A Critique of Professor Goedicke’s Exodus Theories

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The reaction among scholars to Professor Goedicke’s newly expressed views regarding the Exodus and the crossing of the Red Sea (see “The Exodus and the Crossing of the Red Sea, According to Hans Goedicke,” BAR 07:05) has been, to put it mildly, not good. A universally respected and extremely prominent American Biblical historian referred to these new views as “Goedicke’s nonsense.”

This of course does not make Professor Goedicke’s views right or wrong. Nor does it detract from the importance of considering Professor Goedicke’s views.

BAR’s aim is to report, not to endorse or to reject. But part of this task is to repeat not only the initial statement of new scholarly views, but also the scholarly reactions.

Accordingly, we asked two distinguished scholars to comment on Professor’s Goedicke’s theories: one, Charles Krahmalkov of the University of Michigan, presents his comments below. The comments of the second, Eliezer Oren, chairman of the department of archaeology at Ben-Gurion University in Beer-sheba, Israel and who is currently on sabbatical at Harvard University, will appear in the next issue of BAR (“How Not To Create A History Of The Exodus—A Critique Of Professor Goedicke’s Theories,” BAR 07:06).—Ed.

Few subjects in the study of ancient history are more intriguing than Israel’s exodus from Egypt and in particular the episode of the drowning of Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea. What so confounds the intellect is the elusiveness of the event, which loomed so large in the historical and religious consciousness of ancient Israel yet cannot be confirmed by an extra-Biblical source.

A new solution to this 3,000-year-old riddle is now proposed by Professor Goedicke. His view is that the deep waters which drowned the Pharaonic army was a huge tidal-like wave (a tsunami) that swept in from the Mediterranean over Lake Menzaleh in northern Egypt in the spring of 1477 B.C. This catastrophe, Professor Goedicke believes, is described in an inscription of Queen Hatshepsut: “the directive of the father of fathers (Nun, the primeval water), who came one day unexpectedly.”

According to Professor Goedicke’s reconstruction, a group of immigrant Asiatics, whom he identifies with the Israelites, were en route to their ancestral home in Palestine when the huge wave struck. Having taken refuge for military reasons on high ground at the desert’s edge, the Israelites escaped while their Egyptian pursuers drowned in the waters which covered the plain below.

Professor Goedicke’s reconstruction is a fascinating combination of the Biblical account and Hatshepsut’s famous account of her expulsion of the Asiatics. The individual accounts, however, are not themselves similar.

The Egyptian text on which Professor Goedicke relies speaks only in the vaguest terms of Asiatic immigrants who, having disregarded the tasks assigned to them, had their historic privileges annulled by the queen and were allowed to depart from Egypt. Israel is not explicitly mentioned in the inscription, nor is there any reference to pursuit by the Egyptians.

More significant is the fact that the Egyptian narrative, if it does refer to a huge tidal-like wave, tells us that “the earth swallowed up their [i.e., the Asiatics’] footsteps”; that is, the departing immigrants were the victims of the disaster. In the Hebrew account, it is the opposite.

Both the scholar and informed reader must ask whether the Biblical Exodus narratives and the Egyptian account are in fact directly related or whether Professor Goedicke has created an illusion of similarity between the two, contaminating both. Can the Egyptian account, even with substantial interpretation, be reconciled with the descriptions of the Exodus in the Bible?

Let us begin with a fundamental difficulty: In none of the Biblical descriptions of the Exodus is there anything remotely suggesting a huge wave. One may of course respond that the Biblical accounts were written long after the event and, as a result, misunderstand or misrepresent what actually occurred in what was, even then, a remote antiquity. But among the Biblical descriptions, at least one is a primary source describing the great event, and 052this, at least, may be compared to what Professor Goedicke regards as the Egyptian account of the same event.

Professor Goedicke insists that there are “no primary sources such as documents, public inscriptions, or representations which can be connected with the Exodus account.” He must therefore rely on secondary sources and inferences from circumstantial evidence.

In this, however, he disregards the great poem known as the Song of the Sea, contained in Exodus 15, which is a description of the Exodus written by an eyewitness and participant.

This poem presents a far different picture of the Exodus from that inferred by Professor Goedicke. Exodus 15 speaks not of a huge wave but a raging storm at sea which claimed the lives of Israel’s pursuers. Moreover, it places the event not in the 15th century, but at the end of the 13th or beginning of the 12th century B.C.

Literary tradition attributes the Song of the Sea to Moses and Miriam (Exodus 15:1–21). Its exceedingly archaic language and form confirm, in my opinion, that the poem was very nearly contemporaneous with the events it describes.

The poem itself indicates where and when it was written. The Exodus is described as a past event (verses 1–10). The safe arrival of Israel at the “sacred encampment,” presumably Kadesh Barnea in the Sinai, is related in what we may call the present perfect tense: “You extended your right arm for the land to swallow them up;/ In your faithfulness You have led the people whom you redeemed;/ You have led them in your might to your sacred encampment!” (verse 12–13).

The conquest of Palestine, however, is a planned, future offensive: “When your people invade, O Yahweh,/ when the people whom you have acquired invade,/ bring them and plant them on the mountain of your inheritance,/ the place of your residence which you have made, O Yahweh,/ the temple of the Lord which your own hands have built!” (verses 16b–17). Thus, the poem must have been written before the Israelites conquered the Promised Land, at some time during the forty-year period which, tradition says, separated the Exodus from the Conquest.

Apart from its archaic language and form which affirms its ancient authorship (probably the oldest verses in the Bible), the mention of the Philistines allows us to date the poem more precisely. The Philistines are included among the nations inhabiting Palestine: “Anguish has seized the inhabitants of Philistia!” (verse 14b). We know that the Philistines and related Aegean peoples entered Egypt and Palestine in the late 13th century B.C., beginning in the reign of Pharaoh Merneptah (1224–1214).¹ The reference to Philistia is, in my judgment, authentic, not an anachronism, and places the historical context of the poem in the late 13th or early 12th century B.C.

Accordingly, we may state with considerable confidence that this poem, containing the oldest and most reliable account of the Exodus, was written no more than forty years after the event and thus dates to about the first quarter of the 12th century. This is 250 years after Professor Goedicke dates the Exodus.

Let us look at the contents of the poem and see how its description of the Exodus compares with Professor Goedicke’s. In clear and vivid language the Biblical poem describes the drowning of a Pharaonic army in a turbulent body of water whipped by gale force winds. Although the body of water is not clearly identified, it was surely no shallow lake or inland sea. The Egyptians were drowned in deep water with massive swells and towering whitecaps into whose depths they descended and sank. This is surely a storm at sea, at the Red Sea (yam suph, verse 4), a notoriously treacherous body of water because of its coral reefs and high winds. The name yam suph is used in the Bible for the Gulf of Aqabah (1 Kings 9:26) and, to quote Professor Jack Finegan, “We must conclude that this name, Sea of Reeds, and later Red Sea, was applied to the whole of what we know as the Red Sea, including its two gulfs, the Gulf of Aqabah and the Gulf of Suez.”²

This ancient eyewitness account must take priority over later Biblical traditions. Where these later Biblical accounts differ, we must accept, in my judgment, the version in this archaic poem although much in these later traditions is otherwise historical. Professor Frank M. Cross of Harvard has called our attention to some of the most important differences between this archaic poem and other Biblical traditions: “There is no suggestion in the [“Song of the Sea”] of a splitting of the sea or of an east wind blowing the waters back so that the Israelites can cross on a dry sea bottom or of waters ‘returning’ to overwhelm the Egyptians mired in the mud. Rather it is a storm-tossed sea that is directed against the Egyptians by the breath of the Deity … Most extraordinary, there is no mention of Israel’s crossing the sea or of a way through the deep places of the sea for the redeemed to cross over. The absence of these traditional motifs is surprising and requires explanation. So far as we can tell (from the poem), the Egyptians are thrown from barks or barges into the stormy sea; they sink in the sea like a rock or a weight and drown.”³

This helps provide the key to reconstructing the course of events which led to the confrontation of Israel and Egypt at the Red Sea. I shall now try to piece together the fragments of the puzzle found in Exodus 15 and in the 054related prose narrative. Needless to say, the reconstruction is pure conjecture. But it is far better grounded in the Biblical text than in Professor Goedicke’s version.

When “there arose over Egypt a new king who did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:8), a group of Israelites resident in Goshen planned their escape from Egyptian oppression. Goshen, where they had been settled in the time of Joseph (Genesis 45:10; 46:28–29; 46:1, 6) was perhaps Egyptian Gs-ssn, a territory belonging to the city of Hermonthis (Armant), which was situated in the fourth Egyptian nome some 20 miles to the southeast of the Egyptian capital of Thebes.⁴ No route of escape from Upper (that is, southern) Egypt to Palestine was feasible except by sea. The participants in this exodus, in other words, planned their escape by the traditional route used by the Egyptians to reach the copper and turquoise mines in the Sinai.

From Goshen, near Thebes, they took the Wadi Hammamat to the Red Sea port of Qoseir. The 107–mile desert road down the Wadi Hammamat probably took four to five days of well-provisioned and laborious travel through the forbidding eastern desert. This road may be what is referred to in Exodus 13 as “the desert road to the Red Sea (derek hammidbar yam suph).” It was on this road that Moses ordered the Israelites to travel toward the Red Sea and to encamp at the shore of the sea (Exodus 14:2). The Egyptians gloated over this apparent tactical error, thinking Israel “hopelessly lost in the land, the desert having closed them in” (Exodus 14:3). When the Egyptians overtook Israel encamped at the sea (Exodus 14:9), they found that their intended victims had already departed by ship. The Egyptians vowed to continue the pursuit by sea. But while at sea a sudden storm arose, capsizing the Egyptian pursuit vessels and hurling horse, chariot and rider into the deep waters with great loss of life (Exodus 15:1–5).

How many Israelites perished at sea we do not know, but we do know that some reached land safely to tell of the disaster and to represent it as a victory won by their God. We cannot be sure where the Israelites landed—perhaps in Sinai or even in northern Arabia.

Israel perceived the storm at sea which saved it from the Egyptians as a singular and miraculous event, a sign of divine intervention. In fact, the dangerous waters of the Red Sea claimed numerous victims in antiquity, among them the most experienced navigators and seamen, even those “who could foretell a storm before it came, a gale before it broke,” to cite a passage from the Middle Egyptian tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor.⁵ The unfortunate captain of this masterpiece of Egyptian literature describes a Red Sea expedition under his command to “the mines of the king” in Sinai “in a ship 120 cubits long and 40 cubits wide, in which were 120 of the select sailors of Egypt.” As the captain recounts it, the ship met its end on the storm-tossed waters of the Red Sea:

A storm arose while we were at sea, before we could reach land. As we sailed, [the sea] swelled. In it was a wave eight cubits high which struck the mast. The ship sank, of those in it no one remaining. I alone was cast upon an island by a wave of the sea.

To this description of a Red Sea storm which claimed the lives of those who ventured to make the perilous journey to Sinai after embarking at the Red Sea port of Qoseir, we may compare Exodus 15:8, 10:

At the breath of your nostrils the waters were heaped up;

The swells stood erect like a hill;

The deep waters foamed in the midst of the sea …

When you blew with your wind, the sea covered [the enemy];

They sank like lead in the great waters!

There is no pretense to certainty in this reconstruction of the Exodus. Its purpose is merely to draw attention to the fact that in the Biblical tradition there is ancient documentation of the Exodus and that it is fundamentally different from the Egyptian source which Professor Goedicke believes to bear on the event. We may never know what really happened, but we may be sure that it did not happen on a spring day in 1477 B.C. on or near the shores of Lake Menzaleh.

The reaction among scholars to Professor Goedicke’s newly expressed views regarding the Exodus and the crossing of the Red Sea (see “The Exodus and the Crossing of the Red Sea, According to Hans Goedicke,” BAR 07:05) has been, to put it mildly, not good. A universally respected and extremely prominent American Biblical historian referred to these new views as “Goedicke’s nonsense.” This of course does not make Professor Goedicke’s views right or wrong. Nor does it detract from the importance of considering Professor Goedicke’s views. BAR’s aim is to report, not to endorse or to reject. But part of […]