Mount Sinai and the Red Sea Crossing (Part One): Digging for Truth Episode 72

hi welcome to digging for truth I'm your co-host Henry Smith and our program is sponsored by the associates for biblical research we love digging into the world of archaeology in history to show the reliability of the Bible and today we're gonna be talking about probably what is considered the moment most momentous miracle of the Old Testament the parting of the sea by God for Moses and the Israelites and connected to that is the location of Mount Sinai both of these are two great questions that people have asked about where did the crossing take place and where is Mount Sinai located well we're gonna have fun in these next two episodes discussing just that I'm joined today by my esteemed colleague and friend co-host Scott Lancer Scott how are you hi Henry I'm doing well it's good to see you again and dr. Brian wood is here again to share with us his expertise on these matters the director of research for a br Brian it's good to see you thank you for having me well we're glad to have you here okay so we're gonna jump right into it we know the amazing stories the story of the parting of the sea after the Israelites come out of Egypt but we've got to back up a little bit and we're going to just talk about their departure and sort of some of the geography and some of the locations mentioned in the biblical text to sort of lead our audience to where we think this amazing miracle may have taken place so Brian I'm gonna hand it over to you and let you get started okay well there's many ideas of course like everything else in our key ology everybody's got their own theory yes but the traditional idea is that the Israelites left Ramses and then traveled to the south to the Gulf of Aqaba or Gulf of Suez and crossed at one of these places but when you begin to work with the details of the text it turns out that probably it's a lot closer to Egypt than that and so I I sort of go along with the ideas of one of our colleagues Jim Hoffmeyer who's done a lot of work in the Egyptian Delta area in this area where the Israelites traveled through as they were leaving Egypt so when you do an analysis of the the text and what it says I think it's going to lead us to a place that's relatively close to where they left from Rameses actually right because the the route is not a straight line okay so when we when we read the text well there's one other fact that I should mention right away and that is travel time how far could the Israelites travel in one day with thousands upon thousands of people they're animals they're little kids elderly they're elderly it's not gonna be very far so much lot of sense some people would like to put Mount Sinai in Saudi Arabia it just is too far away right now so you have to keep these factors in mind and when you look at the itinerary you know we have a very detailed itinerary from Ramses to Mount Sinai yes now when you deal with the after Mount Sinai it gets I haven't really analyzed that but it's not so straightforward but from what we have preserved for us as far as stopping places and so on we can work out the pretty much the route and where they went so if you look at the map that's up on the screen you can see that Ramses is there and east side of the Delta and we have a little dotted line going south east to Tel L mascoutah that's the ancient site of suck off that's the first stopping place mentioned it might have taken a couple of days to get there but it's a major stopping point now I'm very familiar with Tel L mascoutah because I excavated there for three seasons and we've made some interesting finds was that just recently Brian well it was a little while ago we won't say when it was but interesting discoveries there actually some material from the middle Bronze period the time of the sojourn in Egypt may be related to the Israelites but nothing actually from the time of the journey which would have been in the early Late Bronze period of course 14 46 BC but we know we think we know we think suck losses at Tel mascoutah because the name Sukkoth is preserved in the word mascoutah we have Sukkoth with a prefixed name which makes it a noun so that seems to be a good candidate and that's located in the wadi tomb a lot it's an east-west route across the southern part of the Delta originally that was one of the branches of the Nile and the Nile kept moving westward so at wadi as a dried-up River yeah right some of the term means yes there's a canal there that they use for irrigation then we read that they come to eat I'm which means fortress according to the text at the edge of the wilderness and there we're told the Israelites turn but we're not told if they turn north or if they turned south now that we've done a fair bit of archaeological work in Egypt we realize that item was a border fortress because we are now at the eastern border of Egypt of course the Israelites are trying to get out the the Egyptians after the Hyksos episode where these Canaanites came in and took over rule of the country for a period of time they basically sealed up their eastern border so people just couldn't wander back and forth and so this was a difficulty facing the Israelites they had to get out of the country but how do they get through the defensive system that the Egyptians had sent up not and not only fortresses but canals wide deep canals along the border and that would have been very difficult for them to traverse with family animals and all that kind of thing yeah so they had to turn and we believe from the evidence we have they turned north and the places that are mentioned the campsite and so on leads one to believe that they were up in the north bottles of fun that means bail of the north one of the one of the stopping places so we will now come to your question where was the Red Sea crossing yes and we're gonna do that in our next segment Scott is gonna pick up with the next question for that and folks dr. wood has just set the table for us we're just getting started on the journey it took the Israelites a long time it's gonna take us some time to work through it so don't go away we'll be right back in a culture of intense Bible denying skepticism associates for biblical research exists to strengthen followers of Jesus by affirming the authority of the Bible our archaeological fieldwork and original research form a strong foundation in upholding the reliability of the scriptures students or anyone asking if they can really trust the Bible please visit our website and partner with us by joining our prayer team or financially supporting this ministry and thank you for standing with us [Music] hi welcome back to digging for truth I'm your co-host Henry Smith I'm here with my colleague Scott Lancer and dr. Bryant wood and we're talking about the crossing of the Red Sea and the location of Mount Sinai and we left off our last segment just just getting started on the journey right the Israelites went to Sukkot or suck off depending on how you pronounce it so Scott you're gonna pick it up from here with dr. wood yes yes so yeah we mentioned that the Israelites left the Sukkoth and tell mascoutah and they camped out eat em on the edge of the desert as the scripture says so we get the sense there Bryant that they're not traveling that far that the sea is probably very close by let's talk a little bit about the text and the geography of the that area and how we can understand this more clear okay well we talked in the last segment about the fact the Israelites could not travel very far in a day on the order of maybe six miles a day with their families and flocks and herds and so on so when we look at this route we see that it would take them about a week's time to get to eat am that place at the border there and then probably turned north the evidence seemed to suggest that and then they only travel another three days they reach the sea in ten days only ten days okay no they made a bit of a security group here going south east then east now north but that seems to be what the text is saying and we have quite a bit of detail given about where they camped at the say it mentions McDowell and Boggs the phone and the pea high here oath which means the mouth of the canal so they were you know near one of these canals that I mentioned before but now they're sort of trapped if you remember Pharaoh changed his mind about letting the Israelites go yes and after they left he said boy we got to get these people back you know we don't have our work force here and so Pharaoh got his army together and he set out for to catch up with the Israelites so if you look at our map you can see that from Rameses if Pharaoh was just leaving say after a week or so after he decided he's going to chase the Israelites he would simply go east directly east from Rameses and he would come to the place where many scholars believe the crossing took place a good friend of mine has done a lot of research in this area Jim Hoffmeyer he was friend of mine at the University of Toronto and he's excavated in this very area he's done a lot of work around an area referred to as the Bala Lake and determining the extent of that Lake and the depth of it and so on and he concludes that this is the correct location for the sea crossing now this might bother a lot of people because they might have in mind some monster body of water actually it was a large body of water in antiquity but it's not there today the Suez Canal comes through here and when they built that canal it drained this particular Lake you can see remnants of it particularly from a satellite photo but even in the local area you can find pockets of water that you still see the reeds going incidentally the Hebrew name is young sooth which means sea of reeds it doesn't say red sea in the Hebrew it says read see and so this appears to be the place and Jim Hoff Myers determined it was a very large body of water satellite photo tells you that actually and it was very deep and with Pharaoh now approaching with the army they're backed up against this tzuf and as I mentioned they they're trying to penetrate the border fortresses canals all the way along so now they're trapped their backs are to the wall so to speak and it would take a miracle for them to get out of Egypt and to survive an attack from Pharaoh and his army and that's exactly what God did he parted the waters of this body of water and they crossed over and once they were on the other side they were out of Egypt they were into the so called wilderness Sinai area and so they were sort of on their way once they had gotten through this so that's a little bit of the geography it was that situation there and as I say they reached that point in ten days only and then they continued their journey from there so I think what I hear you saying in part there's a lot of limitations created by the biblical narrative as to how far they could have gotten the logic logic of the group that they had but also the fact that the Pharaoh would assume a Brian I'm inferring inferring from what you said before Brian that there were fortresses here along this border outposts military outposts and canals to slow down the Israelites so if that's the case the Pharaoh could have gotten word from his military commanders past to him and he would have known directly where to go to find it where they were at all time right you get that impression from from the biblical text so you know it doesn't say that so that's interesting so the original Israelites are sort of departing and they're trying to figure out where are we going to go you know we're leaving we want to get out of here but where are we gonna you know which direction do we go is that is that kind of your sense of yes absolutely okay well go ahead please interject that some people debate about you mentioned they could go six miles a day and some people want to making the thing 25 miles a day and things that you know why do we end up with six miles a day pretty much based on what the Bedouins can do with their flocks and herds in a day and it's about six miles five miles maybe seven you know somewhere around there now if it's an army and with the equipment and maybe camels or donkeys or horses or something they can go a bit faster they might reach 20 miles in a day if they're pushing it but you know travel is difficult in the ancient world and so six miles a day is about it for a large group of people seems logical well folks thank you for joining us again for this episode of digging for truth we're talking about the israelite departure from egypt and the crossing of the sea and we'll be right back for our last segment of this episode after this break don't go away by M'Lynn spade is at non-technical quarterly publication published by the associates for biblical research written from a scholarly and conservative viewpoint bible and spade supports the inerrancy of the biblical record and as it must read for both the serious bible student and anyone asking if they can really trust the Bible archaeological evidence properly interpreted upholding the history of the Bible subscribe today at bible archaeology org [Music] hi welcome back to digging for truth I'm your co-host Henry Smith and we're here today talking about the israelite departure from egypt the crossing of the sea the great miracle and the location of mount sinai so Bryant we were talking a little bit about the name of the sea and we're gonna have some talk here Scott you're gonna interject cuz you've done some research on this in the Hebrew we have this word yong-soo talked a little bit about that and then let's talk about the use of the term red sea yes well unfortunately the way this has been translated has caused confusion yob tzuf as I mentioned literally means read see and we said in the previous segment that the most likely candidate from the evidence we have is a place that's called bowel Lake which has been drained it's not there but we know basically where it was located and it's referred to in the Egyptian text as the read see now you think whoa that clinches it but there were many bodies of water called the reed sea so it's not a simple matter in fact later on in the itinerary on the way to Sinai they stopped again at the reed sea to camp well it's not the crossing rate see it's actually the suez Gulf of Suez yeah at that point in the itinerary that was called the reed sea so that's caused a lot of confusion well in the Septuagint it's God will speak to this they translated it Red Sea yeah because that was their concept and that got carried into the New Testament so every time yong-seok is mentioned in the Old Testament is translated read see after the Septuagint and then in the New Testament writers of course were using the Septuagint so Red Sea shows up there it's caused a lot of confusion right right and names changed over time and all that so maybe Scot you could talk and speak into this a little bit let's pick up from there yeah well the the the Red Sea in the New Testament the the the Apostle spoke with the Red Sea a couple of basic biblical texts that that referenced that in Acts and Hebrews but the the focus for them was the development of this word over time meaning a larger it becomes a larger and larger body of water and by the time of the New Testament period you know they they look at the writings of the the Greek historians this body of water wasn't just the Red Sea we know today but it spread out possibly over - maybe all the way as far up as as the Mediterranean Sea yeah it becomes this huge body of water even encompassing partially some of the ocean and if you look at some of the ancient maps from the descriptions of these ancient writings the Red Sea became something much larger so interesting in the New Testament writers could have been just using a word to describe this body of water and of course the Red Sea being this the the Great Sea is symbolic of also of God bringing us out of the sea to the promised land into delivery yes it's very interesting to see how it's used in the New Testament certainly has some specificity but it also has some grandeur to it it's really good so what we have something a little bit more complex here right we're not saying if certainly the New Testament authors were incorrect they were correct in their description their emphasis was not on geography per se yeah they had other interests in mind but when we get back more closely to the events our idea of what Red Sea is we have to try to put that out of our mind and think about what is Moses talking about in the in the biblical text of the Old Testament now let's go back to a little bit to the Bala Lake region there now that's been drained because of the because of just over time and the Suez Canal particularly so so in antiquity some people have been concerned of your taking away from the miraculous nature of this affair toward that you know the Red Sea that's a big body of water we've all watched the Ten Commandments with you know the great miracle of parting the sea if it's 200 feet tall and you decide we're not detracting from the miracle here right would say this is a miracle still but we're trying to get the geography accurate maybe accurate maybe you could expand on that a little bit to give our audience and ease it with that well it was a large body of water this bowel Lake yeah Jim Hoffmeyer estimates it's probably was 30 feet deep no it's not the Mediterranean rights not the Gulf of Suez right but it's a body of water that was impenetrable for the Israelites it formed part of the eastern border of Egypt one of the barriers there's several lakes along that eastern border yes so between the lakes there's very wide deep canals the Egyptians dug periodically there's fortresses and so on so it was part of the border actually the eastern border of Egypt and the Israelites needed a miracle no matter where they cross they needed a miracle and so it's at a place called yeah I'm so if we know from Egyptian records by a lake was referred to a number of times foot visitors as as the sea of reeds and so all the evidence comes together to suggest this particular place and as you say we have a idea in our mind some monster body of water but it doesn't matter how big it is if it's a part of the border and it's a barrier to the Israelites they had to somehow penetrate it and the only way would be for God to open up that water and allow them to cross and the Bible's quite specific about it God parted parted the water with a wall on the left and a wall on the right it wasn't some wind blow the latter two one end of this bond or something yes yes so it's still a significant event I mean you got children you got elderly you got animals so I think 30 even if it's 30 or 40 feet deep that's still that's still oh it's in plastic and so so I think I think when we look at the geography the last thing I'll add we only have a few seconds left but you know it says that in the text and numbers that they passed as soon as they laughs P ha her oath they passed through the sea into the desert so right there the deserts right they're meaningless 9 9 yeah and I think and this is part of your argument for the geography so well folks thank you for joining us for this episode we're setting the stage now we've talked about the crossing of the Red Sea we've talked about the biblical text some of the archeology the geography in our next episode we're gonna pick up from there and we're going to be talking about the location of Mount Sinai which there's been many locations that have been identified as Mount Sinai but we're going to work through the material ABR has identified a mountain in the Sinai desert particularly dr. wood that we think may be a good candidate and we hope you'll join us for that episode please join us down thank you [Music] [Music]

Channel: Associates for Biblical Research

Views: 18,728

Rating: 4.262032 out of 5

Keywords: Red Sea, Rameses, Succoth, Tell el-Maskhuta, Etham, Migdol, Ballah Lakes, Yam Suph, Gulf of Suez, Pi-Hahiroth, Exodus, Mount Sinai, Sinai, Desert of Sin, Tell el-Daba, Avaris, Baal Zephon

Id: xiwQ0KtD3fI

Length: 26min 1sec (1561 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 01 2019