How did the Red Sea part in Exodus? Medicane, storm surge, Rossby waves, suggests UK study

Moses, the prophet of God, led the Hebrews out of slavery from Egypt after the tenth plague (the death of firstborn sons in every Egyptian household) forced the Pharoah’s hand. On the way, Moses parted the waters of the Red Sea and the Israelites crossed safely. The waters then came back, trapping the Pharaonic army, sent by the ruler who had broken his promise.

At least that is what the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament tells us. Parting the waters of the Red Sea is one of several miracles ascribed to Moses (also known as Moshe and Musa), a prophet in all three Abrahamic faiths — Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Now, a new study published by two researchers from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom has suggested that the parting of the waters can also be explained through meteorological phenomena — a negative storm surge caused by a Medicane, a wind setdown, tidal resonance or Rossby waves.

Rebekah Garratt & Rikesh Kunverji from the School of Biological Sciences, University of Leicester, wrote in How did God part the Red Sea?:

The speed of the wind to have parted the Red Sea would need to have been considerable in this Biblical account, especially with the ability and being able to keep the water apart for extended periods of time. The aim of this paper is to discuss feasible ways that this crossing could have taken place, by considering meteorological and tidal phenomena.

It’s all in the geography

All four phenomena used by Garatt and Kunverji to explain the Biblical event have one thing in common: the location.

The Bible does not exactly name the Red Sea in the Exodus account. Both researchers cite a 2018 piece by Dennis Bratcher, a retired Professor of the Old Testament. He wrote:

…nowhere in the entire Old Testament Hebrew text is the body of water associated with the exodus ever called the “Red Sea.” Instead in the Hebrew text the reference is to the yam suph. The word yam in Hebrew is the ordinary word for “sea,” although in Hebrew it is used for any large body of water whether fresh or salt. The word suph is the word for “reeds” or “rushes,” the word used in Ex. 2:3, 5 to describe where Moses’ basket was placed in the Nile. So, the biblical reference throughout the Old Testament is to the “sea of reeds”…

Bratcher added the translation “Red Sea” was simply a traditional one introduced into English by the King James Version Bible through the second century BC Greek Septuagint and the later Latin Vulgate. “It then became a traditional translation of the Hebrew terms (yam suph),” he said.

The northern end of the Red Sea, the Gulf of Suez, separates the mainland from the Sinai Peninsula and the ‘Land of Canaan’, to which the Israelites under Moses were headed.

The researchers’ first hypothesis for the water parting is a ‘negative’ storm surge caused by a Medicane. A negative storm surge happens when coastal waters fall to lower levels during an extreme weather event. It occurs most dramatically in inlets and bays such as the Gulf of Suez.

The researchers gave the example of Hurricane Irma, which caused parts of the waters off the Florida Peninsula to push back, exposing the sea floor.

An event like Hurricane Irma is not possible in the Red Sea or the Gulf of Suez. However, the Mediterranean (to which it now connects via the Suez Canal) and the Arabian Sea (to which it connects via the Strait of Bab El Mandeb) do host ‘Medicanes’, hurricane-like tropical storms.

Medicanes have recently wrought havoc on opposite shores of the Mediterranean — Greece in 2020 and Libya earlier this year, where at least 5,000 people died in the port of Derna.

“Tropical cyclones require a sea temperature of at least 27°C, as well as being in a low pressure region within 30° latitude of the equators low pressure region. Particularly in the Summer months, the Red Sea meets both of these requirements making a medicane, and the subsequent negative surge, a possible explanation to allow the Israelites to cross an exposed reef,” the researchers wrote.

The Biblical account also mentions a ‘strong east wind’ as having helped part the waters. The authors said a phenomenon known as ‘wind setdown’ matched this description.

If winds, at a speed of 28 ms-1 were to be “incident” for 12 hours, it would expose a raised reef in the Suez, where the Israelites would have crossed over into Sinai, Garatt and Kunverji hypothesised.

A third hypothesis they suggested was ‘tidal resonance’.

The phenomena occurs “when a sudden, unexpected external input, such as extreme wind, excites one of the resonant modes of a local region of the Red Sea, leading to a much more extreme low tide, exposing greater areas of the seabed,” the authors wrote.

One area where this has been seen is the Bay of Fundy on the United States-Canada border in the North Atlantic. There, “the tidal frequency is close to its natural frequency causing the most extreme tides on the planet,” the writers noted.

“Due to the greatest fluctuation in sea level, the Gulf of Suez represents the best location for Moses to have crossed due to any tidal extremes,” the researchers wrote.

The fourth and last hypothesis is Rossby waves. Garatt and Kunverji stated:

Rossby waves are caused by the rotation of the Earth, and are found in two forms, oceanic and atmospheric…The waves move vast amounts of water meaning an occurrence at the Red Sea could have moved vast amounts of water, causing the tide to recede by an unusual amount, leaving shallow or no water for the Israelites to walk through.

Interestingly, the authors noted that Napoleon Bonaparte’s account of his campaign against the Mamluks of Egypt in the 1790s also entailed crossing the Red Sea through tidal changes.

“Whether a miraculous act of God or due to some of the unlikely, coincidental phenomena discussed in this paper, the chance of ‘parting’ is not zero,” wrote the researchers in the study published in the  Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics.

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