Evidence of the Exodus

The Exodus narrative is the central event of the Old Testament. It is a complex story which gives rise to many crucial questions. The primary question for unbelievers, of course, is whether it happened at all.

In the past few decades the field of Biblical archaeology has been secularized to the point that, in the mainstream of expert opinion, the Exodus story is now considered to be legend. Believers would probably be stunned to know the contemporary perspective of Biblical archaeology.  Moses, Joshua, Elijah are all the stuff of myth. Perhaps they existed, perhaps not; but little or no archaeological evidence of these persons has surfaced, so their very existence is in question along with the events they inspired.

The miraculous nature of the Exodus narrative and the gap of more than a thousand years between the events of the Exodus and the earliest surviving manuscripts have led many scholars to question various aspects of the story. One of the logical flaws of historical science is the presumption that a lack of evidence equals a lack of an event. The typical statement of scholars that "there is no physical proof of the events of the Exodus" convinces many that the Exodus did not happen. 

Of those believers who remain engaged in archaeological research, many have become "minimalists" who no longer support events of the Bible before 1000 B.C. as historical fact. In short, the majority of mainstream scholars have decreed a lack of historical certainty of the Exodus. A consensus has been reached motivated by the increasingly secular perspective of research in the field. The case is closed and no new evidence need be considered.

The result of this consensus is that any researcher who offers evidence of the Exodus is dismissed by Biblical scholars, archaeologists, and seminarians. I was once under consideration for a professorship at a major theological seminary. They asked their Biblical archaeologist's opinion about the perspective of my book, The Writing of God. A major thesis of the book is that the Exodus happened exactly as it is recorded in Scripture. He reported it as a "fringe viewpoint." Needless to say, the post was not offered. Minimalism has become to Biblical research what Darwinism is to biological research. Merely questioning it can be enough to ruin a professional career and be cast out into the darkness where one's work will never be published, debated, or even acknowledged. 

I seek to refute the mainstream consensus by providing scientific evidence of the truth of the seminal event of the Old Testament.  The Exodus and the giving of the law at Mount Sinai was God's supreme act of intervention on behalf of His chosen people. Genesis was the prelude when Yahweh prophesied the Exodus to Abraham four hundred years before it occurred (Gen. 15:16).  All subsequent history of Judaism and Christianity has been shaped by the Exodus and the events at Sinai. 

At Sinai, Moses first prophesied the coming of Christ: "And the LORD said unto me ...  I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee [Moses], and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him." (Deut. 18:15-22). In turn, Christ staked His authority and credibility on teachings from the Exodus: "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets; I am not come to destroy but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." (Matt. 5:17-18)

Over time the precepts coming from the Sinai Covenant have formed the foundation of Judeo-Christian religion, morality, human rights, and legal justice.  The call from Sinai is being debated today with relevance as vital as the day Moses descended with the tablets containing the Word and the writing of God (Ex. 32:15-16). To dismiss the Exodus is to dismiss the foundation of the moral authority of God, if not His very existence. If the foundation is false then the entire edifice of religion is a house built upon sand. God becomes a myth.

That, in a nutshell, is the present mainstream viewpoint of the academy, that vast body of expert researchers and higher institutions of learning who dictate "truth" to each succeeding generation of students.  The purpose of this series of articles is not so much to argue the evidence of the Exodus as to establish that it exists and warrants serious debate, a debate most Biblical scholars are anxious to avoid. Although they hold minimalist views, they don't like holding them up for examination before their more Biblically-oriented congregants. 

Historicity of the Exodus

As believers, we need no proof to know the Exodus is historical fact. Nonetheless, it behooves us to inquire whether physical proof of the Exodus exists.

Evidence gives important insight into scriptural passages that were previously unclear. Physical proof can also serve as a crucial beacon for the unbeliever searching for truth.  Finally, scientific evidence arms the believer confronting the secularist claim that the Bible is myth.

During the past several decades, while the field of Biblical archaeology has been sliding into secularism, a flood of new data on the Biblical location of Mount Sinai in Midian, and the physical evidence found there, has been forthcoming.  A tipping point has been reached.  Even Bible scholars no longer support the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt as the location of the real Mount Sinai.  This is mainly due to the clear description in Scripture that Mount Horeb, also known as Mount Sinai and the Mountain of God, is in Midian (Ex. 2:15, Ex. 3:1) in Arabia, "mount Sinai in Arabia" (Gal. 4:25).

Nonetheless, church tradition since Constantine in A.D. 326 has proclaimed Mount Sinai to be in the Egyptian peninsula that has also come to bear the name Sinai.  This church tradition has confused not only the location of Mount Sinai but also the location of Midian.  Many Bible maps of the ancient Mideast redraw the boundaries of Midian across the Red Sea and into Egypt just enough to include the traditional site of Mount Sinai. This revisionism is absolutely inaccurate. Historically, the Sinai Peninsula has always been a part of Egypt, and Midian, just across the Gulf of Aqaba, has always been a part of Arabia. 

The current scholarly viewpoint is that the real Mount Sinai is probably somewhere in Arabia but they don't know where. Fortunately, significant new research and archaeological evidence coming out in the past few decades have narrowed the feasible locations of Mount Sinai down to one.  Although many possible sites of the Mountain of God in Arabia have been investigated over the years, the earliest sources of Jewish philosophers and Christian church fathers indicate Mount Sinai is the tallest mountain in Midian.  Allen Kerkeslager¹ was the first contemporary historian to analyze the oral tradition of the location of Mount Sinai in Arabia.  Bits and pieces of this oral tradition kept leaking out in the writing of Jewish scholars, early Christian theologians, Arab geographers and local Bedouins in the region of Midian in Arabia.  Kerkeslager took his information from sources such as the Septuagint, The Book of Jubilees, Demetrius, Josephus, Philo, Origen, Eusebius, Jerome and Paul.  The results of Kerkeslager's research are remarkable:

There is a long Jewish tradition dating back to antiquity that places Mount Horeb in the Midian region of northwest Arabia ... There is evidence of Jewish and early Christian pilgrimage to the Midian site ... There is no Jewish tradition at all locating Mount Horeb in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt...  There is no evidence of Jewish pilgrimage to the Sinai Peninsula before 326 AD when Emperor Constantine declared it to be the holy site of Mount Sinai ... Clues gleaned from the oral tradition give us enough information to establish criteria for the location of Mount Sinai ... only one mountain meets all these criteria ... the only possible option in this case is Jebal al-Lawz at 2580 m ... uncontested as the highest mountain in the region of ancient Madyan [Midian]. Jebal al-Lawz also fulfills every other criteria. (Kerkeslager 1998:210-211)

It should be noted that Dr. Lennart Möller² (2008) unearthed ancient maps of the region that still designated Jabal al-Lawz as Mount Horeb, or Oreb, before the name was changed to Islamicize the region.  In addition, Dr. Sung Hak Kim³ (2006), a fluent speaker of Arabic and one of only a handful of researchers to ever examine the site, relates that the local Bedouins call the mountain Jabal Horeb or Jabal Musa (Mount Horeb or the mountain of Moses) where, according to their oral tradition which predates Islam, the tablets containing the Ten Commandments were handed down to Moses.

At Jabal al-Lawz in Midian, an impressive array of evidence of events of the Exodus has been found.  The following discoveries support the case that Mount Sinai is Jabal al-Lawz in Arabia:

(1) Alphabetic inscriptions at the site date to the time of the Exodus and their content refers to events described in Exodus 17:8. (2) Footprints are traced there with an alphabetic caption, "wherever the soles of your feet shall tread shall be your territory" as in Deut. 11:24 and Josh. 1:3. (3) The split rock (of Horeb, Ex. 17:6) is found at the presumed site of Rephidim near Sinai. (4) An altar to cattle worship (Ex. 32:4, the golden calf) is found at the Midian site. (5) An altar for burnt offerings (to Yahweh, Ex. 24:4) is found at the base of the mountain. (6) Alongside that altar are remains of marble columns (to the 12 tribes of Israel, Ex. 24:4). (7) A cave just below a cleft in the rock at the peak is found there (cave of Elijah, 1 Kings 19:8-9). (8) None of these things are found at the traditional site in Egypt. We will examine the archaeological and inscriptional evidence in more detail in the next article in this series.

The Origin of the Alphabet

My part in documenting the Exodus has been to date and translate the inscriptions found at the Rephidim and Sinai sites in Midian. These inscriptions are brief but telling. They are written in the oldest alphabet of letters (Thamudic) known to historical science. They date to the fifteenth century B.C, the time of the Exodus, according to experts at the Saudi Ministry of Antiquities. Their translation, discussed in the next article in this series, reveals them to be written in ancient Hebrew.  Mostly funerary, they nonetheless reflect names and events of the Exodus.

My research into these inscriptions indicates the "writing of God" (Ex. 32:16) engraved upon the tablets of Moses was the original alphabet of letters.⁴ As different as they all look today, there has only been one original alphabet from which all others have been derived. As a historical linguist I knew previously that this original alphabet was discovered at the time of the Exodus and in the path of the Exodus. It remained only to establish if the "writing of God" mentioned in Exodus could have been that first alphabet of letter symbols, a tremendous advance over the pictographic alphabet and other writing systems in use at the time. The discovery of the most ancient form of alphabetic writing at the Midian site raised the possibility that the origin of the alphabet of letters came from the events at Sinai. The inscriptions themselves will be discussed in more detail in the next installment in this series and are explained and illustrated much more completely in my book, The Writing of God, available at writingofgod.com.

Historically, the position that the alphabet originated at Sinai was put forward by Eupolemus, the noteworthy scholar of the second century B.C.  Hillel the Third⁵ (first century A.D.), grandson of the founder of the famous Hillel school in ancient Israel, is also attributed with a similar viewpoint of the origin of the alphabet:

The more I contemplate the mission of Moses, the higher he rises in moral sublimity in my estimation ... The whole world was sunk in the debasement of idolatry. What a noble use did the Almighty make of the recent invention of man's ingenuity, the invention of letters to engrave upon stone his awful testimony against the great, fundamental, and all-polluting sin of the world, the worship of idols: Thou shalt have no other Gods before me; thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or the likeness of any thing ... thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them.  (The Hillel Letters, 1887)

The opinion that the alphabet came from Moses was a widely-held view of medieval theologians. John Owen,⁶ in 1661, after sifting all the ancient literature, stated that "the letters which God inscribed with His own fingers on the tables of stone were the first of all letters." Owen also concurred with the statement of Clement of Alexandria⁷ (second century A.D.) that "the first philosopher [Moses] taught the alphabet to the Jews.  The Phoenicians obtained it from the Jews, and the Greeks from the Phoenicians." In more modern times this was the controversial conclusion of Hubert Grimme,⁸ one of the most renowned Hebrew scholars and historical linguists of all time, who went to the Middle East to study the earliest alphabetic inscriptions. Grimme stated that ancient Thamudic script was the original alphabet of letters (1896) and the writing of the Israelites of the Exodus (1923).

The determination that around 1500 B.C. Hebrew was spoken-and even written-on the Sinai Peninsula, revolutionizes completely the present view of the history of the Hebrew language ...  Neither the Egyptian hieroglyphs nor the cuneiform writing would have been suitable for the written version in this language; only a writing system based on alphabetic characters, namely the Semitic script, could have been considered for the written version, and there is no doubt that the authors of the Bible kept in mind this Semitic writing system as the original written form of (the tablets of) the law. (Grimme, 1923:78)

Although Grimme received some support from scholars, he was mostly alone in this opinion until 1936 when the archaeologist Stephen Caiger⁹ came to the same conclusion from sources independent of Grimme. 

In the light of recent research, far from questioning the ability of Moses to write, we may even conjecture that he had progressed beyond clumsy syllabic scripts to an alphabetical style of writing not dissimilar from the Hebrew of a later age. (Caiger, 1936:6)

Although Caiger misidentified the Thamudic script as "Minaen," today it is well accepted that ancient Thamudic is the oldest alphabet of letters, and the precursor of Minaen/Sabean, dated by many epigraphers as early as the fifteenth century B.C.  A clear statement to that effect can be found on the joint website of the Smithsonian and the Saudi Ministry of Antiquities & Museums along with many examples of ancient Thamudic inscriptions (http://www.mnh.si.edu/epigraphy/e_pre-islamic/thamudic.htm).   

More recently, another expert in the development of the alphabet, Leonard Schlain¹⁰ (1998:71), theorized that the transforming event of Sinai was the invention of the alphabet. 

It is not mere coincidence that the first book written in an alphabet is the Old Testament. There is none earlier ... Previously, Akhenaton and Hammurabi each took tentative steps toward introducing monotheism and the Law to their people. These abstract concepts initially failed to take hold because both monarchs ruled over barely literate societies. The mystery of why not one but both these incredible ideas should appear shimmering together in a mirage in the middle of the desert, to a group of escaped slaves teetering on the edge of survival far from centers of learning, is one of the great puzzles of all time. Perhaps the transforming event that transpired so long ago at the foot of Mount Sinai was the invention of the alphabet.

Yet another expert on the alphabet, Robert Logan,¹¹ concurs, "The occurrence of monotheism, codified law, and the alphabet all at the same moment in history cannot have been coincidental ... The abstractness of all three innovations were mutually reinforcing." Or, as Schlain puts it, "A monotheistic God not tied to a concrete image is a highly abstract concept.  Abstraction is a crucial component of logical reasoning and its use can set people free from superstition." 

In the James Cameron film, Exodus Decoded (2006), researched and presented by Simcha Jacobovici, he concludes the Hebrews did not write in hieroglyphs but in an early alphabet. Of late, the prominent archaeologist David Rohl¹² (2009) postulates "the Ten Commandments-were carved in the world's most ancient alphabet." Anyone who studies early writing with an open mind eventually comes to the inevitable reality that the earliest alphabet appeared at the same time and place as the earliest body of literature written in alphabetic writing, the Old Testament.  The conclusion of all of these prominent researchers, both past and present, is impressive support indeed, yet none of these experts was aware of the inscriptional evidence from the Sinai site in Midian which we will examine in this series.

The Writing of God

The scriptural support for the "writing of God" (Ex. 32:16) is as profound as it is overlooked. The "writing of God" is an integral part of the call from Sinai, a sacred covenant which God intended to reach the whole world: "Now therefore, if you will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people, for all the earth is mine. And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests ..." (Ex. 19:5-6). Note that "priests" were the literate keepers of knowledge in antiquity. The tablets were written in God's own hand: "And He gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing  with him upon Mount Sinai, two tablets of testimony, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God" (Ex. 31:18).

The Sinai Covenant is a teaching covenant: "And the LORD said unto Moses, come up to me into the mount, and be there: And I will give thee tablets of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written; that thou may teach them" (Ex. 24:12). God stipulates two purposes of the covenant, to teach His Word and His writing: "And the LORD said unto Moses, write these words, for after the purpose and character of these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel" (Ex. 34:27 Amplified Bible). God provides the Israelites with a system of writing: "And Moses turned, and went down the mount, and the two tablets of the testimony were in his hand: the tablets were written on both their sides; on the one side and on the other were they written. And the tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God ..." (Ex. 32:15-16).

Later God specifies that the writing of God, the alphabet, is of Him: "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending ...  the first and the last: what thou seest, write in a book ..." (Rev. 1:8-11).  The phrase "alpha and omega," first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, referred to the alphabet as a whole until the word alphabet was coined many centuries later. The covenant includes numeracy as well since the letters, just as with Roman numerals, were also used for numbers. "Take ye the sum ... and divide ... (Num. 1:2)" and multiply, do fractions, measurement, calendar reckoning, surveying etc. The teaching of numeracy is the unrelenting theme of the book of Numbers. The call from Sinai was, and still is, a covenant to teach literacy, numeracy, and the Word of God.

The covenant bestows a blessing on those who answer the call from Sinai. "And He has filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge ... " (Ex. 35:31).  "And He hath put it in his heart that he may teach..." (Ex. 35:34).  God specifies the power of this covenant blessing to His believers. "Behold I make a covenant; "I will do marvels, such as have not been done in all the earth ...  with thee" (Ex. 34:10).  "And every able and wise-hearted man in whose mind the Lord had put wisdom and ability, everyone whose heart stirred him up to come to do the work..."  (Ex. 36:2). The covenant is for men and women. "And they came, both men and women, as many as were willing-hearted" (Ex 35:22), and children.

Daniel and his cohort were also learning the Word and the writing of God and received God's blessing for it. "God gave them knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom ..." The blessing in Daniel 1:17 is essentially the same as Exodus 35:31. The Scripture in Daniel specified a godly yardstick-a means of measuring those receiving the blessing of the covenant "in all matters of wisdom and understanding, that the king inquired of them [Daniel, et al.], he found them ten times better than all the [wise men] that were in his realm" (Dan. 1:20). If this godly yardstick, "ten times better" seems fanciful, be patient. I will give specific examples of it being fulfilled in the third installment in this series.

The covenant commands believers to teach the Word and the writing of God to their children: "Said the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people" (Jer. 31:33). "Thou shalt read this law ..." (Deut. 31:11), "And thou shalt write them [words of the law] upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates" (Deut. 6:9), "And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up" (Deut. 6:7).

There is a curse to those who do not obey the covenant: "Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse; a blessing if ye obey ... (already cited in Ex. 35:31), and a curse if ye will not obey ... " (Deut. 11:26-28).  "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children" (Hos. 4:6). It seems that God took the covenant very seriously.

Remember that all of these commandments, blessings and curses, were being passed on to a people who were illiterate. Although Moses could write both hieroglyphs and cuneiform (Acts 7:22), there was no Hebrew writing that we know of before the time of the Exodus. However, the specifics of Scripture are unmistakable. At Sinai, Yehovah presented His followers with both a system of law for a lawless nation and a system of literacy for an illiterate nation. Moses, the highly educated former prince of Egypt, was the ideal innovator to convey and fashion those skills.  Remarkably, modern Bible scholars have completely missed the importance of the medium of the message, the "writing of God," explaining it away as simply a redundant reference to the Word of God written on the tablets.  Nonetheless, the facts are crystal-clear: the multiple commands to read and write in the Exodus story went hand in hand with the gift of the "writing of God."

From this covenant the Jews developed the ritual of the bar mitzvah (for boys) and bat mitzvah (for girls) where every young person, as a passage into adulthood, was required to demonstrate the ability to read and understand the Torah in Hebrew. After the great revolt in A.D. 66-73 the Hebrew people were vanquished and scattered by the Romans in a diaspora to all points of the map, a move intended to destroy their nation forever. Yet, due to their honoring the covenant to learn the Word and the writing of God, they were able to reunite in Israel almost 2,000 years later, still possessed of a common culture and a common tongue. This is an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of humankind! 

In our time, these scriptural edicts have inspired one of the most important social movements in U.S. history, home-schooling. Studies show that seventy percent of young people quit attending church within a couple of years after being fed into the secularizing process of the university system. If the church is to be saved, its salvation will come from those who are answering the call from Sinai to take personal responsibility for educating their children. Churches who do not respond to this call are doomed to wither.

Archaeological Evidence of the Exodus

The physical evidence from the Midian site comes from three primary sources; Jim and Penny Caldwell,¹³ Dr. Sung Hak Kim, and the Al-Bid History and Archaeology done by the Saudi Arabian government.¹⁴  The Caldwells are committed Christians who lived and worked in Saudi Arabia.  Although they had permission to travel to the region of Jebal al-Lawz, they were arrested twice and harassed whenever they came in contact with the frontier police. They are the only westerners to bring out film and photographs of the archaeological and inscriptional evidence behind the fenced and guarded site in Midian, published in their 2008 book, Mountain of God. There are now numerous books and film documentaries about the real Mount Sinai located at Jabal al-Lawz in Midian. All these other books, documentaries or websites on the real Mount Sinai are usually based on the physical evidence provided by the Caldwells. 

Dr. Kim was physician to the royal family at Mecca for twenty years.  Also a committed Christian, he too was drawn to the mountain in Midian.  An intimate of the royal family, he was gifted with artifacts from the royal museum collection and allowed to bring them out of the country. They are now housed in the History of Christianity Museum in Seoul, Korea. Dr. Kim wrote of his experiences in the best-selling 2006 book, written in Korean, The Burning Bush, now in its thirty-third printing.

The Saudis were spooked by the cascade of international publicity surrounding the Sinai site in Midian. They rushed out an archaeological survey of Jabal al-Lawz entitled Al-Bid History and Archaeology (2002) to debunk the notion this was the legitimate location of Mount Sinai. The unintended consequence of the survey was that they provided provenance of the Exodus documentation gathered by the Caldwells. Archaeological evidence is poorly accepted unless it comes with a scientific credential.  Provenance, or scientific validation, is provided by the publication of data from a professional team of experts on an archaeological dig such as the Al-Bid History and Archaeology.

The Saudis provided numerous key photographs of the altars and their engraved icons identical to those in the Caldwells' archives. They documented the presence of the footprints with the "individual marks" engraved beside them. Their description of the petroglyphs on the altar (of the golden calf) acknowledged them as cattle worship motifs. They photographed the "cut marble columns" beside the altar at the base of the mountain exactly as described in Exodus 24:4. Their preliminary dig at the altar found "a layer of ash, charcoal and bones found mixed with other organic materials ... and animal waste" (p.65), exactly what you would expect to find at an altar for burnt offering. 

The Saudi survey confirmed that all these elements exist at Jabal al-Lawz. "And Moses ... builded an altar under the hill, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel ..." (Ex. 24:4). The Saudi study differs from my own only in the interpretation of the data. They also described evidence we did not have. Whereas we have photographs of a few ancient Thamudic inscriptions, the Saudis documented 155 Thamudic inscriptions on the mountain. Piece by piece the mosaic of events of the Exodus has become ever more clear from the physical evidence unearthed at the Midian site of Sinai. One thing is inescapable: The inscriptions are written in the oldest alphabet of letters-dating to the time of the Exodus, when Moses descended from Mount Sinai with the tablets containing the Word and the writing of God.

The second article in this series, "The Stones Will Cry Out," describes the archaeological remains and alphabetic inscriptions from the base of Mount Sinai in Midian and the story they tell, which comes straight from the pages of Exodus. Look for it in the next edition of Faith for All of Life. The final article in the series, "The Call from Sinai," will describe the discovery of the Yahweh stone, the oldest artifact ever found with the name of God, YHWH, engraved upon it. It will illustrate the purpose of writing in combating idolatry and human sacrifice. It will outline the spread of the alphabet along with Judeo-Christian values, their role in creating the model of Western civilization, and the relevance of the call from Sinai in today's world.

NOTE: The text (not the photographs) of this copyrighted article may be reprinted if (1) Chalcedon's website and copyright are acknowledged and (2) if Dr. Jones's website, www.writingofgod, is also acknowledged. All photographs appear here by permission of the copyright holders and may not be reproduced without direct permission from their respective sources.

 See Part 2 The Stones Will Cry Out

1. Kerkeslager, Allen, "Jewish Pilgrimage and Jewish Identity in Hellenistic and Early Roman Egypt," in Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, edited by David Frankfurter (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 134 [Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1998]), 99-225.

2. Möller, Lennart, The Exodus Case (Copenhagen, Denmark: Scandinavia Publishing House, 2008).

3. Kim, Sung Hak, The Burning Bush (in Korean, 2006) [email protected]. ISBN 978-89-531-0839-4.

4. Jones, Miles R., The Writing of God (Dallas, Texas: Johnson Publishers, 2010).  Available at writingofgod.com.

5. Hillel the Third (1st century A.D.), "The Hillel Letters," in W. D. Mahan, The Archko Volume (New Canaan, CT: Keats Publishing, [1887] 1975), 174.

6. Owen, John, Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, [1661 Latin] 1994 English translation), 378. 

7. Clement of Alexandria (2nd century A.D.).  Stromata, bk 1. Quoted in Owen.

8. Grimme, Hubert, Grundzüge der Hebräischen: Akzent und Vokallehre - mit Anhang - Über die Form des Namens Jahwae [Guidelines of the Hebrew: Accent and Vocal Teaching - with Appendix - Concerning the form of the name Yahweh] (Freiburg, Germany: Freiburg Universitaes Buchhandlung, 1896). Grimme, Hubert, Althebräische Inschriften vom Sinai [Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions in Sinai]. (Hannover, Germany: Orient Buchhandlung Heinz Lafaire, 1923).

9. Caiger, Stephen. Bible and Spade (London, UK: Oxford University Press, 1936).

10. Schlain, Leonard, The Alphabet versus the Goddess: Conflict between Word and Image (New York, NY: Penguin, 1998).

11. Logan, Robert K., The Alphabet Effect (New York, NY: William Morrow & Co., 1986).

12. Rohl, David, From Eden to Exile (London, UK: Century, Random House, 2009).

13. Caldwell, Penny, God of the Mountain. (Alachua, Florida: Bridge Logos Publisher, 2008).

14. Al-Ansary, Abdul-Rahman and Majeed Khan et al., Al-Bid: History and Archaeology (Saudi Arabia Ministries of Education, Antiquities, & Museums, 2002).