It is possible that this may be the Migdol which is stated in the book of Exodus to have been near the next camping-place of the Israelites. From the fortress of Etham they had turned to the ‘sea,’ and had there pitched their tents ‘before Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea, over against Baal-zephon.’ In Baal-zephon, ‘Baal of the North,’ we have the name of a Phœnician temple, which is alluded to in an Egyptian papyrus;[[182]] and in place of Pi-hahiroth, the Septuagint and Coptic versions read ‘the farmstead,’ reminding us of the ahu or ‘estate’ of Pharaoh in the district of Thukut, on which the Edomite herdsmen were afterwards allowed to settle.
But what is ‘the sea,’ by the side of which the Israelites encamped? Its identification has been the subject of much controversy—a fact, however, which ceases to astonish us when we find that the Hebrew writers themselves were uncertain about it. While in the narrative of the Exodus ‘the sea’ crossed by the Israelites is carefully distinguished from the ‘Yâm Sûph’ or ‘Reedy Sea,’ at which they subsequently arrived, there are other passages in the Old Testament, more especially of a poetical nature, in which the two seas are confounded together. Two irreconcileable systems of geography are thus presented to us which have hitherto made the geography of the Exodus an insoluble problem.
In the narrative, however, all is clear and exact. The children of Israel, it was determined, instead of following the northern road to Palestine, should march along that which led to ‘the wilderness of the Yâm Sûph.’ But between them and this wilderness lay the Egyptian wall of fortification, which extended from the marshes in the north to the Gulf of Suez, or its prolongation, in the south. It was only when they had turned the southern end of the wall by crossing ‘the sea’ that they entered ‘the wilderness of the wall,’ where they wandered for three days without finding water (Exod. xv. 22). Later they came to the palm-grove of Elim, and then after that to the Yâm Sûph (Numb. xxxiii. 10).
The Yâm Sûph was well known to Hebrew geography, and corresponded with the modern Gulf of Aqaba. It was upon the Yâm Sûph, at Elath and Ezion-geber, ‘in the land of Edom,’ that Solomon built his ships (1 Kings ix. 26); and after the capture of Arad, in the extreme south of Canaan, the Israelites marched ‘from mount Hor by the way of Yâm Sûph, in order to compass the land of Edom’ (Numb. xxi. 4). Elim is but another form of Elath, the ruins of which lie close to Aqaba, while the town of Sûph lay ‘over against’ the wilderness in the plains of Moab (Deut. i. 1). The Yâm Sûph, in fact, so erroneously rendered ‘the Red Sea’ in the Authorised Version, was the Gulf of Aqaba. The sister Gulf of Suez was called by the Hebrews ‘the Egyptian Sea’ (Isa. xi. 15), a very appropriate name, since it was enclosed on either side by Egyptian territory. From the days of the third dynasty to those of the Ptolemies, Mafkat, the Sinaitic peninsula, was included among the provinces of Egypt.
In the list of the Israelitish stations given in Numb. xxxiii. a careful distinction is made between the Yâm Sûph (ver. 10) and ‘the sea,’ through the midst of which the fugitives from Pharaoh passed safely into the wilderness. This ‘sea’ washed the southern extremity of the Shur or ‘Wall’ of fortification, the line of which was approximately that of the Suez Canal. If Dr. Naville is right, in the days of the Exodus it would have extended much further to the north than is at present the case; the Bitter Lakes, in fact, marking its northern boundary. But there are serious difficulties in the way of this hypothesis. The canal which, in the time of Seti I., already united the Pelusiac arm of the Nile with the Gulf of Suez, ran southward as far as the modern town of Suez, where its mouth can still be traced. Only five miles north of Suez, moreover, the fragments of a stela can still be seen, on which Darius commemorated his reopening of the old canal of the Pharaohs. Had the gulf really extended so far north as Ismailîya and the Bitter Lakes, this southern prolongation of the canal would be hard to understand.
However this may be, the poets and later writers of the Old Testament came to forget what was meant by ‘the sea.’ It was confounded with the Yâm Sûph, and the scene of the Exodus was accordingly transferred from the Gulf of Suez to the Gulf of Aqaba. Dr. Winckler has recently endeavoured to show that besides Muzri or Egypt, the Assyrian inscriptions know of another Muzri or ‘borderland’ in the north-west of Arabia. If so, this second Muzri or Egypt might help to explain the confusion between the two seas.
It is in the song of triumph over the destruction of the Egyptians that the confusion first makes its appearance. Here (Exod. xv. 4) ‘the sea’ and ‘the Yâm Sûph’ are used as equivalents, and the contents of the song are summed up at the end in the statement that ‘Moses brought Israel from the Yâm Sûph.’ But elsewhere in the Pentateuch the geography is accurate, and it is not until we come to the speeches in the book of Joshua that the two seas are once more confused together.[[183]] The same geographical error is repeated in two of the later Psalms, as well as in a passage of the book of Nehemiah.[[184]] The older Hebrew geography had by this time been forgotten; with the loss of Edom and its seaports an exact knowledge of the two arms of the Red Sea had faded from the memories of the Jews. But in the historical narrative of the Pentateuch all is still distinct and clear.
Hardly had the Israelites left Goshen before the Pharaoh repented of his permission for their departure. The retreating multitude, encumbered with women and children, with flocks and herds, and with the booty that had been carried off from the Egyptians, was still encamped within the lines of fortification, near the southernmost Migdol or ‘Tower,’ and on the shores of ‘the sea.’ Southward was a waterless desert; behind were the hostile forces of Egypt. The situation seemed hopeless; ‘the wilderness,’ as the Pharaoh said, had ‘shut them in,’ and there seemed no escape from the Egyptian troops which had now been sent in pursuit of them.
But Israel was saved, as it were, by miracle. All night long the sky was black with clouds, while a strong east wind drove the shallow waters of ‘the sea’ before it towards the western bank. The fugitives marched in haste through its dried-up bed, and before morning dawned they had reached the eastern shore. The Egyptian forces pursued, but it was too late. The wheels of the chariots sank into the soft sand, and before they could advance far the wind dropped and the waters returned upon them. The chariots and host of Pharaoh were overwhelmed by the flowing tide.
Classical history knew of similar events. Diodoros (xvi. 46) tells us that when Artaxerxes of Persia led his forces against Egypt, part of his army perished, swallowed up in the ‘gulfs’ of the Sirbonian Lake on the Mediterranean Sea. Alexander’s troops, moreover, narrowly escaped being swallowed up by the waters of the Pamphylian Gulf, through which they passed during the winter, and their escape was magnified by later writers into a miracle.[[185]]