Professor Douglas Petrovich is the author of two books, The World's Oldest Alphabet: Hebrew as the Language of the Proto-Consonantal Script, and his latest book, Origins of the Hebrews: New Evidence of Israelites in Egypt from Joseph to the Exodus. Dr. Petrovich teaches biblical studies and ancient Near Eastern history and archaeology at The Bible Seminary in Katy, Texas. He formerly taught ancient Egypt at Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Ontario) and served as a professor and administrator at Shepherd’s Theological Seminary (Cary, North Carolina) and Novosibirsk Biblical-Theological Seminary (Siberia, Russia). He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, with a major in Syro-Palestinian archaeology, a first minor in ancient Egyptian language, and a second minor in ancient Near Eastern religions. He completed a Th.M. and M.Div. from The Master’s Seminary and a B.A. from the Moody Bible Institute. He and his wife have three adult children.

Dr. Petrovich is excited to present his newest book, Origins of the Hebrews: New Evidence of Israelites in Egypt from Joseph to the Exodus. We are looking forward to hearing about his research! Here a synopsis of his latest book:

"One of the most important stories to both the Eastern and Western worlds, as attested by blockbuster films such as The Ten Commandments and Prince of Egypt, is the Bible’s account of ancient Israelites who resided in Egypt for over four centuries, then were freed from enslavement by an act of God. Yet until now, no strong case ever has been made to validate these events from the historical and archaeological record. For this reason, an extensive portion of the scholarly world has abandoned the picture presented by the historical record in the Bible, which indicates that Jacob’s descendants grew into a nation within the comfort of a divinely prepared incubator, namely Egypt. In lieu of this time-honored account, many scholars have turned to speculative theories about how Israelite origins should be connected to Transjordan or locations even further to the east of the Holy Land, as numerous authors have documented in their publications.

Are these alternative options appropriate when such minimal effort has been devoted to examining carefully and objectively whether Egypt, in fact, might be the correct location of their origins? An enormous amount of research and the synthesization of historical events and archaeological artifacts has led Dr. Petrovich to verify Israelite residence in Egypt from 1876–1446 bc, which he argues in his new book (2021), Origins of the Hebrews: New Evidence of Israelites in Egypt from Joseph to the Exodus. This research is connected to the unexpected discovery of interconnecting archaeological, epigraphical, and iconographical evidence that attests to the presence of Israelites in Egypt over virtually the entire 430 years described in Exodus 12:40–41. By the sheer volume of verifiable evidence of complementary historical data—when comparing the biblical text and the artifactual and epigraphical record—the author attempts to demonstrate convincingly to objective readers that the biblical story of the Egyptian origins of the Hebrew ‘nation’ is reliable as a factual account."