Author: Steve Brock

Publiszher: TurnKey Press

ISBN 0-9754803-0-8

The following review was contributed by:  SHELDON (SHELLY) WAXMAN & click to view Shelly's reviews

            This is a book written for professional Bible scholars. For lay people or amateur scholars, it is a load to read. It is also in a strange 8 ½ by 11 layout, more like a children’s coloring book. Not a proper format for what is really a textbook.

            The author’s motivation in writing the book appears to stem from a current debate about whether the Exodus ever happened or whether it is a work of fiction. Much of the disbelief is caused by the lack of verifying Egyptian archeology.

            The author weighs in on the side of it being fact accounted for in Egyptian archeology with a twist. His theory told in a very annotated and complex story is that there was a Double Exodus. His first—startling to me—proof of this starts with his explanation of the “Documentary Hypothesis”.

            There were actually five authors of Moses’ five books of the Bible—The Torah. There may have been six with the last putting all the versions together into one story. This is what caused the Double Exodus to be told as one Exodus.

            The result of this combining and redacting gave us the one linear version known as Moses’ books. The author says there were two Exoduses. The first being the expulsion of the Hykos from the Delta region of Egypt.  The patriarch Abraham is linked to the lesser Hykos. This group took the King’s Road (the northern route) to the land of Canaan and met no misfortune. In this version, Moses is actually Ahmos I, Pharaoh at the beginning of the 18^th Egyptian Dynasty.

            The second Exodus occurred approximately 250 years after the first at the end of the 18^th Dynasty and is associated with the Aten expulsion (1315BCE). This was the wandering in the desert for forty years with which we are familiar.

            The methodology Brock uses is the same that Joseph Atwill used in his more readable classic—“Caesar’s Messiah—The Roman Invention of Jesus”. That is parallelism—the comparison of two different literary works or stories for similarities. This is a mathematical model that if it comes out can provide a very high probability that the match is there for a number of reasons. Brock uses many charts to show this and they are helpful. He wraps it up at pages 209-211. You could skip the preceding proofs and get to this conclusion for the final proof.

            The story is convincingly told and there can be no doubt that the author knows his stuff. However, I feel he took on too many topics not related to his core thesis. Also, an index would have helped.

            Moreover, contrary to his publicist’s claim that Brock’s work verifies the existence of Jesus Christ, I found no evidence of this in the book.