From Goshen to Sina'i: The Research

The Red Sea at sunrise. Image credit: Mohamed Kamal via Wikimedia Commons Of all the miracles in the book of Exodus, the most impenetrable to scientific reasoning would seem to be the parting of the Red Sea. By comparison, the Ten Plagues are fodder for a high school Enviro syllabus: Toxic algal blooms or “ red tides ,” like the annual scourge in Lake Erie , can lead to mass die-offs of marine life -  potentially producing an invasion of frogs and the disease-laden insects that they would otherwise have eaten. I’ll get to the rest of the Ten Plagues - locusts, darkness, Slaying of the Firstborn among them - in another blog post. But for now, suffice it to say that climate events like those we are accustomed to in the 21st century loom large in scientists’ understanding of the biblical plagues. But who has ever seen waters “divided,” so that hundreds or thousands of people could go “through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left” (Exodus 14:22 ...

St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai Desert, Egypt. Image credit: Makalu from Pixabay. Mount Sinai is almost definitely not in Sinai. At least, not what we call the Sinai Peninsula today. Since the third century, most Christians have believed that a mountain on the Sinai Peninsula was the Mountain of God where Moses received the Ten Commandments. About 1,450 years ago, the Roman emperor Justinian built a beautiful monastery dedicated to St. Catherine at the foot of that mountain, called Jebel Musa or Mountain of Moses, in a part of the Sinai Desert that now belongs to Egypt. Today, pilgrims are welcomed on most mornings by the Greek Orthodox monks who live there in quiet devotion, and religiously-themed videos still center on this location at the low tip of the triangular Sinai peninsula as the actual backdrop to the biblical stories. 21st century archaeologists are very sceptical about the monks’ claims to fame. Decades of research have pretty much established that there ...

Hi, I’m Bonnie J. Gordon, and this is my Google Earth flyover for the route the Israelites might have taken as they fled from Pharaoh in Egypt in the biblical stories of the Exodus. It’s based on the work of Colin J. Humphreys, a Cambridge University physicist who wrote a book called The Miracles of Exodus. I created this flyover as part of the research for my own novels, collectively called The Sina’i Trilogy. You can find out more, and get a link to Dr. Humphreys’s book , on my website Goshen2Sinai-Research.com. Our first stop is the Land of Goshen, the area that’s highlighted in orange on the Google Earth map. No one is quite sure exactly where Goshen was  located, but its description fits the fertile Nile River Delta that still supplies food to most Egyptians. I am calling the town my characters live in Pi-Habiru. Some scholars believe the word Habiru is the origin of our word Hebrew, as in “the Hebrew slaves,” but most think it was applied to anyone in Egypt who was a servan...

A scene from Nina Paley's animated feature Seder-Masochism . Image credit: Nina Paley So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh (Ex. 1:11, NIV translation). What is a “store city,” anyway? The ancient Egyptian equivalent of a gigantic Amazon fulfillment center? Archaeologists have never found anything matching that description, in Egypt or anywhere else. Every village and town in the world has depots and repositories of various types, but - at least until very recently - there’s never been so much stuff around that you needed a metropolis to store it where people had no room to live. So, assuming that at least part of the Exodus story contains elements of truth , the products of Israelite labor mentioned in the Hebrew Bible were more likely to be city-sized storage facilities within much larger municipalities than actual “store cities.” But that still begs the question of where Pithom and ...

Statues at the boundary of the archaeological dig at Tell el Amarna, Egypt. Image credit: Einsamer Schütze, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons      In 2015, thousands of graves of children and teens from biblical-era Egypt were found at the archaeological site of Tell el-Amarna, once the capital city of the monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaten. The skeletons showed signs of heavy labor, and had been wrapped only in rough matting before being dumped into the ground. Their families were unknown.      A Times of Israel reporter, Amanda Borschel-Dan, asked Amarna Project director Barry Kemp whether these skeletons could be the remains of Israelite slaves under Pharaoh.      His answer was a quick no.      “I am afraid that I do not accept the Old Testament narrative as a historical record, and therefore that there is any connection between Amarna and ‘Hebrew slaves,'” he replied promptly in an email.      Fr...