Did God really part the Red Sea for Moses?
an essay by Dahn Batchelor
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The King James Version of the Bible states in Exodus 14;


"And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided."


There has long been a continuous debate about the account of the crossing of the sea in Exodus 13-15, including the number of people, the route taken, the date, etc. For some, these details, none of which are clear from Scripture, have become the battleground for arguing about the inerrancy of Scripture and, indeed, about the very nature of Scripture itself. Millions of people over the centuries have questioned that aspect of the Bible with a jaundiced eye. They have asked themselves, is it really possible for the deep waters of the Red Sea to be parted to the point where the floor of the bottom of the sea suddenly becomes dry?


Looking at that event scientifically, one can easily arrive at the conclusion that it flies in the face of nature. We live in a time when people simply don't believe the Red Sea crossing really happened. Some people want to continue preserving a very narrow literal reading of the Exodus narrative. For example, many adamantly argue that the point of exit from the land while escaping from the pharaoh’s soldiers was across the Red Sea "as the Bible clearly says. (at least in some translations). This would mean that the Hebrews journeyed far to the south before turning across the Red Sea into the Sinai Peninsula. Some like to point out the great width of the sea as a further proof of the miraculous nature of the escape, since the Red Sea averages about 150 miles in width.


If Moses and his people chose to cross the Red Sea, they would have been faced with incredible obstacles. For one thing, the crossing would have taken days. The sea at its widest is over 190 miles (300 km) and averages 150 miles. The sea floor has a maximum depth of 8,200 feet (2,500 m) in the central median trench and an average depth of 1,640 feet (500 m).


Let’s presume that Moses and his people (600,000 men and over a million and a half women and children) really did walk across the floor of the Red Sea in the dark of night. Walking at 5 miles an hour, it would take a minimum of 30 hours for any one of them to go from shore to shore. And if they did cross the Red Sea by walking along the floor of the sea, they would first have to climb down at least 1,600 feet to get to the bottom and then climb up on the other side another 1,600 feet to get to the shore on the other side. This could mean it could take as much as 38 hours and I feel confident that if you consider mothers carrying babies and old people struggling and tiring all the way, it could take as much as 48 hours for all of them, young and old to cross the sea and that is if they walked and never stopped for a rest or for meals. I don’t think that is what happened for obvious reasons. This is far too much a distance for a large group of people of all ages to traverse in a single night.


Even if God did part the Red Sea, there is nothing in the Bible that says that he gave Moses and his people such strength that they could walk non-stop for four days and nights to make the crossing.


There is no mention of a narrow pathway through the sea as it is often pictured in religious art and movies. This agrees with the simple logistics of the crossing: for a couple of million people to file through single file or even in several lines would have taken days if not a week. Only if the gap was at least 5 km (3 miles) wide and less than 20 km (12 miles) in length from shore to shore could they have crossed in a single night.


There has been much controversy through the years over which Red Sea is being referred to in the Exodus account. The "Red Sea" is used to refer to all sections of that sea --- the main body, the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba. If you will get a large map of that part of the world, you will note that the Red Sea is quite large --- beginning at Ethiopia on the southwest and Yemen on the southeast. It separates northern Africa from Arabia. At its northern end, it splits into two arms from west to east; the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba, which is same Red Sea that existed in Moses’ time.


It’s obvious that he didn’t cross the lower portion of the Red Sea notwithstanding the fact that the Bible states that he moved southward. Traditionally it is believed that the Red Sea crossing took place somewhere in the area of the Gulf of Aqaba which is several hundred kilometers east of the Gulf of Suez.


One view is that the route that Moses took seems to have begun in Goshin which is hundreds of miles northeast of Cairo and just at the edge of the Nile delta and from there, he headed southeast along the western shore of Bitter Lake and then crossed a river that connects Bitter Lake with the Gulf of Suez. From there he passed through the city of Soccoth (which is midway between the Bitter Lake and the Gulf of Suez) and then headed eastward through the wilderness of Sinai and when he was a hundred or so miles from the eastern edge of Sinai, he headed south to a small city called, Pi hahiroth. It is here that Moses allegedly crossed the open water of the Gulf of Aqaba to get to Baal-zephon. Their belief is based on scripture, specifically verse 2 of chapter 14 in Exodus which says;


"Tell the people of Israel to turn back and encamp in front of Pi-ha-hi'roth, between Migdol and the sea, in front of Ba'al-ze'phon; you shall encamp over against it, by the sea.”


The migdol in that location was not a place name, but an elevated land mass between two river beds, rising to about 300 metres.(984 feet)


The Gulf of Aqaba is 12 to 17 miles (19 to 27 km) in width and is 100 miles (160 km) in length. It stretches from the Straits of Tiran to a point where the border of Israel meets the borders of Egypt and Jordan.


If the crossing took place here (and many people believe that it did) it is inconceivable that Moses and his two million people could have crossed that part of the Gulf in one night providing of course that we are willing to accept the premise that God really parted that body of water for Moses.


The site of Pi-hahiroth, where God alegedly led the people constituted a strategic trap for the fleeing Israelites. On either side were mountains and desert. Before them was the Gulf of Aqaba. As God intended, within a day or two, this predicament invited pursuit by Pharaoh and his company of chariots. In such an hour of extremity, Moses exhorted the fearful people, "Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord." Thus God intervened to provide for the crossing of the Red Sea.


Since most biblical scholars believe that Moses marched his people down the east side of the Sinai Peninsula and then up the west side of the peninsula over a period of twenty years, he had no reason to part the Gulf of Aqaba since that would have been too far and too long a period of time for the pharaoh’s soldiers to follow Moses. That would seem to rule out him and his people crossing the Gulf of Aqaba.


The biblical account never refers to the Red Sea by name. Instead in the Hebrew text the reference is to the yam suph. The word yam in Hebrew is the ordinary word for "sea," although in Hebrew it is used for any large body of water whether fresh or salt. The word ‘suph’ is the word for ‘reeds’ or ‘rushes’, the word is used in Ex. 2:3, 5 to describe where Moses' basket was placed in the Nile. So, the biblical reference throughout the Old Testament is the ‘sea of reeds’. Many scholars feel that since the original text implies this was a "Reed Sea" (later misconstrued to mean ‘Red Sea’) the body of water actually was not the gulf of Aqaba but a northern inland lake that is now extinct.


Whatever body of water Moses and his people crossed, it is self-evident that it was no insignificant body of water, for the entire army of Egypt was destroyed by the returning waves. Scripture points out that before long, the bodies of dead Egyptians littered the shore and Josephus (a Jew who was a Roman citizen who wrote about his times in the time of Jesus) reports that the Israelites armed themselves with weapons that were salvaged on this occasion.


What body of water did Moses and his people cross to escape the soldiers close behind then? More importantly, where is the ‘Sea of Reeds’? In the first place there are no reeds in the Red Sea so it has to be somewhere else and obviously, it cannot be in the Sinai Peninsula.


‘Yam suph’ would be more correctly translated “sea of seaweed,” and could refer to any body of water – freshwater or saltwater – in which aquatic weeds flourish. It is conceivable that the ‘Sea of Reeds’, had been saltwater swamps around El Balah, the now extinct lake. If that is where Moses and his people crossed, then there is some truth to this story. However, one must consider certain factors. First, a lake in the Middle East has since time immemorial, been referred to as a sea. Take for example, the ‘Sea of Galilee’ is really a lake. The reason is obvious. It is a freshwater body of water. It is also called Lake Tiberius, named after a Roman emperor.


Second, if a strong wind were to blow from the east, it would push the water westward and that being so, the crossing would have to be from north to the south or visa versa. This rules out a crossing from west to east.


It is possible that the volcanic eruption on the Greek archipelago of Santorini triggered a chain of natural catastrophes recorded in the Bible as the 10 plagues that God visited upon Egypt as punishment for enslaving the Jews. The story of the parting of the Red Sea may have been told as a result of a tsunami coming from the Mediterranean Sea that destroyed the pharaoh’s army as it pursued the escaping Jews. The episode occurred not at the Red Sea but at the smaller Sea of Reeds, the marshy area at the northern end of the Gulf of Suez. An underwater earthquake may have also released poisonous gases that turned the waters red.


More than a dozen archeological relics suggest that the exodus took place three centuries earlier than biblical scholars estimate. By reinterpreting artwork at museums in Luxor, Cairo, Athens and elsewhere, archaeologists believe that the exodus might have occurred around 1500 BC. That was about the time when some geologists believe the Santorini volcano, 400 miles north of Egypt, erupted in the eastern Mediterranean. Scientists and historians have long speculated that the 10 “plagues” suffered by Egypt might have been linked in a “domino theory” of natural causes such as the Santorini volcanic explosion and subsequent undersea earthquake.


A series of earthquakes may have “destabilised the entire Nile Delta system and resulted in part of the delta sliding off the African continental shelf”. This would have raised the level of land around the Sea of Reeds. Water would have cascaded from higher ground to lower ground . . . creating dry land on which the Israelites could cross. This event would also have caused an enormous ‘backsplash’ of water, a veritable tsunami. If the waves went a mere seven miles inland, they would have engulfed the Egyptian army.


If this version is true, then this would explain how Moses and his people were able to cross over ther marshy lake and how the Egyptians perished later in the same lake when the water returned to that area.


Anyone who ever saw Cecil De Mill’s movie about Moses would have seen a narrow pathway at the bottom of the sea with a wall of water on either side of them that reached at least as high as a ten-story building. Of course it really didn’t happen like that. Notwithstanding that, it still was a great movie. But then so was Star Wars.


It is doubtful that a purely natural wind could produce a “wall” of water that high. If a strictly natural wind blew from the east, the water most likely would have been walled up in a north/south direction, which would have prevented the Israelites’ crossing. Further, if a natural wind came from the east, and continued its force, sustaining the north and south walls of water (which later returned and drowned the Egyptian army), how could the Israelites possibly have crossed the area in the face of such fierce winds velocity?


Ask yourself this question. Did God really cause the volcanic eruption at Santorini thereby causing a series of earthquakes that destabilized the Nile Delta and killed so many of the people there so that the Jews could escape the pharaoh’s soldiers? It would make God’s role highly suspect considering the fact that the scriptures say that he is a merciful God.


Although this was a fantastic event, it's not the only time this has ever happened. Another event (the blowing of a fierce wind) is mentioned in a story dating all the way back to the Egyptian Old Kingdom period, in which the water of a lake piled up on one side, laying the lake bed bare, before it came back again. There are also modern reports of the wind blowing back the water of these desert lakes. But as I said earlier, if the wind was so strong that it could empty a lake at one end of it, it would be too strong for anyone to walk through. If any of my readers have ever been in a hurricane and tried walking in it, my point will be accepted as obvious.


Water levels in recent years are not necessarily an accurate indication of levels in the past, since the water found in lakes in arid regions can vary dramatically from year to year and from season to season. But it wasn't just the depth of the water that killed the pharoah’s soldiers----surely some of them knew how to swim; it was the force of the sediment-laden flood waters as they rushed back into the lake bed, creating deadly undertows and whirlpools as they washed together, just as in much more recent floods around the world that have destroyed homes and lives.
A Russian scientist announced that one of the Old Testament's most monumental events — Moses' parting of the Red Sea — was due to stormy weather and a shallow reef rather than divine intervention. He publicly said, "I am convinced that God rules the Earth through the laws of physics."


The senior researcher at St. Petersburg's Institute of Oceanology spent six months studying the tides, winds and reefs common to the Red Sea, then developed a series of differential equations to chart out the parting of the waters, as detailed in Exodus 14. The researcher determined that if a strong wind blew at 30 meters per second over a shallow reef, then yes, it could have blown that reef dry. He also calculated it would have taken the fleeing Jews about four hours to make their crossing. Of course, explaining away the miracles and mysteries of the Bible is a perennial favorite among scientific researchers, who find a ready audience for such things.


When you discuss the credibility of the Bible, you have to be careful not to try to explain something that is presented in the Bible as a miracle. A miracle is, by definition, something that you cannot explain naturally.


It is this writer’s opinion that it is highly unlikely that anyone in this century will ever really be able to explain satisfactorily as to whether of not Moses was able to cross a large body of water with assistance from God.


It certainly is convievable however that he did cross a large body of water such as a lake at the northern end of the Gulf of Suez and if he did, it was the direct result of some natural event that by co-incidence, occured just at the time when Moses and his people were fleeing the pharoah’s soldiers.


No matter how Moses and his people crossed a body of water, it wasn’t the Red Sea and I strongly doubt that Moses was told by God (if there really is a God) to raise his staff and the sea would be parted right then and there.