Where did the Israelites cross the Red Sea?

Red Sea or Sea of Reeds?

The Hebrew text of Exodus never says Red Sea. It says Yam Suph. Yam is sea, and suph is the everyday word for reeds, the same reeds that hid baby Moses’s basket on the Nile (Exodus 2:3). “Red Sea” comes from the Septuagint, the Greek translation made in Alexandria in the 3rd century BC, which wrote Erythra Thalassa. Latin and English Bibles followed the Greek, and many modern scholars prefer “Sea of Reeds.”

Yet the Hebrew name is not always a marsh. When Solomon builds a fleet, the same two words name a real arm of the sea.

King Solomon made a fleet of ships in Ezion Geber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red Sea, in the land of Edom.

Eloth lay at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, beside today’s Eilat. So Yam Suph can mean a reedy lake near the Nile Delta and also the gulfs on either side of Sinai. That double meaning keeps the argument alive.

Clues on the road

Israel sets out from Rameses, in the eastern delta. God does not take them by “the way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near” (Exodus 13:17). That coast road, the Ways of Horus, was lined with Egyptian forts that archaeologists have dug up in northern Sinai. Then God tells Moses to turn back and camp “before Pihahiroth, between Migdol and the sea, before Baal Zephon” (14:2). Migdol simply means tower. Baal Zephon is a god’s name used for a place. None of the three can be pinned to a map.

After the crossing, Numbers lists the camps: bitter Marah, Elim with its twelve springs and seventy palms, and then the people “encamped by the Red Sea” (Numbers 33:10). Some readers conclude that the water they crossed and the Gulf of Suez, reached later, are two different seas. Others say the march simply came back to the same coast farther south.

The candidates

• Lake Bardawil. A long lagoon on Sinai’s Mediterranean shore, the ancient Sirbonian lake, behind a thin sandbar. It lies close to the coast road Exodus says they avoided.
• Lake Timsah and the Bitter Lakes. Shallow lakes and marshes between the delta and the Gulf of Suez, now strung together by the Suez Canal. Many scholars favor this chain: it was Egypt’s natural eastern frontier, and reeds grew there.
• The head of the Gulf of Suez. The choice of many old maps and pilgrims, at the northern tip of the Red Sea proper.
• The Gulf of Aqaba. Some writers put the crossing at Nuweiba beach and Mount Sinai in Arabia. The chariot wheels said to lie on the seabed there have never been verified by archaeologists.

A wind all night

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

Exodus tells it as a miracle, the waters standing as a wall on either side (14:22). In 2010 Carl Drews and Weiqing Han, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, asked what wind alone can do to shallow water. Their computer model found that an east wind of about 100 kilometers an hour (63 mph), blowing for twelve hours, could open a land bridge a few kilometers long at an ancient lagoon in the eastern delta, and let the water rush back when it dropped. A model shows how, not where. The Song of the Sea remembers only who won: “He has thrown the horse and his rider into the sea” (Exodus 15:21). For the king who lost that army, see who the Pharaoh of the Exodus was.