9 Scientific Explanations For Famous Bible Stories
8. Red Sea Parting
The story of Moses parting the Red Sea shortly after the whole 10 Plagues of Egypt (read on for the story on that) drama is one of the most famous and astonishing biblical stories that we all hear as children.
The Red Sea is an enormous body of water and it would indeed take some kind of miracle to part it so, if it really happened, how did Moses do it?
Our first clue comes from the fact that the term "Red Sea" might actually be a mistranslation of "reed sea", which already brings the scale down pretty significantly. Reeds grow in abundance around the Nile, so much so that the Egyptians made their paper out of them, so the presence of a "sea" of reeds in the marshy Nile delta is entirely conceivable.
This is all very well, but even the parting of a much smaller body of water using just wind has got to be pretty miraculous, surely?
Well, no. In fact it's a known phenomenon called "wind set down" (or a blowout tide to the surfers among you) and it can occur at the coast and in lakes with winds of just 60mph, which would put them in the category of "severe gale" or "storm". Strong, but not miraculously so.
Wind set down can cause coastal waters to be pushed back by a significant amount, certainly enough to allow a crowd of people to pass through. It has often been observed to blow an entire harbour dry and would have indeed created a very dramatic effect for the fleeing Israelites.
Experts have been trying to put their finger on the exact place that this could have happened and some are putting their money on the Lake of Tanis in the Nile delta. The lake “was a shallow brackish lagoon, and that was the ideal place for these papyrus reeds to grow” so it seems like a pretty good fit.
Unfortunately, it's difficult to be 100% sure of anything in this part of the world as the delta is constantly shifting and changing, leaving us guessing about how it would have looked thousands of years ago.