§1        Remarkable confirmation of the date of the Exodus have come from three secular sources besides the Astronomical Calculations for the Date of Pentecost which I have given.  First, the Explosion of Thera in the Agean has been redated to 1628 b.c.e. ±? (I require ±5) using radiocarbon calibrated by dendrochronology.  Second the destruction of Jericho has been redated to 1580 b.c.e. using the same method.  Third, David Rohl has shown that the Exodus happened at the end of the 13th dynasty, which conventional Egyptology places in 1632 b.c.e.! (Rohl should not have revised the chronology of the middle and early new kingdoms).
        §2        Thera is the remnants of the Agean Island of Santorini which blew up in a castaclysm which was unequaled since Noah's Flood.  The crater is 8 miles wide, and its ash spred as far away as Greenland and Antartica.  In the process, the civilazation of Minoa was overthrown.  All the cities of Crete were either buried or drowned in the upheaval.  Minoan civilization was very advanced for its day, and some say that Noah himself settled on Crete after the flood.  By the first century, some say, they would have reached our level of technology, had the explosion not occured.  Civilization was set back 3000 years, and the whole world experienced the equivalent of "nuclear winter."
                        Here are some details:

            The following is taken from Charles Pellegrino's Unearthing Atlantis (pages 233-246). This is a story of how science works toward discovery. It is the story of why we can believe that the destruction at Thera probably occurred in 1628 B.C. This is a fascinating story, but read it as a lesson of how historical science works.
            From the Greenland ice sheet, in layers of ice that accumulate annually, much like the tree rings, University of Copenhagen glaciologist Claus Hammer has extracted an ice layer containing traces of an acidic snowfall. It is more than three thousand years old, and though similar acid signals in the uppermost layers of snow and ice can be identified as fallout from the carbon exhaust cloud that now shrouds the earth, in the seventeenth century B.C., volcanoes were the only source of acid snow. Hammer acknowledges that ice-layer dates cannot be counted back as easily or precisely as California bristlecone rings. Keeping this limitation in mind, he places the acid snow at 1644 B.C., give or take twenty years. The age uncertainty (1624-1664 B.C.) is large enough to encompass the Irish peat-bog event (1620- 1629 B.C.), the California bristlecone scars (1627 B.C.) and the carbon-14 date (1610 - 1670 B.C.).

So, we are probably looking at a final explosion in the autumn of 1628 B.C. Atmospheric dust then circled the globe, created a false winter during the summer of 1627 B.C. and eventually fell to earth as acid snow. If Marinatos's five-year gap between LM1A and LM1B is assumed to be true, then the buried city of Thera was abandoned in 1633 B.C., give about ten years or take two (emphasis mine).

        One other piece of the jigsaw puzzle, only recently brought to light, provides a
glimpse of life under the pall of volcanic winter, and can be dated with reasonable
assurance to the time of the Thera upheaval.

        In China, during the Minoan Linear A Period, records were written on strips of
bamboo. Fourteen hundred years later, all such strips that had survived to the reign
of Emperor Qin were recognized as priceless treasures and, probably under orders
from the emperor himself, were compiled and copied by scribescopied so many times
that survival of China's past into its future was virtually guaranteed. The ancient texts
state that "in the twentyninth year of King Chieh [the last ruler of Hsia, the earliest
recorded Chinese dynasty], the Sun was dimmed . . . King Chieh lacked virtue . . .
the Sun was distressed . . . during the last years of Chieh ice formed in [summer]
mornings and frosts in the sixth month [July]. Heavy rainfall toppled temples and
buildings.... Heaven gave severe orders. The Sun and Moon were untimely. Hot and
cold weather arrived in disorder. The five cereal crops withered and died."

        The bamboo annals further record that floods and ice were followed by seven years
of drought lasting into the beginning of the Shang dynasty. A great famine broke out,
and in the northern provinces man became a maneater.. The Chinese scribes did not
provide precise dates for these events; but they did footnote their royal genealogies
with listings of eclipses and other astronomical phenomena. During 1990 and 1991,
NASA/JPL astronomer Kevin Pang carefully tracked China's dynasties backward
through time, using as probes the predictable motions of heavenly bodies to derive
such precisely dated events as the lunar eclipse of January 29, 1137 B.C.which,
though not dated by the scribes, was said by them to have occurred during the thirty-
fifth year of King Wen.

        King Chei lived at the same time as T'ang (the first king of the Shang dynasty),
which, according to the scribes, was sixteen generations before King Wen. Because
the Chinese considered a generation to be thirty years long, one can infer that Chieh
ruled about 480 years before Wenaround 1617 B.C., plus or minus a decade or two.
Armed with additional eclipse dates for 1876 B.C. (twenty - five generations before
Wen) and 1302 B.C. (five generations before Wen), Kevin Pang plotted the eclipses
on a graph, fitting a curve through them and locating the point that, according to
Chinese history, places Chieh sixteen generations before Wen.

        "We find the date is again [in the range of] 1600 B.C.," says Pang, "plus or minus
thirty years. Thus the historical records confirm what was suggested by the ice cores,
tree rings and older radiocarbon datesthat Thera [exploded] late in the seventeenth
century B. C. "

                        It is possible that the ash from Thera was God's means of causing "darkness which could be felt" over Egypt (but not in Goshen) for three days.  As experienced with Mt. St. Helens, falling ash can literally turn day into night, and the stuff can be felt as a fine dry mist all around you.  In one place it can be totally dark, and in another place the wind patterns will cause the ash to bypass your location completely.  Whatever, the cause of the darkness, Thera could fit the bill.
         §3        Archaeologists have dated grain found in the destruction layer at Jericho to 1583 b.c.e., which is only 10 years off of the true date (1593 b.c.e.):

                    Recently, six grains from the final destruction of the Bronze Age city of Jericho were dated by carbon-14 testing. The work of the two scientists involved, H.J. Bruins of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and J. van der Plicht of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, received considerable media attention in the summer of 1996 because they related their findings to the Exodus and Conquest. Bruins and van der Plicht dated the charred grains to 3311 years before present (i.e., before 1950). The C-14 date must then be corrected to account for differences in the carbon content of the atmosphere in the past. Using currently-available correction curves yields a date of about 1583 B.C. for the destruction of Jericho. [1].

        Bruins and van der Plicht noted that their date for the destruction of Jericho was about 45 years later than the C-14 date for the eruption of Thera (Santorini) in the Mediterranean (ca. 1628 B.C.). Some scholars have related the eruption of Thera to the plague of darkness at the time of the Exodus (Ex 10:21-23). Bruins and van der Plicht suggest that the 45 years difference in the C-14 measurements may be the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness described in the Bible. [1]

 
 

Notes

[Note: I am getting into the habit of saving internet files, because I often find that name servers go down for days at a time, as last weekend.  Therefore, references must be limited to such as can be found on the saved page.  Where ever the pages go your best bet is a good search Engine anyway]

1.  Associates for Biblical Research
     31 East Frederick Street, Suite 468
     Walkersville, MD 21793-8234, USA