Page:Mount Seir, Sinai and Western Palestine.djvu/224

Rh there can be little doubt. The locality, as suggested by Dean Stanley, was probably in the vicinity of Ajrûd, the halting-place of the Mecca pilgrims. Now, to the north of the Gulf of Suez, and extending a distance of ten statute miles to the Bitter Lakes, there exists at the present day a neck of land, across which the Israelitish host might have marched into the wilderness of Etham on their way to Mount Sinai, and over which the army of Pharaoh, with its chariots, would probably have been unable to follow; at any rate (if the conditions had been the same then as now) there would have been no necessity for the performance of a miracle in dividing the waters of a sea which at the present day does not exist. Here is a difficulty; arising from the impossibility of reconciling the Scriptural narrative with observed physical phenomena.

It seems to me, however, that the explanation is sufficiently clear to any one who considers that ever since the Pliocene period down to very recent times the land has been gaining on the sea over the area which was the scene of these events. At the Pliocene period the whole of Lower Egypt and the borders of the Mediterranean were submerged to a depth of (at least) 200 feet below the present sea-level, and since that period the land has been slowly rising. It is not too much to assume that at a period of four thousand years ago the process of elevation had not been completed to its present extent; and that, in consequence, the waters of the Gulf of Suez stretched northwards into the Bitter Lakes, forming a channel, perhaps of no great depth, but requiring the exercise of Almighty Power to convert it into a causeway of dry land in order to rescue the chosen people from their impending peril. The levels taken for the Suez Canal show that a depression of about 25 feet would suffice to bring the waters of the Gulf of Suez into the Bitter Lakes; and this submergence would still leave the neck to the north of the Bitter Lakes in the position of land such as we know it to have been in the time of the Pharaohs, and which formed the line of communication between Egypt and the East. In this way, as it appears to me, we may bring the Bible narrative into harmony with physical phenomena.

2. The Giving of the Law from Mount Sinai.—The claims of the different mountains of the Sinaitic peninsula to be that from which the Law was delivered to Israel have been carefully analysed by one who knows the topographical details perhaps better than any other Englishman, Colonel Sir Charles Wilson, who gives his decision in favour of Jebel Mûsa, or