Just where was yam suf, the “sea of reeds” that the Israelites, according to the book of Exodus, miraculously crossed on dry land in their flight from Egypt while Pharaoh’s pursuing army drowned in it? Was it Lake Bardawil, a large saltwater lagoon near the Mediterranean at the northern tip of the Sinai Peninsula? Lake Balah, a once sweet-water lake, fed by the easternmost arm of the Nile, now obliterated by the Suez Canal? Lake Timsah to the south of it? The Gulf of Suez? The Gulf of Eilat? Numerous arguments—textual, geographical, archaeological, and historical—have been marshaled for and against all of these possibilities and still others, to which must be added the contention that none of them is correct because the story of the Exodus is purely mythical.
Although some of these locations are more probable than others, all have to deal with the same difficulty—namely, that yam suf is not only the biblical name of the water crossed by the fleeing Israelites. It is also what the Bible calls what is known today as the Gulf of Eilat or Gulf of Aqaba. The words appear in this sense, for example, in the verse in the book of 1Kings, “And King Solomon made a navy of ships in Etzion-Gever, which is near Eilot, on the shore of yam suf.” Solomon’s fleet sailed down the Gulf of Eilat to the Red Sea and from there to Arabia and India, not across the lakes of Egypt.
But can the Gulf of Eilat, let alone the Red Sea that stretches to the south of it between northeast Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, be the “sea of reeds” of Exodus? Hardly—and not just because no reedy marshes grow along its rock-and-sand coast. It lies 200 kilometers from the Israelites’ assumed point of departure, the biblical “land of Goshen” in the northwestern corner of the Nile Delta, far too distant for the flight-and-pursuit narrative of Exodus. Besides which, though it lies at the southern tip of the promised land of Canaan that the Israelites were heading for, they could have, had they reached it with the Egyptians on their heels, simply skirted its northern rim and kept on going. No miracle would have been necessary.
Nevertheless, the Jewish translators of the Greek Septuagint, history’s earliest Bible translation produced in Alexandria in the 1st and 2nd centuries BCE, chose to render yam suf in the story of the exodus from Egypt as erythra thalassa, “red sea,” thus influencing all Bible translations that came after them. They did this because erythra thalassa was the ancient Greek name for the entire Indian Ocean and its approaches: the Gulfs of Suez and Eilat on either side of the Sinai Peninsula and the Red Sea they connect with. And since they were obviously not referring to the Gulf of Eilat or today’s Red Sea, they can only have been thinking of the Gulf of Suez. (This they make clear when, in translating yam suf in 1Kings 9:26, they do so not as erythra thalassa but as eskhata thalassa, “the furthest sea,” reading suf as sof, meaning “end” or “limit,” and thus disambiguating the Gulf of Eilat from the Gulf of Suez.)
Indeed, the northern tip of the Gulf of Suez, which separates Egypt from Sinai, is a logical place for the Israelites’ crossing. It lies some 50 kilometers to the land of Goshen’s south, in the direction in which God, according to the Bible, turned the escaped slaves because they were unprepared to force their way through the more direct route to Canaan, the heavily garrisoned “road of the land of the Philistines” along the Mediterranean coast. Therefore, Exodus tells us, God “turned the people around” and sent them southward on the “Yam Suf desert route [derekh ha-midbar yam suf],” from which they could proceed to cut eastward through sparsely populated central Sinai to the Negev of southern Israel.
Such a scenario seems even more plausible in light of a paper published some 30 years ago by two Israeli scientists, the meteorologist Nathan Paldor and the oceanographer Doron Nof, in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Using mathematical models, Paldor and Dor explained how the physical properties of the Gulf of Suez could have made it behave exactly as the Bible says the “sea of reeds” did. The book of Exodus relates:
And the Lord rolled the sea back with a strong east wind that blew all night and turned the sea to dry land. . . . And the children of Israel entered the sea on the dry ground. . . . And the waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen and all the host of Pharaoh, . . . and there remained not so much as one of them.
By blowing at a gale-force rate of 70 kilometers an hour for ten hours, Paldor and Nof calculate, a strong wind from the east-northeast, of the kind known in Arabic as a hamsin and in biblical Hebrew as a ru’aḥ kadim and common in the eastern Mediterranean basin in springtime, could have made the waters of the northern tip of the Gulf of Suez recede 1.2. kilometers to a depth of three meters. Moreover, if the wind then died down suddenly, as a hamsin can do, the water would have returned in a rush to its former state in no more than four minutes. Just as the Bible describes it!
Except for one thing. As is the case with the Gulf of Suez, there are no reeds or marshlands, and almost certainly never were any, growing along the shores of the Gulf of Suez. Why would it have been called “the sea of reeds”? For this reason, Paldor and Nof support the suggestion that yam suf was originally yam sufah, “the sea of storms.”
I find this linguistically unlikely. Furthermore, Lakes Balah and Timsah, directly to the Gulf of Suez’s north, were lined by reedy marshland. In fact, the former is even referred to in Egyptian hieroglyphic texts as “the twfy”—twf being the Egyptian word for “reeds” from which the Hebrew word suf derives. Yam suf (yam can also denote a smaller body of water than an ocean or sea) would thus be a direct translation of from the Egyptian, leading some scholars to propose that it was the no-longer-existent Lake Balah rather than the Gulf of Suez that the Israelites crossed.
But why, if this was the case, would the translators of the Septuagint have referred to Lake Balah as “the red sea?” Indeed, they wouldn’t have. Alexandria was far from Egypt’s eastern frontier with Sinai, and while they would have been aware of the existence of the lakes, marshland, and gulf running along that frontier, they would not have been familiar with the terrain’s details or known where reeds did or didn’t grow. Faced with deciding what was the Israelites’ crossing point, they opted for the larger and more prominent Gulf of Suez. This is why we speak to this day of the crossing of the Red Sea, even though this is clearly not where the miracle of Passover could have happened.
