DID THE SEA REALLY PART?

 

Rabbi Rifat Sonsino, Ph.D

The parting of the sea is a major episode in the Hebrew Bible. According to the story, as the Israelites left Egypt in haste, they went through a watercourse that was miraculously split, and the people crossed over in dry land.

Now, we all know that seas do not split. So, what is behind this narrative? How was it explained?

The story appears in the Book of Exodus, and is referred to in many parts of the Hebrew Bible, but there are a number of problems associated with it. First, the sea is not “the Red Sea.” In Hebrew, it is called YAM SUF (The sea of suf). However, the word SUF means “reeds,” not Red. So, the Israelites did not cross the Red Sea, they crossed the “Reed Sea.” The second problem is that we do not know where this sea of reeds is located? Is it the Gulf of Aqaba? Or, is it found in one of the small lakes/marshes close to the Lake Sarbonis? We do not know.

Finally, we have at least three different descriptions of the miraculous event:

1.     According to one source in Exodus 15 (biblical scholars call it the J source, namely, the texts that refer to God as YHVH), God is the main character and there is no mention of the splitting of the sea. God simply drives back the sea itself with a strong east wind, and the Egyptians sink to the bottom of the sea.

2.     According to another source, usually assigned to the P source (namely, the texts written by priests), Moses is the main character, and the sea is always called “the sea,” not the “Red/reed sea.” Here at the command of God, Moses held his arm over the sea, and it parted (Ex.14: 21-23).

3.     In yet another source, this one also called the P source (i.e. a different priestly text), God threw the Egyptians into panic and locked the wheels of their chariots (Ex. 14: 24-25).

Over the centuries, many commentators have tried to explain this so-called miraculous event by offering, at times, fancy explanations. For example, according to the Wisdom of Solomon (1^st cent. BCE), the deliverance was the work of personified wisdom (Chap.10). The Jewish historian Josephus (1st cent. CE), stated that Moses chose the route by means of clever calculations (Ant.II, 16). For the Greek-Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria (1^st cent. CE), the entire episode is an allegory (Legum, Alleg. 2). The Rabbis, too, imagined various scenarios: For some, the sea did not part until the Israelites first stepped in the waters (BT Sotah 36b), or until the waters reached up to their noses (Sh’mot Rabba 21). In the medieval times, the conjectures continued: For Rashbam (11 cent. northern France), the winds dried up and coagulated the rivers (on Ex.14:21). For Maimonides (d. 1204) on the other hand, all miracles, including the parting of the sea, were built into the structure of the universe and do not represent God’s intrusion into nature (Eight Chapters, 8). Some even argued that a volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini produced a tidal wave that parted the sea.

Fancy explanations still appear in contemporary literature: In 2004, Naum Volzinger, a senior researcher at St. Petersburg’s Institute of Oceanography, and his colleague, Alexei Androsov of Hamburg, argued that the parting of the sea was caused by strong winds. Similarly, in 2010, according to Carl Drews, a mechanical engineer, the “sea” is to be located in the Lake Tanis, in the Eastern Nile Delta region, just south of the Mediterranean Sea. The parting was caused by strong winds that created wind pushes, moving the waters away.

In reality, all of these explanations are just speculations, trying to justify the biblical text that is highly elusive. Besides, in the Hebrew Bible, the story is introduced as a divine miracle. The entire episode is legendary, and highlights the fact that the Israelites must have left Egypt under difficult circumstances and yet survived. We do not know when it happened, where it happened or how it happened, but we can surmise that the purpose of the story was to praise God and Moses for the Israelites’ glorious escape from servitude, which left an indelible mark on the historical views of the ancient tribes. The Exodus finally became the rationale for the injunction of not to wrong the resident aliens (Lev. 19:34).

(For more details, please see my article, “Did the Israelites Escape Through the Sea”? in my book, Did Moses Really Have Horns (2009), pp. 70-81).