Va-era
Torah reading: Exodus 6:2 - 9:35 -- the Plagues of Egypt, and Numbers 28:9-15 -- About Burnt Offerings
Haftarah: Isaiah 66:1-24 -- Judgement and Hope
When I was young I seem to recall there were a spate of paperbacks claiming to "prove" the Bible with Science. These days this type of thing pops up as documentaries on the History Channel, but back then they were cheesy paperbacks. I always regarded them sceptically, possibly because I had already encountered Erich von Däniken by then and I recognized the technique of plugging a superficial reading of Scripture into something that sounded scientific in order to get a sensational cover blurb.
One bit from one of them that I remember was an attempt to connect the Exodus with the Santorini explosion. Now as any good psuedohistory buff will tell you, the Santorini explosion which occured in the Agean Sea around 1500 or so BCE destroyed the Minoan civilization of Crete and may have been the inspiration for Plato's story of Atlantis. 1500 BCE (give or take a millenium) is also around the time usually assigned for the Exodus. Coincidence? I'm not sure if 'coincidence' is even the right word for dates which have a margin of error of several centuries, but bear with me.
Some scholars have suggested that the Parting of the Red Sea might have been caused by siesmic aftershocks of a tremendous earthquake -- like the shocks which the Santorini explosion would have produced.
Maybe.
And then more aftershocks could have caused the eruption of another volcano on the Sinai Penninsula which would account for the Pillar of Cloud which led the Children of Israel.
Okay, that's stretching it.
Once source I read went even farther and claimed that the Plagues of Egypt, which we read about in this week's Torah reading, were also caused by the explosion. The theory goes something like this.
First we get a major algae bloom off the coastal waters of Egypt and in the Nile delta. I don't remember how the volcano is supposed to have caused this, but perhaps ashfall from the explosion killed off a bunch of marine life and upset the ecosystem. Or something. The important thing is, that this results in a "Red Tide" which would have made it look as if the water had turned to blood and rendered the water pretty much undrinkable. That's the First Plague.
The river's wildlife would flee from the tainted water to the cultivated lands on the riverbanks; and so we have the Plague of Frogs. That's Plague Number Two.
The frogs die off and insects feed on their rotting carcasses which leads to the Plague of Gnats and the Plague of Flies. That's Three and Four if you're keeping score. The insects spread diseases which lead to the Plague on Livestock and the Plague of Boils.
To a certain extent this does make sense; many of the Plagues do seem to be logical consequences of the preceding events. The Plague of Hail is harder to fit in with the volcano theory, though. The Plague of Darkness might be an ash cloud from the explosion... but then the sequence is wrong.
I suppose that is why I'm so dubious about attempts to "prove" the Bible. Every once in a while an archaeological or scientific discovery turns up which maybe validates a single point mentioned in Scriptures; but just as often the discovery is open to interpretation and might not mean what they tell us it means. And when the sensationalists start off by claiming to "prove the Bible right", they wind up bending the text or picking and choosing passages in order to fit the theory.
It's fun sometimes to look for connections between the Scripture narrative and uncovered history. But we don't have to "prove" a Bible story happened in order to draw meaning from it. Even the skeptic who says the whole thing is a pack of myths cand find meaning there. Myths have meaning too. It's what sets them apart from mere stories.