Where and What was Yam Suph (The Red Sea)

      Modern scholarship has dismissed the Bible account of the Exodus completely and come up with new accounts based on the translation of Yam Suph as Reed Sea, which either do not agree with the Biblical account or directly contradict it. Moreover, they ignore key points of the Biblical account while unquestioningly accepting traditions from the time of Constantine, over 1700 years after the fact. As the Bible is the only existing account of the Exodus, it seems rather foolish to ignore it or contradict it. Why not just throw it out completely and claim the Exodus never happened?
      So does Yam Suph really mean “reed sea”? in Hebrew? Yes, it does, though it is actually ancient Egyptian and was adopted into Hebrew from there. It means the same thing in Egyptian: Reed Sea, or Sea of Reeds.
      Before getting off on the Reed Sea rabbit trail, let's look at what the Bible says. Moses gave the exact location of Yam Suph in several places in the Pentateuch.
      Exo 23:31 “And I will set thy bounds from the Red sea even unto the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert unto the river: for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and thou shalt drive them out before thee”. Here God tells Moses What the bounds of the new nation will be. The bounds are given east to west and south to north. If the Red Sea were in the Nile Delta or even the Gulf of Suez, these boundaries would make no sense. It only makes sense if Yam Suph is the Gulf of Aqaba.
      Deu 1:40 “But as for you, turn you, and take your journey into the wilderness by the way of the Red sea”. Deu 2:1 “Then we turned, and took our journey into the wilderness by the way of the Red sea, as the LORD spake unto me: and we compassed mount Seir many days”. At Kadesh Barnea, God told the Israelites to turn around and go back the way they came – back to the wilderness (pasturelands) by way of the Red Sea. He wasn't telling them to return to Egypt, which He had forbidden them to do: Deu_17:16 “But he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he should multiply horses: forasmuch as the LORD hath said unto you, Ye shall henceforth return no more that way”. If Yam Suph were in the Delta, along the Route of the Philistines, or the Gulf of Suez the Israelites would be returning to Egypt (which was also NOT known as “the wilderness”!) Mt. Seir was to the east, not the west. Again, this only makes sense if Yam Suph is the Gulf of Aqaba.
      Num 21:4 “And they journeyed from mount Hor by the way of the Red sea, to compass the land of Edom: and the soul of the people was much discouraged because of the way”. Deu 2:8 “And when we passed by from our brethren the children of Esau, which dwelt in Seir, through the way of the plain from Elath, and from Eziongaber, we turned and passed by the way of the wilderness of Moab”. Mt. Hor is on the east side of the Arabah on the edge of Edom. Since the Edomites wouldn't allow the Israelites to cross Edom, they had to go south along the Arabah, east through Wadi Yatim (Etham), and north along the eastern border of Edom and Moab– a long way around, but not nearly as long as it would have been if they had to go all around the Sinai Peninsula! If Moses was giving modern directions, he would say they took Route 65 south to Aqaba, then Route 15 east and north towards Quweira3. Elath and Eziongeber were on the northern edge of the Gulf of Aqaba, so these verses prove convincingly that Yam Suph was the Gulf of Aqaba. 1Ki 9:26 nails this down even further: “And king Solomon made a navy of ships in Eziongeber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red sea, in the land of Edom”.
      Having shown that the Bible pinpoints the “Red Sea” as the Gulf of Aqaba, how did it get the name Yam Suph? Reeds are fresh water plants and don't grow in either the Gulfs of Aqaba or Suez. However, early English explorers found bulrushes growing in the wadis1,2 at Maqna in present day Saudi Arabia, at Noweiba and also further south and east of the entrance of Aqaba. It is also likely that the climate has dried out since Moses' time, not that the area wasn't dry then, but it had somewhat more rainfall than today.
      In any case, the Bible itself proves that Yam Suph was the modern day Gulf of Aqaba.


2. Book
Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society ...
Bombay Geographical Society
http://books.google.com/books?id=Hp0BAAAAYAAJ
1836. P. 48


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