Authors: Bruce Feiler
Straightening out the name does help the identification somewhat, but not conclusively. There are five major candidates for the Sea of Reeds: (1) the Mediterranean, specifically a bay north of the Delta; (2) the marshy area just south of the Mediterranean; (3) Lake Timsah, or Crocodile Lake, a large lake halfway between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea; (4) the Bitter Lakes, a series of lakes just to the south of Tim-sah; and (5) the Red Sea itself, specifically the Gulf of Suez.
Again, the name does provide clues. The Hebrew word
suf
is generally considered to be a borrowing from the Egyptian word
twf,
or papyrus. Papyrus grows only in fresh water, which would seem to rule out the Mediterranean and the Red Sea (though in Numbers 21, while the Israelites are on their way to Edom, the Bible apparently uses
yam suf
for
the Gulf of Aqaba). Also, since the ancient marsh north of the Timsah is now covered by the Suez Canal, and therefore unknowable, it has few proponents. Instead, informed speculation centers on Lake Timsah and the Bitter Lakes. It is possible these were part of a continual stream of lakes, all of which are referred to as
yam suf
. But differences do exist among them. The Bitter Lakes are bigger and deeper. Timsah, by contrast, is relatively shallow, often no more than three feet deep. It’s tempting to imagine the Israelites, on a windy day, wading across this body of water, while the Egyptians mindlessly followed and got their chariots stuck in the mud.
As for me, now that I was nearing the area, the matter of finding the
actual
spot where the Israelites crossed was beginning to seem less important. This feeling was a mark of exactly how much change I’d been undergoing. When I first came up with the idea of retracing the Bible, I was fascinated by questions of archaeology and identification: the precise place where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, the specific valley where Jacob had his dream; the exact mountain where Moses met God. Now, more than a year later, I was shifting my objectives. I still found these questions fascinating, but more in an academic, recreational sort of way. Instead, the questions that were drawing me more were those of symbolism, character, metaphor. I was reading the text less as a Baedeker now and more as a Bible. I was reading it for meaning.
That change, which first began in Israel, became more fully realized in Egypt, as I discovered the powerful emotions that ancient sites are still able to evoke. They are testaments to the ability of places to mark holy spaces where humans come into contact with their god. And what better example of that contact than the parting of the Red Sea. In dividing the waters, God shows his mastery not only over nature but also over humanity. He uses wind, smoke, and water both to save the Israelites and to destroy the Egyptians. In this sense, it doesn’t matter where the event happened, or whether it happened. As Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, said, “What is vital is only that what happened was experienced, while it happened, as the act of God.”
What’s also important is that, in recording the event, the writers show their mastery of storytelling. As Avner said, “I remember as a child imagining the wall of water on both sides of my bed.” Reading it as an
adult, one can see even more. The dramatic events surrounding the crossing of the sea harken back unavoidably to the opening verses of Genesis: the dividing of the Red Sea recalls the splitting of the watery world into two; the destroying of the Egyptian army evokes the slaying of the forces of chaos. In this passage, the Bible serves up yet another creation story. And this time the product is not the world; it’s the nation of Israel. As Avner said, “
Now
the people are free. Now the real work begins.”
Back at the car it was past 3:00 and Ahmed and Yasser were getting antsy. None of us had eaten since 4
A.M.
Delirium—and exhaustion—were starting to weigh heavily. Also, the sun was about to set. Still, we had yet to attend to the main purpose of our journey. I may have been less interested in the precise location where the Israelites crossed, but we were still interested in experiencing what they might have gone through during their flight. But where to do that?
We turned south toward Ismailia, a garden city erected during the construction of the canal and named after Ismail, which sits at the northern cusp of Lake Timsah. The city was largely deserted by the time we arrived, as most people had gone home early on Thursday afternoon in advance of the Muslim sabbath. The once grand avenues seemed like emblems of a ghost town, with baronial mansions turned into tenement houses for workers in the run-down resorts around the lake. We drove through the streets for twenty minutes, trying to suss out the best way to get afloat. We stopped and asked a local policeman, who gave us directions to a hotel on the lake.
There were few cars in the parking lot of the Mercury Hotel, and no one in the lobby. Clouds had started to form overhead and the sense of vacancy was now accented by a stormy gloom in our car. Ahmed and Yasser stayed in the jeep as Avner and I went to the front desk and asked if we could rent a boat. The woman looked at us quizzically, then glanced at her watch. “We have a boat leaving ten o’clock tomorrow,” she said. “But we need it this afternoon,” we pleaded. “Impossible,” she said. I reached for my wallet. “No, no,” she said, waving my hand away. “It can’t be done. You need permission from the police, from the army, from Cairo.
It takes two weeks.”“But we’re going home tonight,” I said. She dropped her head. “Sorry. Maybe you should try the boats in the park.”
Back in the jeep Ahmed and Yasser were half asleep and were not interested in trying the park on the northern shore of the lake. “Can’t you just take a picture?” Yasser said. I shook my head. “Let’s try the park,” I said. Ten minutes later we found the chain-linked entrance to Mallhala Park; it was padlocked. I shook the gate for a second and a man emerged. Avner explained what we wanted and the man went inside and used the telephone. A few minutes later a car appeared, and a well-dressed man stepped out. Seeing that we were foreigners, he berated the guard for not letting us in and opened the gate. We paid the small entrance fee and drove inside.
The park was set up for summertime recreation, with a few steel umbrellas over picnic tables, a grassy area for soccer, a mosque, and a narrow beach about the width of two towels. The complex was entirely vacant, and a bit eerie. One reason is the unusual nature of the lake. Close to where we were standing, Timsah, which covers an area about seven square miles, looks like any lake in Minnesota. But the center of the lake has been completely taken over by the canal, as if a superhighway were plopped down in the middle of a duck pond. When we arrived, two enormous tankers were passing in front of the beach, close enough to hit with a Frisbee.
Feeling desperate now, I sprinted quickly from one side of the park to the other until I spotted a small cabin with a handful of rowboats chained together in front. My heart leapt. I knocked on the cabin, nobody answered. I knocked a little louder, still nobody answered. I screamed. No reply. I even went to the boats themselves and tried to dislodge one. I couldn’t. Either way, I didn’t see any oars. However romantic it might seem, the idea of paddling across the Suez Canal with a palm branch, dodging oil tankers, hardly seemed prudent.
It started to rain. I slumped back to the pavilion, where Avner was speaking with the man who had let us in. “It’s winter,” the man said. “It’s Ramadan. It’s raining. Are you sure you need to do this?” I thanked him and turned back toward the car. Of course I didn’t need to cross the Red Sea, no more than I needed to climb Mount Moriah or lick Mount
Sodom. I didn’t
need
to be here at all, yet here I was, nearly halfway through my travels, called by some unhearable voice, following some unfollowable path. And where had it gotten me? For the moment, standing in the rain at the Suez Canal, staring at the desert in front of me, feeling the pull of civilization behind me, having dragged a small carload on this quixotic quest, and having landed, trapped, in the most predictable of dead ends: an uncrossable body of water.
Back at the car I explained the situation to Yasser and Ahmed. They did little to disguise their displeasure. It was almost time to break the fast, they said, and they wanted to return to Cairo. By the time Avner arrived they were openly sulking. Cheerily I announced a desire to give it one more try. We could drive south along the waterfront of Lake Timsah, I said, and if we reached the end without finding a boat, we could give up and go home. We went around the car in an informal vote. Ahmed stared ahead; he was apparently voting no. Yasser was more vocal; he wanted out. I turned toward Avner. He looked at the others, then at me. And as he did, I realized how long we’d been traveling together, how much we’d seen already, and how lucky I was to have found him.
As much as he knew about the Bible,
he seemed to know more about the nature of travel, about how to go to places, leave a bit of yourself behind, take a bit of the place with you, and in the process emerge with something bigger—an experience, a connection, a story. Maybe that’s one reason the Bible has such enduring power: At its heart, it’s a great adventure tale.
“I think we should give it a try,” he said.
Along the waterfront the choices were not promising. The farther south we drove, the more industrial the lake became. We saw several container ships docked in a shipyard, but I figured the chances of their taking a $10 offer of baksheesh to ferry us across the lake were small. We spotted some tugboats, but even they seemed unlikely. Also, there were few people around anyway. The quays were totally abandoned. The sense of misery in the jeep was now palpable. The sense of righteousness worse. It looked like Ahmed and Yasser were right. You couldn’t cross the Red Sea at dusk during Ramadan. Our flight of fancy had come up short. I
felt disappointed, and a bit silly. The romantic folly behind our journey never seemed more palpable. What was I expecting? A crack of lightning, a raised staff, a miraculous parting of the tankers?
In time we emerged from the commercial zone into the last residential stretch and I was preparing to concede defeat, when all of a sudden we rounded a bend and I spotted to our right a small fishing enclave, with dozens of newly painted, bright white rowboats. “That’s it!” I shouted, flinging open the door. Ahmed screeched to a halt and I leapt from my seat. Avner followed and we went sprinting to the narrow beach. All the boats were empty, except one, which was just pulling into the shore. An older man jumped off and began dumping fish into a barrel.
When the man finished, Avner spoke to him for a second, asking if he might take us for a ride. The man seemed agreeable, chuckled a bit, and after consulting with the teenager who was manning the oars, invited us aboard: me, Avner, Ahmed, Yasser. If the police escort had come, he couldn’t have fit. There were now six of us struggling to find seats in a boat the size of a bathtub. I sat in the stern, closest to the oarsman. Mohammed was sixteen, with maroon pants and a black turtle-neck with
CAT
imprinted on the collar. A wet blanket covered his knees. His boat was made of eucalyptus, he said, and the turquoise paint on the seats was a week old. “Does the boat have a name?” I asked. “
Number Fifty,
” he said.
He steered us carefully through the bay, which was crowded with anchored rowboats. This part of the lake was similar to the northern tip, with turquoise water lapping against a few yards of beach. The dredged area where the canal intersects the lake was several miles away. With no tankers passing, we had a clear view of the sandy shore of the Sinai. All around us, the water was shallow, and you could see the vegetation on the bottom. The farther we got from the fishing boats, the more the lake began to take on a natural, pristine feel. Huge sprouts of marsh grass blossomed from the banks, with cattails swaying like candle flames. The image of Moses in the basket was unavoidable. Regardless of its relevance to the biblical story, Timsah, at least, is a lake with reeds. A fish jumped out of the water and squiggled back in place. It stopped raining.
“So what kinds of fish do you catch?” I asked Mohammed. “Mostly gray mullet,” he said. “Sometimes perch, or Moses fish.”
“
Moses
fish?” I repeated.
“It’s good to eat,” Mohammed said.
“I think it’s a kind of flounder,” Avner added.
As we were speaking the sun slowly broke through the clouds. Quickly the entire feel of the scene changed, as the light filtered through the yellowy grass and filled the air with a saffron glow that when it reflected off the sheen of the water—turquoise and gold—reminded me of Tutankhamen’s mask. Instantly I recalled the sense of power—and fear—I felt upon seeing the mask in the museum. And in so doing I began to see the Exodus in a different light. No matter how oppressive the pharaoh must have seemed to residents of Goshen, for the Israelites, crossing this (or any other) body of water would have been a profoundly frightening experience, akin to what religious refugees must have felt like boarding boats in Europe in the 1600s and sailing for the New World. No matter how full of hope they were, they were still leaving the most civilized place on earth for the most barren. In the case of the Israelites, this meant leaving Egypt behind for the desert. They were “going forth” from a world they knew to a world that didn’t yet exist based solely on the word of a god they’d never actually seen. Perhaps no one since Abraham could understand the depth of faith that required.
And in sensing the mix of anxiety and awe, I felt an emotion I hadn’t experienced since my earliest days in Turkey. It was the feeling of the land reaching up to touch me, elbowing aside my preconceived views of the Bible as a sterile collection of stories set in places I couldn’t see, involving characters I couldn’t relate to, experiencing desires I didn’t have. What emerged instead was a vibrant view of the Bible as a collection of living tableaux, set in actual places, involving genuine people, experiencing the most basic of human desires: the longing to live in a place, with their own beliefs and their own aspirations.