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posted by martyb on Wednesday December 10 2014, @06:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the pillar-of-fire dept.

Bruce Parker, the former chief scientist of NOAA’s National Ocean Service and currently a visiting professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, reports in the Wall Street Journal that there is a natural explanation for how a temporary path across the Red Sea could have been revealed that that doesn't involve biblical miracles. The explanation involves the tide, a natural phenomenon that would have fit nicely into a well-thought-out plan by Moses, because Moses would have been able to predict when it would happen. In the biblical account, the children of Israel were camped on the western shore of the Gulf of Suez when the dust clouds raised by Pharaoh’s chariots were seen in the distance. The Israelites were now trapped between Pharaoh’s army and the Red Sea. The dust clouds, however, were probably an important sign for Moses; they would have let him calculate how soon Pharaoh’s army would arrive at the coast. Moses had lived in the nearby wilderness in his early years, and he knew where caravans crossed the Red Sea at low tide. He knew the night sky and the ancient methods of predicting the tide, based on where the moon was overhead and how full it was. Pharaoh and his advisers, by contrast, lived along the Nile River, which is connected to the almost tideless Mediterranean Sea. They probably had little knowledge of the tides of the Red Sea and how dangerous they could be

Interestingly enough Moses was not the only leader to cross the Gulf of Suez at low tide. In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte and a small group of soldiers on horseback crossed the Gulf of Suez, the northern end of the Red Sea, roughly where Moses and the Israelites are said to have crossed. On a mile-long expanse of dry sea bottom exposed at low water, the tide suddenly rushed in, almost drowning them. When Napoleon and his forces almost drowned in 1798, the water typically rose 5 or 6 feet at high tide (and up to 9 or 10 feet with the wind blowing in the right direction). But there is evidence that the sea level was higher in Moses’ time. As a result, the Gulf of Suez would have extended farther north and had a larger tidal range. If that was indeed the case, the real story of the Israelites’ crossing wouldn’t have needed much exaggeration to include walls of water crashing down on the pursuing Egyptians.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by theluggage on Wednesday December 10 2014, @03:54PM

    by theluggage (1797) on Wednesday December 10 2014, @03:54PM (#124719)

    It doesn't change the fact is that religious fairy tales are about as intellectually rigorous as J.K. Rowling or C.S. Lewis.

    Hang on there! There is plenty of reliable historical evidence that a major European conflict around 1940 caused English children to be evacuated to the country exactly as described in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe". At the time, large wooden cupboards called "wardrobes" were commonly used to store clothes, and there are contemporary accounts of children hiding in them as part of a game called "hide and seek". There was certainly a confectionary called "Turkish delight" available in that time period.

    Meanwhile, a lot of the misinformation spread by Potter-deniers about the non-existence of Platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross station can be explained if the station being described was, in fact, St Pancras (as depicted in the limited video evidence available) and not Kings Cross. Since St Pancras was being extensively re-built during Potter's lifetime, the existence of a temporary platform between 9 and 10 is quite plausible. Events at the Ministry of Magic in the later chronicles clearly refer to the so-called "trojan horse" educational scandal in early 21st century Britain.

    This is all typical of the continual attempts by meta-pre-radical-neo-post-liberalists to deny the historical importance of figures such as Robin Hood, James Bond, Doctor Who and Snowdon Assange by invoking the pseudo-scentific dogma of "confirmation bias" to wave away all the evidence of their existence.

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