed Israel's "seed" means that he destroyed its grain supply, then Israel can be taken to be a settled, crop-growing people; if, however, it means he killed Israel's progeny, then Israel can be taken to be pastoralists, i.e., Shasu.[14] The normative Egyptian use of "wasted, bare of seed" was as a repeated, formulaic phrase to declare victory over a defeated nation or people group whom the Egyptian army conquered and had literally destroyed their grain supply in the specific geographic region that they inhabited.

Merneptah, after dealing with the Libyans, dealt with the uppity Canaanite tribes. If the word "seed" could mean grain or progeny, the formulaic phrase could be used for any conquered people no matter what their lifestyle was.

The Israelites were inventing an epic history of their origins. They didn't mention this setback so it didn't get into the Bible. From the Egyptian point of view this rebellion was just a minor annoyance so it was mentioned as an afterthought on the stele.

[Anomalocaris]

still the aerosol the eruption put into the air changed the weather in egypt enough to kill several million egyptians.

Do you have a source for that? I can't find anything on it.

Actually, The volcanic eruption whose aerosol killed several million egyptians is the 1783 Lakagígar eruption in Iceland, not the 1814 Tambora eruption in Indonesia. I got the two confused. Mea Culpa.

Oman, Luke; Robock, Alan; Stenchikov, Georgiy L.; Thordarson, Thorvaldur (September 30, 2006). "High-latitude eruptions cast shadow over the African monsoon and the flow of the Nile". Geophysical Research Letters 33 (L18711).

A B Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (November 22, 2006). "Icelandic Volcano Caused Historic Famine In Egypt, Study Shows". Science Daily.

BTW, the climate impact of 1783 Lakagígar eruption is estimated to have killed 6-10 million people world wide, making it by far the most deadly non-epidemic natural diseaster in history.

[Brian37]

Took a few moments to find this.



Egypt is in the 0.1 cm ring for the ash fall ring.

Egypt was already in the Second Intermediate period so one can't tell much from political instability. They may have suffered economic loss because a number of their commercial partners were utterly wrecked. I don't know if that is the stuff of legends, though.

Um look at the geography and the close proximity. Egypt is not on the other side of the planet. Anyone witnessing the actual events close up who survived could have carried quite easily their gullible view of nature and not only conflated it to comic book proportions, but spread their "witnessing" around them later that got filtered throughout the region and multiple cultures over long periods of time.

There is not one religion or holy book that is not based on legends and myths. Our current and falsely believed gods and religions are ALWAYS based on prior claims and legends because of our own human ignorance and gap filling.

You are not always going to have a record of the story passing through time anymore than one can name every single person they have met in a lifetime. What is important in all this is that humans spread their legends and they get incorporated into other cultures and spread down through time to become newer or even completely different myths and legends.

Humans make up gods and especially back then, a natural disaster to ignorant people, be they polytheists or monotheists, are going to see those events as super natural, not merely nature.

[Minimalist]

Yet there is nothing in Egyptian literature which indicates such an event or any change in the Egyptian mythology. I know that some nudniks - namely Simcha Jacobovici - have tried to shoehorn the much later Tempest Stele of Ahmose I into an eyewitness report of Thera but no one takes Jacobovici seriously.

Also, geography comes into play:




Carpathia and Rhodes would have shielded much of the Eastern Med from the tsunami. We know Crete caught hell and I imagine it was a tough day on Cythera and Melos but actual evidence for a significant impact on Egypt is hard to find.

[Brian37]

Again, in human evolution you are NOT going to always have records of overlap when a legend gets passed on. Geography most certainly comes into play and when you know how close Egypt is to Mesopotamia and that that entire region has had its power shifts and overlap Ocham's razor points to the simplest solution as to how stories end up where they do. The get passed down through humans and time and can have the same motifs but completely different character names and details by the time they get written down by someone and you don't always have a record of that overlap.

The plague story is a result of conflating a natural event to comic book status, just like all flood myths. It is a legend born out of human ignorance. Just like all comet myths and flood myths in human history get created. The story was put in the bible to give the writers legitimacy, but we can only conclude it was put there AFTER the fact regardless of how got there or who passed it on to them.

[Confused Ape]

Carpathia and Rhodes would have shielded much of the Eastern Med from the tsunami. We know Crete caught hell and I imagine it was a tough day on Cythera and Melos but actual evidence for a significant impact on Egypt is hard to find.

Traveller's tales would have got round, though, because people travelled.

It seems that the tribes who became the Israelites were never in Egypt and the Exodus was based on the Hyksos being chased out. If you want your invented history to be really spectacular, just add in traveller's tales about the eruption.