On Wednesday morning, a 6.1 magnitude earthquake shook the Greek Island of Crete. The quake was felt as far away as Israel. No injuries or damage was reported. This comes after a series of three quakes (5.2, 5.4, 4.2) hit the island on Sunday. 

The quake was at a depth of 80 km (49.7 miles), the  European Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) said.

On October 12, a powerful magnitude 6.3 earthquake rocked Crete, two weeks after another tremor on the island killed a man and damaged hundreds of buildings.

The island of Crete is referred to in the Bible as Caphtor (Amos 9:7, Jeremiah 47:4). Though no catastrophic earthquake has been recorded in Crete, a cataclysmic volcanic blast that took place at approximately 1627 BCE and 1600 BCE in the nearby island of Thera was one of the largest volcanic eruptions in the last 4,000 years. The devastating results of the eruption are evident on the island to this day, as are the results of an earthquake and tsunami generated by the volcano. The Thera eruption, 124 miles from Crete, was so transformative that major historical events in the region including  Plato’s story of Atlantis have been attributed to it.

Some Egyptologists claim that ancient Egyptians wrote about the Thera eruption in the Tempest Stela.  Attributed to  Pharaoh Ahmose I who ruled from 1539–1514 BC, it describes a great storm striking Egypt during this time, destroying tombs, temples and pyramids and the work of restoration ordered by the king. The storm was accompanied by darkness, earthquakes and flooding.

In 1981, Professor Hans Goedicke, chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a world-famous Egyptologist, attributed several aspects of the Biblical account to the eruption at Thera. His theories were based on his opinion that the Exodus took place in 1477 BCE in the reign of the Pharaoh Hatshepsut, 200 years earlier than most historians previously ascertained.

This theory was resurrected by two-time Emmy winner Simcha Jacobovici and world-famous film director James Cameron in a 2006 documentary titled The Exodus Decoded. In addition to espousing Goedicke’s theory attributing the splitting of the sea to a Thera-generated tsunami, the film also suggests that Thera may have been the source of the Biblical pillars of fire and smoke.