The discovery of a “hot hole” in the Red Sea indicates that Pharaoh’s Egyptian soldiers could literally have been in “hot water” pursuing the fleeing Israelites at the time of the Exodus, Dr. David A. Ross of the Woods Hole, Mass., Oceanographic Institution, today reported to the American Geophysical Union.
Dr. Ross defined a “hot hole” as deep and filled with hot, very salty water, extending down to the cooler sea bottom. He said the new discovery brings to three the number of such holes found in the area of the Red Sea. They are roughly opposite Mecca on the Arabian side and many miles south of where the sea is believed to have swallowed the pursuing Egyptian forces.
The Bible relates, in its account of the Exodus, how the Israelites, pursued by Pharaoh’s army, safely crossed the Red Sea after “Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord…made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.” Then the Egyptians followed in hot pursuit but were engulfed in swirling and raging waters. A spokesman for the National Geographic Society stated that which “no one knows for sure” where the Israelites crossed and the Egyptians subsequently drowned, all scholarly theories suggest that such events took place many miles north of the newly discovered hot holes in the Red Sea.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
