Red_Sea

The Red Sea is the body of water that separates northeastern Africa from the Arabian peninsula, and within Scripture it is chiefly the sea that Israel crossed in the exodus out of Egypt. In the Hebrew Bible it is called yam suph, a phrase whose ordinary sense is “sea of reeds,” and the Greek Old Testament renders it erythra thalassa, “Red Sea,” the name carried over into the New Testament (Acts 7:36; Hebrews 11:29). The English term follows that Greek and Latin usage rather than the literal Hebrew.

What Scripture says of the sea is dominated by the deliverance narrative. Israel cries out in affliction beside it (Nehemiah 9:9), and God divides the water so that the people pass through on dry ground while their pursuers are cast into the depths “as a stone into the mighty waters” (Nehemiah 9:11). The psalmists retell the same event: “He split the sea, and caused them to pass through. He made the waters stand as a heap” (Psalm 78:13), and Israel is charged with forgetting those wonders and rebelling “at the sea, even at the Red Sea” (Psalm 106:7), though God saved them “for his name’s sake” (Psalm 106:8). Moses’ song celebrates the same act — the horse and its rider thrown into the sea (Exodus 15:1) — and praise of God’s incomparable holiness is set within that song (Exodus 15:11). The sea also functions as a territorial marker: the land promised to Israel is bounded from the Red Sea to the sea of the Philistines and to the River (Exodus 23:31).

The New Testament treats the crossing as both past event and figure. Stephen rehearses it among the wonders God worked through Moses “in Egypt, in the Red Sea, and in the wilderness for forty years” (Acts 7:36). Hebrews cites it as an act of faith — “By faith they passed through the Red Sea as on dry land” — with the Egyptians swallowed up when they attempted the same (Hebrews 11:29). Paul recalls that the fathers “all passed through the sea” (1 Corinthians 10:1), appealing to the Exodus generation as a warning and example for the church.

Historically and geographically, the identification of the exact crossing point is genuinely disputed. The northern end of the Red Sea divides into the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba, and proposals have been made for each, as well as for marshland and shallow lakes near the eastern Nile Delta, which some scholars favor on the strength of the Hebrew phrase “sea of reeds.” Which site is meant is not settled by the text itself. Christian traditions also read the sea differently: many treat the crossing as a type of baptism and of liberation from bondage, following Paul’s language about passing through the sea; others stress it primarily as a concrete historical rescue and a display of divine power over nations; and interpretations differ over how far the account should be understood as a direct miracle of divided water or as providence working through natural wind and tide. These are readings within a shared memory of the event, not disputes over whether Scripture records it.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.