The Elusive Red Sea

What is it about?

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scholars engaged in passionate debates about the truth of biblical stories. One of their prominent subjects was the story of the Exodus, which chronicles the miraculous salvation of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. Using a broad spectrum of classical texts in multiple languages, these early modern savants tried to prove how and where the Israelites crossed the Red Sea. These highly technical philological debates created a voluminous body of scholarship that Enlightenment radicals during the eighteenth century were able to utilize against the Bible. With the philological debates at an impasse, biblical scholarship shifted its focus gradually to material evidence, ushering in the age of biblical archaeology and exploration.

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