August 10, 2005
By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News
Discovery Channel

Consequences of a seven-year climactic cycle foretold by Joseph in the Old Testament Book of Genesis may have materialized, and the climactic cycle still exists today, according to a scientific analysis of hundreds of years of data compiled on Egypt's Nile River.

In addition to the seven-year cycle, the findings reveal climate patterns that exist in 2.2, 4.2, 12, 19, 64 and even 256-year cycles, all of which could affect Egyptian rainfall levels.

In Biblical times, desired rains or dreaded drought meant the difference between crop success or failure, as Joseph suggested in his interpretation of a dream that a pharaoh had concerning seven healthy and unhealthy cows.

In Genesis Chapter 41, verses 29-31, Joseph said to the pharaoh, "Seven years of great abundance are now coming throughout the land of Egypt; but these will be followed by seven years of famine, when all the abundance in the land of Egypt will be forgotten. When the famine has ravaged the land, no trace of the abundance will be found in the land because of the famine that follows it — so utterly severe will that famine be."

Michael Ghil, who worked on the recent Nile River data analysis, thinks the prediction probably came true.

"But the longer and more accurate answer is that we have confirmed there are cycles; they do not necessarily mean bounty versus famine, especially not since the Aswan Dam went up, disrupting these cycles," said Ghil, who is a professor of climate dynamics and geosciences at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Ghil, who co-authored a recent Geophysical Research Letters paper on this subject with colleagues Dmitri Kondrashov and Yizhak Feliks, studied Nile water level records dating from 622-1922 A.D. He explained that Egyptian scribes, royals and others kept such records.

Ghil and his team think the seven-year cycle, suggested by Joseph, is due to influences from the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). The NAO, used to track storms, reflects atmospheric mass and sea level pressures from the lows of winter over Iceland to the highs of the subtropical Azores region.

Because gaps exist in the dataset, particularly for the later records, and because a lot of "noise," or irrelevant information, also clouds the data, Ghil and his team utilized an advanced form of a software program called the Singular Spectrum Analysis to organize the information, which revealed the various climate cycles.

The Old Testament is not the only text to have mentioned the seven-year periods.

"It seems that there are other, non-Biblical sources for such cycles," Ghil told Discovery News. "The ancient civilizations (Babylonian, Chinese, Egyptian, Indian, Mayan) were excellent observers."

They had good reason to monitor climate changes, given rainfall's affect on agriculture. Before and during Biblical times in Egypt, higher to moderate Nile water levels saturated farm lands before the river receded.

This natural process yielded arable soils. Without such life-sustaining rains, the years of famine as described by Joseph could have happened.

Mark Cane, professor of earth and climate sciences at Columbia University who has authored dozens of papers on climate variability and its impacts, agrees with the new findings.

"It is not surprising at all to find long-term patterns in climate variables in many parts of the world," Cane told Discovery News.

He suggested that natural disasters mentioned in the Bible and other early texts may be explained by science.

"An obvious example is the very large number of earthquakes at Jericho," Cane said. "Its walls have tumbled down quite often."

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20050808/bibleclimate.html