God as Houdini?

Let’s not conjure up explanations for miracles

My friend, award-winning Canadian documentarist Simcha Jacobovici, spent six years and $3.5 million making The Exodus Decoded, a two-hour History Channel blockbuster claiming to “solve the mystery of the events of the Biblical Exodus for the first time ever.” With slick graphics and prodigious research, Simcha tied the natural events surrounding the Israelites’ flight to a volcanic eruption on the Greek island now called Santorini. James Cameron, who directed the blockbuster Titanic, served as narrator and executive producer for the program, which drew some 2.3 million viewers to its cable host, leading to a monthly record.
Clearly, there’s an audience hungry for—or at least intensely curious about—concrete evidence of God’s miracles. Should they be? Does it advance religious or historical understanding to conjure up natural explanations for God’s miracles? And, in trying to do so, do we augment the power of our texts, or diminish it?

Scholarly debate rages over what in the Bible is historical and what isn’t: the patriarchs, the Exodus, the conquest of the Promised Land, the kingdoms of David and Solomon, and so on. Yet, among most Jews, these questions of authenticity seldom arise. They prefer to ponder the meaning of religious stories rather than when and whether they happened. Most Orthodox Jews probably conclude that events occurred as described, while Conservative and Reform Jews consider much of the early contents to be largely legendary or apocryphal, with an historical core at most.

Simcha—a baal teshuva, a devout returnee to Orthodox Judaism—cares deeply about biblical history. He wants to know what happened, and what didn’t. In answer to archaeologists who routinely place the Exodus in the latter category, he insists he can validate every one of the ten plagues as the result of the tremendous volcanic eruption in 1500 B.C.E. on the Mediterranean island once known as Thera. In his eyes the cataclysm’s tsunami-like waves could also explain the parting of the Reed (not Red) Sea in northern Egypt.
The date of the Santorini eruption is itself a matter of scholarly debate. It might have occurred as early as 1700 B.C.E., as suggested by carbon-14 tests, long before the Exodus is thought to have occured. Simcha opts for other evidence that dates it to 1500 B.C.E., when a small minority of scholars also places the Exodus. Unless this minority is right, Simcha’s whole scenario collapses.

To explain the first plague, how the Nile’s waters turned to blood, Simcha points to underground gases released as a result of the Thera eruption. In 1986, a similar phenomenon followed a volcanic explosion in the Cameroons, turning the water of nearby Lake Nyos blood-red. Simcha has a photograph of it.
To me, explanations like this demean the miracle. Trying to find natural sources for miracles degrades them. Miracles have a meaning in and of themselves. Rather than reflecting how clever God was in using natural means to create what seem to be miracles, his extraordinary acts should by definition fall outside the natural order.

Simcha countered my argument with a reference to the Ramban who, he says, explicitly states that one ought to be able to find the science behind miracles. “With due respect,” he wrote, “I can believe Shanks or I can follow the Ramban.”

But my friend didn’t stop there. “I find miracles that stand outside of nature theologically unsatisfying,” he explains, “because the whole point of the confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh is to demonstrate to Pharaoh that God rules nature, not that God can step outside of nature.”

In fact, to Simcha, the texts challenge us to search for the natural sources of miracle. “The Torah goes out of its way to state that, prior to the miracle of the parting of the sea, ‘an east wind blew all night,’” he says. “If I was writing this story, and if I wanted God to be a super magician in the sky, I would state that the day the sea parted was so windless that not a leaf moved on any branch. But the Torah invites us to investigate the wind that blew all night and forces us to struggle with the question: Was it the wind, or was it God manipulating the wind?”

So, if we can explain all miracles as simply God’s manipulation of nature, what about miracles for which you cannot find a natural explanation? I think that turning Nile’s waters “into blood” falls in this category. Simcha’s explanation is not only farfetched but worse; it makes God out to be a magician, an ancient Houdini. Now the filmmaker wants to learn God’s tricks.

“You tell us how the Nile could appear blood-red.” I wrote him. “You have learned God’s trick. Very nice! But the Bible doesn’t say the water was blood-red. It says the water was BLOOD. Your Houdini/God is exposed: ‘Hey, this isn’t really blood; it’s just red water—what’s more, I know how you performed the trick.’”
Simcha wanted to know if I found his documentary convincing. No, I told him, but I did find it thought-provoking—and profoundly wrong.

Hershel Shanks is editor emeritus of Moment.