Which Sea Did the Israelites Cross?

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.