How did the Red Sea part?

Trapped at the water

Exodus 14 begins with a trap. Pharaoh regrets letting his slaves go, takes six hundred chosen chariots and all the chariots of Egypt, and catches Israel camped by the sea (14:5–9). The people panic, and their words to Moses are bitter enough to be funny: “Because there were no graves in Egypt, have you taken us away to die in the wilderness?” (14:11).

Moses answers with the opposite of a battle plan: “Don’t be afraid. Stand still, and see the salvation of Yahweh” (14:13). God answers Moses with the opposite of standing still: “Speak to the children of Israel, that they go forward” (14:15).

The night, step by step

1. The cloud moves. The pillar of cloud shifts to the rear, between the two camps, dark on one side and light on the other, all night (14:19–20).
2. The hand and the wind. Moses stretches his hand over the sea, and a strong east wind blows the whole night and turns the seabed into dry land (14:21).
3. The walls. Israel walks through on dry ground, “the waters were a wall to them on their right hand and on their left” (14:22).
4. The wheels. In the morning watch the Egyptians follow. God throws the army into confusion, and their chariot wheels come off (14:24–25).
5. The return. Moses stretches out his hand again, and as morning comes the sea “returned to its strength” (14:27).

The waters returned, and covered the chariots and the horsemen, even all Pharaoh’s army that went in after them into the sea. There remained not so much as one of them.

Wind or miracle?

Exodus does not choose. In the prose, God works through a wind that blows for hours. In the victory song of the next chapter, the same wind becomes God’s own breath.

With the blast of your nostrils, the waters were piled up. The floods stood upright as a heap. The deeps were congealed in the heart of the sea.

Modern explanations look for the mechanism. Computer models show that a strong, steady wind can push shallow water back and open a land bridge for a few hours, then let the water rush in when it drops (where the crossing may have been is a question of its own). Others point to a tsunami from the eruption of Thera, on Santorini, though most date it long before any likely date for the Exodus. The text tells a miracle, and it names the wind anyway.

Did Pharaoh’s army drown?

Exodus is plain about the army: not one left, and in the morning “Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore” (14:30). It is less plain about Pharaoh. The song says God cast “Pharaoh’s chariots and his army” into the sea (15:4), and a psalm says he “overthrew Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea” (Psalm 136:15), but Exodus never describes the king’s death. The Quran does: drowning, Pharaoh declares faith in the God of Israel and is told his body will be kept as a sign for later generations (10:90–92). No Egyptian record mentions the disaster; see who the Pharaoh of the Exodus was.

How it is remembered

Jews read the crossing and the Song of the Sea on the seventh day of Passover, the day tradition assigns to it. The rabbis added two famous scenes. In one, every tribe hangs back at the water until Nahshon, the prince of Judah, jumps in first (Sotah 37a). In the other, the angels want to sing as the Egyptians drown, and God stops them: the work of my hands is drowning in the sea, and you would sing? (Sanhedrin 39b). Paul saw a picture of baptism: the fathers “all passed through the sea” (1 Corinthians 10:1). And in 1956 Cecil B. DeMille parted it on screen in The Ten Commandments, which won the Oscar for special effects.