The problem of trying to match the characters and events of early Hebrew history with those of Egyptian history is one that has exercised the minds of scholars for over 2,000 years. Egypt, the Egypt of the pharaohs, plays an extremely prominent role in the story of the Jewish people; for which reason the Land of the Nile has long fascinated Christian and Jewish writers. Which pharaoh, they have wondered, reigned in the time of Abraham; who it was that made Joseph his vizier; and which ruler of the Nile oppressed the Israelites in the time of Moses? Following the decipherment of the hieroglyphics by Champollion in 1821, European scholars fervently hoped that all these questions would soon be resolved. Alas! It was not to be. Search as they might, historians found not a mention of the Israelites or of the great events described in the Old Testament. In time, the search was abandoned, and it became part of accepted wisdom that none of these things were mentioned by the Egyptians because the Books of Genesis and Exodus were little more than a collection of myths.

But although the Egyptian records could produce no Hebrew vizier named Joseph nor a catastrophe like the Ten Plagues or the Exodus, they did indeed refer to characters and events which seemed to recall these biblical stories. So for example one Egyptian inscription beside the Nile mentioned a famine of seven years and a wise vizier who solved the crisis by interpreting the pharaoh’s dream. The vizier was named Imhotep and the pharaoh Djoser. However, Imhotep and Djoser were placed by Egyptologists a thousand years before the biblical Joseph of the many coloured coat. In the same way, Egyptian documents named the Pessimistic Texts did recall a series of terrible disasters that afflicted Egypt, including a universal darkness, a slaughter of the “first born,” and the Nile turning to blood. However, Egyptologists dated the events described in the Pessimistic Texts a thousand years before those described in the Book of Exodus.

Virtually all the customs and traditions of the Jewish people can be traced to the Exodus. The Exodus seems to have been a cataclysmic occurrence; one which saw the forces of nature unleashed against the land of Egypt. Ten Plagues, we are told, struck the earth. Amongst these was a plague of hail, mixed with fire. Another saw darkness envelop the world; and a final “plague” brought the death of the nation’s “first born.” We are told that, in the wake of this last terror, the Israelites made good their escape – only to be pursued and overtaken at the seashore by the pharaoh. As the Egyptians closed in for the kill, the sea, on whose shores the refugees stood huddled together, opened up, leaving on its bed a passage through which the Israelites might travel to freedom.

A growing number of academics, including the present writer, hold that the disasters described in the Book of Exodus, which dissolved royal authority, were not normal climatic events, but were part of a cosmic catastrophe that affected the whole earth; a catastrophe that rained meteor showers on the world (the hail mixed with fire) and darkened the skies with the ash of hundreds of erupting volcanoes.

If there is any truth at all in the story recorded in the Old Testament, then the Exodus must have been a defining moment of Egyptian history. We should not therefore be looking for vague references to the departure from the Nile Valley of an obscure band of Semitic shepherds; we should be looking for something of central importance to Egyptian religious tradition; something whose signature is glaringly obvious, and which has probably been staring us in the face all the time!