Ancient Mapping: Israelite Versus Egyptian Orientation

William H.C. Propp, Exodus 1-18: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Anchor Bible; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 338-339. See also his gloss on 14:21, in which he reiterates this suggestion, 498-499.

See discussion in, Joel F. Drinkard “Direction and Orientation,” Anchor Bible Dictionary2 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 204.

See: Dieter Keßler, “Himmelsrichtungen,” in Lexikon der Ägyptologie, ed., Wolfgang Helck, Eberhard Otto, Wolfhart Westendorf (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1977), 2.1213–1215. I would like to thank Aayko K. Eyma for this bibliographic reference.

One could ask how a north wind could carry locusts into the Suph Sea, which is south east, not south. The answer is that the direction of sand dunes in the Sinai Peninsula indicates that the primary direction of the sea wind comes actually from NW. Thus the “sea wind” carried the locusts SE towards the Gulf of Suez and the row of lakes which separates Sinai from Egypt. Ancient Egyptian (unlike biblical Hebrew) has terms for intermediate directions that combined both primary directions.

Even if the author had the map wrong, the locust story also demonstrates some knowledge of Egyptian geography since he knows locusts come from downstream in Egypt.

Lake Manzeleh, El-Balkah Lakes, Lake Timsach and Bitter Lakes. See: James K. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 164–169 and fig. 2.

See: Alan H. Gardiner, “The Ancient Military Road Between Egypt and Palestine,” JEA 6 (1920), 99–116, plate 11.

I am referring here to the non-Priestly version of the story in which the sea is not split but pushed back. Whether the story is divisible into two or three strands is debated by source critics. In my view, the account of the blowing back of the water is E.

A north wind could do the work too by drying the northern part of the lake. Yet a northern Egyptian wind is described in the Bible as “Sea Wind” (Exod. 10:19).