Fact-Checking the Torah -- Behold! A Second Witness

One of my projects for some years now has been trawling the Internet for articles about the Akrotiri explosion that have bearing on the Exodus.

The relevant Bible verses are Exodus 10:21-23, the palpable darkness that fell on Avaris but not in Goshen across the border. This palpable darkness is characteristic of the Plinian phase of a volcanic eruption like Vesuvius in 79 CE or Mount St. Helens. The Akrotiri eruption was 20x that of Vesuvius in 79 CE which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. 

The dust streamed SSE on a ruach yam, a sea wind which, for Egypt, meant it came from the NNW. But did it happen in the spring?

Well, it happened before autumn and studies from multiple perspectives have pegged it more and more closely. Examinations of charred insects in jars of fava beans show that the beans came from the prior year's harvest; it contained all stages of the insect's metamorphosis except eggs, which are laid in spring. This pest never develops in stored beans. It can only develop out in the fields. So the beans were picked after they were infested, stored up and left behind when the dust clouds sent people scurrying from Akrotiri, accounting for the lack of human remains. They probably assumed things would blow over and they would come back for the stored food. Instead, KERBLOOEY.

Another important indicator was olive remains found in the ash deposit. This included branches, leaves with parasites on them, and olive stones. The question I always had was, did they find any way to tell if the olive flesh had started to develop yet. Finding bare stones with no trace of even charred flesh would put the disaster in early spring; finding any remains of even charred flesh sets the date closer to summer. The leaves are not enough; olives are evergreens. I haven't found the answer to my question yet.

Now comes an article on the Babylonian Venus Tablets of the reign of Ammisaduqa, containing records of observations of Venus as well as the meaning of the various phases and things. In addition to phases, the tablets record an issue called conjunction. Twice a year Venus disappears into the glare of the sun; there is an inferior and a superior conjunction and you can google about the definition of those terms.

What the tablets record is that in 1627 BCE, the dates of the superior conjunction could not be determined from observation. About 25 April, Venus should have been visible as "the morning star", then reached conjunction and come out by 5 October as "the evening star". But they never saw "the morning star". There's no explanation of unusual storms, the rain clouds of which would have hidden Venus. But given the year, the explanation probably turns out to be dust from Thera. 

It would have taken months for this dust to get thick enough to occlude Venus. American Meteorological Society data shows that historically, the most common wind in Mesopotamia came from the NNW. Ancient maps of cities put this direction at the top and free-standing buildings were oriented to keep out the wind and its dust. The main component coming from the north would have limited the amount of dust coming from Thera, which was located to the WNW. 

Avaris, on the other hand, is about half the distance from Thera as Babylon, and the prevailing wind out of the NNW at that time of the year promoted the volume of dust that produced the plague.

The article on the tablets has another suggestion to make, an eruption of Aniakchak in Alaska. However, this has the same problem as the eruption of Krakatau that I discussed for Gildas. It's thousands of km farther from Babylon than Thera. It's to the ENE. It's just another example of how academics don't take all the evidence into account (like distance and prevailing wind), or don't look outside their pipeline (such as to see the resemblance to the Krakatau claim). 

And now another example of how you can't rely on what people say. I found three tourism websites, all parroting the same text about finding flowers in the remains of the Thera explosion. I contacted one and they told me they had no data to back up that claim. So if anybody tells you that olive flowers were found at Thera, ask them for the archaeological report. I doubt they'll be able to give it to you; Google didn't find it for me, though it did turn up the paper on the Venus tablets.