Timothy Mahoney, the award-winning investigative filmmaker of Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus sets off to make his next film investigating the miraculous journey of the Israelites out of Egypt. His search quickly changes course when he runs into claims by mainstream scholars that the Exodus account was not written by Moses as the Bible states, but was most likely an exaggerated tale written a thousand years later.

To continue the investigation, Mahoney has to determine whether Moses could have written the Exodus as an eyewitness account. This question also impacts the credibility of the entire Bible.

Mahoney meets new scholars who point to a writing system, called Proto-Sinaitic, found in ancient mines in the Sinai Peninsula. It was dated several hundred years prior to the Exodus. Some have the belief that this writing system is actually the earliest form of Hebrew that Moses would have used to write the first books of the Bible. They propose that the early inscriptions even tell about biblical people and events. These controversial claims are challenged by some of the world’s top scholars.

A case is built that the new writing system matches the time and location the Israelites lived in Egypt before the Exodus. The new script came from a Semitic person who modified Egyptian hieroglyphics into the world’s first alphabet. Mahoney explores the question, “Was this script developed by the biblical Joseph who served as second command in Egypt?”
Mahoney concludes that there is a pattern of evidence matching this first alphabetic script to the history of the early Israelites. There seems to be no reason to doubt that there was a tool Moses could have used to write the Exodus account as the Bible claims. And the simplicity of the new alphabet, would have allowed the Israelites to obey the command to read, understand, and pass on the words given to Moses by God at Mt Sinai for generations to come.