Did the Israelites really walk through the Red Sea?

A recent show, airing on the History Channel, had experts taking exception to the Bible's miraculous account of the Red Sea crossing. These so called experts stated that the word translated Red was actually Reed. The Reed Sea, according to their research, was a shallow salt water marsh east of the Nile which dried up when the wind blew the water out into the Mediterranean. The Israelites were able to cross the dried up marsh before a change in the wind permitted the water to come back in. The incoming water, according to these experts, saturated the ground so quickly that the Egyptian war chariots got stuck in the mud of the marsh. By the time the chariots were able to clear the marsh, the Israelites had been able to get away.



Since the Reed Sea was so shallow, the elimination of the entire Egyptian army was simply not possible. These experts claimed that the time it took the Egyptians to get unstuck was sufficient for the Israelites to lose themselves in the country side. It was the arny's inability to locate them that led to the survival of the Jewish nation.

This argument does not stand up to the smell test!

Let's apply a little bit of mental gymnastics and see if this presentation is really more believeable than the Biblical account. The nation of Isreal was between 1.2 and 2 million people. That is approximately the number of people living in Nashville, Tennessee and its five surrounding counties. These people included young and old, mostly traveling on foot. These people also had large flocks of sheep and goats, herds of cattle and donkeys, camels and wagons. Stop and think for a moment. Trained soldiers would have been able to follow the trail with their eyes closed!! Just the animal droppings would have been sufficient to follow the nation of Israel. Chariots would have closed the gap rapidly, and the distruction of the Israelites would have been assured. In fact, the only way to save the nation of Israel was accurately recorded in the Bible.



How 'bout that hoop?