Thread by @firstladyship

PARTING THE RED SEA: FACT OR FICTION?

1. The story says the man Pharoah Ramesses II freed his people the Israelites after years in slavery, was Moses. God initiated series of plagues, finally Pharoah agreed to release the Israelites, they leave Egypt & head for the promised land

2. Fast, racing against time, the Israelites head for freedom. But Pharoah changes his mind, sends his army to chase them down & kill them.

The Israelites increased their pace, off they ran, but their way is blocked by an impenetrable obstacle - the RED SEA.

3. They are trapped & Ramesses Egyptian army is closing in fast. The Bible tells us the next amazing thing, something extraordinary happened.

Moses stretched out his arm, the water parts & the Israelites escapes right through the exploded seabed.

4. As Egyptian army pursued, the waters flood back destroying Pharoah’s army.

A great story by many stretch, but did anything like this really ever happen? Most scholars agree the story of Moses & the Israelites have been in the time of Ramesses II, the Greatest of all Pharaohs!

5. He reached his highest powers around 1230 BC, so we have a precise date.

It’s an all too familiar story, but there’s a problem. Biblical text tells about the Israelites in Egypt for so many years. We are talking generations, but no one has found any physical trace of them.

6. So let’s start our quest in one of the great museums of the world - The Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Could the answers we seek be within its walls? Our first clue can be found on the “Victory Stele of Merneptah” or simply “Israel Stele.”

7. There is an inscription by Merneptah himself & it was discovered by Flinders Petrie in 1896 at Thebes.

Merneptah ruled Egypt for just ten years in the early 1203 BC. He was the son of Ramesses II.

8. The “Victory Stele of Merneptah” is the first & the only mentioning of the word “ISREAL” in an ancient Egyptian text.

So from the very son of Ramesses II, is a story written in stone describing his victory over a people called Israel. But that’s all there is?

9. The Israelites are in the centre of this Red Sea story. But why is there only one mention of Isreal in the entire Egyptian records?

Is the problem the name? Was the Israelites called something else in that time? Our quest takes us to the city of Luxor, 500 miles from Cairo.

10. Luxor was called Thebes in the time of Ramesses II. The ancient city was his capital. It was full of magnificence, adorned with huge temples, gardens & hidden secrets.

Luxor wasn’t just Ramesses capital, it was the ceremonial & religious center of the whole Egyptian empire.

11. Evidently, there was a mysterious people of “Shasu” - (those who wander about on foot) in Luxor, the people often associated with Israelite origins.

The evidence surrounding the Shasu people of Luxor is all too compelling.

12. First is the hieroglyphs that talks about the “Shasu of Yahweh.” Is the Shasu the people we are looking for?

Secondly there is a papyrus that says, “the Israelites fled Egypt” right about the same time the story of Moses took place.

13. Finally, archeologists found something amazing in Luxor in 1930, - the ruins of a very distinctive house that many believe was built by the Shasu.

The remains of similar house, has been found all over the Holy lands.

14. If the Shasu built houses in both places, that means their travels took them between Egypt & the Holy lands, just like the story of the Israelites in the Bible.

15. This is not all; in the surface waste lands, all traces of the Shasu houses in Luxor are gone but with a satellite above, looking in the infrared spectrum, it reveals secrets hidden underneath the earth for centuries.

The image matches with the same house in Isreal.

16. So a discovery of a Shasu house in Luxor Egypt has been made, it’s the first time in 3000 years that anyone has seen it

It’s possible these are the Israelites we’ve been searching for! And there are traces of them everywhere, this might be the closest anyone can get to them.

17. So we may have found the slaves that Moses led out of Egypt. Now the question is, can we find the lost city where they began the journey?

18. In the Bible story, Exodus began in a city called Rameses, & Archaeologists believe this ancient city also called Pi-Ramesses is located 360m North of Luxor, in the current city of Qantir.

19. So we are searching for a lost city hidden among farming fields. Does the description under the fields at Qantir, match with the one in the Bible?

If it does, then perhaps Qantir city is where the Exodus began.

20. Making use of the technique called “magnetometry” which records tiny changes in earth’s dynamic field to reveal mostly hidden underground structures, we can peel back time & reveal the secrets of the ancient Qantir city. It’ll be nice to see what the data reveals.

21. If it matches the story in the Bible describing Pi-Ramesses as a large & important city with store rooms, where Pharoah kept his chariots, so we have stables

The scans reveal a huge Square mile area with huge stables for horses, just what you’ll need for an army of chariots.

22. So the answers are there, laid out in the magnetometric data. But how did the city of Ramesses look like? Again this is where tech come in.

23. Archaeologists built an augmented reality platform that combines magnetometry scans with a digital reconstruction of what we think Pi-Ramesses might have looked like 3000 years ago.

Maybe the Shasu started their journey there? If they did, where did they go? The Red Sea?

24. The big question is, “how do you explain what happened next?”

The question that puzzled many scholars for centuries is if the Israelites story is based on actual events?

If it was, what route did the Israelites take to the Holy lands?

25. The direct route would have taken them East along the Mediterranean coast. But in the biblical story, it maps Israelites journey in the desert road towards the Red Sea.

This is obviously a long hike through the Syrian heat. There’s nothing in that desert in present day.

26. No water, not even a tree. According to the Bible, somehow the Israelites made it across straight into an even tougher challenge, the Red Sea.

How were they going to cross the vast Red Sea, before the Egyptians caught up with them?

27. Back to the biblical text, Etham (the edge of the wilderness) is believed to be the modern day “Ismaïlia,” was the second place the Israelites made a stop, during the Exodus.

It is at this modern day Ismaïlia Egypt that the Bible tells that Moses parted the Red Sea.

28. So from Etham, the Israelites will be headed south. It made sense that they would have crossed the narrowest point of the Northern part of Red Sea at Etham.

Now studies show that a mile wide channel is big enough to allow the Israelites to pass.

29. But Moses would have needed to move about 2 trillion gallons of water, even the Hoover Dam Nevada, can’t hold that much water.

And even if it happened, how can so many people make it over in just one night? That doesn’t make any sense.

30. Let’s assume some event allowed the water to be removed for a moment, alright, but even then “how do you make 30 miles on foot for a single day?”

I mean, you can’t run 30 miles in a day, can you? That’s a lot of distance.

31. For now, the parting of the Red Sea is not only implausible but impossible, at least it’s impossible by scientific facts.

But what if it happened somewhere else? Now here’s an interesting twist; some experts believe the Red Sea is not the very sea the Bible talks about.

32. In fact, experts think it is misrepresented. We call it the Red Sea because that is what we read in the English Bible.

But the actual language in Hebrew is “Yam Suph” & the better translation is the “Sea of Reeds or the Reed Sea.”

33. Now the Red Sea in the Bible could be a misinterpretation of the Reed Sea. This blows our minds, doesn’t it? So we have to find out more.

Now we have no idea where to find the mysterious Reed Sea, but there is a clue hidden back in Luxor.

34. Engraved in one of the magnificent walls of the Karnak Temple Complex in Luxor, is something extraordinary.

An epic pictorial history of the conquest of Pharoah Seti I, father of Ramesses II.

35. The carved image tells of Seti I dealing with rebels & he is bringing them along the border of Egypt.

Now these rebels are a bunch of people known as the Shasu - our Israelites, the very people we’ve been looking for, bound as captives.

36. These engraving turns out to be more than just a story. We find on the engraving, the area of the coast of Egypt & we see these chariot horses coming through.

37. This schematic could show us the way to the Reed Sea. It may look like a river but Egyptologists & Archaeologists believe the channel represents the whole Nile Delta with all its lakes, tributaries & even crocodiles.

38. We have one more clue in the Bible that says the night before the Israelites crossed the Reed Sea, they camped where is called “Migdol.”

Migdol is what we can call a “fortress,” but it doesn’t actually mean a specific place.

39. However in the contest of our search for the “Reed Sea,” we are getting closer to the unfolding of a potential Bible story & it’s in a map.

So where is Migdol? Ancient Egyptians drew their maps upside down with the South at the top, the North in the bottom.

40. This makes sense when we look at this map in a different way. Then it all becomes clear, Migdol is East of the Nile Delta.

41. The Israelites journey now takes a very different route. If you follow the map, the strange detour south to the Red Sea is gone, instead from ETHAM the Israelites turned North towards Migdol, then East on direct route to the Holy lands.

42. And if we follow this route towards Migdol & try & find the “Reed Sea,” straight away, something on the map catches our attention.

43. We find a large body of water called “Lake Manzala” in the heart of the Nile Delta & it’s full of “reeds.” Could Lake Manzala be the “Reed Sea” Hebrew texts described?

Did Moses lead the Israelites across Lake Manzala?

For the record: 30 miles in the Bible is a day's march for soldiers. If the soldiers keep up, its about 8 hours of walking.

Now imagine slaves who were predominantly the old & the feeble walking 30 miles across the Red Sea seabed in just one night.

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