Here is an interesting 34 minute 2017 interview with Dr. Fritz detailing his study of the “Lost Sea of the Exodus”:
Dr. Fritz-Biblical Studies Interview 2017 (Transcription below)
HOST: The crossing of the Israelites through the Red Sea is one of the most famous scenes in the story of the exodus out of Egypt. Can it be that for the last couple of thousand years historians, geographers, and scholars have had the wrong sea in mind? Dr. Glen Fritz believes the answer is yes. And he’s here to tell us why. We’ll be discussing his recent book, The Lost Sea of the Exodus.
You’re listening to New Books and Biblical Studies and I’m Michael Miralis, your host.
Glen A Fritz has been involved in the study of the Exodus geography for 17 years. He holds a PhD in environmental geography from the Texas State University, San Marcos. His doctoral dissertation, completed in 2006, pursued the location of Israel’s sea crossing. Listeners can visit his website: Ancient Exodus.com, where Fritz explores questions of locating both the correct sea of the exodus, as well as the correct Mount Sinai. Glen thanks for being with us today.
Dr. Fritz: Michael It’s a pleasure to speak with you.
HOST: So Glen, you did your PhD research on the location of Yam Suph, the sea that Israel crossed during the exodus. What first sparked your interest in that topic?
Dr. Fritz: It’s actually quite a zigzag path, but to cut to the chase, I was originally trained as an oral and maxillofacial surgeon and I spent 16 years in private practice. And that gave me a science-driven and analytical background and, the most important thing for a surgeon, to understand that normal anatomy, as only then can you understand the abnormal or pathological anatomy.
When I started my career in geography a number of years later, I found there was a similar principle in geography. You have to understand the normal or correct geography before you can identify geographical error. So, in the case of the exodus, the Bible is the only source of our geographical framework. But many Exodus traditions ignore or pervert this geography, which has led to a number of conflicting, erroneous theories.
But my interest in the exodus began about 1996, when I first visited Israel; and there were a lot of people on the trip that had questions about the exodus. But I’d never studied it and had no answers for anybody. I surmised there must be some kind of analytical way to approach the exodus geography, and I tucked that away in my mind as a future challenge that I would like to tackle.
And then, on that same trip, I met a rabbi from San Antonio who challenged me to study Hebrew; and subsequently I studied Hebrew for four years. In retrospect, the knowledge of Hebrew has really helped me glean geographical subtlety from the Bible; that really helped me in this topic of the sea of the exodus.
In my initial approach the Exodus, I organized all the place names in chronological order, and I noticed some names were referenced by different terms, and from different perspectives. But, what stuck out is that the name for the sea of the Exodus, Yam Suph was mentioned a number of times. Moses mentioned that twelve times. And when I say Yam Suph, in English we would perhaps spell it Y-A-M S-U-P-H, Yam Suph. Most Bibles render this Hebrew term as “Red Sea.”
And so, most listeners won’t be familiar with the idea of Yam Suph as the name for the sea of the exodus. But, the listeners also need to realize that Red Sea is not a translation of the Hebrew Yam Suph. It’s merely an interpretation that was started with the Greek Septuagint Bible around 2200 years ago.
In initially approaching Exodus, I recognized that many theories identified this Yam Suph as a reedy swamp in Egypt. But, I found it very curious that Yam Suph was mentioned as a landmark in the last year of the Exodus relative to events that were very distant from Egypt. I thought that this was a real contradiction to some of the “Reed Sea” theories that seemed to dominate the literature.
But, I also realized that, going back to the places of the exodus, that they had to all be connected by a route that can be traversed by thousands of people accompanied by large herds. And when you look at the desert topography between Egypt and the Promised Land of Canaan, it has many geographical barriers, mountains, valleys, rough terrain, bodies of water, but it has very few corridors suited to a multitude. And so, that very fact helps limit what you’re looking for in terms of reconstructing the exodus itinerary, because you just can’t go from point A to Point B over mountains, valleys, rough terrain–it doesn’t add up. So, I realized (this was in the late 1990s to 2000) that to analyze these potential corridors to reconstruct the exodus, I really needed detailed 3-D satellite mapping capabilities–and that was not available. It was not an off-the-shelf product.
The listener needs to remember that Google Earth, which we now take for granted, was not released to the public till 2005, and it didn’t become a browser-enabled item until about 2008. So that’s a relatively recent tool–and it’s very magnificent, but nothing like that existed when I started this research in 2000. So that quest led me to Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, where in 2001 I began postgraduate studies in cartography and satellite imagery analysis. It was accidental that in 2006 I did get a Ph.D. in environmental geography. I did not have that planned when I started. It was just a quest to try and come up with a mechanism to analyze the terrain in the region of the Exodus.
So things grew. As I said, it’s a zigzag route to getting to this book, but in my geographical studies at the university, I realized that the sea of the Exodus, Yam Suph was probably one of the most vital parts of reconstructing the route–even more important than Mount Sinai. That led to my 2006 doctoral dissertation entitled The Lost Sea of the Exodus: A Modern Geographical Analysis. Then, the following year, in 2007, I released a book version of that work.
And now in 2016, we’re talking about the second edition, which is a re-edited, greatly enlarged, version with 350 pages and 180 maps and illustrations. This book, and the research behind it, concludes that the biblical geography references to this Yam Suph pertain solely to the Gulf of Aqaba. To give an interview without visual maps is difficult, but to acquaint your listener, the Gulf of Aqaba is a 100-mile-long strip of water outlining the eastern side of the Sinai Peninsula, and it separates the Sinai Peninsula from the Arabian Peninsula, which is now Saudi Arabia.
So this Gulf of Aqaba is what the Bible repeatedly refers to in its references to Yam Suph. The important point in my research is that this whole idea was missed through the centuries by scholars because they did not know about this particular gulf. It was missing from the maps and the geographical writings for most of history. And so, as the various theories for the exodus and the sea crossing emerged, the Gulf of Aqaba, which the Bible references, could not be considered as an alternative because it was essentially a dark spot on the map–an unknown area. I thought that was so interesting, that this piece of information, this body of water has been unexplored and unmapped for so long, that it had blocked the normal thinking and theoretical process of understanding the geography of the exodus.
HOST: To get a mental map in our minds for this discussion, listeners can picture the Sinai Peninsula as an upside-down triangle. On the left side of that triangle on the west is the Gulf of Suez, leading down to the Red Sea where scholars traditionally place the sea crossing. On the right side of that upside-down triangle is the Gulf of Aqaba, on the east, where Fritz locates the crossing. Glen, apparently there are some problems for the traditional understanding of the sea crossing. Two locales are typically set forth, which you believe are wrong. The Red Sea which is the northern part of the Gulf of Suez, and then the Sea of Reeds.
Dr. Fritz: Great. That’s a good issue to bring up. First of all, we have to understand that there’s been an evolution of the idea from the Red Sea to the Sea of Reeds; and all of these ideas that evolved pertained strictly to the area of Egypt. So, if the Bible is referring to a body of water at the Gulf of Aqaba near Canaan, how is it that all of these theories and histories evolved concerning bodies of water near Egypt?
We start the story with the Septuagint, the first translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek around 2200 years ago. Whenever they came across the term Yam Suph, they called it “Red Sea” in Greek. When we look at the maps and the writings at the time of the Septuagint, it’s clear that their concept of the Red Sea was as a single shaft of water extending from Egypt, south a great distance into what we now know as the Indian Ocean. But, they thought of it as a single shaft of water. They only knew of two seas, they knew the Red Sea, that shaft of water, and they knew the Mediterranean. That was all that was written of at that time.
And so, whenever they saw Yam Suph, these scholars of the Septuagint substituted Red Sea. Now, what’s interesting is that there are three places where the term Yam Suph appears, and they didn’t know what to call it because it was near Canaan; and so they called it other names–and I go through that in my book. So they were confused about the geography of Yam Suph, but they did assign it as the idea of Red Sea.
And so, from that point forth, beginning with Jewish historian Josephus, around 2000 years ago–he talked about the crossing of the Red Sea and the exodus. It was assumed that it was this body of water near Egypt because there were no maps or geographical information sources that even spoke of the Gulf of Aqaba as an alternative. This was the status quo.
Now we move into the idea of the “reed sea” or the “reedy sea.” How did that develop from the Red Sea? Well, Pliny, a classical author over 1000 years ago, wrote of forests in the Red Sea, of vegetation in the sea, probably referring to coral. And we also see in Milton’s Paradise Lost in the 17th century that he refers to it as the “sedge sea.” And then you have Luther’s German Bible in 1534 that, instead of using the term Red Sea, he called it “Schilfmeer,” which in German means Reed Sea. So there was this idea that the Red Sea was also the reedy sea, or the Sea of Reeds, or associated with vegetation.
Combined with this idea, there were traditional biblical translations that tended to use vegetation terms for Suph (the Suph of Yam Suph)–particularly in the finding of Moses in the Nile, where it says that the basket of Moses is found among the Suph. And traditionally, they’ve used vegetation terms like reeds to translate that. But that is a problem in itself. But it helps to explain this vegetation or plant idea that was assigned to the Red Sea, calling it euphemistically the “sea of reeds” or the “reedy sea.” That concept lasted up until the 1900s, a century or so ago. At that point, we had people that wanted to try to make the crossing of the sea more naturalistic and less dependent upon miracles.
They decided that, perhaps, the Red Sea had expanded over the Isthmus of Suez (east of Egypt) and that it was an inland sea, a shallow sea, either caused by high sea levels or low land levels. And that it was through this inland extension of the Red Sea that the exodus crossing occurred. The convenient aspect to this idea is that people who wanted to use wind as the dominant factor in the parting of the water–could explain that, perhaps, shallow water could be parted by wind, and this whole thing could happen in the lowlands with shallow water east of Egypt. So that was the “inland sea” idea. And so what we saw, was the concept of a true sea in Yam Suph, and the Red Sea, now creeping inland to shallow water that could be navigated without supernatural intervention during the exodus.
Next, you had the concept of the “Sea of Reeds” as being a shallow Egyptian swamp. This idea was introduced by several Egyptologists in the late 1800s. As I read the accounts of how these ideas were introduced, I see absolutely no use of biblical geography, no consideration of the Yam Suph terminology in the Bible, and the references to Yam Suph as a distant body of water near Canaan. The “sea of reeds” idea used the vegetation or reedy idea of the Red Sea, and it also used the shallow water concept of the inland sea theories. It completely segregated Yam Suph from the Red Sea, from being a sea, to this shallow swamp that, again, would require no supernatural intervention for crossing.
And so what we see is a long story of unjustified evolution: from the Red Sea to the “Sea of Reeds,” to the “Inland Sea,” to the swampy “Reed Sea” idea, which is now probably the most popular in the literature. Yet, we can see how the lack of knowledge of the existence of the Gulf of Aqaba as an alternative body of water influenced history and tradition for thousands of years. Then we can also see how the Egyptologists seized on the idea of vegetation and a vegetation meaning for Yam Suph in shallow water. All the while, ignoring the biblical geography–and almost having a “pipe dream” of this Yam Suph being a little shallow lake or sea of reeds immediately adjacent to the Nile Delta. So that’s a thumbnail sketch of the evolution of the Red Sea to the Sea of Reeds, which is probably now the dominant theory, as opposed to the idea that Yam Suph was a true sea that the Bible describes as being near Canaan.
HOST: Now, how would you translate Yam Suph?
Dr. Fritz: Well, first of all, Yam clearly means “sea.” The word appears 396 times in the Old Testament. There are a few times when it’s used hyperbolically to describe the brazen sea in the temple, which was used for the priestly washing, but the majority of times it always refers to a large body of water, specifically a sea. So Yam Suph, you have to say, it’s a sea. Suph itself comes from a word family. Hebrew is made up of word families, each having a root word that’s a verb and the root word of the Suph family means to end, to cease, to form a border, and the root word has no sense of vegetation, plants, or reeds, or things of that sort.
And so in the 116 suph-like words in the Bible, they all refer to end, border, or edge. Now to me, the key verse concerning the meaning of Yam Suph has to do with its original function. And that is seen in Exodus 23 31, where the Lord states to Moses that “I will set the promised land bounds from Yam Suph to the Mediterranean, and from the wilderness unto the Euphrates. That statement is describing the width and the length of the promised land using Yam Suph as the southern border of that land. And so, when we think of Suph as meaning to cease, to end, to bound, I apply those ideas to this geographical function of Yam Suph as a boundary marker, as a landmark of the promised land. Realizing that the promised land was everything to the Hebrews, the boundary marker of that land would be ultimately understood and ultimately important. And so, to me, Yam Suph means “the sea end,” or “sea boundary,” “sea of border”–those sorts of meanings.
HOST: The scholar Batto has, what is to my mind, has a persuasive article. He also argues for a sea of end, or sea of extinction translation for Yam Suph. He seems to take a theological or mythological reading where the sea is the end for the Egyptians and the end of the old life for the Israelites.
Dr. Fritz: It seems to me that, in some places in Scripture, that the Lord discloses a sense of humor.
And so, perhaps, there was a double meaning, in terms of the end of the enemy, the end of the Egyptians, but also in the geographical sense, as the end of the land, the endpoint. It is interesting to see the double meaning that can be there with the idea of Yam Suph.
HOST: What are some of the indicators that the Gulf of Aqaba is the sea the parted for the Israelites?
Dr. Fritz: When the Bible refers to the event in Yam Suph during the exodus, in numerous places, the Psalms and the Torah, it describes Yam Suph as being deep and rough, and uses terms that would have to be associated with a large body of water, not a pond or a swamp. The way that it’s referenced, the descriptive language, also suggests that we’re looking for a sea. And again, with the predominant theories being that it was a shallow swamp near Egypt, you have a clash of concepts there with the way the Bible describes this body of water.
As a geographer, my attempt was to lay out the geographical relationships, and to me that’s the most analytical thing I can do, is to look at the language, the words, the spatial relationships, and say well, this is what it says. And conversely, there are no verses in Scripture that require Yam Suph to have been near Egypt. In fact, if it was near Egypt, the whole boundary definition using Yam Suph doesn’t make sense. It’s got to be in the position of the Gulf of Aqaba for it to make sense with the boundary of the promised land.
I find another thing that’s interesting too in this story of the frog plague. The Bible mentions a whole bunch of different terms for water in Egypt. You find that in Exodus Chapter 7, where these frogs were upon the waters of Egypt, upon their streams, upon their rivers, on their ponds–upon all the pools of water. Again, in the next chapter, on their streams, the rivers, over the ponds, using a number of Hebrew words to describe the bodies of water in Egypt. But none of these names used the term Yam, or used the term Suph–in describing all these bodies of water, the Bible is trying to explain that every body of water in Egypt had these frogs. Every single one.
But there are people that like to say, well Yam referred to an exaggeration or hyperbolic description of a swamp or a lake, or something, whatever. But at the time of the exodus, when this frog plague is described, and the Bible is exhaustively listing the bodies of water in Egypt, it says nothing of a Yam, and certainly nothing of Yam Suph. So, I think you can look at the positive geographical evidence and then you can look at the other side of that, with the absence of evidence for the Egyptian location. It’s hard to argue from the negative, but it is something that clearly would support the geographical position at the Gulf of Aqaba.
HOST: You have an appendix discussion related to the locust plagues. English translations of the book of Exodus state that the Lord blew the locusts into the Yam Suph, and so many scholars say the Yam Suph couldn’t be the Gulf of Aqaba because that would be sending the locust clear to the other side of the Sinai Peninsula. Can you give our listeners a summary of your response?
Dr. Fritz: Yes, in that account, the Bible says that the Lord turned the sea wind to a west wind. When you’re in Egypt, the sea wind is coming off of the Mediterranean, blowing north to south, from the sea over the land. But God turned that wind to blow the locusts, in the Hebrew it says toward Yam Suph. It’s a very minor grammatical thing, but it’s clearly there, it says toward, in the grammar, toward Yam Suph. It doesn’t say “into” in any way.
All that’s being described there are general, large directions, over a big region, where we’re getting the picture of the wind being turned. And to Moses, writing that, in his mind, Yam Suph would have been the most distant recognizable landmark that he could set forth for his readers. To have them understand that that was the general direction that the wind was blowing the locusts toward. And of course, that landmark being the boundary of the promised land, would certainly be a significant landmark to use.
And so, that’s a case in point, where having studied the Hebrew, reading the scriptures in Hebrew, and then reading the translations, points out that some of these traditional wordings and the translations really hide the geography or other details that are present. The classic example you brought up is that the wind blew the locusts into Yam Suph, which is totally wrong. It’s a concept that is based on tradition going back hundreds of years or thousands of years, where the idea was, “OK, the Red Sea was right by Egypt and so, yes, it blew the locusts into the sea and killed them so they didn’t fly back into Egypt.” That would be the sophomoric, traditional way to look at it. It’s easy to overlook because you have the word Yam, which we would spell Y-A-M, but the Scripture says Yamah, Y-A-M-A-H, in English.
Well, that little “A-H” ending there is what means “seaward” or “toward the sea.” That little tiny ending on there is the grammatical marker meaning –ward, and it’s easy to miss that, it’s easy to overlook it for translators who think, “Oh it’s no big deal whether it went toward or into.” But for our purposes, recognizing where Yam Suph really is–it’s a big deal.
HOST: In placing the sea crossing at the Gulf of Aqaba, it follows that Mount Sinai cannot be in the Sinai Peninsula, is that right?
Dr. Fritz: Well that would be logical that the mountain would be found on the far side of the sea crossing. And I think it’s interesting, I’ve even done his on a map, if you take the traditional location of the sea crossing, at the head of the Gulf of Suez, and the traditional location of Mount Sinai, in the southern Sinai Peninsula, and you just rotate that whole thing so that the sea crossing occurs at the Gulf of Aqaba, that then places the mountain somewhere in a similar situation in the Arabian Peninsula. So that’s what we have, a much more distant location for the sea crossing, which definitely leads us to look at the Arabian Peninsula as a location for Mount Sinai.
HOST: And are there some mountains in the Midian area proposed to be Mount Sinai?
Dr. Fritz: Yes, I’ve studied that question extensively. I’ve visited the area that could be the place that hosts Mount Sinai. And I’ve written a book, published in electronic form, called Fire on the Mountain: Geography Geology and Theophany at Jabal al-Lawz.
I look at the problem from the standpoint of, well, Moses was in Midian. Moses went to the mountain of God, which was Mount Sinai. How would he have gotten there and why would he have gone there. And if you look at the historical geography of Midian, the way the mountains are, and the way the mountain passes exist, you see that there’s only two ways Moses could have gone to the wilderness where Mount Sinai was located.
The reason that he would have gone there is because it’s located in the highlands east of the coastal Midian area, and it was the custom of the Bedouin and shepherds, through the ages, to take their herds to the higher elevations during the hot seasons of the year. They would retreat to the coastal areas in the winter, and in the spring and summer they’d go to the Highlands. And that’s what Moses was doing, he was taking the sheep eastward from the Midian lowlands to this highland plateau.
That highland plateau, which is called the Hisma in modern times, is outlined to the west by a chain of mountains which includes the Jabal al-Lawz range. Jabal al-Lawz happens to be the tallest peak in the area and there are some references, for instance Josephus, to it [Mount Sinai] being the tallest peak in the region. And so that might be a place to look, to start. From my review of the geography, the historical geography, the potential travel routes, the places where vegetation and water would be most likely, I tend to favor the Jabal al-Lawz range as a place to look.
HOST: Glen, before we let you go, why don’t you tell our listeners about your site:
AncientExodus.com, and about any other projects you’re working on.
Dr. Fritz: Yes, that’s AncientExodus.com. I’ve got a number of articles posted there regarding some of the Exodus topics. One topic that’s been very popular is the reference to Mount Sinai by the Apostle Paul in Galatians. So I have an extensive article posted about that, which is quite fascinating because the Apostle Paul used, apparently, two important geographical terms in the Greek that seemed to give us a pretty strong idea of where to look for Mount Sinai relative to Jerusalem.
I’ve also got something posted about “Was Mount Sinai a Volcano?” Some people say that the cloud and the pillar of fire were volcanic–and I address that in detail. There’s a number of articles there that are academically written discussions, but yet the lay person can appreciate the arguments, and I use a lot of maps and images to try to convey the information that’s important.
HOST: It’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you for spending time with us.
Dr. Fritz: Well Michael, you’ve been a good questioner and I’ve enjoyed talking to you.
HOST: Friends, you’ve been listening to Glen Fritz discuss his recent book, The Lost Sea the Exodus. We hope you enjoyed this edition of New Books and Biblical Studies.