The Red Sea

Start with what is not in dispute. The Hebrew text names a body of water called yam suph. It says Israel walked through it on dry ground with the water standing on both sides, and that Pharaoh's army drowned in it, and every later writer in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament treats that as a fact of history and the ground of Israel's confidence in God. What is disputed is which water, where along it, and in what year. It is worth saying plainly that no physical evidence of the crossing has ever been recovered, anywhere, by anyone. The name itself is the first body of evidence. Suph means reed, and the same word describes the reeds on the Nile in Exodus 2:3, so a water called yam suph sounds like marsh rather than deep salt water. Martin Luther's German Bible rendered it Schilfmeer, reed sea, in the 1530s, so that reading is not a modern invention. In the twentieth century a proposal in the scholarly literature derived Hebrew suph from the Egyptian word for papyrus, and pointed to an Egyptian place name meaning the papyrus marsh in the eastern delta. The strongest objection comes from the Bible itself. 1 Kings 9:26 uses yam suph of the water at Ezion-geber, where Solomon launched a fleet, and Numbers 21:4, Deuteronomy 1:40 and Judges 11:16 use it of water on the eastern side of the wilderness. Whatever the etymology, the biblical writers apply the phrase to open sea. The text gives five place names between Egypt and the water: Succoth, Etham on the edge of the wilderness, and then Pi-hahiroth, Migdol and Baal-zephon. If any of the last three could be fixed on the ground, the crossing would be fixed with it. Succoth is widely connected with the Egyptian name Tjeku in the Wadi Tumilat, often at Tell el-Maskhuta, the mound Edouard Naville excavated in 1883, though the identification of that mound has been argued over since. Migdol is a Semitic word for tower or fortress, and there was more than one Migdol on the Egyptian frontier, which is exactly why the name locates nothing by itself. Baal-zephon is a Canaanite storm god's name, so the marker is a shrine rather than a town. Pi-hahiroth has never been identified. Exodus 13:17 names the road Israel did not take, the coastal highway through Philistine country, which the Egyptians called the Way of Horus and garrisoned with forts; James K. Hoffmeier excavated one of them at Tell el-Borg and published the results in Ancient Israel in Sinai (Oxford, 2005). The first position is the northern Gulf of Suez, the oldest continuous identification. Josephus tells the story with Israel shut in between mountains and the sea (Antiquities of the Jews, Book 2), and a crossing place near the head of the gulf was pointed out to Christian pilgrims in late antiquity. Among nineteenth-century commentators, Albert Barnes wrote that the conditions of the narrative are satisfied by a passage near Suez, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown placed it at Mount Attakah or the mouth of Wady Tawarik, where the sea was narrow enough to cross in a short time. The objection is that the march from the delta to Suez is long for the timetable the text gives, and none of the text's markers is securely placed along the way. The second position is the Bitter Lakes or Lake Timsah, at the eastern end of the Wadi Tumilat. Nineteenth-century Egyptologists working in that valley argued that Israel left Egypt eastward along it and crossed the shallow water at its end, which before the canal were separate basins. Edouard Naville, following his 1883 excavation at Tell el-Maskhuta, is the name usually attached to this route, and a long line of commentators follow the Wadi Tumilat road. Its strength is that it fits Succoth in the Wadi Tumilat and needs no long march south. Its difficulty is that these are lakes, and the text's language of a sea with the water standing on both sides has to be carried by them. The third position is the northern delta lakes. James K. Hoffmeier argues from the ancient geography of the Egyptian frontier and from his own excavation that the crossing belongs at the former Lake Ballah, a now-drained lagoon north of Lake Timsah, and that yam suph in Exodus names that water rather than the Gulf of Suez; he sets the case out in Israel in Egypt (Oxford, 1996) and Ancient Israel in Sinai (Oxford, 2005). Proposals placing it further north still, at the edge of Lake Manzala or the sandbar by Lake Bardawil, follow Otto Eissfeldt, who argued in Baal Zaphon, Zeus Kasios und der Durchzug der Israeliten durchs Meer (Niemeyer, 1932) that Baal-zephon was the sanctuary at Mount Casius. The strength of this family of readings is that it takes the Egyptian evidence for the frontier seriously and fits the marsh sense of suph. Its difficulty is the one the marsh reading always faces, that yam suph elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible is open sea. The fourth position moves the crossing to the eastern arm, from the beach at Nuweiba across the Gulf of Aqaba, with Mount Sinai placed at Jebel al-Lawz beyond it. Ron Wyatt promoted it from the late 1970s, and it was taken up by Larry Williams and Jim Irwin in The Mountain of Moses (1990), by Bob Cornuke, and by Lennart Moller in The Exodus Case (2000). The arguments offered for it are that Galatians 4:25 puts Mount Sinai in Arabia, that Exodus 15:22 sends Israel from the sea into the Wilderness of Shur, and that the beach at Nuweiba is wide enough for a large camp. Wyatt's specific finds are claims, and this page reports them as claims. He said he had found coral-encrusted chariot wheels, axles and bones on the seabed off Nuweiba, and photographs of them circulate widely. No artefact from that site has been recovered, catalogued or published, no independent examination has authenticated the photographs, and the claims are rejected by secular archaeologists and by confessional ones alike, including Associates for Biblical Research. Wyatt also said he had found Noah's ark, the ark of the covenant and the blood of Christ. The objection to the Aqaba crossing as a whole is that the gulf there is deep and steep-sided, with no confirmed shallow ridge across it, and that Galatians 4:25 does not require the eastern shore, because in Paul's day the name Arabia covered Nabataean territory and the Sinai Peninsula with it. Hoffmeier answers the Arabian location at length in Ancient Israel in Sinai. Beside all of that sits a second kind of question, about mechanism rather than place. The text itself names a wind: all that night the LORD drove back the sea with a strong east wind that turned it into dry land. Doron Nof and Nathan Paldor modelled wind setdown at the northern Gulf of Suez in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in 1992, and found that a sustained strong wind could lower the water enough to expose a passage that would return quickly once the wind dropped. Carl Drews and Weiqing Han ran an ocean model on a reconstruction of the ancient eastern delta and published it in PLoS ONE in 2010; an easterly wind of 28 metres per second held for twelve hours across a gap where the Pelusiac branch of the Nile met a coastal lagoon exposed a land bridge that stayed open for about four hours. Adam Clarke had already drawn the distinction this site keeps, arguing in 1832 that no natural agent could make the water stand as a wall on both sides, and that the east wind served to dry the seabed once God had divided it. This site's tradition reads Exodus 14 as a miracle of God and teaches it that way; the modelling is reported as modelling, and neither the wind nor the model is offered as a reason to think less happened than the chapter says. The year is contested too, and this page states it the way the Egypt page does. The early date, about 1446 BC, follows the 480 years of 1 Kings 6:1 and the 300 years of Judges 11:26, and is held by Bryant G. Wood and Associates for Biblical Research, which is a confessional body and is named as one here, by Eugene H. Merrill in Kingdom of Priests (Baker, 1987), and by Douglas Petrovich. The late date, about 1260 to 1250 BC, follows the name Rameses at Exodus 1:11 and the building of Pi-Ramesse by Ramesses II, and is held by Kenneth A. Kitchen in On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 2003) and by James K. Hoffmeier. Neither answer settles it. Four crossing sites, two dates, no consensus in the field, and no recovered object: that is why this place carries no pin on its map, and the page says so rather than dropping a point somewhere and letting it stand as a verdict.