...Requires Explosive Evidence

In part one of this article I examined a claim that the biblical city of Sodom had been destroyed by an exploding meteor. Part one mostly reviewed the surprisingly negative response from biblical literalists. In part two, I would like to survey the physical evidence presented to support the explosive claim.

Explosive Evidence

The claim was put forward in a paper presented at the 2018 annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR). The paper’s authors were a team composed of excavators at the Tall el-Hammam site along with researchers from the Comet Research Group. The physical evidence presented in the paper was collected from the dig at Tall el-Hammam, claimed to be the site of biblical Sodom.

Tall el-Hammam. A "tall" or "tell" is is an artificial hill created by many generations of people living and rebuilding on the same spot.(Credit: Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology in the Middle East)

The paper presented at ASOR begins by noting that many archaeological sites in the Jordan plain north of the Dead Sea were abandoned in the Middle Bronze period (2000-1500 BCE) and remained unoccupied for centuries. The authors propose an exploding meteor as the explanation for the sudden end of the Middle Bronze Age civilization in that region.

Four main pieces of physical evidence were put forward:

1. Concussive evidence: Only stone foundations remain; the mudbrick superstructures are mostly missing. Very few intact pieces of pottery were found.
2. Directional evidence: Where tumbled mudbrick walls were found, they were northeast of the stone foundations. Pottery fragments were scattered in a northeasterly direction.
3. Chemical evidence: A salt and sulphate content of 6% in the ash layer marking the city’s destruction in the Middle Bronze Age. The chemical composition of the salts is virtually identical to that of Dead Sea water.
4. Thermal evidence: A small portion of pottery sherds are partially melted (“vitrified”) on the surface, indicating an exposure to temperatures between 8000° C and 12,000° C for less than a few milliseconds. A “melt rock” composed of melted and fused quartz and sandstone was found at another site 8.5 km away.

On my first read, I found this all very interesting but not completely convincing. I consider myself an educated reader but certainly no expert on Middle Bronze excavations. I did some Internet searches to see what experts had to say. The vast majority of articles were breathless announcements of the findings like those mentioned in my previous article. The only negative opinions were outright rejections (“this is pseudoscience”) with no assessment of the physical evidence.

Examining the Evidence

Barring analysis from an expert, I can only share my own thoughts.

Inhabited mudbrick structures need constant upkeep and will quickly deteriorate once they are abandoned. After all, the bricks are just dried mud. Only mudbricks that have been buried since their last use and thus protected from the elements will be uncovered on an archaeological dig. Archaeologists rely on stone foundations to tell them where mudbrick walls once existed. Therefore, an absence of mudbrick structures at Hammam is not at all unusual.

Similarly, unbroken pottery is more the exception than the rule at a dig. Only in an undisturbed burial context should you reasonably expect to find intact pots.

With respect to the directionality of the found remains for mudbrick and pottery fragments, maybe that had something to do with the prevailing wind direction for the area in ancient times. A steady wind off the Dead Sea could have blown debris material towards the northeast. Blown debris covering fallen mud bricks in the northeastern sections of the site would have preserved them from eroding away.

Wind blowing off the Dead Sea may have also had something to do with the concentration of salt and sulphates. These were found in the ash layer marking the end of the site’s Middle Bronze occupation. The site was unoccupied for six or seven centuries until the Iron Age. Core samples indicate that during the Middle Bronze the water level of the Dead Sea had fallen and the south basin was entirely dried up until around 1500 BCE. Over that time, salts blown off a desiccated Dead Sea could have accumulated in high concentrations just offshore.

Vitrified potsherd. Only the top 1mm of the 5mm-thick sherd was melted to glass. The next 2mm of clay was darkened and the bottom 2mm are the natural color. (Photo from paper discussed in this article.)

The vitrified potsherds seem like the strongest pieces of evidence for something unusual. Middle Bronze pots were fired at low temperatures of around 800° C.  They may not have had the technology to fire a pot hot enough to glaze it. But maybe they did. Had there been a flash thermal event of 8000° to 12,000° C, it seems to me that much more than just a few pieces of vitrified pottery would have been found. Sand anywhere in the vicinity should also have been turned the glass. Lightning is known to vitrify sand, soil, and rocks into fulgurite, so imagine what a thermal event such as what was proposed would have done.

The “melt rock” was a surface-level find, so who knows where and when it came from.

The paper goes on to identifier several typical markers of an airburst event. I’m not convinced that an aerial burst would generate those kinds of markers, but the point is moot because the authors go on to  admit that preliminary analysis reveals some of these markers at the Hammam site, “but not at compelling levels.” If it’s not compelling to them, it’s certainly ain’t compelling to me.

Evidence Demands a Verdict

One thing not mentioned by the article involves the conditions at other sites in the area. The Bible states that Sodom was only one of the “cities of the plain”. In addition to Sodom, there’s the well-known sister site of Gomorrah and the less-known cities of Admah and Zeboiim. Being the largest ruin in the area, Tall el-Hammam is supposedly the main city of Sodom and the neighboring Tall Kafrayn is assumed to be Gomorrah. Tall Nimrin is proposed as Admah and other sites for Zeboiim.

If a meteoritic airburst took out Sodom, it would have affected the neighboring cities as well. I reviewed the papers from the teams excavating Tall Kafrayn and Tall Nimrin and nothing out of the ordinary was mentioned there. Maybe I missed it. Or maybe the teams exploring those sites failed to spot salt haze and vitrified potsherds.

Where does this leave us? The physical evidence proposed for a meteoritic airburst hardly seems conclusive. There are simpler alternate explanations that come to my mind. I would think that an expert in the field would be able to suggest more likely explanations than what I was able to come up with. We would also need to see evidence from other sites in the Jordan plain, not just Tall el-Hammam.

I am sympathetic to the airburst theory. A major catastrophe like that would be remembered for centuries and handed down in legends. It would be cool if it were true. But based on the physical evidence presented, I have to conclude that it is not. Or at best, not proven.

Tall el-Hammam may have been the biblical city once known as Sodom, but that doesn’t mean it was destroyed by an exploding meteor.

Explosive Claims...

I don’t think anyone can accuse me of not keeping up with current events, but even a veteran news reader like me missed the reports that came out about a year ago from a team of researchers from Trinity Southwest University, an unaccredited theological school and Bible college in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Since 2005 they have been digging at the Tall el-Hammam site a few miles north of the Dead Sea in Jordan.

The Trinity Southwest team began digging there because they thought it might be the biblical city of Sodom. And then they began looking for evidence that it had been destroyed in some sort of fiery cataclysm to confirm their hypothesis. Because, short of finding a “Sodom City Limits” sign, how else can you conclusively prove you actually found the biblical city of Sodom?

Kaboom Town

The archaeologists from TSU say they found what they were looking for: widespread destruction over a 200 square-mile area north of the Dead Sea that left the region uninhabitable for six centuries. The researchers theorized the destruction was caused by shock waves of heat and pressure from a meteoritic airburst. Not only did the airburst kill everyone in the immediate vicinity, but a tsunami of superheated brine from the Dead Sea poisoned what had previously been a fertile area.

Artwork for a scene from a Christian movie called "God's Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah" by a group called Eastern Lightning (https://en.easternlightning.org/videos/destruction-of-sodom-and-gomorrah.html)

While extraordinary, these are not outlandish claims. Meteoritic airbursts do happen. The Tunguska event of 1908 is perhaps the most well-known. That event had an explosive force of 10-15 megatons and flattened trees over an 825 square-mile area in a forest in Siberia. More recently is the Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded with a force of 400-500 kilotons over the southern Ural region of Russian in February 2013. 1200 people were injured, mostly from glass shattered by the pressure wave. It would have been much worse if the meteor had entered the atmosphere at a steeper angle; the main force of the blast would then have been directed towards the ground.

Dashcam footage of the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion.

The TSU researchers date the destruction of their site to ca. 1700 BCE, the Middle Bronze II period. They claim this is the time of Abraham. Many biblical scholars doubt there was a historical Abraham, but those who believe there are historical memories in the patriarchal narratives (Gen 12-50) would date them to the early 2^nd millennium. A meteoritic explosion causing the destruction of several Middle Bronze communities and the wasting of the surrounding lands could have been memorialized as a story of God bringing down his wrath on a wicked populace much as television preachers are quick to blame the sins of the victims of especially destructive hurricanes or earthquakes.

As you can imagine, the combination of the words “Sodom” and “meteor” is catnip to the media and the period of late Nov/early Dec 2018 saw titles in online articles such as:

“New Science Suggests Biblical City of Sodom was Smote by an Exploding Meteor”

“Biblical Sin City of Sodom Destroyed by Giant Meteor says Archaeologist”

“Scientists Find Evidence of Meteorite Responsible for Destroying Sodom and Gomorrah”

Fundamental Disagreement

You would think that such a confirmation of the Bible would make fundamentalists very happy. You would be wrong.

Some biblical literalists take a nihilistic approach. The Bible says God utterly destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Since they were utterly destroyed, there would be no ruins left to dig up. Alrighty.

Other literalists object to the time. According to them, the figures provided in the Bible date the overthrow of Sodom to 2067 BCE. If Tall el-Hammam was Sodom as the researchers from TSU claim, then its destruction ca. 1700 BCE doesn’t leave enough time for a 430-year sojourn in Egypt by the Hebrews before the exodus in 1446 BCE.

Dr. Steven Collins, the co-director of the dig at Tall el-Hammam, has been vociferous in his promotion and defense of the Hammam site as ancient Sodom. As an evangelical, he believes in the inspiration and authority of the Bible, but he does not take the patriarchal lifespans literally. For example, when the Bible says Abraham died at the age of 175, he says that number may reflect an actual age of 55 years plus three “honorific” supplements of 40 years. Otherwise, if 175 is taken literally as Abraham’s age, he would still be alive when his grandson Jacob was a teenager.

A final objection from literalists is to the place. They insist Sodom was south of the Dead Sea, not north of it. They reference Gen 14:3 placing Sodom in the “Valley of Siddim, which is the Salt Sea”. Dr. Collins argues that Gen 14 is describing the location of a battle, not the location of Sodom. He also points out that the “Southern Sodom Theorists” ignore Gen 13:10-12 which places Sodom in the “plain of Jordan” and that can only be north of the Dead Sea since the Jordan terminates in the Dead Sea.

The Better Argument

Examining both the Northern Sodom and Southern Sodom arguments, I would say that Dr. Collins makes the better case for a Northern Sodom. A destruction date of ca. 1700 BCE poses no difficulties for anyone who doesn’t take biblical chronology literally. The core reason for arguing for a Southern Sodom site like Bab edh-Dra appears to be that it gives you a destruction date of 2350 BCE (Early Bronze) which is a closer fit (but still not exact) to the Bible-generated date of 2067 BCE.

Dr. Collins does not believe in evolutionary theory or that the OT was composed from multiple sources. He can’t make the argument that the Bible is not always consistent. Any references to Sodom being south of the Dead Sea have to be argued away.

As someone who accepts a critical understanding of the Bible’s development, I can accept that the location of Sodom – assuming it actually existed – could have been misremembered, showing up north of the Dead Sea in some traditions and south of the Dead Sea in other traditions. It’s not a big deal to me either way.

My main interest is what evidence has been found for an aerial burst in the Dead Sea area. Ascribing the destruction of Sodom to a meteoritic explosion is an extraordinary claim. And, as Carl Sagan frequently said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” But it’s a potentially provable claim, so the evidence will either bear it out or not.

How does the evidence stack up? I’ll examine that in part two of this article.

Gardener of the Gods

In addition to original programming like Orange is the New Black and Stranger Things, Netflix also streams various documentaries (although not as many as Amazon Prime). One interesting documentary I’ve recently watched is a 3-part BBC Two series from 2011 called The Bible’s Buried Secrets hosted by Dr. Francesca Stravrakopoulou, Senior Lecturer in the Hebrew Bible at Exeter University. This is not the same program as the two-hour NOVA episode with the same name that aired on PBS in 2008 and is not to be confused with the similarly titled Buried Secrets of the Bible with Albert Lin that aired in March 2019 on the National Geographic channel. (Note to TV producers: try to be more original in naming your bible programs.)

Dr. Francesca Stravrakopoulou, host of BBC's 2011 series The Bible's Buried Secrets.

The first episode in the series (“Did King David’s Empire Exist?”) reviewed the archaeological evidence that cast doubt on the Bible’s claim to the extent – or even existence – of a United Kingdom under David and Solomon. The second episode (“Did God have a Wife?”) looked at evidence from archaeology and the Bible itself that belief in multiple gods in Israel was much more widespread prior to the Babylonian exile than is commonly believed. Neither episode presented anything to me that I had not previously encountered, although they could be eye-opening to those unfamiliar with the current state of biblical studies.

The Real Eden

Not so with the third episode, “The Real Garden of Eden”. Dr. Stravrakopoulous (hereafter, “Dr. S” for brevity’s sake) presents an intriguing hypothesis that the story of the Garden of Eden from Gen 2-3 is an allegory for the fall of Jerusalem. Understanding how she gets there requires following a chain of arguments.

Beginning in the British Museum, Dr. S shows us Assyrian reliefs presenting the king in his garden. The king’s palace was meant to be monumental, to show off the king’s power and wisdom. It was also considered a religious center. The king was the link between the people and the gods.

Gardens were built by the king to demonstrate his control over the environment, creating lushness in a barren environment. Gardens were built and maintained by the king as a place for the gods to reside.Only the king was granted privileged access to the garden to tend it and cultivate it.

Royal gardens were more like what we would think of as small parks and she takes us the garden surrounding the Alhambra in Spain for a modern example.

One of the gardens at the Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain.

The king was the gardener for the gods. In the Eden story, Adam plays the role of the king. There are still traces of this concept in Gen 2-3 where it states (Gen 2:15) Adam was put in the garden to “tend it and keep it.” Later (Gen 3:8), YHWH is seen enjoying his garden, walking about in it at “the breezy time of the day.”

Cherubs and Rivers

Another clue to the true identity of Eden comes after Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden. Gen 3:24 states that YHWH posted a cherub at the entrance to the garden to prevent humans from returning. Cherubs were winged creatures who accompanied the gods and marked their dwelling places. Back the British Museum to see the giant cherubs that flanked the entrance to the royal palace at Nimrud. Dr. S reminds us of the cherubs affixed to the top of the Ark of the Covenant and those that dominated the Holy of Holies in the temple.

Assyrian cherubs from the North-West Palace of Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BCE) in Nimrud. These colossal statues are on permanent display at the British Museum in London (photo by author, 1996).

Dr. S’s final clue is in the names of the four rivers flowing out of Eden (Gen 2:10-14). One of these is the Gihon and the only Gihon we know of is a modest stream that provided water for Jerusalem in ancient times. This, she tells us, allows us to identify the true location of Eden as the Jerusalem temple. Just as the garden was known as the abode of the gods, the Jerusalem temple was where YHWH lived. It was the heart of religious life in ancient Judah, tended by the king. But in this case, the temple was a symbolic garden. The Jerusalem temple was built of cedar and decorated with palm trees, flowers, lilies, and pomegranates.

When the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in 587 BCE, it was a psychic blow to the survivors. They had lost their link with God and began to wonder how it could have happened. Some great sin on the part of the king must have led God to withdraw his presence from among his people. This became allegorized as Adam (representing the king) being cast out of God’s garden (representing the temple).

Backwards Argument

It’s an interesting theory and the individual components make sense, but I believe Dr. S drew the wrong conclusions. To be precise, I believe she got it backwards. Instead of the Eden story composed as an explanation for the loss of the temple, it makes more sense to me that the temple was built as an earthly model of the divine garden in which YHWH resides.

For Dr. S’s hypothesis to work, the Eden story would have to have been created after the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE. True, the majority of biblical scholars believe that the Bible as we have it today was compiled during the Babylonian Exile in the 6^th century BCE. But the Eden story is usually attributed to the Yahwist tradition, one of the oldest sources in the Bible dating from 8^th or 9^th century BCE.

My study of the Garden of Eden story convinces me that it is an etiological tale meant to explain why men have to labor to work the land, why women experience pain in childbirth, and so on. Dr. S never explains directly why these parts would be in an allegory of the last king of Judah. The closest she comes to that is a last-minute mention that the true villains were the serpent and the woman. The serpent was included to discredit serpent worship in the temple and Eve was included because women are usually blamed whenever a man misbehaves.

I couldn’t easily find an academic paper arguing Dr. S’s exact hypothesis but I did discover that a presentation of the Garden of Eden as a temple is not unheard of. While I believe it makes more sense that the temple was built on the model of the Garden of Eden than the Eden story was inspired by the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, there is value in exploring the ancient idea of the garden as a place where humans and the divine could co-exist. If nothing else, it challenges the common conception that Eden was simply meant to be a paradise for human beings.

Ark Twain

In my previous article, I made some (hopefully) educated estimations that allowed me to calculate how heavy the fabled Ark of the Covenant would have been had it been constructed according to the instructions in Exodus chapter 25. That exercise clarified some issues for me.

His Ark is Bigger than is Right

First, my estimated weight of 165 kg (362 lbs) for the ark leads me to conclude it would have been too heavy to be carried by four men. While soldiers sometimes carry backpacks of over 100 lbs of equipment needed for special missions, that weight is being distributed across both shoulders. Levites carrying the ark would have all that weight coming down on one shoulder, greatly reducing the amount they could comfortably carry.

Second, the estimated weight of the chest and the lid are about equal, so the center of gravity would sit at the point where the lid meets the chest. This would be the most balanced place to locate the rings for the carrying poles, yet the instructions in Exodus state that the rings should be attached to the feet of the chest. Underneath the ark next to the feet would be the strongest area to place the poles but it would also make the ark top-heavy and prone to tipping over.

Third, the ark’s purpose was to hold the stone tablets on which were written the Ten Commandments. 1 Kings 8:9 insists that “There was nothing in the ark except the two stone tablets that Moses had placed in it at Horeb.” But the ark’s dimensions are much larger than needed to accomplish that goal.

One of the six pairs of tablet props made for 1956 film The Ten Commandments sold for $60,000 at an auction in 2012. The lettering is in an early Canaanite script practiced in the late Bronze Age.

Take Two Tablets…

The Bible does not provide us dimensions for the two stone tablets, but does tell us that Moses carried it “in his hand” as he climbed up and down the mountain of God (Sinai or Horeb, depending on the tradition). The size of the stone tablets would be limited to what Moses could comfortably carry while climbing a mountain.

The dimensions of the prop tablets from the classic movie The Ten Commandments starring Charlton Heston were 23.5 x 12 x 1.25”. The props were made of fiberglass. Had they been made of actual stone, they would have weighed something like 15 kg (32 lb) each.  Quite a load for poor old Moses to schlep up and down the mountain twice!

But even with such oversized tablets, there’s more than enough room in the ark with the dimensions given in Exodus 25 (2.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 cubits). You could lay the tablets side by side on the gold-covered floor of the ark and they would take up only half the floor space. And there would be 2.5 feet of wasted space above the tablets.

An ark properly built for such movie-size stone tablets would be much, much smaller. By stacking the tablets on top of each other, you could reduce the footprint to something like 27 x 14” (roughly, a half-cubit by quarter-cubit) and only 3” height. More reasonable dimensions for the stone tablets would yield an even-smaller ark.

A cedar and ebony chest (33 x 24 x 25") found in King Tut's tomb has similarities to the ark as described in Exodus 25. The width is roughly equal to the height, it has a cornice around its opening, and carrying poles slide through metal rings near the chest's feet. The poles are retractable!

The “Other” Ark

To these observations, we can mention that the source of Exodus 25 is the Priestly narrative (P), typically dated to the exilic period (6^th-5^th century BCE), after Jerusalem and its Temple had been destroyed. Many scholars have cited this as reason alone to doubt that the ark ever existed at all.

While it is definitely possible that the Ark and Tabernacle never existed, the detailed descriptions in Exodus could imply that the author was familiar with the items, knew they no longer existed, but wanted to preserve their memory so that one day they might be recreated. But even if we accept this as a possibility, it doesn’t mean that the ark from Exodus 25 originally existed in the form described.

The ark is also mentioned in other parts of the Bible outside of those attributed to the Priestly writer. Deuteronomy comes from a different source tradition. Signified as “D”, this source is typically dated towards the last years of the Kingdom of Judah (7^th-6^th century BCE). Moses says in Deut 10:1-3:

At that time Yhwh said to me, “Carve out two tablets of stone like the former ones, and come up to me on the mountain, and make an ark of wood. I will write on the tablets the words that were on the former tablets, which you smashed, and you shall put them in the ark.” So I made an ark of acacia wood, cut two tablets of stone like the former ones, and went up the mountain with the two tablets in my hand. 

In this older tradition, the ark is a simple chest of acacia wood – no gold cladding, solid gold lid or angels.

But the purpose of the ark was not solely to store the tablets of the covenant, but also for religious processions. Many ancient (and modern) cultures carry sacred relics or images in religious procession. These images would be placed on or in a box that would be carried on poles. Not allowed to use graven images, the tablets of the covenant were a substitute for an image of Yahweh. Such an object intended for public display would be larger and more resplendent than a simple wooden chest.

Ark Evolution

Suggested only as a hypothesis, the early Israelites could have employed the concept of the portable shrine. If Levites had a semi-monopoly on cultic practices and if Levites hailed from Egypt, the portable shrine would have been built along the Egyptian models they were familiar with. Containing a statue or maybe even stone tablets, it probably would have been smaller than the ark described in Exodus. Built of wood, maybe covered in thin gold foil rather than sheets of gold plate.

Once all cultic practices were centralized in Jerusalem and there was no longer a need to keep the chest portable, a new container may have been built to take its place. Much as the Temple replaced the Tabernacle, a new golden ark would have replaced the old wooden book box. Perhaps the old, sacred chest may even have been placed inside of the golden ark.

If the golden ark as described in Exodus 25 really existed and held an older, smaller wooden ark, that would explain why it is so much larger than needed to hold two stone tablets. The extra size and weight would not be an issue if the golden ark was intended to have its permanent home in the Jerusalem temple and would never be moved.

The Weight of Mystery

In the popular 1981 action film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones battled Nazis seeking the lost Ark of the Covenant. As described in the Bible, the Ark was a gold-covered box of acacia wood with a lid of solid gold, built as a container for two stone tablets on which were written the Ten Commandments. It was carried ahead of the people during the days in the wilderness when the Hebrews were en-route from Egypt to Canaan. But when it wasn’t in-transit, it sat in the inner sanctum of the Tabernacle and, later, the Temple in Jerusalem.

A Seemingly Simple Question

The instructions for how the Ark was to be constructed are provided in Exodus 25:10-22. A few weeks ago I was reading a commentary on Exodus and, thinking about the slab of gold forming the lid and all the other gold used in its construction, I had a very simple question: How much would it have weighed? Could it have been easily carried by four men?

It seems like it should be easy to calculate an answer. We know the density of acacia wood (0.54 g/cm³) and gold (19.3 g/cm³). Exodus 25:10-22 provides dimensions for the Ark’s length (2.5 cubits), width and height (both 1.5 cubits). But how long is a cubit?

A cubit is the distance between elbow and fingertips and the definition varies in different cultures and time periods (anywhere from 17.5 to 20.8 inches). A commonly-cited value is 18 inches (45.7 cm).

My thinking is that the Hebrew artisans who built the Ark for Moses would have learned their craft in Egypt. We know the length of the ancient Egyptian cubit from measuring rods discovered in New Kingdom tombs that are roughly contemporary to the time the Exodus is supposed to have taken place. The Egyptian cubit is about 52.4 cm so I’ll use that as the base measurement. This gives me 131 cm (51.6”) for the length and 79 cm (31”) for the width and height.

I am now able to calculate the surface area but to calculate the volume I’ll need to know the thickness of the wooden walls and Exodus doesn’t provide that measurement. Neither does it tells us the thickness of the solid gold lid nor the dimensions of the cherubim atop the lid.

Scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. You can actually purchase a kit (http://goldenarmor.com/arkhomepage/) that allows you to build a replica of the prop from the movie

Feast of the Assumptions

What have others come up with in estimating the missing dimensions? A simple Google search for “how heavy was the ark of the covenant” returned wildly varying answers.

WarrenMyers is one of the first results that pops up in Google, which is unfortunate because his assumptions are unsupported and his math is questionable. For example, he assumes the walls are 2” thick but calculates the wooden part of the Ark weighs only 25 lbs (based on Myers’ assumptions my math says the wood should weigh over 240 lbs). He estimates 104 lbs for the cherubim and guesses 1/32 inch (0.8 mm) for the thickness of the gold plating, eventually determining a total weight of 615 lbs.

Another of the top hits, JacquesGauvin uses some ridiculous assumptions. He assumes 3” thick walls, making the wood portion 413 lbs. His carrying poles are 6” diameter, more like fence posts. His cherubim are 1000 lbs. He guesses 0.125” (3.2 mm) for the thickness of the gold plating. His Ark finally weighs in at a whopping 4763 lbs. That’s more than twice the weight of all the gold Exodus 38:24 says was used in construction of the entire Tabernacle!

These two examples illustrate a couple of points: 1) unconstrained assumptions can vary wildly and 2) gold is the major determining factor in the weight. In Gauvin’s example, even if the weight of the acacia wood is reduced to almost nothing, you would still have an Ark weighing in excess of two tons due simply to the amount of gold used in his estimates.

Scientific Wild-Ass Guesses

A more thoughtful exercise is taken by ElihuSchatz. I found his Jewish Bible Quarterly article well after I had already started working through the issues on my own and was pleasantly surprised to see that Schatz had also identified gold as the key factor. Schatz’s Ark weighs in at 183 lbs mainly because his gold overlay is only 0.2 mm thick. But unlike the wild guesses of Myers and Gauvin, Schatz arrived at this thickness through deduction.

Exodus 38:24 tells us that 29 talents and 730 shekels of gold were used in the construction of the Tabernacle. This includes not only the Ark, but also an incense altar, table, lampstand, and the walls of the Tabernacle.A talent was 3000 shekels and archaeological evidence tells us a shekel weighed 11.3 g. In modern measures, 994 kg (2187 lbs) of gold were used for all the items in the Tabernacle.

Schatz writes (p. 116), “I calculated the total weight of the gold for all the vessels [in the tabernacle], and had to use a thickness for the gold overlay of 0.02 centimeters in order to approximate the value.” He cites the calculations made in his commentary (in Hebrew) on the book of Exodus, so I’m not able to see how he arrived at his conclusion but independently I had run some numbers on my own and arrived at the same figure. I originally was concerned that it might be too thin and would scrape off, but subsequent research told me that 0.02 cm (0.2 mm) is twice the thickness of the side of an aluminum can, so it seems that a gold overlay of that thickness would be durable.

I do have quibbles about some of Schatz’s other assumptions. For example, he estimates the walls of the Ark were 1.0 cm thick. This seems too flimsy and 2.0 cm would be more realistic. An article from the Metropolitan Museum of Art references (p. 130) an ancient Egyptian royal coffin from 2680 BCE “made of plywood, the six layers arranged with the grain running in alternate directions for strength and to prevent warping.” Each of the six layers was an eighth of an inch thick, giving a total thickness of ¾” (1.9 cm).

Also questionable is Schatz’s assertion that a 1-mm layer of gold for the cover “would have sufficient structural strength” (p. 117) to hold up his 25-kg (55 lb) cherubim. Gold has about the same elasticity of aluminum. A 1-mm piece of gold the size of a stick of chewing gum could be easily bent in your hands, so I have my doubts about its structural integrity. The inner coffin in King Tut’s tomb is made of solid gold with a thickness of 2.5-3.0 mm. My reasoning is that the ancient Egyptian goldsmiths knew what they were doing, so 3 mm seems a more realistic estimate for the thickness of the Ark’s cover.

On the bright side, I consider Schatz’s estimate of 25 kg for the two cherubim realistic. I base this on the fact that King Tut’s famous gold mask is 54 cm tall and 39 cm wide and weighs 10 kg. For comparison, the angels on the Raiders prop are 16.5” (42 cm) long and 8.75” (22 cm) tall. I think the cherubim may have been standing figures instead of crouching as in the angels from Raiders. The cherubim may also have been bigger than what the moviemakers had in mind. No one knows. But I think an estimate of 25 kg for the two cherubim puts us in the right neighborhood.

Multiple views of King Tut's gold death mask.

Putting it All Together

To arrive at an estimate for the weight of the Ark, I need to determine the weight of the acacia wood used to construct the chest, add the weight of the gold overlay, then the estimates for the solid-gold cover and cherubim. There’s also supposed to be a gold molding around the edges and rings to hold the carrying poles, but those comprise only a minor fraction of the total weight. Considering all the estimations and approximations, we can only hope to be in ballpark range for the total weight anyway.

The weight of the acacia wood using my preferred 2-cm thickness comes out to be 47 kg and the gold overlay of 0.2-mm thickness is 33 kg. The weight of the solid gold lid is 60 kg and the cherubim 25 kg. Almost half the weight is in the chest and the other half in its cover. The center of gravity would be around the point where the lid comes in contact with the chest.

The total weight using my estimations is 165 kg (362 lbs) and more than 70% of that weight (118 kg) comes from the gold. Four men could lift it but couldn’t be expected to carry it very far for very long.

Using a shorter cubit (such as the 18” cubit) dramatically reduces the estimate to 131 kg (289 lbs). Decreasing the thickness of the gold overlay to 0.1 mm further reduces the weight to 119 kg (261 lbs). Using 2.5 mm for the thickness of the cover marginally reduces the estimated weight to 111 kg (244 lbs).

As you can see, small changes in the variables can increase or decrease the estimated weight by 33% or more. You can come up with various reasons to tweak the numbers to get the weight of the Ark (and its contents) down to 180 lbs, and it might work if you only consider the Ark in isolation, but any of these tweaks will affect how much gold you end up using for all the Tabernacle items. Reducing the length of the cubit, for example, reduces the surface area of not only the Ark but all the other Tabernacle items and the amount of gold that would be needed to cover them.

Now that I have an idea how much the Ark could have weighed, in my next article I will discuss some observations I drew from this analysis and examine the question as to whether the Ark ever existed at all.

Echoes of Egypt

In the last few articles, I’ve reviewed the archaeological evidence that the Israelites emerged from the existing Canaanite population. There was no military conquest in which migrating Israelites displaced an indigenous Canaanite people as recounted in the biblical book of Joshua. The only thing that seems to set “Israelites” apart from “Canaanites” is their distinctive style of house and a lack of pig bones in their garbage dumps.

Examining the source traditions that make up the Bible, the Elohist (E) and Priestly (P) traditions insist that the divine name of Yahweh was revealed in Egypt. While the deity may have been known under the Canaanite name of El in the past, his real name is Yahweh. The worship of Yahweh as the chief deity is another distinctive belief of the Israelites.

Is there any evidence that a small group of people may have migrated from Egypt to Canaan, bringing with them some of their religious traditions, including a belief in a god named Yahweh?

Egyptian Names

The exodus and wilderness narratives mention several individuals with names that seem to be Egyptian in origin: Hur, Phinehas, Merari, Mushi, and of course Moses.

As odd as it may seem, one of the most frequently-mentioned names in the OT is not Hebrew in origin. The name Moses derives from the Egyptian mose, “is born.” We see it frequently in the names of the Egyptian pharaohs like Thutmose (“Thoth is born”) and Ramesses (“Ra is born”). In the case of Moses, the name of the Egyptian deity was lost.

Hur was the companion and assistant of Moses and Aaron. His name derives from the Egyptian god, Horus. Phinehas was the grandson of Aaron. His name derives from the Egyptian words meaning “the southerner.” Merari was the third son of Levi and Mushi was his son. The name Merari derives from the Egyptian words meaning “to love.” Mushi has the same derivation as Moses.

To be clear, Egyptian names alone mean nothing. Someone composing the stories centuries later could have made up Egyptian names to provide verisimilitude to the story. But when it comes to Moses, it does not seem as though the tradition realized his name was Egyptian in origin.

In the story of Moses being rescued from a basket (Ex2:3b-10), the Pharoah’s daughter called him Moses (Hebrew mosheh) “because I drew (Hebrew, mashah) him from the water.” She’s making a pun on the name as though it were of Hebrew origin, not a shortened form of an Egyptian name. It’s as though she is saying, “I’ll name him ‘Drew’ because I drew him from the water,” not realizing that “Drew” is a shortened form of the name “Andrew”.

The evidence suggests the name of Moses was handed down in the tradition but not its Egyptian origin. Those who later wrote it down came up with a Hebrew derivation for the name. This militates against the idea that Egyptian names were created to provide local color to the story.

Pharaoh’s daughter finding baby Moses by Konstantin Flavitsky (1830–1866) 

Egyptian Artifacts

Seven chapters in Exodus (25-31) provide the blueprint for the Tabernacle and its furnishings and six chapters (35-40) describe how those instructions were followed in its construction. As the Bible relates it, the Tabernacle was the center of Israelite religion in the pre-monarchial days just as the Temple was central to worship in the days of Solomon and beyond.

As befitting a people on the move, the Tabernacle was essentially a fancy tent with the Ark of the Covenant in its inner sanctum. As Moses and his people left one campsite, they would disassemble the Tabernacle and carry its furnishings (the Ark, lampstand, altar, etc.) to the next campsite where they would then reassemble it until it was time to move again. Once the Israelites reached Canaan, the Tabernacle was eventually established at Shiloh until David had the Ark moved to Jerusalem.

Just as the Exodus is questioned as historical fact, biblical scholars and archaeologists have doubted if such a Tabernacle ever existed. Some think it was the Priestly author’s idea for a scale model of the Jerusalem Temple adapted for desert wanderings. Others have found parallels in tent shrines built by neighboring people.

Perhaps the best comparison for the Tabernacle as described in Exodus may be the battle tent of the Pharaoh Ramesses. Both feature the main tent situated inside a courtyard. The battle tent is divided between a larger reception area and the inner sanctum where the Pharaoh resides. This matches the Tabernacle with its larger Holy area and the inner Holy of Holies where the Ark of the Covenant, the footstool of YHWH resides. The 2:1 proportions between the inner and outer sanctums are roughly the same in both.

The Ark, too, has an Egyptian parallel in the sacred bark, a ritual object resembling a boat, usually carried on poles by priests in procession. Its main purpose was to transport gods and mummies.

A Tribe Called Levi

Looking back on the evidence so far, a pattern begins to emerge. References to Egypt as the location where God revealed his name as YHWH only come from the E and P sources, both of them of Levite origin. Of the individuals mentioned with Egyptian names, the Bible tells us most belonged to the tribe of Levi. The Tabernacle and Ark are strongly tied to cultic practices which could only be undertaken by members of the tribe of Levi.

Could it be that a small group who escaped from Egypt became known as the tribe of Levi?

References to the Levites in the Bible are not consistent and somewhat confusing, but two points stand out: the Levites were not given a territory of their own in Canaan and were the only tribe allowed to serve as priests. These are not unrelated.

Outside the urban economy of the Canaanite city-states, there was little opportunity for artisans, craftsmen, and so on. Most of the residents of the Canaanite hill country needed land to grow food for subsistence. If an incoming group from Egypt arrived after territory had already been doled out to various clans and tribes, they would have found themselves landless and in need of a way to make a living. Serving as priests of the central sanctuary of Shiloh and at local shrines throughout the countryside would have sufficed.

These Egyptian refugees would accommodate their religious beliefs and practices to those of the indigenous Canaanite population. The god Yahweh that they had worshipped in Egypt (and perhaps earlier if they were originally from Midian) would be recast as another name for the Canaanite god El who the locals already worshipped. As the official teachers of religion, the Levites could instruct the Israelites in the Egyptian practice of circumcision, the kind treatment of slaves, and tales of the plagues.

Because they were resident aliens, perhaps it is not surprising that the Levite sources in the Bible commands 52 times that resident aliens are not to be mistreated “because we were once aliens in Egypt.”

Out of Egypt, I am Called Yahweh

Previous articles have discussed evidence for multiple sources in the creation and flood stories. In the final version of these stories that appears in our bibles, the Bible’s editor (called the “redactor”) sometimes keeps the sources intact (as in the two separate creation tales) and other times interweaves them (as in the combined flood story). Scholars can identify the separate strands based on terminology, consistent themes, and narrative flow. One of the themes that sets one source apart from the other is when God’s name is revealed.

What’s in a Name?

According to the source known as the “Yahwist” or “J”, God revealed his name around the time of Adam’s grandson:

To Seth also a son was born, and he named him Enosh. At that time people began to invoke the name of YHWH.” (Gen 4:26)

Thereafter, the J source exclusively uses the name YHWH (usually translated as “the Lord” in modern bibles) in narration. That is why this source was named the “Yahwist.” Ancient Hebrew consisted of only consonants, so we don’t know for sure exactly how it was pronounced, but scholars believe it would have been “Yah-WEH” (accent on last syllable).

Other sources – the “Elohist” (E) and “Priestly” (P) – hold that the divine name YHWH was first revealed to Moses. Before Moses, God was known to the ancestors under different names. For example, in the P account of the covenant with Abram, we read,

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, YHWH appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am El Shaddai.” (Gen 17:1)

The P source explains in this verse that Abram only knows the deity by the name El Shaddai (“God Almighty” in most English translations). But when YHWH speaks to Moses, the text reads:

God also spoke to Moses and said to him: “I am YHWH. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but by my name ‘YHWH’ I did not make myself known to them.” (Ex 6:2-3)

These verses are taken from the P version of the call of Moses (Ex 6:2-12). God’s commission to Moses to lead his people out of Egypt is a “triplet,” a story recounted in three sources: P, J, and E. The P version is isolated and intact, but the J and E versions are combined in an earlier passage (Ex 3:1-4:23). The E source predominates in this longer passage:

But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘YHWH, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ (Ex 3:13-15)

There’s a lot going on in this passage that doesn’t concern us at this point. The key thing to note is that, as in the P version, the ancestors knew the deity under different names but God first reveals his true name to Moses. Both E and P agree on this point: the name YHWH only came into use after the exodus from Egypt.

Could this be a clue that refugees from Egypt brought the worship of YHWH with them to Canaan?

Charlton Heston as Moses learns the name of God in the burning bush scene from Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 version of The Ten Commandments.

The Midianite Connection

In my last article, we saw that archaeology revealed the early Israelites were Canaanites, speaking a Canaanite dialect and practicing the Canaanite religion. In that religion, the main god was known as “El” (as in El Shaddai). Of the hundreds of city names in Canaan, many include the name El (for example, Beth-el, for “house of God”) but none include the name YHWH. Yet the worship of YHWH eventually became synonymous with Israel (etymology uncertain, perhaps means “God rules”).

How did Canaanites go from worshipping El to YHWH? Let’s go back to Exodus 3-4 and the commission of Moses. Other than Moses being told God’s true name, we also have the indication of where this occurred:

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. (Ex 3:1)

Both J and E tie Moses to Midian, even going so far to say that Moses’ father-in-law was a Midianite priest. Both also locate God’s mountain (called Sinai in J and Horeb in E) in or near Midian. It is reasonable then to look for the origins of the cult of YHWH in Midian. (Midian was located east of the Gulf of Aqaba, south of present-day Jordan, in what would now be the extreme northwest corner of Saudi Arabia.)

We also have Egyptian texts from the 14th-13th centuries BCE that mention semi-nomads called the “Shasu of yhw3” who were located in the general vicinity of Midian. Egyptologists derive the name “Shasu” from an Egyptian verb meaning “to wander.” The Egyptian hieroglyphs transliterated as “yhw3” would probably have been pronounced “Yahu” and is strangely similar to the name of Israel’s God, YHWH. It may have been a place name or it could have been their patron god.

The pieces seem to fit together. Let’s say you have a small group who escape from Egypt – perhaps captured Canaanites or Midianites who had been enslaved – and, on their way to eventually settling in the hill country of Canaan, they pass through Midian. When they finally arrive in the central hill country, they bring with them their story of deliverance from Egypt and attribute their freedom to the god they followed in Midian, who they now call Yahweh.

Certainly the Midianite connection is strong, but so are the Egyptian connections. There are Egyptian details in the story that may go back to the original story told by those who escaped Egypt. We’ll look at those in the next article.