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To: discostu
The super low tide usually hits about +/- 1 hr before the wave, good timing on Moses part could get him across before the wave, stranding the Pharoah to get nailed by the wall of water we've come to know and love about the story.

Hmmm... Interesting about the out-suck, but if it only lasts for an hour or so, I doubt that many Israeli refugees could've crossed the sea in that time. (Unless the "Red Sea"/"Reed Sea" was really just a river?)

37 posted on 11/08/2001 10:17:52 AM PST by jennyp
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To: jennyp
Sorry for the delays, caught up in other discussions (really need to keep one window on every thread I get mixed up in). Depending on where you are (both physically and temporally, it changes a lot during the seasons and because it's been getting used as a sea way man kind was mucked with it) the Red Sea can actually be pretty narrow (like able to shout a conversation across it narrow).

On the other side you have to also consider the difference between a good epic story and what probably happened. Remember there are no records of mass Jewish enslavement in that time in Egypt. Now there were Jews in the area and there were slaves in Egypt so there's a good chance some Jews were slaves, but it probably wasn't the tens thousands of Jews like we see in the movie, for one things how to tens of thousands of people on foot stay ahead of a chariot using army, not gonna happen. You have to remember scale on a lot of levels, to people living in the relatively small villages that were prevalent at the time the number of people we fit into an NBA arena (20,000 +/-) would be staggering you're talking at least 20 entire villages worth of people in one place (or one smallish city). They didn't have New York or LA, "a lot" of people to them were less than than it is to us (thus why Rome blew a lot of minds, because that was very close to an American sized city, far beyond the scale of anything they'd ever seen).

So what you're probably talking is around 1,000 people running like hell, getting to the Suez Canal (which wasn't very deep through much of history), wondering if now was a good time to learn to swim, then the water rolls back, they run some more. The horses and chariots probably get bogged in the mud (you get really gooky mud in areas that never get dry, but humans can deal with it better than horses, we're lighter and can crawl), the people keep running, get a sand dune or two between them, then the wave hits, of course most of the wave has been spent going through the Gulf of Suez (shallow water marks the end of a tidal wave, after that it's just riding momentum) so it doesn't go very wide (otherwise the Jews get nailed too), and wave bye bye to Pharoahs army.

Or the whole thing doesn't synch up at all. Maybe Moses frees some slaves, there's so few of them the Pharoah doesn't care, but then something makes him decide to chase them down a couple years later, get's to Suez right as the out suck hits decides HIS gods were helping so he ignores the boats gets stuck and drowns when the water comes back.

Or a couple of completely unrelated stories got jelled in together. We are finding more and more archeological evidence of key events in the Bible, which makes sense you don't right about the destruction of cities that never existed and expect people to worship your book (unless your name is L Ron Hubbard, but I digress). What's still lacking is distinct chains of events like the Bible, the Bible talks about A led to B led to C and we keep finding B, but A and C are no where to be found (like here no record of mass Jewish enslavement, no record of something like Exodus, but plenty of record of volcanic action that could have caused much of the stuff that happened to the Pharoah).

This stuff is generally written as recollection, often probably after being passed down through oral history for a bit. 1 or 2 years here or there can get jumbled pretty easy, events that happened seperately a few years later might be recalled as intimately related (especially if you have the generally boring life of a subsistance farmer in Biblical times). An example so you can understand: Which came first: Phil Collins Face Values album featuring the smash hit "In the Air Tonight" or the first episode of Miami Vice that brought the song to prominence? Follow up was that Phil's first solo album? Of course the answer is Face Values preceeded Miami Vice by almost 2 years, but had very luke warm sales, and no it was his second solo album (for the life of me I can't remember the title of his first, which tells you a lot about it, I used to be a huge Phil Collins fan, then I discovered women and stopped acting so gay). But unless you were a fan of Phil's (there is a recovery program) you probably didn't know that, even if you lived through the time.

OK, enough of this. Started talking about the Bible and now it's on low rent halfassed 80's drummer that never should have strayed from their bands. Time to go. Have fun.

38 posted on 11/08/2001 2:20:53 PM PST by discostu
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