A Skeptic's Guide to Passover

Scientific explanations for the parting of the Red Sea, the 10 plagues, and the burning bush.

By Michael Lukas

For thousands of years, skeptics and believers alike have debated whether the events described in the Passover story—the parting of the Red Sea, the 10 plagues, and the burning bush—actually took place. Roman Jewish historian Josephus Flavius speculated that the parting of the Red Sea "might be of God's will or of natural origin. Let everyone believe at his own discretion." The skeptic's skeptic, Sigmund Freud, called the Passover story "a pious myth," contending that Moses was a rebellious Egyptian prince who worshiped the sun god Aton and made up the Jewish religion as a political ploy.* In more recent times, scientific explanations of the Passover story range from formula-laden academic papers like "Modeling the Hydrodynamic Situation of the Exodus" to more popular inquiries such as Cambridge materials scientist Colin Humphreys' The Miracles of Exodus. Whether or not you subscribe to these theories, they beat listening to your little cousin sing the "Four Questions."

As anyone who has seen The Ten Commandments can attest, the parting of the Red Sea is one of, if not the most, climactic moments in the Passover story. As Exodus describes it:

And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground; and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left.

Accepting the biblical account as a "possible 'qualitative' description of an event," Florida State oceanographer Doron Nof set out to investigate whether the parting of the Red Sea is "plausible from a physical point of view." Using a common phenomenon called wind set-down effect, he found that "a northwesterly wind of 20 m/s blowing for 10-14 h is sufficient to cause a sea level drop of about 2.5m." Such a drop in sea level, Nof speculates, might have exposed an underwater ridge, which the Israelites crossed as if it were dry land. Although the event is plausible, Nof estimated that the likelihood of such a storm occurring in that particular place and time of year is less than once every 2,400 years.

While scientists agree that wind set-down effect could have caused the Red Sea to part as described in the Bible, most biblical scholars and archeologists insist that the Israelites' crossing did not take place at the Red Sea at all. The original Hebrew (yam suph), they contend, should be translated as Sea of Reeds, not Red Sea. So where's the Sea of Reeds? It depends whom you ask. In the somewhat specious History Channel documentary Exodus Decoded, Simcha Jacobovici (aka the Naked Archaeologist) places the Israelites' crossing in the Bitter Lakes, a reedy marshland north of the Gulf of Suez that was subsumed during the construction of the Suez Canal. For his part, Walking the Bible author Bruce Feiler concludes that the Sea of Reeds is Lake Timsah, located halfway between Port Said and Suez. But The Miracles of Exodus author Humphreys argues that while the translation of "the Red Sea" may be incorrect, the Sea of Reeds nevertheless refers to the Red Sea, concluding that "there can be little doubt that the Red Sea crossing was made possible by wind setdown at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba."

http://www.slate.com/id/2215127/