Conference taveng::bagels

1193.0. "News Article on Red Sea" by EMDS::SEGAL (DEENA) Sat Mar 21 1992 19:23

This article was in "The Boston Globe" newspaper  Saturday,  14 March
1992.  It is copied without permission.

                 "A Scientific Parting of the Red Sea?"
                    by David L. Chandler Globe Staff
                                    
"And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry
ground..."

The Biblical account of the parting of the Red Sea, enabling the
Israelites to flee their bondage in Egypt and escape from Pharaoh's
troops in hot pursuit, may not have required a miracle after all.  A new
report by two oceanographers says there is a perfectly natural
explanation for the event.

"...the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all the
night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided."

That's just how it could have happened, write Nathan Paldor and Doron Nof
in  a paper being published  tomorrow in the Bulletin of the American
Meteorological Society.  A strong wind of about 46 miles per hour,
blowing for about 10 miles per hour (all night) could, because of the
peculiar topography of the Gulf of the Suez, cause a drop in sea level of
about 10 feet at the end of the gulf, exposing the sea floor and allowing
people to walk across.

"And the Egyptians pursued, and went in after them into the midst of the
sea, all Pharaoh's horses, his chariots, and his horsemen...And the
waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen..."

According to the calculations based on well-accepted physical laws,
Paldor and Nof that although it would have taken about 10 hours for the
waters to recede, and abrupt shift in wind could cause the waters to
return in a sudden, devastating wave in just a few minutes.  Since a sea
floor about two miles wide could have been exposed, such a rapid return
of the water could easily have trapped the troops, allowing no time for
escape.

"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first hard-core scientific
research on the problem," said Paldor in an interview yesterday.
Although others have made suggestions about possible physical
explanations for the events described in the book of Exodus, none have
done the calculations to support such explanations, he said.

The results of the calculations "both quantitatively and qualitatively"
agree with the biblical account, said Paldor, who teaches oceanography at
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is presently on sabbatical at the
University of Rhode Island.  Nof is a professor of oceanography at
Florida State University.

Although he has not seen the new paper, oceanographer Joseph Pedlosky of
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution said "that's an ingenious idea."  He
said Paldor is "a sharp guy, he's well respected.... He's certainly a
responsible theoretician."  Pedlosky said the basic phenomenon of steady
wind causing a change in sea level is well known and is a cause of
frequent flooding in Venice, for example.

Some details of Paldor and Nof's scenario don't fit the Bible story
exactly, however.

The Biblical account says "the waters were a wall unto them on their
right hand, and on their left," and the calculations do indeed support
the idea that the waters on their right hand would have been piled up
steeply enough to give the appearance of a wall.  But what about the
left?

Paldor suggests that there may have been a natural ridge or sand bar in
the gulf, which would have left a narrow dry path for the escape with "a
wall on one side and a pool on the other," he said.

Because the bottom is sandy and shifts rapidly, it is impossible to know
what the contours were like 3,500 years ago, he said, and to be sure
whether such a ridge existed.  That part of the theory is "highly
speculative," Paldor said.

The other discrepancy from the biblical account is the direction of the
wind.  The passage in Exodus clearly specifies an east wind, but the
calculations show that the wind would have to have been from the
northwest to produce an uncovering of the sea floor.  Paldor and Nof say
the explanation may be that the mountains surrounding the gulf can
produce great variations in the wind.  It is possible, they say, that the
Israelites encountered an east wind locally, even if the main winds over
most of the area of the gulf were from the northwest.

Such a parting of the sea has never been directly observed in historical
times, Paldor said, but the area is remote and sparsely populated; a
similar receding of the sea could easily take place there now without
attracting much attention.

There are accounts of similar occurrences, though.  Napoleon was almost
drowned while trying to cross a shallow area of the Gulf of Suez, when a
"sudden high tide" overtook him.

Differences of sea level of about three feet have been recorded in the
Great Lakes as a result of steady winds, but because these lakes have
much steeper bottom slopes, such a difference would not produce the
dramatic exposure of a wide area of the sea floor as it would in the Gulf
of Suez.  According to Paldor and Nof's calculations, the unusual
narrowness, length, and shallowness of the gulf could result in exposing
a swath more than half a mile wide.

Paldor said he was surprised by the way some of his colleagues reacted to
his theory.  Because the subject matter was drawn from the Bible, even
though the calculations were based on established scientific principles,
some scientists said, "Forget it, this is not science," Paldor said.