Crossing the Sea of Reeds; an inside job

originally posted by: Seede
a reply to: Utnapisjtim

TextSince you seem to avoid anything important and instead carry on explaining your incompetence clearly dismayed by mine:

You seem to have forgotten that this subject of Lucifer was your idea and not mine. This was another of your diversions from reality which you call intelligence.

In the context of where I mentioned the KJV Lucifer example, it was adequate, I used it to show how the name of a Roman deity that hadn't even been invented yet, suddenly shows up in Isaiah, written long before the Roman god of the Morningstar was even conceptualised. It is called historical anachronism, just like the LXX is calling Yam Suph 'The Red Sea', and as an "academically trained historian", you should know how to identify it or atleast be able to read what I wrote in it's proper context.

Just as you have no idea of the Hebrew language you also have no idea of where your Sea of Reeds is located.

Ok. I don't need to boast of my education like you do (you never answered my question about your university degree you claimed to have), and to be honest I am too old to take my rocks off to show you I'm bigger, but let's just say I have studied linguistics and probably know as much about Hebrew and language as you do. And my favorite sidekick is religion. I have about five yards of books related to linguistics and just about as many books about religion, esoteria, myth and history.

In fact you have no idea where Succoth is located nor where the Freedom Valley (coastal city of Pitham or Pi Ha Chiroth) is located. You have no clue as to the location of Baal Tzephon (Baal Zephon), the snarling dog, and it would shock you to learn that your great gates of the Nile are non existent and even if they did exist could not possibly be anywhere near the Exodus. Where is the Tower and Lord of the North located? You have no idea of what I am talking about simply because you have no idea of the Exodus. Tell us again the unfounded fable that Moses was nothing but a gate keeper who waved his stick to signal the opening of those imaginary gates and drown thousands of the Egyptian charioteers. Wikipedia cannot help you on this one. You are at best delusional.

HA HA HA. I must have hit a nerve. And I can't wait to get an answer to : DO you hold a university degree in history or don't you? It is relevant since you claim integrity in history, religion, liguistics and, oh my God, GEOGRAPHY!

Since you know all these things, and I don't, why don't you tell us all your uniquely almost divine insight.

a reply to: Utnapisjtim

Or get laid or something.

Im sorry, what were you were saying about being childish???
FYI, there is no deficit in that department.

With that said, your theory requires the rewritting of scripture entirely. There is no honest research here.

a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

Rewriting the bible? Is that your last stance? Please tell me how and why the Bible needs rewriting in order for Moses to cross the drained body of water referred to as Yam Suph. Fact is, the bible HAS been rewritten and made to fit into the nonsense idea that Moses supposedly crossed the Red Sea. It started with the LXX and goes on even to this day. Truth is The Red Sea is as far from where Moses and his people were, as the border of Israel. That's quite a detour. Not mentioning they would have to pass the heart of Egypt and the Pharaoh's palaces and the army on their way. That's a miracle as well. There are no miracles, man. Everything can be explained.

originally posted by: BELIEVERpriest

FYI, there is no deficit in that department.

Very well. Have an ice cream then. It's the heat, you know, it must be the heat

Exodus says Moses approaches Yam Suph, lifts his staff over his head and the water is held back by two walls, left and right, or perhaps figure of speech for a wall that can be turned right and left; and the river crossing at Yam Suph emerges. The Hebrew word Yam refers to a body of water, but the word is of Chaldean origin and translates 'sea', or a missing English word 'a *water' with general reference to a considerable body of water.

As a proper noun however, Yam is the name of one of the sons of El and in some stories, he is the enemy of Ba'al and several other deities up through history. Yam is a seven-headed dragon, and rules over seas and rivers, and as a god of order in chaos and chaos in order, he also is the god of winter and hardship. Yam may be the very same as the Sumerian dragon Tiamat, often seen with ten horns or seven heads or similar, more certain is that he is called Leviathan and Rahab in Semitic mythos and pantheons. The different destinies of Yam include being killed by Ba'al. Being slaughtered by Yahveh and be closed behind doors, and be dried up, he is: *drum roll* Egypt and the Nile. Water is the source of life, so the imagery is vivid, a result of pantheism where water is given different personalities from it's different states and a remnant from a time where water was sacred, scarce and scary, and how those who made themselves able to control water, or in this case, the Nile, were deified and were worshipped as gods.

Suph basically has two main definitions, reed or end (bottom, last, etc). Suph is also the name of a town in Deuteronomy 1:1 [ESV] where it is mentioned together with six other places:

"These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel beyond the Jordan in the wilderness, in the Arabah opposite Suph, between Paran and Tophel, Laban, Hazeroth, and Dizahab."

That'd be the town or place of Suph, beyond Jordan, beyond the wilderness, beyond Arabia, beyond the other four places mentioned. Though it shows the wrong location, see source here.

Moses wasn't stupid. And the sensible would be to simply go East toward Sinai from Goshen where they lived, by the "Ends of the River" in Lower Egypt, which is an alternate translation of Yam Suph, placing Suph somewhere near the Nile Delta towards the Sinai peninsula near where Suph was located, where Moses, being an Egyptian prince demonstrated his royal power to open and close the floodgates of the Nile during flood season and use the lake crossing as he pleased and further allow Israel to use the strategic crossing point at Yam Suph or the *water of Suph, lit. Sea of Suph, which name alludes to 'Aaru' or the 'Field of Reeds', the ancient Egyptian name for Paradise, and finally to open the gates again destroying the army representing the Pharaoh in the process.

Suph also means Reed, and many read Yam Suph as being the Red Sea based on a translation or rather an interpretation made in the LXX Septuagint where "The Sea of Suph" becomes the 'red sea' or ἐρυθρά θάλασσα in Greek, an allusion to all the blood of the soldiers who were crushed to smitherines against the bedrock of Yam Suph as Exodus shows Moses raising his staff a second time and the walls give in and the raging flood of water collapse upon the Egyptian army division, crushing them, as God crushed Rahab, according to Psalms.

During one of the seven stages in the flood cycle of the Nile, due to the six natural cataracts, the Nile also turned red at a given, predictable date, so the LXX 'red sea' part might very well be a subtle date-stamp (one of many), for there is nothing in the Greek LXX to indicate the LXX wording is a proper name, really, and the modern English name The Red Sea, is just that, a modern English idiom, constructed several millennia after Moses and the crossing of Yam Suph in Exodus is supposed to have happened.

Moses crossed Yam Suph during Passover, and adjusting for precession of the equinoxes, Passover in the 15th century BC happened to be at the same time as the annual flooding of the Nile, when the Nile turned into a giant moving sea covering the whole Nile Valley, rising with least 45 feet or about 15 meters, that's like a six storey building, based on markings at several ancient Nilometers along the Nile. Connected to this fluctuating body of water, were intricate systems of canals reaching distant parts of areas now all dried up and deserted, save the sand dunes and a few nomads, but we know from different sources that back then All of Egypt was green and lush because of this giant net of canals now buried under the sand of time.

==> Isaiah 11:15

And the LORD will utterly destroy the tongue of the Sea (U: Yam) of Egypt, and will wave his hand over the River with his scorching breath, and strike it into seven channels, and he will lead people across in sandals.

The nile IS divided in seven channels, separated by six mostly natural cataracts or floodgates. The first one is by Aswan and there are five more further up in Sudan. The Aswan High Dam today has eliminated the annual floods in Egypt by capturing and utilising all of the extra water added during flood season.

a reply to: Utnapisjtim

Im afraid I missed your point, Isaiah 11 is prophetic and pending fulfillment. It has nothing to do with the actual events of the exodus. Furthermore, it says that the Lord will scorge the ground so that the Jews will walk on dry land, not mud. There are no mentions of flood gates here.

originally posted by: BELIEVERpriest
a reply to: Utnapisjtim

Im afraid I missed your point, Isaiah 11 is prophetic and pending fulfillment. It has nothing to do with the actual events of the exodus. Furthermore, it says that the Lord will scorge the ground so that the Jews will walk on dry land, not mud. There are no mentions of flood gates here.

The thing is, it would have been impossible to live in the Nile valley had it not been for the different efforts that have been put into taming and harnessing the river up through history. The whole Nile system is basically seven channels separated by six cataracts, natural flood gates or "made by the hand of God" if you like. God lives in the future, but can speak and lead us today, just as effortlessly as he can talk in real-time to the ancients and direct them to building magnificent things or stuff like hanging out in a desert for generations.

Besides, did you notice how Isaiah calls the Nile Yam in the quote I gave? And how it has a tongue? Like the dragon Yam, split in the end like the delta of a river?

[Exodus 10:13] So Moses stretched out his staff over the land of Egypt... [ESV]

Earlier in this thread I have showed that the flooding of the Nile was an annual occurrence, and from knowing the date precisely you could predict when the floods started, when the water turned crimson and so on. A simple way to get an accurate date reading would be to measure the angle of Stella Polaris or the Sun above the horizon, and comparing the exact time and the given height to different tables, and you could get the exact date, latitude etc. You would have to use some kind of trigonometry to measure the angle of the star above the horizon. Below I have made a drawing of one such device that most likely existed in one shape or another at the time of the Exodus. The Cross-staff or Jacob's staff:

The Cross-staff is a primitive yet effective forerunner to the sextant and other such modern inventions used for the same purpose.

en.wikipedia.org...

In navigation the instrument is also called a cross-staff and was used to determine angles, for instance the angle between the horizon and Polaris or the sun to determine a vessel's latitude, or the angle between the top and bottom of an object to determine the distance to said object if its height is known, or the height of the object if its distance is known, or the horizontal angle between two visible locations to determine one's point on a map.

The Jacob's staff, when used for astronomical observations, was also referred to as a radius astronomicus. With the demise of the cross-staff, in the modern era the name "Jacob's staff" is applied primarily to the device used to provide support for surveyor's instruments.

Sooo.... Could the magic staff of Moses have been one of these? A cross-staff?
solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov... (.pdf)

The first real ancestor of the modern-day sextant as a multipurpose nautical instrument was the cross staff or Jacob's staff which was first described by a Jewish scholar named Levi ben Gerson in 1342. The instrument, as its predecessors, was an adaptation from an earlier astronomical surveying device. It consisted of a frame (staff) over 30 inches long with scales engraved on all four sides. Perpendicular to the frame were two or more transoms or "crosses" (hence the name). By lining up the horizon with one end of a cross and the celestial object with the other end, the observer had a simple trigonometric computer.

a reply to: Utnapisjtim

I have always found it amazing that the whole Egyptian army including their chariots all drowned in ankle deep water of this supposed reed sea. How do you explain that?

a reply to: guitarplayer

Who mentioned ankle deep? I see that come up all the time. A "yam" is a considerable body of water, and it could even be a reference to the flooding Nile itself, and like I have shown several times during this thread, the Nile rose by more than ten feet, and would fill the whole Nile valley with raging water. Read up. Papyrus reeds growing along the Nile would grow to become 15 feet high. One of the main regalia of the Pharaoh was the broken reed. It illustrates the destructive power of the Nile and how the Pharaoh controlled it showing godlike qualities.