Solving the Exodus Mystery, Vol. 1: Discovery of the True Pharaohs of Joseph, Moses, and the Exodus

Rating:
Summary:

Been Done, Earlier, and Better

Review:
The first thing that overwhelmed me was Stewart's need for an editor. He continually uses boldface in an amateurish way, and like the Elaine Bennis character on "Seinfeld", uses exclamation points throughout. On pp 124 and 128 he uses the term "brainchild" (spelled two different ways) incorrectly -- the thinker isn't the brainchild, the idea is. On p 139 he refers to "mid-thirty's" which should be "mid-thirties". He refers to the upcoming volume 2 as "Solving the Exodus Problem" (p 345) and refers to "Table 21-I (p. 312)" while the table is on p 314. These may sound like nitpicking, but such things reduce an author's credibility, and could have been fixed by an editor.

Stewart draws far too much data and too many conclusions from the same few words of his sources (one of which is usually the Bible). He is repetitious. Most of his "discoveries" are reworded versions of his other "discoveries". Instead of stopping to state his "discovery" after his presentation of evidence (or, what he calls evidence), then moving to the next data and "discovery", he summarizes all of them at the end of the chapter. By that time this reader was dazed, and not in a good way. An editor could have cleaned up this problem as well.

Stewart spends at least two chapters analyzing errors in everyone's use of the Sothic Cycle, invalidating all Sothic dating "before and after", then in a tour de force non sequitur concludes that he has derived the correct Sothic dating for some 12th and 18th dynasty pharaohs. He claims that parallel dynasties are the secret to building a correct chronology, then faults others (Velikovsky, Courville, Rohl) based on the kludge of parallel dynasties built by still others. Stewart accepts without question that the 2nd intermediate period is lousy with parallel dynasties without appearing to realize that the synchronisms don't exist per se -- the chronology resulted from the fixed Sothic dates he spends two chapters debunking. In other words, Stewart saddles on conventional source data which seems to support his position while rejecting or ignoring any that doesn't.

Sothic dating was ripped to shreds decades ago by Velikovsky. Peter James also claims to have laid it low circa 1990. The recent discovery that a Babylonian eclipse record from the late centuries BC would not have been visible from Babylon if our wonderful retrocalculations were correct should give pause to anyone trying to use eclipse records (or risings of Sirius) to verify a ballparked date for anything ancient. Rohl's (and now Stewart's) use of an eclipse report to establish a 1012 BC date for the late 18th dynasty is invalid, which isn't surprising. Their chronology for the 18th dynasty is hundreds of years too early.

Here's an example of one piece of data which blows apart Stewart's entire corpus:

"According to the Book of Genesis Potiphar was 'an officer of Pharaoh, captain of the guard.' In the register of the private names to the Ancient Records of Egypt by James Breasted, we find the name Ptahwer. Ptahwer was at the service of the Pharaoh Amenemhet III of the Twelfth Dynasty of the Middle Kingdom. According to an inscription of Ptahwer at Sarbut el-Khadem in Sinai dated in the forty-fifth year of Amenemhet III, his office was that of 'master of the double cabinet, chief of the treasury.' ...In the days of Amenemhet III there occurred in Egypt a famine enduring nine long years... Thus it seems that the Pharaoh in whose days was the seven years' famine was the successor of the Pharaoh in whose days began the rise of Joseph's career (if Yatu is Joseph). Potiphar, who lived under Amenemhet III, probably lived also under his successor. The inscription which deals with Ptahwer mentions a man whose name is transliterated by Breasted as Y-t-w. Among the monuments of Amenemhet III's reign is one of the Storekeeper who was honored together with two other persons." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, "Joseph and Potiphar"

Despite the fact that Stewart is obviously familiar with Breasted, he identifies Amenemhet I as the pharaoh during Joseph's entry into Egypt, and Sesostris I as the pharaoh who elevated Joseph to Vizier of Egypt. He claims that Amenemhet III is the pharaoh who tried to kill Moses. None of these are supported by the Egyptian documents that he cites. This suggests to this writer that Stewart decided that he had the right pharaoh and was heaven-bent-for-leather to cast aside everything that showed he is wrong. He might, for example, reject this obvious synchronism from Velikovsky by pointing out that the Bible said the famine lasted exactly seven years, not nine, then run off on a tangent about other famines mentioned in old records.

One of Stewart's strengths is his humility. In addition to frequent thanks to God and Jesus, he thanks an astronomer who helped him with the Sothic problem, thanks Velikovsky for identifying the Ipuwer papyrus as the ten plagues from the Egyptian point of view, and acknowledges a number of other scholars. On the other hand, he refers to Lynn Rose as an "historian not a scientist" which is probably unintentionally derisive.

It's unfortunate I've run out of space, because the book isn't terrible, and there are ideas with which this writer agrees. This book really could use an index, however.

Readers of Rohl's "Test of Time" a.k.a. "Pharaohs and Kings" or Peter James et al's "Centuries of Darkness" should enjoy this book. It is best read after one has read Velikovsky, and provided one keeps in mind that Stewart doesn't have a very good grasp of what's gone before, either in ancient Egypt or in the past couple centuries of the study of history.

Rating:
Summary:

Been Done, Earlier, and Better

Review:
The first thing that overwhelmed me was Stewart's need for an editor. He continually uses boldface in an amateurish way, and like the Elaine Bennis character on "Seinfeld", uses exclamation points throughout. On pp 124 and 128 he uses the term "brainchild" (spelled two different ways) incorrectly -- the thinker isn't the brainchild, the idea is. On p 139 he refers to "mid-thirty's" which should be "mid-thirties". He refers to the upcoming volume 2 as "Solving the Exodus Problem" (p 345) and refers to "Table 21-I (p. 312)" while the table is on p 314. These may sound like nitpicking, but such things reduce an author's credibility, and could have been fixed by an editor.

Stewart draws far too much data and too many conclusions from the same few words of his sources (one of which is usually the Bible). He is repetitious. Most of his "discoveries" are reworded versions of his other "discoveries". Instead of stopping to state his "discovery" after his presentation of evidence (or, what he calls evidence), then moving to the next data and "discovery", he summarizes all of them at the end of the chapter. By that time this reader was dazed, and not in a good way. An editor could have cleaned up this problem as well.

Stewart spends at least two chapters analyzing errors in everyone's use of the Sothic Cycle, invalidating all Sothic dating "before and after", then in a tour de force non sequitur concludes that he has derived the correct Sothic dating for some 12th and 18th dynasty pharaohs. He claims that parallel dynasties are the secret to building a correct chronology, then faults others (Velikovsky, Courville, Rohl) based on the kludge of parallel dynasties built by still others. Stewart accepts without question that the 2nd intermediate period is lousy with parallel dynasties without appearing to realize that the synchronisms don't exist per se -- the chronology resulted from the fixed Sothic dates he spends two chapters debunking. In other words, Stewart saddles on conventional source data which seems to support his position while rejecting or ignoring any that doesn't.

Sothic dating was ripped to shreds decades ago by Velikovsky. Peter James also claims to have laid it low circa 1990. The recent discovery that a Babylonian eclipse record from the late centuries BC would not have been visible from Babylon if our wonderful retrocalculations were correct should give pause to anyone trying to use eclipse records (or risings of Sirius) to verify a ballparked date for anything ancient. Rohl's (and now Stewart's) use of an eclipse report to establish a 1012 BC date for the late 18th dynasty is invalid, which isn't surprising. Their chronology for the 18th dynasty is hundreds of years too early.

Here's an example of one piece of data which blows apart Stewart's entire corpus:

"According to the Book of Genesis Potiphar was 'an officer of Pharaoh, captain of the guard.' In the register of the private names to the Ancient Records of Egypt by James Breasted, we find the name Ptahwer. Ptahwer was at the service of the Pharaoh Amenemhet III of the Twelfth Dynasty of the Middle Kingdom. According to an inscription of Ptahwer at Sarbut el-Khadem in Sinai dated in the forty-fifth year of Amenemhet III, his office was that of 'master of the double cabinet, chief of the treasury.' ...In the days of Amenemhet III there occurred in Egypt a famine enduring nine long years... Thus it seems that the Pharaoh in whose days was the seven years' famine was the successor of the Pharaoh in whose days began the rise of Joseph's career (if Yatu is Joseph). Potiphar, who lived under Amenemhet III, probably lived also under his successor. The inscription which deals with Ptahwer mentions a man whose name is transliterated by Breasted as Y-t-w. Among the monuments of Amenemhet III's reign is one of the Storekeeper who was honored together with two other persons." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, "Joseph and Potiphar"

Despite the fact that Stewart is obviously familiar with Breasted, he identifies Amenemhet I as the pharaoh during Joseph's entry into Egypt, and Sesostris I as the pharaoh who elevated Joseph to Vizier of Egypt. He claims that Amenemhet III is the pharaoh who tried to kill Moses. None of these are supported by the Egyptian documents that he cites. This suggests to this writer that Stewart decided that he had the right pharaoh and was heaven-bent-for-leather to cast aside everything that showed he is wrong. He might, for example, reject this obvious synchronism from Velikovsky by pointing out that the Bible said the famine lasted exactly seven years, not nine, then run off on a tangent about other famines mentioned in old records.

One of Stewart's strengths is his humility. In addition to frequent thanks to God and Jesus, he thanks an astronomer who helped him with the Sothic problem, thanks Velikovsky for identifying the Ipuwer papyrus as the ten plagues from the Egyptian point of view, and acknowledges a number of other scholars. On the other hand, he refers to Lynn Rose as an "historian not a scientist" which is probably unintentionally derisive.

It's unfortunate I've run out of space, because the book isn't terrible, and there are ideas with which this writer agrees. This book really could use an index, however.

Readers of Rohl's "Test of Time" a.k.a. "Pharaohs and Kings" or Peter James et al's "Centuries of Darkness" should enjoy this book. It is best read after one has read Velikovsky, and provided one keeps in mind that Stewart doesn't have a very good grasp of what's gone before, either in ancient Egypt or in the past couple centuries of the study of history.

Rating:
Summary: Vanity press and throwback to old-style biblical archaelogy
Review: I recently read Solving the Exodus Mystery by Ted Stewart, a Bible scholar at the Sunset International Bible Institute in Texas. This book adds in a significant way to the mounting body of evidence for a much closer correlation between ancient Palestinan/Near Eastern history as it is recorded in the Hebrew Bible and the History of Egypt. Exciting discoveries by archeologists, historians, and astronomers in the past decade have challenged the immutability of the standard Egyptian chronology long defended by professional Egyptologists. While Stewart's book may never be made into a television documentary like the more specific outside (Egyptology) work of David Rohl, Robert Bauval, and Graham Hancock, it provides the reader with a preponderance of internal or inside evidence which I find totally convincing. Stewart has simply sifted through every shred of evidence available, in a very careful and exhaustive manner. It will be difficult for the professional Egyptologist to dismiss Stewart's conclusions without considering them carefully, but I believe that such careful consideration will lead to yet another revision of the standard chronology of the History of Egypt, and one that brings it into a crisp focus with the History of Israel.

Rating:
Summary: Too Many Facts to Ignore
Review: Most people with more than a passing interest in archeology have been confronted with the disparity between Biblical History and the asserted facts found in archeologic studies of the Bible lands. When I first read the claim by Mr. Stewart that he had found information that would leave almost every professional archeologist in error, I suspected that this book would find it's way to the heap of conspiracy theories behind most used bookstores. A further perusal of the cover notes revealed a commendation by a professor that I knew from my days at Texas Tech University. By the time that I finished the first 50 pages of Stewart's book, I knew that this was probably the most valuable book on Biblical archeology that I own.
Stewart does not purport to have any special knowledge or undiscovered manuscripts. Using materials that are largely available to most people, and some astronomy calculations that can be replicated, he shows that archeological data itself allows for a re-dating of the Twelfth Egyptian Dynasty by placing it 300 years later than where most archeologists have placed it. This "new" dating almost exactly matches the Carbon-14 dates from known Twelfth Dynasty tombs, and by examination of astronomical events that were documented in the hieroglyphs and papyri of this dynasty, the re-dating is also found to be probable.
Mr. Stewart's conclusion is that the archeologic, astrologic and scientific dating methods all substantiate a later dating of the Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt. When these events are then examined with a corresponding Bible timeline, there is an amazing synchronicity with the events recorded in the Old Testament involving the movement of Israel into Egypt, their sojourn and enslavement in Lower Egypt, and their return to the Land of Canaan.
I was amazed that Mr. Stewart's methods are neither contrived nor strained. He does not deny the facts of archeology, or lead the readers on such contorted routes that they are left wondering, "Where in the world did that come from?"
The critic who fails to read the book will be left supposing that the author is just someone trying to prove what they already believe, regardless of what the archeologic facts actually yield. In so doing, the critic will have committed the same error himself, and never discover that Mr. Stewart is both able and happy to prove what he sat out to do: Archeologic facts substantiate what Moses recorded, and that Mr. Stewart has identified approximately 436 synchronisms that join archeology and the Bible in an incredible harmony.
This book should be in the library of every Bible student and student of the archeology of the Bible lands.

Rating:
Summary: Solving the Exodus Mystery
Review: Several scholars recently have tried to revise Egyptian chronology because of a growing consensus that it is necessary to shorten our traditional chronology by several hundred years. Each writer suggests a different solution. I believe Stewart has the best solution and may have finally "solved" this problem. His solution includes analyzing the Sothic, or astronomical, dating method and the carbon and tree-ring dating methods, and the traditional lists of pharaohs. So his solution is reached by scholarly means. And his new chronology now matches Bible history.

Rating:
Summary: A scholarly book that demands a full reading.
Review: The reviewer who titles his review as "Vanity Press and throwback to old-stlye biblical archaeology" has done the unspeakable. He attacks the credibility of the book without offering anything other than incendiary statements to support his claim. His review raises the real question as to whether or not the reviewer has even read the book or just has a personal axe to grind with certain religious views. I have read the book and while its conclusions support ancient biblical stories, it is based on logical and sound interpretation of archaeological and historical evidence. It points out real problems with conventional chronology for the Ancient Near East and Egypt and supports its claims with credible and scholarly evidence. While one may not agree with its conclusions, it is hard to read this book and say it is not written in a scholarly fashion. Yes, it is true that just because there is a Kansas this does not prove the Wizard of Oz. And just because someone signs their review as "a reader" does not mean it is so. This book is well worth the read and will challenge the best of the scholars with difficult issues and novel, but scholarly solutions.

Rating:
Summary: Best Book on the Topic
Review: This author has really done his research. Although the author doesn't claim to have a doctorate, which would make a scholarly book such as this more reliable, the author really has done a whole lot of research. This book must have taken years to write. I can't wait for volume 2.

Rating:
Summary: Best Book on the Topic
Review: This author has really done his research. Although the author doesn't claim to have a doctorate, which would make a scholarly book such as this more reliable, the author really has done a whole lot of research. This book must have taken years to write. I can't wait for volume 2.

Rating:
Summary: Convincing in spite of itself
Review: This book could really use an editor (or one who is more a professional editor than a friend of the author). The fact that his wife took this or that picture, for example, just doesn't need to be in the text. Many of the pictures were too small or of too poor a quality to be useful. That said, the author has clearly done his research. The sheer quantity of supporting evidence, much of it rather convincing, more than makes up for the quality of the writing. The author agrees in part with David Rohl's book Pharaohs and Kings, but places the Exodus in the 12th Dynasty of Egypt, which I find more convincing. This is volume 1 of a promised 2-book set.

Rating:
Summary: Convincing in spite of itself
Review: This book could really use an editor (or one who is more a professional editor than a friend of the author). The fact that his wife took this or that picture, for example, just doesn't need to be in the text. Many of the pictures were too small or of too poor a quality to be useful. That said, the author has clearly done his research. The sheer quantity of supporting evidence, much of it rather convincing, more than makes up for the quality of the writing. The author agrees in part with David Rohl's book Pharaohs and Kings, but places the Exodus in the 12th Dynasty of Egypt, which I find more convincing. This is volume 1 of a promised 2-book set.