Exodus 14: One camp, three landmarks, and three readings of where it stood
Read it →Exodus 14:2 fixes the camp more precisely than any other verse in the march: in front of Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea, in front of Baal-zephon. One place, three landmarks, a sightline to each. It is also the verse that has kept the route of the exodus open for the best part of two centuries, because those three names are the three nobody can find. Take each name's leading identification on its own and they land up to 82 km apart — Pi-hahiroth on a plain by the Bitter Lakes, Migdol and Baal-zephon away up on the old Pelusiac frontier — which is not a camp any scholar has proposed but an accident of counting each name's votes separately. So this map does not count them separately. Every site the sources put forward is drawn, in the colour of the reconstruction it belongs to: a northern reading that sets the camp on Egypt's fortified frontier and the crossing in the lagoons behind the Mediterranean bar, a lakes reading that keeps it on the isthmus among the reed marshes of Timsah and the Bitter Lakes, and a southern reading that takes it down to the head of the Gulf of Suez under Jebel Attaqa. None of the three names carries a pin, because none of the three readings has won. What the chapter itself says is not in doubt at all: the chariots come out of Egypt behind them, the sea goes back before an east wind that blows all night, Israel walks through on dry ground, and the water returns over the horsemen. Only the where is open, and the map says so three times over.
Regions on this map
Verses 1-20: one campsite, given three landmarks and a sightline to each, and between them the three names carry thirteen candidate sites spread over 154 km of the isthmus. Nothing here is pinned. Every proposal is drawn as an open ring in the colour of the reconstruction that offers it.
Verses 5-9 and 23-31: Egypt is named in ten verses of this chapter and never as somewhere anyone is going. It is what the column has left and what the chariots come out of. The dot is the gazetteer's nominal point for the whole country, at Ain Shams in modern Cairo; the pursuit is drawn from it and stops in open delta, because where it caught them depends on where the camp was.
Verses 21-31: nine verses running that name no place, which is why this map keeps them. Three tracks cross, one for each reading, each over the water that reading crosses. The three short tracks that go in and stop are the Egyptians.
Exodus 14, verse by verse
- Exodus 14:2“Tell the people of Israel to turn back and encamp in front of , between and the sea, in front of ; you shall encamp facing it, by the sea.
- Exodus 14:5When the king of was told that the people had fled, the mind of Pharaoh and his servants was changed toward the people, and they said, “What is this we have done, that we have let Israel go from serving us?”
- Exodus 14:7and took six hundred chosen chariots and all the other chariots of with officers over all of them.
- Exodus 14:8And the LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh king of , and he pursued the people of Israel while the people of Israel were going out defiantly.
- Exodus 14:9The Egyptians pursued them, all Pharaoh's horses and chariots and his horsemen and his army, and overtook them encamped at the sea, by , in front of .
- Exodus 14:11They said to Moses, “Is it because there are no graves in that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us in bringing us out of ?
- Exodus 14:12Is not this what we said to you in : ‘Leave us alone that we may serve the ’? For it would have been better for us to serve the than to die in the wilderness.”
- Exodus 14:18And the shall know that I am the LORD, when I have gotten glory over Pharaoh, his chariots, and his horsemen.”
- Exodus 14:20coming between the host of and the host of Israel. And there was the cloud and the darkness. And it lit up the night without one coming near the other all night.
- Exodus 14:25clogging their chariot wheels so that they drove heavily. And the said, “Let us flee from before Israel, for the LORD fights for them against the .”
- Exodus 14:30Thus the LORD saved Israel that day from the hand of the , and Israel saw the dead on the seashore.
- Exodus 14:31Israel saw the great power that the LORD used against the , so the people feared the LORD, and they believed in the LORD and in his servant Moses.