The upcoming release of Ridley Scott's film "Exodus: Gods and Kings," has reopened an ongoing debate about whether there is a scientific explanation for Moses' parting of the Red Sea.
In his version of the biblical story, Scott breaks from Cecil B. DeMille's depiction in the legendary "Ten Commandments" of Moses miraculously separating the Red Sea into two walls that open to allow the Israelites to pass through to freedom. Instead, Scott has opted for a more "realistic" version inspired by an actual underwater earthquake that occurred off the coast of Italy circa 3000 BC,
reports The Boston Herald.
Scott's version is similar to the explanation offered in a 1992 paper, "Are There Oceanographic Explanation for the Israelites' Crossing of the Red Sea?" published in the Bulletin American Meteorological Society by Doron Nof and Nathan Paldor.
The authors examined the explanation, now being put forward by Scott, that it was the result of a tsunami generated by an earthquake, as well as whether it was the consequence of "wind setdown," which occurs when wind drives water abnormally far from the coast, according to the website
Decoded Science.
The scientists, however, decided the wind setdown was the more likely explanation. Others have taken issue with the tsunami argument.
"The period during which coastal waters draw back before a tsunami usually lasts only 10 or 20 minutes, too little time to get all the children of Israel across the temporarily dry seabed. Also, there would have been no way for Moses to know that the earthquake and tsunami were going to happen, unless God told him. That’s fine, but then the story would retain some element of the miraculous," Dr. Bruce Parker, a former chief scientist of [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]'s National Ocean Service, wrote recently in
The Wall Street Journal.
Parker also is the author of “The Power of the Sea: Tsunamis, Storm Surges, Rogue Waves, and Our Quest to Predict Disasters.”
Scott's effort is just the latest chapter in an ongoing debate among scientists about possible explanations for the famous Biblical story.
In 2010, a team at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado published a paper on what they argued was a plausible physical explanation for a parting of the waters.
Using a new computer modeling study, researchers, led by software engineer Carl Drews, attempted to show how the movement of wind could have caused the event as described in the
Book of Exodus.
"The computer simulations show that a strong east wind, blowing overnight, could have pushed water back at a bend where an ancient river is believed to have merged with a coastal lagoon along the Mediterranean Sea. With the water pushed back into both waterways, a land bridge would have opened at the bend, enabling people to walk across exposed mud flats to safety. As soon as the wind died down, the waters would have rushed back in," according to a NCAR press release announcing the study.
"Did the parting of the sea really happen? We will never know. But Carl Drews has used impeccable science to show both where and how it may have happened," Greg Holland, a hurricane researcher and colleague of Drews,
told The Washington Post.
"There are obvious difficulties in drawing a firm conclusion about the passage across the Red Sea. The Bible’s information can be interpreted in different ways and is vague about location. Also, the topography of the Red and Mediterranean Seas and their coasts has changed as sea levels fluctuate over periods of thousands of years," argued Jennifer Young in her 2011 article in Decoded Science.
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