Biblical skeptics often assert one or more of the following things regarding an event like the parting of the Red Sea:
- that it’s impossible, because miracles are impossible;
- that its seemingly “mythical” or fantastic character proves that the Old Testament is historically unreliable; and
- that a natural explanation is not to be had, either.
Along these lines, Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass gives his opinion of the entire Exodus story as presented in the Bible: “Really, it’s a myth. . . . Sometimes as archaeologists we have to say that never happened because there is no historical evidence.”
I believe that whatever occurred in this instance, with Moses, Pharaoh, and a body of water, about 3,250 years ago, God was behind it, for his purposes, and that it was extraordinary. I’m providing readers with this particular natural explanation of the parting of the Red Sea for the sake of pondering and consideration—as food for thought. If nothing else, it’s certainly fascinating.
Carl Drews is a software engineer who has a Master of Science degree in atmospheric and oceanic sciences from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Graduate Certificate in oceanography. His Master’s thesis was “Application of Storm Surge Modeling to Moses’ Crossing of the Red Sea; and to Manila Bay, the Philippines.” He works for the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a top U.S. institution. His article, which made quite a splash, is “Dynamics of Wind Setdown at Suez and the Eastern Nile Delta.” It has been discussed and analyzed in many well-known venues, including New Scientist, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post, and a host of other news and information outlets.
NPR provides an overview:
“This is something that is known in meteorological science as wind setdown,” Drews tells NPR’s Guy Raz. . . .
After modeling a body of water that resembled the waters trapping Moses and the Israelites, Drews enforced the laws of physics and applied a wind stress to the water body. . . .
“The place I picked is not at the Red Sea proper, it’s at the north end of the Suez Canal in one of the shallow lagoons along the Mediterranean Sea.” . . . This is the same area where a British general named Alexander Tulloch witnessed a similar wind setdown event in 1882.
“He observed a strong east wind blow all night long, and in the morning the water had completely disappeared,” says Drews. “The lake was blown seven kilometers to the west.”
The Guardian cites Drews:
The simulations match fairly closely with the account in Exodus. . . . The parting of the waters can be understood through fluid dynamics. The wind moves the water in a way that’s in accordance with physical laws, creating a safe passage with water on two sides and then abruptly allowing the water to rush back in.
Drews explains his scientific research and speculations in his article published by Plos One. The phenomenon of the wind setdown “occurs in shallow coastal areas when strong winds blow offshore.” His experiment simulated “a wind setdown event at the eastern end of the Lake of Tanis, which extended from Damietta to Pelusium during the Egyptian New Kingdom Period (approximately 1250 B.C.).”
The model demonstrated that a gap could have opened up “where the Pelusiac branch of the Nile flowed into the Lake of Tanis.” This would result in a land bridge about 3 miles wide and 2 to 2.5 miles in length, which would remain open for four hours under a wind of 64 miles per hour.
There is evidence to suggest that there were about 20,000 people involved in the Exodus. Keeping in mind Drews’s numbers above, the average width of a man (shoulder-to-shoulder) is about 1.5 feet. If we use that figure for each person (knowing that women and children are smaller), it could, I submit, account for space between people.
Now, in an area that is 3.1 miles wide (16,368 feet), approximately 10,912 people could fit side by side (using the width of males). This means that only two rows would be required to add up to 20,000 people (or ten rows of 2,000 each, which would take up one fifth of the width available). A slow walk is about two miles an hour, a fast walk three miles an hour. If we use the slower rate of walking, the distance could be covered in an hour and fifteen minutes, and the model allows four hours.
It is thus seen that the passage (assuming the possibility of Drews’s model) is entirely possible—not a “logistical” problem at all for this number of people. If the Egyptian army was far enough behind the Hebrews so that the soldiers couldn’t shoot arrows at them, then they could all get across before the Egyptians started pursuing them across the dry bed of the area formerly occupied by water.
Exodus 14:21 states, “The Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night.” In Drews’s higher time estimate (with a higher wind), the land was dry for 7.4 hours. That could easily be construed as “all night” (say, 11 P.M. to 6:24 A.M.). Once the Egyptians were on the dry bed, the waters rushed back due to the wind ceasing, by God’s providence—just at the right time.
The whole thing is altogether plausible, provided that Drews’s figures and calculations are correct. Of course, they can be questioned in a number of areas, particularly regarding details of the topography and layout of the Nile Delta, with all its various ever-evolving waterways, 3,250 years ago.
Three years after his groundbreaking article, Drews published “Using Wind Setdown and Storm Surge on Lake Erie to Calibrate the Air-Sea Drag Coefficient” in the same journal. He stated,
On December 1-2, 2006 and January 30-31, 2008 there were strong windstorms over the Great Lakes that caused extreme surge events on Lake Erie. In both cases the wind came from the west, producing displacements between the water levels at the western and eastern ends of the lake of 4.2 m [13.8 feet] in 2006 and 5.1 m [16.7 feet] in 2008.
This is noteworthy because Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes (about 30 miles from my home in Michigan) is a shallow body of water, as far as lakes go, with an average depth of 62 feet. Thus, the differential in water level between western and eastern ends of the lake (it’s about 241 miles long) amounted to 22 percent of the average depth in the 2006 storm and 27 percent in 2008.
To provide a mental image of what this means, I have a small pool in my backyard that is 4 feet deep and 15 feet in diameter. The equivalent difference in water level, compared to these storms on Lake Erie, would be a difference of depth of 10.6 inches higher on one side of the pool compared to the other (analogy to the 2006 storm), or 13 inches (analogy to 2008). We can readily observe, then, that such wind events could cause dry land to appear in shallower bodies of water, especially if the winds are significantly stronger.
There is a second requirement to match up with Exodus 14: the water has to part, leaving navigable dry (or muddy!) land for a long enough time for 20,000 people to cross it, and it has to be deep enough when it returns to normal depths to drown the Egyptians (14:26-28). Drews set his model (for various scientific reasons) at 3 meters’ depth (or 9.8 feet) for “the Pelusiac branch of the Nile from Bubastis to Daphnae,” where he believes that the “parting” may have occurred. If this calculation is correct, it’s more than enough to drown the Egyptian army.
Okay, fine, you might say, but how did the Israelites survive for forty years out in the desert? Dave Armstrong answers this question and many more in his book, The Word Set in Stone, new from Catholic Answers Press. Buy a copy today at our shop.