Red Sea

Exodus 14 and 15 describe a wind driving back the water through a night, Israel crossing on dry ground, and the sea returning over the pursuing chariots. The Song of the Sea that follows is one of the oldest passages of Hebrew poetry in the Bible, and the episode became the founding image of deliverance for Judaism and for everything downstream of it.

The name is not straightforward. The Hebrew reads yam suph, which means sea of reeds or sea of papyrus, and the Septuagint rendered it in Greek as the Red Sea, which is how it entered Latin and every European Bible after. Since papyrus does not grow in salt water, many scholars have looked instead to the lake and marsh country of the eastern Nile delta, and Nahum Sarna's study sets out both the philology and the difficulty of fixing any route on the ground. Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman go further, arguing from the archaeology of the Sinai that no large migration of the kind described has left a trace, and reading the narrative as a later composition; other scholars hold that a small event underlies it. Nothing in the debate has changed what the story does.

Its liturgical life is enormous. The crossing is recited every Passover in the Haggadah, is read by Paul as a figure of baptism, is sung in the Orthodox canon of the resurrection, and appears in the Quran in the account of Musa and Pharaoh, where the water closes over a king who claimed divinity for himself.

For most of its history the Red Sea has joined its two shores rather than separated them, and religions have travelled it in both directions. In the fourth century the Aksumite king Ezana adopted Christianity, brought, according to the tradition, by two shipwrecked Syrian brothers, and Ethiopia became one of the oldest Christian states in the world, its church tied to the Coptic patriarchate of Alexandria until 1959.

The sixth century brought a confrontation across the same water. The kingdom of Himyar in what is now Yemen had adopted Judaism, and in about 523 its king Yusuf attacked the Christian community of Najran, an episode remembered by Christians as a martyrdom and read by some commentators into the Quran's account of the people of the ditch. Aksum invaded across the strait in response, and G. W. Bowersock's study of these wars argues that they set the political and religious stage on which Islam appeared a century later.

Around 615 Muhammad sent a group of his followers across to Aksum for protection, the event Muslim tradition calls the first hijra, and the Christian king who sheltered them is remembered with respect in the sources. Since then the sea has been the pilgrim road: hajjis from Africa crossing to Jeddah, a traffic that built the coral-stone port towns of both coasts and their mosques, and that continues in the air above the same water.