Originally published by Glenn Beck.
As people across the nation celebrate Passover today, it is important to remember that our Founding Fathers viewed their roles in creating the United States as far more than a moment in history bearing similarities to a Biblical story.
They talked about Passover and the Exodus as history , and their own pursuit of liberty as a providential echo of it. For the Founders to be correct on that point, Passover cannot be a myth. Denying the credibility of the Passover and its core belief that a specific divine intervention that delivered the Hebrews from slavery took place means denying our own country’s spiritual, moral, political, and historical interwovenness with the most miraculous liberation of an oppressed people that has ever happened.
In recent decades, archaeological evidence and historical research have come together to make a strong case for the historicity of the Passover events when God judged Egypt with 10 plagues, the final being the deaths of the Egyptian firstborns, until Pharaoh finally agreed to let the enslaved Hebrews depart the country.
There is no Passover if there was no enslavement of a large Hebrew population in a part of Egypt that the Bible identifies as Goshen. The first documentary in the Patterns of Evidence series makes an incredibly strong case that the Hebrews match the archaeologists’ discoveries of a foreign and enslaved population in the area that once was Goshen.
The community of Goshen was first discovered in the 1960s at a place called Avaris. Then, in the 1990s, the Austrian Archaeological Institute’s team discovered that a huge Semitic population closely resembling the Hebrews not only existed there but was also enslaved and horribly mistreated.
A second community of Semitic slaves was then discovered at Kahun, 120 miles south of Avaris. Both of these communities, quite a distance apart, suddenly vanished around the same time that Egypt suffered from terrible calamities: Plagues, with one causing mass fatalities among Egyptians but not the two separate populations of Semitic slaves.
Around 1991, archaeologists in Egypt discovered what they described as “death pits” containing massive numbers of Egyptians. Surveys indicated that over half of the corpses were those of children, and males were disproportionately represented. They concluded that the most likely disaster was an outbreak that was particularly deadly for Egyptian boys.
Amazingly, the enslaved Semitic populations were apparently spared. To put it another way, a passing over of the enslaved Semites occurred.
Continue reading the full article at GlennBeck.com →
A free GlennBeck.com account is required to read the full piece.