Myth #76:

Pharaoh’s army drowned in the Red Sea.

The Myth: And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the LORD caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground; and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left. And the Egyptians pursued, and went in after them to the midst of the sea, even all Pharaoh’s horses, his chariots, and his horsemen. And it came to pass, that in the morning watch the LORD looked unto the host of the Egyptians through the pillar of fire and of the cloud, and troubled the host of the Egyptians, And took off their chariot wheels, that they drave them heavily: so that the Egyptians said, Let us flee from the face of Israel; for the LORD fighteth for them against the Egyptians. And the LORD said unto Moses, Stretch out thine hand over the sea, that the waters may come again upon the Egyptians, upon their chariots, and upon their horsemen. And Moses stretched forth his hand over the sea, and the sea returned to his strength when the morning appeared; and the Egyptians fled against it; and the LORD overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of the sea. And the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them; there remained not so much as one of them. But the children of Israel walked upon dry land in the midst of the sea; and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left. Thus the LORD saved Israel that day out of the hand of the Egyptians; and Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the sea shore. (Exod. 14:21–30)

The Reality: The drowning was a metaphorical description for the defeat of an enemy in battle, as used in other Egyptian writings.

After Israel left Egypt, Pharaoh had a change of heart and chased after the Israelites, mobilizing his entire chariot fleet. They came upon the Israelites encamped by the Red Sea and thought they had them trapped. But God parted the Red Sea so that the Israelites could travel across. When the Egyptians followed in after them, the waters reunited, flooding over all of pharaoh’s chariots and over six hundred soldiers. For many people, the defining image of the drowning of Pharaoh’s army comes from the Cecil B. DeMille production of The Ten Commandments, which used cherry gelatin to simulate the parting and reassembling of the Red Sea.

The Red Sea is the northwest corner of the Indian Ocean that separates Africa from the Arabian Peninsula. It is not improbable that the Israelites might have crossed from Egypt to Arabia by this route, but is this where the crossing actually occurred? The chief difficulty with assuming that is that the Hebrew words translated as “Red Sea,” “yam suf,” actually mean “Sea of Reeds,” a description inconsistent with the physical setting of the Red Sea.

So where is the Sea of Reeds? If the description applied to an actual location, the most likely area would be in the Egyptian delta, which has numerous reed marshes, but there is no particular marshy area known as the Sea of Reeds. Egyptians, however, did know of a mythological Sea of Reeds where enemies of Re, the chief deity, were destroyed and covered over by a flood of red waters.

This sea was described in the Book of the Divine Cow in a story about a time when humanity had revolted against the rule of Re. Angered by the apostasy, Re sent Hathor, a sky goddess, to wipe out the rebellious humans, which she did with great relish. Her joy at the devastation gave Re second thoughts about his goals and he decided to cancel his vendetta. In order to distract Hathor, he arranged for a mixture of red ochre and barley beer to fill the fields where Hathor was to continue the final acts of destruction. The beer served its purpose and Hathor fell into a drunken stupor.

After a break in the text, Re declares, “How peaceful it is in this field!” The god then planted green plants there and called the place the Field of Reeds. However, the word translated as “field,” “sekbet,” usually refers to marshy locations with birds and fish .

So, this myth tells about a Reed Marsh, or the equivalent of a Sea of Reeds, where the enemies of Re lay slaughtered and the fields flooded over with a red liquid. This might easily lead to confusion between an actual Reed Sea and a Red Sea.

The drowning of the pharaoh’s army draws primarily on this story. The location is the same, a Sea of Reeds, and the pharaoh’s army takes on the role of the humans who were destroyed for rebelling against Re’s supreme rule, with Jahweh replacing Re as the chief deity.

What is missing from the Egyptian story is the parting of the waters, a biblical claim that is probably a late addition to the story. In Exodus 15, considered the oldest original poem in the Bible (perhaps twelfth to tenth centuries B.C.), and which follows right after the story of the drowning of the pharaoh’s army, we have the Song of Moses, a recap of the pharaoh’s defeat. In it there is no mention of the splitting of the sea, just the drowning of the soldiers. Particularly interesting in this poem is the following passage: “And in the greatness of thine excellency thou hast overthrown them that rose up against thee: thou sentest forth thy wrath, which consumed them as stubble” (Exod. 15:7).

Note here the basic theme from the Book of the Divine Cow. The biblical poem depicts the pharaoh’s army as rebelling against God, a slightly different image than that generally presented in the rest of Exodus, and God sent down his wrath to destroy them. In the Book of the Divine Cow, we have a rebellion and Re sent down his wrath, in the form of Hathor. While the Bible understandably omits the image of Hathor, a Hathor substitute appears in the story.

[T]he angel of God, which went before the camp of Israel, removed and went behind them; and the pillar of the cloud went from before their face, and stood behind them: And it came between the camp of the Egyptians and the camp of Israel; and it was a cloud and darkness to them, but it gave light by night to these: so that the one came not near the other all the night. (Exod. 14:19–20)

The angel described above substitutes for Hathor as the agent of God and even retains some of Hathor’s characteristic as the place where the sun shines .

In addition to the Divine Cow myth, Egyptians also used the drowning theme on occasion to metaphorically describe the defeat of an enemy. Ramesses II, for example, in describing a battle with the Hittites, claimed to have single-handedly drowned the enemy in the Orontes River, despite the fact that he:

entered into the host of the fallen ones of Khatti [i.e., the Hittites], being alone by himself, none other with him. And His Majesty went to look about him, and found surrounding him on his outer side 2500 pairs of horses with all the champions of the fallen ones of Khatti and of the many countries that were with them. (Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs, 263)

Ramesses actually lost the battle and the only thing that saved him was the timely arrival of a rescue brigade. Nevertheless, where the Israelites only faced six hundred Egyptian soldiers, Ramesses faced nearly four times as many and claimed to have drowned them all. In the Moses story, Hebrew scribes simply followed Egyptian literary traditions in claiming that God drowned the enemy forces.