Bless my mother. She’s always forwarding me interesting emails because she knows how busy I am. This is the digital, 21st-century version of a practice she inherited from my bubbie, who used to send packets of newspaper clippings to the house every week, just in case we’d missed a story about a two-headed calf or the top 10 qualities of gifted children.
Last week she sent me an email about how an amateur archaeologist named Ron Wyatt had discovered chariot wheels at the bottom of the Red Sea, effectively proving that divine events of Exodus aren’t just an exciting bedtime story. Except with just a few drops of Google juice I found out that Ron Wyatt also “discovered” Noah’s Ark, the Ark of the Covenant and the exact location of Jesus’ crucifixion. Nothing on the news wires about it, and if the academic homeboy at Paleojudaica doesn’t have anything to say about it, it’s got to be bunk.
But who need physical evidence to make the struggles of Moses, Miriam and the rest of our golden-calf worshipping ancestors relevant anyway? Does the existence of dead Egyptians at the bottom of the ocean actually prove or disprove the existence of God? I’m no rabbi (as I’m sure many are thankful), but isn’t the point of the Passover story is about faith?
Sorry, Mom. It surely would’ve made for fabulous seder conversation. But there’s always this two-headed turtle!
My grandmother once told me there were coyotes in her retirement neighborhood in Sun City, Arizona. I made the mistake of saying something like, “Oh really? That’s interesting.” Every mailed correspondence after that phone conversation, up until the day she died, included clippings of Coyote sightings from the local newspaper.
Chariot wheels in the Red Sea wouldn’t be terribly relevant to the Exodus, since Moses led us by way of the Yam Suf (Sea of Reed). Ex. 13:18.
But coyotes in AZ for sure … that I believe.
Read the article, Dan – Wyatt makes a claim that the Exodus’s actual point of departure was on the shores of the Red Sea, and that Mount Sinai is somewhere in Saudi Arabia. Ah, the loose interpretations…
Yeah I did … Wyatt didn’t bother to check the translation, it’s an old and well known error.
Goyish translators in days of yore couldn’t figure out what the “Yam Suf” was, so they assumed it had to be the Red Sea, because well the Red Sea is big and obvious and right there, after all. But the actual Hebrew text is pretty clearly indicating that Moses took us through the marshes, which is a pretty good way to evade chariots, I should think.
Unfortunately in some parts of the Christian l community, where “literal” interpretation is favored, they seem to rely upon the “literal English” of the KJV — the obvious problem & silliness of this needs no further comment.