For those of you in the Southern California area this weekend, Sunday, February 28, Jonathan Kirsch is speaking for the Skeptics Society at Caltech at 2:00pm in Baxter Lecture Hall, on THAT'S IN THE BIBLE?!: MOSES, THE HARLOT BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD, AND OTHER FORBIDDEN TALES IN THE BIBLE. (Off the 210 freeway exit Lake Blvd, go south. Left on Del Mar, right on Michigan, park in campus lots. Baxter is to the South East of the big white round building called Beckman Auditorium.)

Jonathan Kirsch's lecture is based on his books THE HARLOT BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD and his latest work: MOSES: A BIOGRAPHY. I read the Moses book in its entirety. It is a great read and brilliant on the subject of whether there even was a man named Moses, let alone millions of Jewish slaves. Kirsch, who is one of the book reviewers for the Los Angeles Times, points out that the Egyptians, who were compulsive chroniclers of everything, somehow forgot to record the simple fact that there were millions of Israelite slaves, that these millions of slaves revolted and left, that, in one evening, every first born Egyptian child was murdered, ten plagues ruined the country, the sea miraculously parted to allow the slaves to escape, etc. No mention of any of these monumental events anywhere other than the Bible. Further, it only takes a couple of days to walk across the Sinai desert; what were these folks doing there for 40 years? Clearly they had to be living there. If so, where is the archaeological evidence of their camps, their trash heaps, rock art, tools and weapons, etc. There is none. Finally, the story is just too damn good. An impoverished mother dumps her son in a basket into the Nile river and, just by chance, Pharoh's wife finds it, raises the kid in the Palace of the king where, upon achieving adulthood, discovers his more modest origins to which he returns to in order to rescue his people? Ya, right. Sounds like a Speilberg movie. Hey, it WAS a Speilberg movie!