Different vision

“Zsa Zsa Gabor once famously said, ‘Husbands are like fires: they go out if unattended’. So what kept the burning bush burning?”. This is one of many entertaining asides with which Colin Humphreys introduces his investigation of the miracles of the book of Exodus in the Old Testament. The light-hearted style and pace make the book an easy and enjoyable read, but I have to confess that these traits did nothing to dispel my initial prejudice against taking it too seriously. A further consideration was the fact that Humphreys is a physicist by profession rather than a biblical scholar.

Even if one assumes that a professor at Cambridge University must be among the brightest people on the planet, it was difficult for me to believe that he could make an original contribution to this highly specialized field. However, by the end of the book I had revised my views somewhat. Humphreys provides a convincing challenge to some cherished standard interpretations of Exodus. In doing so he has performed a valuable service that also demonstrates the value of a training in physics, even in very different disciplines.

Humphreys approaches his investigation as “a scientist who tests and weighs the evidence”. His starting point is the following hypothesis: Old Testament writings about the Exodus of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt reveal a great deal of factual information, providing that one can interpret the texts correctly after a period of over 3000 years. Most of the events described are natural ones (people, journeys, places, environments and so on) and Humphreys proposes that the miracles in Exodus invariably have natural causes.

To use an Aristotelian distinction, this means that when a miracle is reported in the Exodus, the “efficient cause” is a natural agent, even though the “final cause” may be interpreted as the will of God, and that the miracle is revealed by the extraordinary timing of these events. He further suggests that the ancient Israelites were aware of this distinction.

A famous example is the way that Exodus explicitly mentions a strong wind in connection with the parting of the waters of the Red Sea: “The LORD drove the sea back with a strong east wind all night” (Exodus 14:21). Elsewhere in the Bible we read that “Your path led through the sea, your way through the mighty waters, though your footprints were not seen” (Psalm 77). Humphreys’ aim, therefore, is to find a single coherent interpretation within which all the data – all the places, events and times – can be reconciled and understood.

The challenge is that biblical scholarship since the 19th century has so far failed to achieve this goal. There have been some successes: for example, a natural mechanism is known in the case of the cessation of the flow of the River Jordan (Joshua 3:15-16), an event repeated during an earthquake as recently as 1927. Furthermore, at least some of the plagues inflicted on Egypt fit into a coherent natural sequence, and most scholars would today concur with Humphreys in placing the Exodus within the 13th century BC (the reign of Ramesses II). However, no satisfactory Exodus route has ever been reconstructed, and the maps of many modern bibles typically show two possible routes with many question marks. The failure of these models has led some scholars to reduce all or part of the Exodus story to the level of a fiction invented for theological purposes.

Taking a fresh approach, Humphreys suggests that the Exodus routes fail because the conventional locations of the two most important places are wrong. First, for many decades the name Red Sea has been held to be a mistranslation of yam suph, the original name in the Hebrew scriptures, and that what the Israelites actually crossed was an inland lake: indeed, yam suph literally means Sea of Reeds. However, he points out that there are other references in the Old Testament that do identify yam suph with the Red Sea: for example, King Solomon is reported as building his ships there (1 Kings 9:26).

Having validated the modern Red Sea as a possibility, Humphreys then asks why the Israelites might have called it the Sea of Reeds since reeds do not grow in salt water. In a vivid demonstration of the value of empiricism, he went to the head of the Gulf of Aqaba to check and found that reeds still grow there today due to the presence of freshwater springs. (I have stood in exactly the same place in Eilat and recall the reeds, although the significance was lost on me at the time.)

The second and more important revision that Humphreys proposes concerns the location of Mount Sinai, the mountain of fire and thunder where Moses received the Ten Commandments. The site of Mount Sinai has been a long-standing mystery, and he identifies it with what we now call Mount Bedr in Saudi Arabia, rather than the traditional candidate in the southern Sinai desert. A good deal of his argument rests on whether or not the accounts of fire and thunder were literal and due, perhaps, to a volcano. However, I was struck by the way that Humphreys’ hypothesis suggests solutions to several outstanding puzzles: how a large number of people and cattle could have survived for long around the arid site; why the Israelites would have remained geographically close to their former masters in Egypt; and how Mount Sinai is already referred to as a holy mountain in Exodus before the Israelites arrive.

If Humphreys is right, Mount Sinai was located on a table mountain surrounded by the fertile green basin of al-Gaw, distant from Egypt and perhaps also already regarded as a holy place. The Mount Sinai/Mount Bedr proposal is not altogether new, but it is surprising that it is not been investigated more seriously. Having reviewed some of the major biblical commentaries in the light of Humphreys’s proposal, I have not found any convincing evidence that would rule out this hypothesis.

What impressed me in this book was the respect given to the information contained in the Exodus text, the author’s enthusiasm and willingness to challenge cherished academic theories, and his determination to check primary data sources wherever possible. It is impossible to say how future scholars will judge his solution: I find it hard to raise any serious objection to his proposals, but the history of biblical scholarship is unfortunately littered with ingenious but conflicting theories.

The book also demonstrates the value of a training in physics, even when applied to very different disciplines. Physicists are generally better at asking questions about quantities and spatial and temporal relations, and at its best their rigorous empiricism can often cast fresh light on fields of investigation often considered closed or moribund. I therefore recommend this book as an entertaining account of an investigation into one of the great mysteries of history. And if you want to find out more about the burning bush, or how Moses parted the Red Sea, you will just have to read it yourself!