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I was on the hunt for the route of the Exodus,

searching for the sea that Moses

and the Israelites crossed after leaving Egypt.

This sea was said to have miraculously parted,

making a way for the Israelites to cross,

and yet destroying Pharaoh and his army.

The mystery of where this event took place

has captivated people for thousands of years.

Can I now verify its true location?

(ambient music)

(gentle music)

The way I was drawn into this investigation

goes back to 2001.

I heard reports that Exodus explorers diving

in the Red Sea were making exciting

discoveries of Pharaoh's army on the seafloor.

(boat engine roaring)

That's what first brought me to Egypt.

These divers claimed to have found chariot wheels encrusted

in coral along with skeletons.

It was so intriguing and very controversial.

But over time I began to realize that

there was more involved here.

Because where you place the sea crossing determines

the size of the miracle needed.

And it's the nature of this miracle

that now grips me, not just where it happened,

but how it happened.

I discovered that there are two main approaches

that explain this miracle very differently.

And there are people of faith in both camps.

(upbeat music)

I traveled to the wilderness of southern Israel

to meet with Australian Deborah Hurn.

For Hurn, it all began in 1995.

While on a family vacation to the Holy Land,

she was introduced to the debate over

the true location of Mount Sinai.

She would become captivated with solving the mystery

of the Israelites' journey in the wilderness and invest over

12 years of her life to research the subject.

This culminated in her doctoral thesis

on the route of the Exodus.

For a long time,

the idea was that the Israelites crossed down

through here and crossed the Suez.

Yeah.
If you look at

maps that are three, four hundred years old,

that this was a common understanding

and that they went off into this mountain down here.

I was raised on that view,

that they basically crossed through

about 10 kilometers south of Suez.

But it's still very deep.

The wind can't do it,

there's no way the wind can do it.

You have to rely then on a spectacular miracle.

Why mention the wind?

Hurn brought up an important factor.

One reason the Egyptian approach

sees the sea crossing happening through

a shallow body of water is

because the Bible mentions the work of the wind.

"And the Lord drove the sea back

"by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land,

"and the waters were divided."

Hurn takes the Egyptian approach seeing

the events happening on a small scale

with shorter travel to a sea crossing

at one of the shallow lakes near Egypt.

Why do you think that scholars started

to shift away from the Suez,

and move the thinking further north to a more

of a marshy lake?

The shift from a spectacular Suez crossing happened

because the scholars became uncomfortable

with the supernatural,

with the patently supernatural,

and they were looking for a more natural explanation.

Do you think it was a larger miracle,

or do you think it was a smaller miracle?

The text indicates it was very large.

Jodell Onstott was an agnostic

that went on a 16-year personal journey looking

for evidence of the Bible.

Her search for answers led her into archaeology,

history and biblical research.

She found the proof for God that she was looking for,

and wrote the nearly 1,200 page treatise "YHWH Exists".

Onstott takes a Hebrew approach,

which sees the events of the Exodus on a much larger scale,

including the miracles,

with a sea crossing at the distant and deep Gulf of Aqaba.

The one thing that separates Israel's God

from all the other deities over the course of the history,

is this idea of the parting of the Red Sea,

this huge miracle.

(rumbling of thunder)

(uplifting music)

(waves crashing)

And it is referred to,

I believe, over 20 times throughout

the Hebrew text as being the defining moment

of bringing Israel and making them a nation.

(uplifting music)

Talking with Deb Hurn and Jodell Onstott,

I could see how their view of miracles impacts

where they place the sea crossing.

The Egyptian approach favors naturalistic explanations,

meaning that God used something in nature

to cause the miracle to happen.

While the Hebrew approach sees miracles

as spectacular events beyond natural explanation.

I just want to know which of these views best matches

the biblical account.

Because understanding the nature of miracles

might be the clue to solving this mystery.

(upbeat music)

Oxford professor C.S. Lewis had an aversion to God

and miracles as a young atheist in the university.

He would later change his mind

and become one of the most influential voices

for Christianity in the 20th century.

He and his good friend,

fellow Oxford professor J.R.R. Tolkien,

author of "The Lord of the Rings"

would often talk about the deep ideas

in the fantasy worlds they created,

and their connection to our own.

You see Tollers, our fantasies must show

that there is something quite outside

this world of ours,

especially in this age of machines

and artificial environments,

which we have made for ourselves.

Goodness gracious it's becoming hard enough to gain glimpses

of the natural world let alone

the supernatural one to which it points.

Absolutely, Jack.

True magic is the power to do good.

I am convinced that miracles are a retelling,

in small letters, of that very same story

that is written across the world in letters too large

for some to see.

(whooshing)

Personally, I had always thought of these miracles

as spectacular events,

but I wanted to better understand

how the Egyptian approach views God working

through natural causes.

So I traveled to England to meet Sir Colin Humphreys

who wrote "The Miracles of Exodus".

He is a highly awarded physicist working

in the field of material science and

the Director of Research at the University of Cambridge.

In 2010 Humphreys was knighted by the queen

of England for his service to science.

As a Christian, he sees no conflict

between science and his faith.

So what do we have here?

So here we have,

this is the latest machine in the world,

it's first in the world to grow LEDs,

and other transistors and so on.

In the future we want to have

micro LEDs which can actually stimulate

individual neurons in the brain,

so we can understand how the brain works.

Then we may have a cure for Alzheimer's disease,

So really important.

While Humphreys views the miracles

of Exodus as naturalistic,

he also thinks that the sea crossing was far

from Egypt at the Gulf of Aqaba,

consistent with the Hebrew approach.

So he has a hybrid approach,

combining aspects of the two views.

Why did you become interested

in that particular story of the Exodus?

The first thing which struck me was the characteristics

of Mount Sinai described in the Bible match

the characteristics of a volcano, exactly.

I mean, it's just a superb observation

of an erupting volcano that was being described.

Professor Humphreys' view of Mount Sinai

as an erupting volcano helped me understand

how many in the Egyptian

view see all the miracles of Exodus.

From the plagues, to the parting of the sea

and even the pillar of cloud

and fire the Israelites were following.

For them, everything had natural causes.

On the morning of the third day

(thunder rumbling) there was thunder and lightning,

and a thick cloud on the mountain,

and a very loud trumpet blast,

(loud trumpet playing)

so that all the people in the camp trembled.

Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke

because the LORD had descended on it in fire.

(thunder rumbling)

The smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln,

and the whole mountain trembled greatly.

And as the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder,

Moses spoke, and God answered him in thunder.

(thunder rumbling)

So there is the fire and the smoke,

which is the obvious characteristic of a volcano,

but there's other characteristics as well.

So it talks about lightening on the top of the volcano,

and you get this with many volcanoes,

because the ash which is fired up is charged.

And so you then get a discharge,

as with clouds,

and so you get lightning flashes.

Then, the whole mountain trembled, the Bible says.

You usually get earthquakes preceding

and during volcanoes.

Humphreys believes that Mount Sinai

was in northwest Saudi Arabia.

This area contained the ancient land of Midian

where Moses spent 40 years, and has volcanic activity,

unlike the Sinai Peninsula.

And there was a particular clue,

which I thought was just remarkable,

and that is the sound of a trumpet came from the mountain.

And I found a Roman historian called Dio Cassius,

he was describing the eruption

of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 Italy,

and he said the sound of a trumpet was heard

coming from Vesuvius.

I thought How remarkable.

And what does it mean?

And there's a good scientific explanation,

and that is, in a volcanic eruption,

hot gases are forced up,

and they go through the narrow cracks in the rocks,

and musical notes come out.

It's like playing a trumpet.

(Tim making a trumpet sound)

Kind of like that?
Wonderful.

That's right, yes.

I don't know if I could do that, but I did it.

That's brilliant, that's exactly right.

You've received pushback from some Christians

because of your naturalistic ideas.

How would you respond to that?

I say they're definitely miracles.

So the fact we've explained them

by science doesn't mean we've explained them away.

They are still miracles and miracles in the timing.

This sounds intriguing,

but does a naturalistic approach at times down play

what the Bible describes for these miracles?

(upbeat music)

Over the last few centuries,

the belief has grown that only what can be directly observed

and measured should be considered valid.

In the 1700s, famous Scottish philosopher

David Hume challenged the credibility of miracles.

Within a century, the ideas of Hume helped

create a new naturalistic mind set among many scholars

that would end up shaping the thinking of the modern world,

and challenge confidence in the miracles of the Bible.

(motorbike engine roaring)

Dr. Craig White, is a professor of philosophy

at the University of Colorado Boulder.

I wanted to talk to him about Hume,

to understand this shift toward a naturalistic view

that's uncomfortable with spectacular miracles.

So what are some of the ideas that Hume has developed?

Well Hume is one of the British empiricists.

They really said the most important thing is evidence

that we can pile up.

You mean things that you can touch or things you can see?

Right. So you can touch them,

you can see them.

If you got evidence,

maybe it should be certified in some way.

So Hume didn't believe in miracles.

Right. There's a famous argument he makes.

If you're going to believe a story

about something that happens in the world,

some factual story, you need evidence.

And a miracle, by definition goes against

the way things usually are.

In his phrase, "It violates the laws of nature."

I've heard that, yeah.
So if somebody's dead

and they rise up three days later,

they've violated the laws of nature.

If waters are parted out of sea?

That's right. If the waters part

and stay away, stay apart,

so the people can walk through on dry land,

that's a violation.

So Hume would have an issue with that

and a lot of other people.
Hume doesn't

say it's impossible.

He says, "Should I believe it or not?"

Hume's ideas spread,

challenging the validity of biblical miracles

in the minds of modern thinkers.

But have his ideas also tempered

the way many believers think about miracles?

Do you think that there are such things

as miracles that are actually supernatural,

not just naturalistic?

Do you mean spectacular supernatural?

Well for example the pillar of fire and the cloud.

So was there a pillar of fire and a cloud?

The Bible says that they were led

through the wilderness by this pillar of fire.

It's only like a year ago,

in fact I read an article that said

that this is not unusual for Bedouin companies

to navigate their way through the desert.

They have a wagon and they burn bitumen in heavy clay pots,

and during the day it sends off smoke,

and during the night it sends off light.

And what is a bitumen? Is it a...

Asphalty stuff. It's tar.

It burns hot and it burns slow,

it was one of the primary products of the Dead Sea area.

Now I'm a conservative Bible believer,

and I do believe the angel was with them,

and I do believe that God was with them.

I believe that everything

that happened to them was orchestrated and created by God,

but I am open to the idea that God uses natural

and otherwise explicable things

to help us, to guide us, to support us,

to protect us, to save us.

And a wagon with a burning bitumen signal,

I'm okay with that, but I'm conflicted.

It sounds familiar, and I think, hmm...

Moses also recorded that at times

the pillar of cloud would descend to the entrance

of the tent of meeting.

This doesn't sound like a natural phenomenon.

(thunder rumbling)

I believe that God can

and does work through natural means.

But the question is,

did God only work through normal natural processes

in the Exodus,

or were these miracles spectacular

in a way that can only be explained by the power of God?

Was there a pillar of fire leading the Israelites?

I don't see how you can get around it.

So what you're suggesting is that it

wasn't a natural occurrence.

No, the text states that it was a molech.

Today we would say that's an angel.

The Hebrew says it's God's messenger.

And God specifically says, "Obey his voice,

"he will not forgive your sins, and my name is in him."

Don't you that the whole story is filled

with these unusual things?

You have a very theophoric element

to this whole wilderness sojourn.

And "theophoric" means?

God-influenced, God-centric.

Where today we have this habit of really humanizing God.

We don't like the ideas of anything out of the ordinary.

We do not see things out of the ordinary occurring.

So when we hear about waters parting,

Israel walking on dry land,

a cloud or a pillar,

we're very uncomfortable with those things.

(upbeat music)

Eric Metaxas is a writer,

speaker and the host of The Eric Metaxas Show.

I've known Eric for a number of years.

He is also the author of "Miracles"

and numerous other New York Times bestsellers.

I think it's important for us to understand

that miracles are for our benefit.

God can do everything in a way that looks naturalistic,

but there are times when he wants to get our attention.

He wants to say,

"Hey, I'm here. I want you to know that I'm here."

So that's actually important that miracles are a way

that God communicates to us,

and so when people say,

"Well, it's no big deal,"

if your attitude is it's no big deal,

then clearly, it's not a miracle.

A miracle is meant by God to be a big deal.

(suspenseful music)

Dr. Jason DeRouchie takes the Hebrew approach.

The Bible talks about a pillar of cloud

and a pillar of fire that led the Israelites,

out of Egypt and on to Mount Sinai

and was with them through the time in the wilderness.

What do you think that was?

Throughout Scripture, miracles of a grand nature

like this were not happening all the time.

There's just specific moments in history

where God is manifesting himself in this way.

I think that Israel is experiencing a cloud,

but it's more than that.

The language of hovering that occurs in Deuteronomy 32

to describe what it was that that pillar of fire

and the pillar of cloud were doing.

It was as if they were hovering

like a bird over Israel, leading them.

And Israel's call was to wait and to follow.

The only other place that that language shows up

in the Torah is in Genesis chapter one

of the Spirit of God hovering over the waters.

There seems to be a connection here

between the cloud and the Spirit.

So what you're suggesting then is that

the Spirit of God was using this cloud as away for them

to see God leading them out of Egypt.

It's not just that he was using the cloud,

his presence was creating the cloud.

(dramatic music)

But what sea was this pillar leading them to?

In my previous film,

I had taken a close look at the biblical account

to identify a sequence of six steps

for the Exodus journey.

In the Egyptian approach the journey to the sea took days.

But in the Hebrew approach it took weeks.

In part one, I investigated the Departure, Direction,

and Desert steps for each approach.

I had gotten as far as the Detour to a Dead End

in the Egyptian approach.

It suggests the detour was caused by forts and canals

that ulTimately trapped the Israelites at one

of the lakes along the border of Egypt's Nile Delta.

Now I need to investigate the Hebrew approach

for the Detour to a Dead End.

The Bible records that Moses

and the Israelites journeyed out of Egypt

until God tells them to turn and camp by the sea.

The Lord said to Moses,

"Encamp in front of Pi-hahiroth,

"between Migdol and the sea,

"in front of Baal-zephon

"you shall encamp facing it, by the sea."

To rightfully locate the sea crossing site,

one would have to find these four identifying places listed

in the biblical account for the Dead End.

Pi-hahiroth, meaning "mouth of the canal"

or "mouth of the gorge."

Migdol, meaning "tower" or "fortress."

Yam Suph, the Hebrew name for the sea

that was crossed.

And Baal-zephon, meaning "lord of the north,"

likely a place of worship for the god Baal.

Egyptologist David Rohl takes the Egyptian approach,

which sees clear links between the biblical terms

and locations near Egypt.

It's a perfect fit,

so you have all the toponyms in this region.

So you have toponyms that match the Biblical text?

They almost triangulate the location.

And you don't think that it was possible then,

that was a crossing either at the Suez or over at Aqaba?

I can't see it.

As far as I'm concerned,

they're just too deep, too difficult,

and they're nowhere near where all these toponyms are.

(suspenseful music)

In contrast, those in the Hebrew approach,

such as geographer Glen Fritz,

note that the Hebrew name

for the sea that was crossed, Yam Suph,

was used for the Gulf of Aqaba.

The book of First Kings records

that King Solomon built a fleet

of ocean-going vessels at a place called Ezion Geber,

here at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba.

The Bible names this sea Yam Suph,

the same sea it says the Israelites crossed

to escape the Egyptians.

And Fritz notes that it makes no sense

for King Solomon to have sea-going vessels trapped

in the lakes of Egypt.

Besides the place-names,

the Hebrew approach also believes that the descriptions

of the events given by Moses are important clues pointing

to the Gulf of Aqaba.

Here, there are three Dead End locations proposed.

The northern tip is where Professor Humphreys

believes the Israelites were trapped.

In ancient times this area had marsh flats with reeds

that have since been largely covered up

by the modern city of Eilat.

You can see that was a very good site

for them to be trapped,

because Pharaoh's army were pursuing them and what we know

is that to get down to the Gulf of Aqaba,

you have to go through quite

a steep mountain drop as it were,

and it's known from Egyptian records

that there was a bypass that chariots could take,

but it didn't godown that drop,

it actually went up north and then came down again.

So, you can imagine the Egyptian army dividing

and the foot soldiers chase the Israelites,

and they'd be behind them.

But then the chariots,

they'd be in front of them.

So they were surrounded.

Their only means of escape was crossing

this body of water.

His proposal for a shallow water crossing,

caused by the wind,

is similar to the scenario at the border lakes of Egypt.

And so, if you have a strong wind,

blowing across a body of water it forces it back.

Which then exposes dry land,

and the Israelites can cross.

It's exactly as the Bible describes.

It's a natural event but just at the right time.

But there's another idea for a Dead End

that fits the hybrid approach and claims

to have located all the

place names specified in the Bible.

Now retired, I met Dr. Fred Baltz at the church

where he had pastored for over 40 years in Galena, Illinois.

He's written a book on his findings,

called "Exodus Found."

The people with their various theories

all have looked at where the water is,

and I realized you have to look at where the water was.

Colin Humphreys thought the same thing,

but I'm looking farther north than his proposal.

I'm looking at Timna,

because Timna has the sites that we're looking for,

based on the Exodus texts.

As Dr. Baltz was investigating ancient maps

he ran across an unusual feature

on one of them that revealed two bodies

of water he had never seen before.

This one shows a lake here and a lake here.

Yeah, I see that.

These lakes are there only on the 1896 map

because this cartographer was there in the spring.

He was there after the spring rains

when the water gathers in those two places.

And I received communication

from someone in Israel just

recently confirming it still happens.

However, this location of Timna

is about 15 miles north of the Gulf of Aqaba

and nearly 250 feet above sea level.

How would this have been considered Yam Suph,

the Gulf of Aqaba?

I think due to the fact that it's in the valley,

the same valley that extends

all the way up to the Dead Sea, the Rift Valley,

I think, conceptually, people would have thought

of these other waters just to the very north

of the Gulf of Aqaba as part of the Yam Suph.

Twice, I have visited this ancient site of Timna.

It was a copper mining center that was

sometimes controlled by the Egyptians

and later was on the border between Israel and Edom.

(metal clanking)

Dr. Baltz believes this was the location

for the Dead End step of the Exodus route at the sea.

We're looking down on Timna.

Three stone outcroppings.

The one farthest to the right

is what we would call a "mesa."

A mesa is a projection from a lower surface with a flat top.

That's one of the definitions,

the dictionary definitions of Migdol.

Here, Dr. Baltz was associating

the Hebrew word Migdol with a towering rock formation.

There is a stone wall,

or the remains of a stone wall,

around the top of it.

Now, the new understanding is that that wall

was there for the protection of the people inside,

so it becomes a fortress.

You have Migdol there,

I would say, in spades.

On top of the Migdol there

was an ancient Semitic high place,

which he suggests was connected to Baal worship,

fitting Baal-zephon.

Now, if Pi-hahiroth means mouth of the waters,

we're in the Wadi Nehushtan,

which comes down to our body of water here.

We have that definition covered, too.

(thunder rumbling)

Dr. Baltz also proposes that Mount Sinai

was a volcano in Arabia,

the plume of which was the pillar of cloud and fire

that was leading the Israelites.

"Then the angel of God

"who was going before the host of Israel

"moved and went behind them.

"And the pillar of cloud moved from before them

"and stood behind them coming between the host of Egypt

"and the host of Israel."

So what you're suggesting

is that the Israelites were following this band.

They had been following off in the distance this pillar.

Now, the pillar driven by the east wind

that is the same east wind that will divide the waters,

it's coming their way,

and that would have been an ominous,

frightening looking cloud.

Dr. Baltz believes that the plume from Mount Sinai

in Arabia would have been driven counterclockwise

around a strong low pressure system

along the ground to the crossing site.

There's another instance of a picture

from space of a volcanic plume traveling

with the wind along the ground.

I see, so you're saying this plume

somehow came between them.

It came across the ground

because a strong east wind was driving it.

But the Bible sort of gives this impression,

it was the angel of the Lord.

And there again,

I mean I wouldn't deny that,

but it was the Lord in the pillar of cloud

that looked down upon the Egyptians.

You couldn't see through it,

and there's volcanic lightning in it,

and it says that not one came near the other all night.

(dramatic music)

So far, I've seen two alternative crossing sites

on the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba,

each involving shallow water.

This leaves two proposed locations

in the Hebrew approach,

either of which would demand a deep-water crossing.

Some scholars reject these locations

because they reject miracles.

Others like Sir Colin Humphreys

are okay with the supernatural,

but believe God primarily works

within the normal laws of nature that we see every day.

(waves crashing)

And it would be impossible for deep water

to part naturally by wind.

(waves crashing) But there is another big reason

for the widespread rejection of a deep-water

Aqaba crossing, the personalities

who have popularized the idea.

It all began in 1960,

with a photograph taken near Mt. Ararat in Turkey

of a mysterious boat-shaped object

which was published in Life Magazine.

That drove Ron Wyatt on a lifeTime pursuit in search

of biblical evidence beginning with Noah's Ark.

I believe that God has preserved time capsules

in different parts of the world mostly in the Far East

or the Middle East there.

And that these are to get the attention of people.

Ron Wyatt was an amateur archeologist

and could be considered one of the first Exodus explorers

of the 20th century and the most controversial.

He claimed to have found spectacular evidence

for many biblical events

more than seemed possible for one man.

(plane engine roaring)

In 1978, he rented a small plane

and flew down the western coast

of the Gulf of Aqaba looking for a place

where the Israelites could reach the sea and be trapped.

He found a deep wadi,

a dry valley that led to Nuweiba beach,

a massive protrusion of sand out from the mountains.

Wyatt later drove to the location.

We're out here at the beach,

that the Israelites came out on

when they came out of the canyon system

that they had been following,

by the leading of the cloud,

and of course following Moses

who was following the cloud.

They came out of the mouth of the canyon here,

totally enclosed by the sheer cliffs on either side.

And having arrived at the beach,

I imagine they were rather shocked to look out

and see a wide expanse of sea awaiting them.

(dramatic music)

From that point they could go no further.

And of course, when Pharaoh and his host

came out behind them

(chariots rumbling)

they were quite ready to stone Moses.

It was here that Wyatt started to dive,

looking for the remains of Pharaoh's chariots

on the seafloor.

Over time, others who learned about

his search joined in the effort,

including Swedish DNA research scientist Dr. Lennart Möller.

I saw Möller in a film about this subject

and that's how I became aware of the Exodus investigation.

I was impressed with his scientific approach.

In experimental sciences

we have a very standardized procedure to follow.

You put up a hypothesis,

you perform an experiment,

you or others can repeat the experiment,

you do statistics, you put it all together,

you have a manuscript and you publish it.

That's the normal function for science.

But if you go back in history,

it's a totally different issue,

because we cannot repeat the experiment.

But you can use scientific tools

to investigate different parts of the history.

And in that way you can apply science.

You have the air.
Yeah.

Möller and others continued the investigation

that Ron Wyatt began.

Since Wyatt first proposed Nuweiba beach,

it has become the most popular option

for a Deep Sea crossing in the Hebrew Approach.

(suspenseful music)

(whooshing)

So what Detour would the Israelites have taken

to reach a Dead End at Nuweiba?

Before turning, Dr. Fritz believes

that Moses was heading toward a Mount Sinai location

in Saudi Arabia.

Now Moses was commanded to bring

the Israelites to the Mountain of God.

The normal route that would be taken, again,

would be across the Peninsula

above the top of the Gulf of Aqaba.

I don't think Moses was planning to cross

a body of water to get to his destination.

Now, Exodus 14:2 says that the Israelites

were told to turn aside.

The Lord said to Moses,

tell the people of Israel

to turn back and encamp by the sea.

For Pharaoh will say of the people of Israel,

"they are wandering in the land.

"The wilderness has shut them in."

They were to turn from the route

that you normally would consider

to be the direct way into Midian,

and that they were to encamp

between Midgol and the sea.

And it is a place where you could either continue

onto the east as the blue route shows

or you could take a route that headed down

to the only opening to the sea and today

this opening to the sea is a place called Nuweiba.

Now, the canyon that you see behind me is part

of the southern route that would lead them up to Edom,

or present day Eilat.

This was the way Moses assumed that they would go.

However, God instructed them

as they actually turned northward here,

to go the way that would have required

no sea crossing whatsoever

he told Moses to turn back or in the opposite direction.

And this, of course, led them down by the sea.

(dramatic music)

I traveled down this wadi

or river bed canyon called Wadi Watir with Möller.

The road was rough and twisting

and yet I could see it would be easy

to traverse the valley floor.

The description of Moses in saying that Pharaoh

thought that the Israelites were trapped,

or imprisoned in the wilderness definitely applies

to the geography and the geomorphology here.

Very rugged peaks.

One route in, one route out.

No way to turn once you get into that wadi.

Its steep walls are up to 7,000 feet high

and lead to a mouth of a gorge.

And we also read in the Bible that Pharaoh thought

that he had the Israelites imprisoned in the wilderness.

And the actual Hebrew word there means "closed"

or "shut up" in the wilderness.

The first century Jewish historian Josephus,

wrote a description that matches the Bible well.

Now when the Egyptians

had overtaken the Hebrews,

they also seized the passages

by which they imagined the Hebrews might fly,

shutting them up between inaccessible

precipices and the sea,

for there was - on each side - a ridge of mountains

that terminated at the sea,

which were impassable by reason of their roughness

and obstructed their flight.

And so, when we think of the language of Josephus,

we think that the terrain adjacent to the crossing site had

to be very rough terrain,

had to be mountainous,

had to have limited escape routes.

(vehicle engine roaring)

In contrast, Glen Fritz notes that the land around

all the border lakes in the Egyptian view is extremely flat,

with no mountains of any kind.

And when Dr. Möller and I traveled to that area,

having served as an officer in the Swedish military,

he posed a simple strategic question

about the Egyptian army.

When we look at the lakes here,

why should the army follow the Hebrews out in the water

instead of going around the lake

and meet them on the other side and in that sense trap

them in the water there?

From a military point of view it would be much smarter

to go around the lake and trap them.

But that wouldn't be an option at Nuweiba.

Here we are approaching the beachhead at Nuweiba.

This is about 8-10 square miles in area,

which would certainly accommodate the Israelites.

Now, there are no other beachheads on this side of the

Gulf of Aqaba that have this same sort of morphology

where you have adequate space for many people to camp

and you have access to the interior of the Sinai Peninsula.

But how do the biblical place-names

of Exodus 14:2 fit with a crossing at Nuweiba?

(waves crashing)

The Egyptian approach connects the name Pi-Hahiroth

to the Akkadian meaning of "mouth of the canals."

But Glen Fritz favors a Hebrew definition.

I believe you have to consider the landmarks

to be large and bigger than life type of landmarks.

Now, Moses and the Israelites were told

to encamp before or on the face of, Pi-Hahiroth.

Now in Hebrew Pi-Hahiroth literally

means "mouth of the gorges."

And as we look into this interior of the peninsula we see

that it's a series of serpentine gorges

going back into the higher terrain.

In Fritz's view,

the Hebrew of this verse actually puts the mouth

of these gorges where the Hebrews would have entered

the Wadi Watir,

and that this entrance was facing north,

which is what he believes the term "Baal-zephon,"

or "lord of the north" was representing.

But what about Migdol?

Migdol in Hebrew means "tower"

and a lot of people would say that's a building or a tower.

However, we have to think in grander terms in the broad,

open wilderness of this area and think

that perhaps Migdol represents the towering mountain mass

at the base of the Sinai peninsula.

And so, if they encamped at this area here,

which is a broad beachhead, now Nuweiba,

they would be encamping between the sea and Migdol,

the towering mountains.

(wind blowing heavily)

At Nuweiba, Ron Wyatt found

a column on the shoreline.

It was reported to authorities who later erected it.

Wyatt also claimed to discover a matching column

across from Nuweiba in Saudi Arabia

that was later removed by the Saudis.

A granite column that we first found in 1978

and if you look at the column behind me here.

This part was laying down in the surf

and it had been eroded considerably by the surf.

This is one of a matched pair of columns

set up at the crossing site,

where the "Habiru" led by Moses crossed the sea.

There was an inscription at one time on this,

we believe simply because there is one

on a column just like this on the other side.

However it's been eroded away or chiseled away,

we're not sure which.

It may have been chiseled away

and then toppled into the surf.

The thing that is unique about it is its design.

It's a Phoenician design.

And the one on the eastern shore,

had an archaic Hebrew inscription.

Wyatt later translated the inscription

from memory for the column on the Saudi side.

He claimed to have identified the words Pharaoh,

Mizraim, Death, Edom, Yahweh and Solomon.

He believed these columns were erected

by King Solomon and dedicated

to Israel's God Yahweh to commemorate the miracle

of the Exodus sea crossing.

When I look at that,

what I see is a Roman column.

It's a typical Roman column.

It's got nothing to do with the period of Solomon at all.

And as for the one on the other side,

on the Arabian side,

well nobody has ever seen that.

It supposedly has an inscription on it,

mentioning Solomon, mentioning Moses,

mentioning the death of somebody or other.

We don't know.

We've never seen the inscription.

We've never seen a photograph of it,

or a drawing of it.

And we've never seen the actual pillar itself,

so how can we make a judgment on

something we've never seen?

When you don't have the evidence to hand,

you cannot discuss it.

You've got to have that evidence.

The debate over Wyatt's discoveries

did not end here.

Possibly the most controversial find came in 1988.

I used some electronics that can tell you

where gold is located at a distance.

And so I triangulated from the shoreline,

I went down and,

shall we say, started moving silt and stuff,

until I actually found this gold-veneer chariot wheel.

I contacted Dr. Gregor Hodgson,

a marine ecologist and coral expert

he is also the founder of Reef Check.

I showed him images of Wyatt's gold-veneer chariot wheel.

The suspicious thing about that particular photograph

is that the wheel is extremely clean.

As we can see from the underwater footage,

anything that sits on the bottom for any period

of time that's got a nice flat surface

to it will be encrusted with all kinds of living organisms

from squishy little sponges

to hard calcareous objects from bryozoans to corals,

and so it's extremely suspicious looking

to see an object like that.

Over time, the claims by Wyatt

and the other Exodus explorers became

widely criticized because of their inability

to verify their finds,

as well as their amateur approach.

This has caused scholars to dismiss the Gulf of Aqaba

as an option for the sea crossing

too far, too deep and too controversial

with its connection to Ron Wyatt.

However, Wyatt wasn't the first to suggest

a sea crossing at Aqaba or that Mt. Sinai was in Arabia.

A century earlier, Charles Beke,

one of England's preeminent geographers,

also proposed these areas.

But for these radical ideas he was stripped

of his gold medal for his achievements in geography.

All these Exodus explorers defended themselves

by claiming they were documenting sites

that no one would acknowledge

had potential connection to the Bible.

And in some cases,

these sites were off limits, even to archaeologists.

But the question remains,

whoever put pillars here,

whether one or two,

what were they marking?

Wyatt's claims divided people.

Some believed he was led by God,

but there were others who argued

he was a fraud just out to make money.

I never met Ron Wyatt.

He died several years before I was involved.

But I did interview people who knew him.

Eric Lembcke was one of them.

(upbeat music)

Lembcke joined the fire department right out of high school.

He later joined the US Forest Service as a hotshot,

jumping out of helicopters to fight remote wildfires.

He went on to get a degree in business at Cal Berkeley.

I always wanted to work in national security matters.

I ended up getting accepted,

went all the way through the process

and started working for the government,

national security matters,

federal law enforcement.

So tell me how you got involved diving at the Red Sea.

I always had an interest in biblical stories.

And I happened to meet an amateur archeologist

by the name of Ron Wyatt.

I thought, "I need to meet this person firsthand,"

to verify one, the messenger, and two,

personally if I can evaluate whether or not

they had any credibility to them.

I know that people have been very critical of Ron Wyatt,

thinking that he's not credible.

Sure. And let's be honest.

One man finding this location,

as well as quote "a lot of other locations"

that he's made the claim to find,

I think if somebody is not skeptical to begin with

and just believes it at face value,

they're not doing exactly what they should do.

Because what does the Bible say?

It says, "Prove all things,

"hold fast to that which is good."

And so that's what initially what I did with Ron.

I thought, okay,

I've got to meet him.

Then I've got to evaluate these things firsthand.

And I found him to be consistent all the time.

Now there's certain things that he's made claims

of that at this point in time,

we don't know the answer to it.

But I take it from the approach of,

let's wait and see.

I had no reason to doubt him from what I had seen.

I didn't witness some of the previous chariot wheels

that were documented.

I didn't see them.

But I believe that he found them based upon

what I just told you and my experience with him.

He was a one of a kind.

I had never met anybody else like him.

I too, just wanted to know if there was any proof

to the things these Exodus explorers

claimed to find at Nuweiba beach,

and how that fits into the pattern.

(suspenseful music)

Next, I need to investigate the southern end

of the Gulf of Aqaba for its Detour to a Dead End.

(upbeat music)

Steve Rudd, is an archeologist

and researcher who runs the world's most visited website

dealing with matters of biblical archaeology.

He has also written the book "Exodus Route Restored".

He takes the Hebrew approach

and favors a Dead End crossing site at the southern end

of the Gulf of Aqaba at the Straits of Tiran.

I started by using just the Bible alone.

I didn't use literally sources.

I didn't use archeology.

I didn't use anything.

I ignored what everybody said and just stopped

and looked at what the Bible said.

And it was then that I conceived

that the crossing point must be somewhere down here.

And that of course automatically

forces Mount Sinai in Saudi Arabia.

What general route do you have the

Israelites taking to the sea?

So it comes down here.

And I call this the Exodus highway.

It's about 18 to 20 kilometers wide.

It's perfect travel for a large population.

And when you cross the sea,

you've got the same thing continuing over here.

Very, very easy travel.

And so what I believe

is the Israelites came down here and they came past

to Etham and they were trapped at Etham,

they came to a dead end.

Why? Because there's a series of mountains

that go all the way over here and it's impassable.

You cannot walk through here.

The water comes straight down

at a sharp angle. They're really trapped hard here.

God says, "Turn back."

It means, for example,

when Isaiah is calling the people to repentance,

he uses the same word.

"Come back to the Lord, turn back to the Lord."

And we know the word repentance means

to change 180 degrees direction.

And so it's very natural to have this mean a reversal,

and what I call a backtrack.

Etham is one of the most critical markers

for all the crossing points

of which of all the potential crossing points

that I'm aware of.

This one here is the only one that fits perfectly

where they're genuinely trapped.

But they came back and they camped here.

It was at this point that Pharaoh realized this geography,

that he could come down,

if he could just get

to right up here at Succoth.

(affirmative) Get up here.

He's got them, he figures he's got them trapped.

So, he comes down with his 600 chariots,

and they would stop right about here.

And so you're placing Migdol, Pi-hahiroth,

in this area over here.

So Tim, Pi-hahiroth, probably what it means

is it's designating the tri-intersection

of the three bodies of water that intersect at this point.

Now the Migdol, if you have the copper mines over there,

and the copper mines up at Timna

and you've got the Egyptian Seaport,

there's going to be travel through here.

And it's very logical for a Migdol to be somewhere in here.

We don't have any archeology for any of these sites.

There is archeology for migdols

up on the northern coast and people say,

"Oh, well there's none down here."

Well, migdols were everywhere,

it just means a fort,

a tower, a watch tower.

One reason Steve Rudd thinks a crossing at one

of the border lakes would not fit the Bible

is that after they crossed,

the Israelites would still have been in close proximity

to several Egyptian forts.

When they crossed the Red Sea, they felt safe.

They were rejoicing.

Crossing the Red Sea is, in the Bible,

the time of Israelite salvation.

So over here they wouldn't start having any rejoicing,

because you would not feel safe.

They would start running.

They'd just keep running.

(chiming)

(upbeat music)

In the Detour to a Dead End step,

which one of these locations seems

to fit the biblical account best?

In the Egyptian approach,

it's a fortress that causes the Detour,

which sends the Israelites to the near side of one

of the marsh lakes along Egypt's border.

It links place-names mentioned in the Bible

for the Dead End,

with Egyptian meanings and locations.

In the Hybrid approach,

the Detour proposals near the north end

of Aqaba favor naturalistic explanations

for the pillar of cloud and fire,

with a volcano as its source,

and the Dead End occurring at shallow bodies of water.

In the Hebrew approach,

the Detour in the central Nuweiba beach proposal

would have been an unexpected turn

off the main way to Midian,

that led through a gorge to a massive beach

where they were shut in on all sides by mountains.

The Detour at the south end of the Peninsula's

Straits of Tiran was caused by an impassable mountain range.

So it comes down to this.

Which evidence is stronger?

The Egyptian place-names at the border lakes,

or the biblical descriptions of the journey found

in the Hebrew approach?

As I looked further into the Scriptures,

I saw something very revealing that might give me a clue.

The people of Israel cried out to the Lord.

They said to Moses,

"Is it because there are no graves in Egypt

"that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness?

"What have you done to us bringing us out of Egypt?"

Egypt controlled various territories at times,

but historically the ancients defined Egypt proper

as the lands watered by the Nile River.

And Glen Fritz notes that with a Dead End

at the Gulf of Aqaba,

the Israelites would have been both outside of Egypt,

and in a wilderness in line with what this verse states.

However, on the near side

of the border lakes they would have still been in Egypt.

I'm now ready for the 5th and final step

in this phase of the investigation - Deep Sea -

and explanations for the Egyptian

and Hebrew approaches for the Red Sea miracle.

"And you cast their pursuers into the depths,

"as a stone into mighty waters."

I wanted to start with the Egyptian approach

and its naturalistic explanations.

How does it explain the waters parting

in a shallow water scenario?

The Bible tells you it was a natural mechanism.

It's explicit.

The Bible says, "Moses spread out his hands over the Red Sea

"and the Lord sent a strong east wind which blew all night."

The Bible is telling you it's the strong east wind,

which blew all night which did it.

And it's still a miracle because the timing.

I'd explain all that by something

that's called wind set down,

which is well-known to scientists.

(upbeat music)

While in Boulder, Colorado,

I met with another scientist about this wind set down idea.

Carl Drews is a software engineer at the National Center

for Atmospheric Research.

He wrote the book "Between Migdol and the Sea"

"Crossing the Red Sea with faith and science".

He has studied storm surge modeling

and the wind's effect on water and landmasses.

He proposes the Exodus crossing happened at a lake

north of Ballah Lake at a place he calls Lake Tanis,

near where Lake Menzaleh is today.

How in the world did you decide

to get involved with this?

I was in graduate school in my first semester,

and Professor David Noone was explaining the Ekman Spiral,

how the wind blows across water and the water pulls back

and recedes from the shoreline.

And suddenly there came into my mind,

I've heard this story before.

I've heard this.

This is about the Exodus and the parting of the Red Sea.

The strong east wind blew and the waters parted,

and Moses and the Israelites escaped.

So, as everybody else was taking notes,

I was my mind was elsewhere,

day dreaming and thinking about this scenario

and how this could fit.

So the key is the east wind isn't it for you?

The east wind is the key.

If the direction comes

from any other place then the crossing there won't work.

Curiously enough, I didn't really have

to know the wind direction.

The only possibility for a crossing with water

on both sides is really up here,

even if you try blowing the wind

in all different directions,

you get no set down for Gulf of Aqaba,

you really don't get water on both sides here.

So still, the only possible place is here.

If you had told me that somewhere near the Sinai,

wind blows and splits the water,

I could find it from there.

Okay how does it work,

how does wind actually move water?

I'll explain how this works

by showing you an animation here.

This is the result of the computer model.

This is a schematic of what the area looked like,

and so what we see is the Lake of Tanis here.

All the blue is bodies of water.

The deep blue is the Mediterranean Ocean,

and the green is low-lying land.

The red is higher land on the Sinai.

So, where are the Israelites?

The Israelites began on the point of

this peninsula here looking toward the east.

And so we'll see what happens to these bodies

of water when the wind blows.

Nothing much happens at first.

Then you see this brown area growing here on the east side.

That's dry land.

That's where the water has completely blown away

from the surface of the lagoon,

leaving dry land below which is now two meters

below the former level of the water.

So, it's blowing back and creating a larger

and larger area of dry land there.

The Egyptians are over here somewhere.

The Israelites are stuck on the end of this peninsula hoping

that something good will happen out of this.

The water is pulling back,

and at about nine-and-a-half hours sure enough,

there is a dry path leading forward to freedom there,

which is the opposite shore.

They have water on both sides.

So, they start heading across.

(uplifting music)

The wind keeps blowing, keeps blowing,

and they have plenty of room here.

So, it's really not a narrow passage

as you've seen in lots of these depictions.

It's quite a wide area.

This is probably four kilometers wide,

so there's room enough for anybody to go through.

They crossed along this land bridge here.

This brown area here is dry land,

and they are now safe, exhausted, on this point here,

but they're alive.

And the chariots meanwhile have figured out

what's happening because it's now dawn,

twelve hours after the wind starts blowing,

the wind stops.

Water now is unconstrained by the force of the wind,

and so it's going to be surging in from both directions.

So, if they are stuck in the gap they're going to drown.

How deep would that water have been?

Right now the lakes here are about two meters,

maybe a meter and a half deep.

That depth of two meters fits the definition

of somebody drowning,

especially if they can't swim very well with their armor on.

It's also the present depth of these lagoons here,

so there is a decent basis for thinking

about two meters deep.

With that returning water,

could it even be higher than two meters?

Yeah, the return surge certainly would be higher,

maybe it would be three meters deep, maybe even four.

When it comes back it forms

this thing called a hydraulic jump,

which is basically what most people call a tidal wave,

and it's this huge,

frothing wall of water which comes just at you,

and if you're in the gap there

and you've been up all night

and you're trying to get yourself free,

it would be terrifying to have this wall

of water coming at you

and there would be no escape from it.

I showed Carl Drews' wind set down animation

to David Rohl and he noticed that

the Ballah Lakes area went dry

before Drews' Lake Tanis area.

I've seen that the Ballah Lakes area

does dry up on that model,

but there's a reason for that, isn't it?

Something to do with the depth of the water, is that right?

Yes. The Ballah lakes dry up in the north part

and what has been postulated there

is that it's a marshy area.

It's not a full lake.

So I have modeled that as a half a meter deep,

which is about two feet or so.

Whereas I had the lake of Tannis at two meters deep,

which is about six foot seven inches.

So, if there's a shallower area such as the marsh,

it will dry out quicker during the wind setdown event.

But it won't be as dramatic in terms

of the return of the water

with a very shallow situation like that would it?

Yes. You would get about a meter

of water coming back over it in the return surge,

which would be about waist or chest high,

but that is a smaller return surge

than I postulated in the lake of Tannis.

Right. But what happens if we adjust

your model a little bit?

Let's say for instance,

we increase the depth of the water to a meter.

Would it still have the wind set down effect?

A moment ago, I quoted to you a six hour crossing time.

If the water were a meter deep at the Ballah Lakes,

perhaps the crossing time would be four or three hours.

It'd be a shorter time, but yes,

it would still happen.

How might a wind set down have looked

for an Exodus sea crossing,

if it happened at one of the shallow bodies of water,

either on Egypt's border or north of Aqaba?

(upbeat music)

(chariots rumbling)

Then the angel of God

who was going before the host

of Israel moved and went behind them,

coming between the host of Egypt 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.

(upbeat music)

Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea,

and the Lord drove the sea back

by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land.

The waters were divided.

People of Israel went into the midst

of the sea on dry ground,

the waters being a wall to them on their right hand

and on their left.

(upbeat music)

One of the things that came up

when I announced this research was,

"Is this a miracle or is it not a miracle

"because you've shown it can happen according

"to the laws of physics?"

The shorter answer is,

this is absolutely a miracle.

This event happened precisely when they were there.

I would say that again,

is showing the hand of God.

The Israelites thought they were going to die

when the sun went down,

and in the morning they ended up

alive over here and that's a miracle.

(ambient music)

The Egyptians pursued and went in after them

into the midst of the sea,

all Pharaoh's horses, his chariots and his horsemen.

And in the morning, the Lord in the pillar of fire

and of cloud looked down on the Egyptian forces,

and threw the Egyptian forces into a panic,

clogging their chariot wheels so that they drove heavily.

At the Timna shallow water

crossing site north of Aqaba,

Dr. Baltz had an interesting observation

related to Exodus 14:25.

It states that when the Egyptians pursued,

the Lord in the pillar of fire

and cloud clogged their chariot wheels

so they had difficulty driving.

They may have pursued actually through

this volcanic dust coming down on them.

The little microscopic particles are very sharp.

This is like new sand,

so it is notorious for destroying mechanical things.

This got into these bearings and started

to destroy the bearings from the inside.

It cut wood shavings loose and those wood shavings tended

to fill up the void between these collars and the axle,

and stop it from turning.

Either way, you have a disabled chariot army.

(upbeat music)

Then the Lord said to Moses,

"Stretch out your hand over the sea,

"that the water may come back upon the Egyptians,

"upon their chariots,

"and upon their horsemen."

(upbeat music)

The Lord threw the Egyptians into the midst of the sea.

And the sea returned to its normal course,

when the morning appeared.

This kind of shallow water crossing,

however, doesn't match what I saw

when I was a kid watching

Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments".

Behold his mighty hand.

It was on in the evening,

every Easter Sunday,

and became a special tradition in my family

that often included popcorn and sometimes rootbeer.

Who shall withstand the power of God?

I could see the Bible coming to life

(waves crashing and people screaming)

with Pharaoh's army being drowned in the mighty Red Sea.

(dramatic music)

This is an illustration by Gustav Doré

whom grandfather copied without embarrassment.

This project allowed me to get to know Cece DeMille,

Cecil B. DeMille's granddaughter.

We spent several days talking

about Cecil's intensive preparation

for making "The Ten Commandments".

One of the things I found very interesting

about your grandfather was how much research

that he put into making the films that he made.

For DeMille, research was everything.

He said he made his movies at his desk.

Indeed he did.

Josephus wrote some ..

But he always wanted to make the story of Moses.

So he never stopped researching Moses.

Between the baby and the basket...

We had so much research that Henry Nordlinger,

our leading researcher,

wrote a book for USC called "Moses in Egypt",

which at the time was the best research done.

To film the "Ten Commandments,"

we rolled our cameras on the very ground that Moses walked.

Here from the land of Goshen across the Red Sea

down through the deserts of Shur and Sin to Mount Sinai.

The holy place of God.

What I find ironic is

that DeMille's research led him

to follow the Egyptian view of his day,

by putting the sea crossing at the shallow border lakes.

Lead them through the midst of the waters.

And yet, his film depicted a grand miracle

with high walls of water through a deep sea in line

with the Hebrew view

of what the Bible seems to be describing.

(waves crashing)

But this spectacular depiction is not

how a crossing would have looked at one

of the shallow marsh lakes.

The challenge that I see with wind set down is that

the water would be miles away.

I mean it would be pushed miles away

from either end and you wouldn't see a wall of water.

You would see a wall of water coming back at you I suppose

once the people were through and the Egyptian army

is at the center of this,

Let's just say when Cecil B. DeMille

made his films on the Ten Commandments,

he illustrated the fact that the Israelites are walking

and they could see the wall of water on their left

and wall of water on their right.

That's the impression you get when you read Exodus.

It is, and in some ways it's the cultural impression

you get from Cecil B.DeMille's movies.

You've got this vision in your mind now,

of that's the way it should look.

But it's not what the Bible says.

Well it does say that there are walls of water.

Yes but not, not deep walls of water,

not high walls of water.

That's the issue here.

But is the Egyptian view ignoring

or downplaying important biblical passages talking about

deep waters with walls?

The Hebrew approach says they are.

It comes down to the definition of Yam Suph

the name Moses gave for the crossing location.

This term is translated "Red Sea" in most modern Bibles.

However, it is thought to mean "Sea of Reeds" by those

in the Egyptian approach.

(waves crashing)

But the Hebrew approach sees many reasons to look

to the Gulf of Aqaba as Yam Suph,

where the miraculous crossing took place.

(upbeat music)

I set off for one of the largest seminaries

in the United States.

Duane Garrett is a Hebrew scholar

who authored "A Commentary on Exodus".

Every biblical occurrence of Yam Suph

that identifies a location puts it at the Gulf of Aqaba.

There are many places where Yam Suph is used.

It doesn't specifically say where it is,

it just says the Yam Suph

and that's what you have in Exodus,

but there are many other occurrences

of the term Yam Suph

that clearly put it at the Gulf of Aqaba.

Yet those in the Egyptian approach,

including geographer Dr. Barry Beitzel, disagree.

The expression Yam Suph is being used

to identify more than the same body of water,

more than one.

It did refer to the Gulf of Aqaba,

but it also referred to the Gulf of Suez.

It referred to inland lakes.

However, the Hebrew approach believes

this view is based on circular reasoning

and the false assumption that the crossing had

to have happened near Egypt.

There is no reference to Yam Suph

that has geographic markers attached to the term

in the narrative, in the description,

that put it anywhere except the Gulf of Aqaba.

But there was more to this point.

In Exodus 23:31 God tells Moses to record

the boundaries of the Promised Land.

God says, "I will set your border from the Red Sea-

"or Yam Suph-to the Sea of the Philistines."

The southern border of ancient Israel has always been known

to go from Aqaba to the Mediterranean,

as it does today.

And if Moses is an eyewitness to the sea parting

and is recording something as important

as the boundary sea by the same name,

wouldn't it be important to have aspecific location in mind?

That's why those in the Hebrew approach declare

that Aqaba is the only option for a crossing

that fits the biblical criteria

of being both outside of Egypt,

and a border marker for Israel.

I've actually heard from some scholars

that well there are many Yam Suphs

and what you're suggesting is that

that couldn't be the case,

if this is a boundary marker in the Bible.

You're right. If this had multiple definitions,

it dilutes the meaning of Yam Suph

and it was given as a boundary of the Promised Land.

And if it was a generic,

generalized body of water at any location

that you want to imagine,

it wouldn't make any sense as any kind of

a boundary for the Promised Land.

Another thing that troubles me about

a shallow water crossing is that

Moses emphasizes the depth of the sea.

That's why this step is called Deep Sea.

"And you cast their pursuers

"into the depths as a stone into mighty waters."

As I looked at "The Song of the Sea" recorded

in Exodus chapter 15,

Moses also mentions heaps of water that were piled up,

and he calls the water the deeps in the heart of the sea.

If he is writing an eyewitness account,

then a shallow lake scenario doesn't seem

to match these descriptions.

And this wasn't the only place.

The Bible has numerous references

to the crossing being through deep and mighty waters.

There are some verses in the Scriptures that says there

was a great mighty deep sea in Psalms and places like that.

What are your thoughts on that?

When you look at those verses that talk

about the great depths and sank like a stone,

those are all in poetry.

So, for example, Exodus 15,

"The Song of the Sea" and also in Psalms.

So, in poetry it tends to be metaphor and symbols,

and kind of exaggerate things.

So, it's not a strict narrative there.

The thinking is that if it's poetic, it's fictional,

or it's exaggeration.

Historical truth claims can be made in multiple genres,

be they narrative or be it poetry.

And we see both, evidence of both in the Scripture itself.

Well, I was thinking about the Star Spangled Banner,

which is, talking about a battle.

"O say can you see, by the dawn's early light.

Bombs bursting in air, yes.
Yes.

(fireworks blazing)

When you think about the Star Spangled Banner,

it's a poetic retelling of an event.

And the fact that imagery is used does not diminish

in any way the veracity of the reality that it testifies to.

The key is identifying that it is the exact same account,

and the same God that is being described

in Exodus 14 - narrative,

as in Exodus 15 - poetry.

(uplifting music)

What it describes is a big God who is

orchestrating the very hearts of the Egyptian rulers.

He foretells, "I'm going to harden their hearts

"so that they will go into the sea."

(chariot rumbling)

He pushes Egypt into the sea.

He carries Israel through the sea.

He causes the wind to blow.

The waters to crash,

decimating the entire Egyptian army.

All of that in the narrative.

It's not just that wind shows up

and that's the only miracle.

In Chapter 14 Verse 17 God himself declares,

"I will get glory over Pharaoh and all

"of his hosts, his chariots, his horsemen."

This isn't about wind getting glory.

This is about God getting glory so that everyone will know

this was indeed about him.

(ambient music)

Yet, scholars in the Egyptian approach stress

that because Yam Suph means "Sea of Reeds"

the crossing site requires shallow reedy water.

To have papyrus grow,

while you can have saltwater or freshwater,

you have to have shallow, quiet water.

It has to be...

Calm.
The water has to be calm.

And the water has to be shallow.

So any of these lakes would fit that.

But does Suph really mean "reeds",

or even any kind of plant?

And was there a Hebrew word for "plant", besides "suph"?

Yes, there are.

Yes, there's a word for "plant" but

that's in a sense almost not a relevant question,

because this is an Egyptian word

and we're in an Egyptian context.

The first time suph was used in the Bible

was in a passage after Moses was born.

Most English translations say

that Moses' mother placed him among the reeds,

or the suph of the Nile.

In this passage, Dr. Beitzel believes that the Bible

is using terms borrowed from the Egyptian language

and that these Egyptian words determine

how to interpret the meaning of Suph.

"And after three months,

"the daughter of Levi,

"the mother of Moses was no longer able to hide him.

"So she got for him a papyrus."

That word is used only twice in the whole Bible.

It is an Egyptian loan-word.

Papyrus is not going to be a Hebrew word.

She made for him a papyrus basket or chest,

that's used twice here,

and only one other place in the whole Bible.

It's an Egyptian loan-word.

And then it says,

"She took it and she placed it in the Suph

"in the reeds or whatever,

"along the edge of the Nile."

Then we're told the Pharaoh's daughter,

"saw the basket and chest in the midst

"of the Suph and she sent her servant girl to get it."

So in the span of about five verses there,

we have seven different uses of Egyptian loan-words.

So what you're saying is that the Bible

in those chapters is borrowing or taking,

as you call them loan-words or?

These are loan words.

And what you're suggesting is that the word Suph

is not as much Hebrew as it is Egyptian.

I don't think it's Hebrew at all.

And that, the word Suph means "reed", right?

Yes. And it's embedded in the immediate presence

of five other technical Egyptian words.

Okay.

"Sea of Reeds" for the Hebrew Yam Suph

nowadays is a common translation,

but I personally don't think that's accurate.

It is not the translation

that was preferred in the ancient world,

they translated it as Red Sea,

not as Sea of Reeds.

They're trying to connect the route of the Exodus

and the crossing of the sea to these little lakes

that are on the eastern edge of the Egyptian delta,

but I just don't think that is what the Bible is saying.

The question is,

are the near-Egypt crossing sites

just the result of Egyptology's

bias in linking Bible place-names

to Egyptian words and locations?

For example, the Egyptian place-name "Pa Tufy"

or place of reeds,

was known to exist near the border lakes,

and is thought to connect to the Hebrew name Yam Suph.

This focus on Egyptian words began

with the birth of modern Egyptology,

which in time would be incorporated

into the Egyptian approach to the Exodus.

(upbeat music)

It started in 1798 when Napoleon

and his French army campaigned in Egypt,

sparking a fascination with all things Egyptian.

During that expedition,

the famous Rosetta Stone was discovered.

On my trip in 2002, Dr. Möller and I stopped

to film the stone at the British Museum,

because it was the foundation of modern Egyptology.

This is the very old Rosetta Stone that was found

in the Nile Delta in 1799 by a French officer.

And it was then later brought to the British Museum in 1802.

This artifact, dated at 196 BC,

recorded the same message in three different scripts,

Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Egyptian Demotic and Greek.

It took some three decades before they,

by the use of these two types of hieroglyphs and the Greek,

to translate the dead ancient Egyptian language.

And by this stone they got a key

to get a fuller understanding of all things we know

of today in ancient Egypt and the history

and the literature.

The Greek writing next

to the two Egyptian scripts was

how the code of Egyptian Hieroglyphs was broken,

flooding the land of Egypt with scholars eager

to discover the secrets of the Pharaohs.

(gentle music)

These treasures of Egypt allowed it

to become the dominant authority

in the study of ancient history

and to influence how people viewed the biblical text.

Was there a more Egypt-centric view of the story

because of Egyptology?

No, I would say absolutely not.

That doesn't hurt.

But modern Egyptology doesn't give us all

of those Egyptian loan-words.

I was just thinking about the connections

between certain names like 'tufy' and 'suph.'

Yeah. Those are Egyptian words,

those are Egyptian loan words,

but there's no argument against that.

I know of no professionally trained Egyptologist

who has taken another view.

Gardiner, Simpson, Groll, Kitchen, Bietak and Hoffmeier.

To me that's very significant.

But that's my point.

These were all Egyptologists

with an Egyptian approach to the Exodus.

I am just asking the question

have two centuries of Egyptology changed

the way we see the biblical account?

Because not all agree with Suph's connection to reeds.

(vehicle engine roaring)

(upbeat music)

I went to Penn State University

to meet with one of the world's

foremost Egyptologists, Donald Redford.

The Bible says that the Israelites crossed a sea.

In Hebrew the name was Yam Suph.

What would you say Yam Suph was?

Well, there are several schools of thought about this.

If you agree, and I don't but many people do

that Suph, Yam Suph, is "tufy",

It's an Egyptian word meaning reeds.

The lake of reeds or the pond of reeds

is a vast extent of low lying land,

and it borders on Pi-Ramesses.

But there are others who derive Suph

from the word for destruction.

Yam Suph, the Sea of Destruction.

Really?
Yeah.

And there is another word

well, from the same root meaning "the end".

The end. Yeah.

The final part of the sea.

In Hebrew, we have to remember that words are in families

and the families are determined by the root verb

and for Suph the root verb is sapha,

which means to consume, to destroy or perish.

The idea of an end.

And of the 101 Suph-like words in the Suph word family,

72 of the verses correspond with the idea of end.

So it would be Yam "sea" and Suph "end".

End, very simply.

In Exodus Chapter 2,

Moses' mother made him a papyrus or reed basket,

but this is a different word than Suph.

Suph was where his mother placed him.

In the original Greek Septuagint,

those scholars did not give a vegetation name to Suph,

they called it elos,

which can be a pool or ooze.

Perhaps Suph was referring to the edge,

the end of the water,

the edge of the shoreline.

The point here is that Suph does not need

to have a vegetation definition.

What I know is that the Israelites journeyed out of Egypt,

crossed a desert and were told to turn back

and encamp at the sea called Yam Suph.

Was this the sea of reeds?

Was it near Egypt?

Or was it the Gulf of Aqaba?

Yam Suph was not the Sea of Reeds

it was not a weedy sea.

I believe that Yam Suph meant the sea of the end,

that means the end or the boundary of the Promised Land.

(gentle music)

A lot of energy and work has gone

into translating Yam Suph.

None of that matters because we have six Bible verses

that explicitly call the Gulf of Aqaba, Yam Suph.

So what that means?

I don't care how you translate it.

You can call it the sea of reeds.

You can call this the Red Sea.

You can call it the blue sea.

I don't care.

This is Yam Suph.

(ambient music)

The ocean is over there on the left.

It's Ocean Drive.

(waves crashing)

Well the thing about being here at the Atlantic Ocean,

it's part of the sea and so my mind always wanders

to the events of the Exodus at the Gulf of Aqaba.

You see the waves and you see the depth.

And it must've been a horrific experience

for the Hebrews to see that body of water

in front of them with the waves and not have any idea

that it could be supernaturally parted.

How would it be possible for anyone

to cross the Gulf of Aqaba on foot?

Huge mountains on every side plunging straight down

to the 6000 foot deep waters of the Rift Valley itself.

I would tell you, first of all,

that you're looking in the wrong spot.

It's simply too deep.

There is absolutely no way,

barring a supernatural act,

that people could have gone across there,

that that much water could have been moved.

Dr. Fritz explained to me

how a crossing at Nuweiba Beach would be possible

if the water was removed.

When we look at the structure of the Gulf of Aqaba,

the distance between the hypothesized crossing point

and the shore of Arabia is about 9.7 miles.

The problem is it's about 2,800 feet deep in the middle.

And that's the big problem.

I mean, people do not see this as a possibility.

A lot of people just think this is ridiculous.

Yeah, it's an impossibility.

Some investigators have said

there was a land bridge in here.

That's not not true.

There's no land bridge at 2,800 feet under water.

What there is in the mid point is a plateau

from north to south.

Because these areas here are cavernous.

I mean there--
Yeah, you can see

this dropping off steeply here,

dropping off steeply here,

but there's a plateau that if there

was a path through the sea at this point,

the path could be several miles wide

and still accommodate a footing

that could be managed by the multitudes.

I could see that the seafloor off Nuweiba Beach

was unique in all the Gulf of Aqaba.

However, David Rohl doesn't see any rational possibility

for a deep sea parting.

So my big problem is this business

of identifying the Gulf of Aqaba as Yam Suph,

simply because of its depth.

And we are talking about several

hundred meters of water here.

How on earth could that sort

of water be moved by a strong wind?

And the Bible tells us it's an east wind.

Well the question is, is it a physical, naturalistic,

event that God used nature to do it,

or was the wind symbolic?

Why mention the wind?

If it's not the mechanism for making the dry land?

Yeah, that's a good question.

And as I am saying.

I'm not in a position of having to prove the miracles.

Okay. That's the job of people who think you can dry

a sea like that,

going down several hundred meters to dry land

and walk across that and hold

these enormous heights of water up.

What could cause that?

You say a miracle.

Okay, well give me the evidence that there

was a miracle performed here.

What evidence is there?

Others have different challenges

to a crossing at places like Nuweiba Beach.

I met with marine biologist Dr. Robert Carter,

from Creation Ministries International.

He has a PhD in coral reef ecology.

One of the main problems with Aqaba.

I don't care how deep the water

is 'cause this is a miracle,

God can do what he wants,

but one of the main problems is the entry and the exit.

The western side tends to have a more gentle slope,

but the eastern side has a steeper slope.

So maybe, there's a place

where God could have picked out a path

where they get to the other side,

and they could meander back and forth to climb up.

But that's no easy thing.

We're talking cattle, old people, young people, babies,

it would be a very difficult trek.

John Hall, working with the

Geological Survey of Israel,

was the first to publish scientific data concerning

the slope of the underwater plateau.

On the north and south of

this plateau the depths plunge to more than a mile,

certainly meeting the biblical criterion of a deep sea.

Yet the terrain from shore to shore

has an average slope of less than 7 degrees.

To put this in perspective,

a maximum grade on an interstate highway

is six to seven degrees.

The down slope here was six.

The up slope here was 7.4.

A wheelchair ramp, 7.125 degrees.

These grades seem to be no different

than the kind of terrain they would have encountered,

as they traveled through the wilderness.

But what about the slopes at the Straits of Tiran.

Well, the depths are very forgiving here.

It goes down to about 300 meters.

And, it comes back up to about 50 meters, all the way.

Eighty percent of the route is under

a relatively flat 50 meters below the surface.

And so, there's this little area here

of a dip and it's very easy.

I've looked at the angles and the slopes.

It's no problem at all.

The straits of Tiran are not

as deep as these other places,

but it's like a rollercoaster ride

to get through some of these 30 to 40% slopes

that are encountered in the channel area

that certainly would not accommodate

any wheeled vehicles like chariots.

Either route is really quite simple,

the slopes of Tiran in some places

could be a little steeper,

but remember God prepared for them to make this crossing

and he also gave them supernatural help.

As I filmed Möller walking along

of the shore of the Gulf of Aqaba,

I was filled with a sense of awe.

If you were to pick a location to part the water,

this would have been one of the

most spectacular places to do it.

(waves crashing)

(upbeat music)

And Moses said to the people,

"Fear not, stand firm,

"and see the salvation of the Lord,

"which he will work for you today.

"For the Egyptians whom you see today,

"you shall never see again.

"The Lord will fight for you,

"and you have only to remain silent."

(upbeat music)

Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea,

and the Lord drove the sea back

by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land.

(uplifting music)

The waters were divided.

People of Israel went

into the midst of the sea on dry ground,

the waters being a wall to them

on their right hand and on their left.

(uplifting music)

And the psalmist says,

"When the waters saw you, Oh God, they were afraid.

"Indeed, the deep trembled.

"The clouds poured out water.

"The crash of your thunder was in the whirlwind.

"Your lightnings lighted up the world

"and the earth trembled and shook.

"Your way was through the sea.

"Your path through the great waters.

"Yet your footprints were unseen."

(uplifting music)

(upbeat music)

The Exodus story is a combination of miracles and history.

Now, the miracles you can't deal

with archaeologically or rationally,

because they're miracles.

I went to Washington DC to talk with Hershel Shanks,

the founder and editor of Biblical Archaeology Review.

He is an attorney who became interested in the archaeology

and the history of the Bible after visiting Israel,

the land of his heritage.

Whether the Red Sea parted is a miracle.

Whether the Ten Plagues happened is a miracle.

You have one of the plagues was darkness

and you had darkness where the Egyptians were

and right beside them in a different area

were the Israelites, and it was light there.

Rationally that may not make sense

but with miracles you can do anything.

So, you have elements of miracles,

and we cannot ask ourselves rationally

whether they occurred.

(ambient music)

The text describes that the water was as walls

on each side of the people.

And we don't know of any scientific explanation,

or what phenomenon would cause that.

So we we have no scientific explanation

to the separation of water.

Dr. Möller may be a scientist but he has given up.

He has abandoned his scientific investigation at that point

and he simply asks us to believe that if you believe in God,

if you believe in the Lord,

then of course the Lord is capable.

But, for a scientist,

that's not a scientific explanation.

(gentle music)

To many modern thinkers,

the miracles are just too fantastic to believe.

And then there's the God question

that makes people uncomfortable.

Yet, this seems to me to be the

central question of the whole event.

Does God act in history?

And if so, how?

(gentle music)

The modern prejudice against miracles goes back

to the arguments put forth 300 years ago by David Hume.

And he says, "Well, given that there is lots

"and lots of testimony that seas don't part

"and dead people don't rise,

"what kind of evidence would we need to overcome that?

"What kind of testimony?

"We would need very very strong testimony.

"It would need to be recorded at the time by educated,

"thoughtful people with good character and it would need

"to be written down right away and so forth."

So he says,

"That's what you would need for a miracle

"but you never get it."

So basically when people report miracle stories,

the evidence isn't nearly good enough.

And on top of that we're gullible.

Generally people like to hear stories and tell them again

and people gossip and start passing stories on

and they get better and better with the telling.

So miracles probably come from that.

But, as I listened to Hume's requirements

for believing a miracle,

I could see that Moses, in fact,

fulfilled all the criteria.

Theologian Dr. Craig Keener, confronted Hume's arguments

in his two-volume set "Miracles".

If we talk about Hume for a little bit,

what was the argument?

If you had to summarize it in one part,

it would be that uniform human experience

is against miracles or at least against us accepting

that something is a miracle.

And the problem with that argument

is that it becomes circular

when you have testimony of miracles

and you dismiss it on the basis

of uniform human experience.

The question is,

can science really explain everything.

In each discipline we need to apply the standard

of evidence appropriate to that discipline.

For history or for journalism.

You can't always experiment on something.

If somebody died you want to find out how they died,

you don't kill them again.

You have to recognize that the testimony

of a reliable witness is itself evidence.

(gentle music)

Philosopher of science, Stephen Meyer,

received his PhD from Cambridge University.

He has written numerous books including

"The Return of the God Hypothesis".

If God exists, then miracles are entirely possible,

because there is a God there to act.

There's no reason to think that

a biblical miracle actually violates the laws of nature.

If I toss this ball in the air and cause it to elevate,

I'm not causing something to happen

that violates the law of gravity.

Ordinarily we would expect

that a ball would fall to the earth.

But if I introduce a contravening force

and toss the ball in the air,

I've simply introduced a force in opposition

to the ordinary force of gravity,

and therefore caused something unexpected to happen.

C.S. Lewis also disagreed with the popular view

that many had taken from Hume,

that miracles were irrational.

It is quite inaccurate to say

that a miracle breaks the laws of nature, it doesn't.

Indeed, one must believe that nature works according

to regular laws before you can notice something

that we are quite unaccustomed to seeing.

Rule out the supernatural,

and you will not see miracles.

Yes the prison that we make for ourselves is thinking

that matter and what we see is all that exists.

Just because science doesn't have

the explanation doesn't mean that there isn't

an explanation and a logical explanation is

it was a miracle,

that there's an intelligence outside

this universe that helped make that happen.

If I as an agent can introduce

an unexpected event into nature,

then surely God as the ultimate agent,

who's responsible for the laws of nature themselves,

is capable of introducing an event,

which may produce something surprising,

Professor Garrett normally takes a Hebrew approach

and doesn't have a problem with spectacular miracles,

but when it comes to the parting

of the sea he believes the text emphasizes

the work of natural wind,

which would require shallow water.

For me, the most important thing

is the Bible explicitly says there was a natural cause,

and the natural cause was the east wind that blew all night.

And so you have to acknowledge

that the Bible requires a natural cause,

it was not just that the water stood up supernaturally

with no physical cause.

Any wind that would have come

and performed something like that,

had to have had some divine guidance.

And again, we are very uncomfortable with miracles,

with anything that cannot be explained by science.

If this is real, if this is true,

then it's time that we get comfortable with it.

It was the wind holding the water at bay

in a way that it wouldn't ordinarily do,

but which it did do because of God's exercising

his powers of agency just as you

and I have powers of agency,

and can affect unexpected changes in physical systems.

Verse 21, "Moses stretched out his hand over the sea

"and it was the Lord

"who drove back by a strong east wind all night

"and made the sea dry land."

Yes, the wind was there.

He was using it.

And yet the text is clear.

Yahweh was at work in pushing back the water.

It's interesting to see how DeMille reflected

this thinking with the insights of an old man.

The wind opened the sea!

God opened the sea with the blast of his nostrils.

(upbeat music)

He was the ultimate mover.

He was the decisive agent.

The wind was merely instrumental in his hand.

(upbeat music)

The Egyptians pursued

and went in after them into the midst of the sea,

all Pharaoh's horses, his chariots and his horsemen.

(dramatic music)

And in the morning The Lord said to Moses,

"Stretch out your hand over the sea,

"that the water may come back upon the Egyptians,

"upon their chariots and upon their horsemen."

And the sea returned and covered the chariots

and the horsemen of all the host of Pharaoh

that had followed them into the sea.

Not one of them remained.

(orchestral music)

Thus the Lord saved Israel that day

from the hand of the Egyptians.

So the people believed in the Lord

and in Moses, his servant.

(orchestral music)

(vehicle engine revving)

According to the Bible,

the sea was large enough to destroy

all of Pharaoh's chariots and army.

The amount of debris left behind must have been massive.

Chariots are bristling with weapons, bronze weapons,

and none of that stuff floats.

Spear points, arrowheads, ax heads, sword blades.

(suspenseful music)

Ever since Ron Wyatt identified Nuweiba beach

as a potential crossing site,

divers from around the world have been searching

for the remains of Pharaoh's army.

Finding chariots here would be compelling evidence

for a Deep Sea crossing.

You bring me up one chariot wheel

from the bottom of the sea there,

and I'll be convinced.

(boat engine revving)

I traveled to Nuweiba Beach with Möller

to film divers as they continued to investigate.

(suspenseful music)

Could there be evidence

for a miracle at the bottom of the sea?

(water splashing)

It is extremely complicated

to work in these waters.

This is no normal dive.

The search area is massive.

You are swimming in a politically explosive area

with four very nervous countries competing

for territorial control.

So, what do we look for?

Circular shapes, 90-degree angles,

strange patterns and things that seem to be piled

on top of one another.

One diver described it as if there

had been a massive wreckage,

and all these parts were scattered everywhere,

with all twisted shapes.

Things that wouldn't grow in a natural way.

Some of them are just table coral,

which the divers are very aware of and dismiss out of hand.

One particular coral growth caught my eye.

On approaching it I recognized the shape as being

of similar dimensions to one of the chariot cabs

that we had seen in the Cairo Museum.

It was heavily encrusted with coral,

but I actually thought I would try out

the size of the shape by kneeling in its coralized form.

(suspenseful music)

The coral on the object was 10-12 inches.

More intricate work would not have been there.

There were parallel struts at the front of the coral growth.

They're not allowed to take up a single coral

from the sea at this location.

It's illegal to do that.

But the divers did find what they believed were animal

and human skeletal remains.

Dr. Möller and I took these samples to Dr. Ebba During

a Swedish forensic bone expert.

When we found this we speculated

that it is rather similar to a human femur.

I think if you compare those two,

there are certain likenesses, of course.

So, I think you have the caput here.

Yeah.

Going into the hip bone.

And, this you have for muscular attachment here.

Similar to this one here.

To this one here.

But, if you follow what we call the diaphysis, like this.

You can see that they are very much alike,

and it's sort of a little bent.

Yeah.

And that's very, very special for a human femur.

So, I think it's not a bad likeness.

But there are questions about

whether any of the remains could have lasted

for thirty five hundred years.

It's actually problematic to think

that anything would have lasted a long time.

The bodies would have been rapidly consumed,

plus bones dissolve in seawater,

so even if the fish didn't get them,

the bones would go away.

But anything made of wood is gonna decompose really rapidly.

But some people are saying

that wood has lasted for a long time

like there's a boat they found in the Sea of Galilee

that was actually buried in the mud.

And that's the point.

It was buried in mud.

If the wood is exposed,

it's gonna get consumed.

If it's buried in mud,

especially anoxic mud,

it can last a very long time.

But if the wood is above the sands, it's gone.

However, if giant walls of water

came crashing down on the chariots,

would the seafloor have been churned up

covering many of the artifacts?

Möller suggests that the wood from the wheels disintegrated

and the coral took its shape,

perhaps leaving traces of metal

where it reinforced parts of the wheel.

If you were searching the seabed

and searching for man-made objects

if you get a positive reading from your magnetometer,

it wouldn't necessarily prove that

there was a man-made object there because

there are many natural objects,

which could set off your magnetometer.

Where we get our magnets from, of course,

is from natural deposits of iron ore and magnetite

and the sea bed is a place where many

of these compounds do accumulate.

I think I have probably dived on about 10

or 12 different trips.

I understand that within coral there are traces of metal.

But you can set the frequency of a metal detector so

that it doesn't pick up traces of those minerals.

What's really important is the pattern

of metals found within coral.

We've come across interesting shaped corals

and you run a metal detector around it,

things don't quite add up, you'll move on.

And you'll find a full circle,

perfect dimensions, symmetrical.

Then you'll run a metal detector across it

and you'll find metal readings

in just the right places where the hub is,

where the spokes would be.

Too much of a coincidence for me, anyway.

Two wheels standing like this,

with an axle in between.

Circular shape, circular shape.

I mean there are no disputing things like that.

For certain it's not a coral reef.

No, it's not natural.

If you want to find a chariot wheel,

and it looks like a coral,

you have to prove that it's not a coral.

Because it just looks like the way corals grow.

Even if a chariot wheel was lying

in the bottom of the sea and it got encrusted in coral,

you wouldn't expect it to maintain that shape over time.

Because first of all, corals grow.

So, if you had something as being encrusted with coral,

well the coral is going to keep on growing.

And it's going to all of sudden,

not look like a wheel anymore.

There's no telling what shape it would take on.

So something that's 3500 years old wouldn't

still look like a chariot wheel,

is that what you're saying?

It shouldn't.

The only way to do that would be,

maybe it got encrusted and buried in sand.

And then, maybe recently go re-exposed again,

but then again,

you have to scientifically examine these,

you have to look at each one,

you have to ask good questions.

You can't just jump in the water,

and see something round, and say,

"I see a chariot wheel."

That's not the way science works.

What is necessary is a proper investigation

led by trained archeologists

before any further claims can be advanced.

The divers and their remote cameras

haven't been able to go deeper than about a hundred meters,

leaving the vast majority of this area unexplored.

I wonder what they might discover if they used submarines

to investigate the deep caverns

on either side of the plateau where coral cannot grow.

From the beginning of my involvement,

I had heard about Eric Lembcke finding

a spoked wheel on the seafloor.

His discovery came nine years

after Wyatt had found his golden wheel.

I was cautious about the report of Eric's find.

He too had waited over two decades until he found someone

he felt he could trust with his story.

This would be his first public retelling of the events.

Explain to me what happened

one day when you were diving.

Sure. That was, like I mentioned before,

the spring of 1997.

There were four of us on that trip.

It was myself, Ron Wyatt, Dr. Möller

and an individual that he brought along by the name of Rory.

Towards the end of the dive,

we came back up,

did our safety stop at 15 feet to decompress.

And once we came to the surface,

there was only three of us there,

myself, Ron, and Lennart.

So I said, "Hey, where's Rory?"

And you could see his bubbles off in the distance,

trailing deeper where it started to drop off.

I said, "Listen,

"If one of us doesn't go back down, something's wrong,

"he's not going to make it."

So I submerged and I got down to about 60 to 80 feet.

And my eye caught something.

It was circular in nature,

and you could clearly see the circumference

of a round object, a rim.

Did you see any spokes?

Definitely, yeah.

There was a hub in the center

that was clearly visible and it was roughly about,

I would describe it as a grapefruit very smooth in nature.

Almost like a grapefruit cut in half like a hub.

And had you ever seen a chariot wheel before?

Yeah. I've seen chariot wheels in Cairo Museum,

I don't know if they're ceremonial in nature,

but this one was definitely a little bit thicker.

It was like a dirty bronze color very dark in nature.

And this was the only time

that I had seen anything definitive, period,

that looked and resembled an ancient wheel.

So what happened then to Rory as he's swimming off?

I realized at that time,

my air was getting low and I'm looking off in the distance

and he's still swimming in a straight line,

going out deeper.

And I knew at that time that I couldn't catch him

with the limited air I had left.

And I literally just start motioning like this underwater.

All of a sudden, he stops, he spun around,

we caught our eyes.

I said, "look at me," in the goggles.

And I motioned him, "Come here."

I pointed like this.

I was right over the top of it, trying not to move.

And when his eyes saw it and he looked up,

they got really big in the goggles.

I lost my octopus, my mouthpiece,

I was so surprised when I saw it so excited.

His first reaction was to go down to it and grab it,

like he was trying to pull it off the bottom.

I could see clearly five of the six spokes,

as well as the rim,

at least 75 percent of it.

The silt was really stirred.

I was trying to lift the chariot wheel

but the problem was it was too heavy.

Now, I was really out of air.

He gave the dreaded,

"I'm out of air" symbol.

And you're 90 feet below?

Yes. Approximately 90, 95 feet below the surface.

So I grabbed his vest and held onto it and inflated my BC,

my buoyancy compensator with as much air as I could

and literally just shot straight

to the surface like a cork,

without initiating a safety stop at 15 feet to decompress.

We surfaced just a little bit too quickly

and as a result of that there was some kind

of bends that I got.

I mean, that's a very dangerous thing,

but it's all you can do, right?

Because you're going to run out of oxygen.

Well yeah, the first reaction is,

"I got to get to the top."

Well, we popped to the surface and my first reaction was,

"Ron, we've got a wheel.

"I'm not moving from this spot."

And Ron, I remember he said,

"Well, you may not be moving

"but the current's moving you, fellow."

And sure enough, we were drifting.

Because some people would say,

"Well, why in the world didn't you have a camera?"

On that last dive,

I wasn't carrying the camera, Ron was.

You were carrying the light.

I had the light, correct.

Searching for this evidence

was one reason I traveled to Nuweiba beach

with Lennart Möller back in 2002.

Yet after all these years no one has been able

to relocate the wheel.

All we have are the eyewitness accounts.

Dr. Jennifer Hall Rivera is a forensic scientist.

She is a specialist in finger print analysis

and a former crime scene investigator.

She is now an author and educator with Answers in Genesis.

How valid is an eyewitness account?

Eyewitness accounts can be very valid,

especially when we look at forensic science,

we will have a lot of circumstantial evidence

most of the time, very little direct evidence.

So because of that,

a lot of times they're relying on eyewitness testimony

to help validate all this indirect evidence

that we may have.

Now eyewitness testimony is very subjective.

If they were just a bystander,

or were they directly affected by it,

can affect someone's interpretation.

But what they have found is that,

if someone goes through a very traumatic experience,

especially when a life is involved or something violent,

those accounts that they give are far more accurate,

because it was so important to them,

and it was such a stressful situation,

they're gonna have far more accurate memories.

And that has been backed up by a lot of research.

And also, as time goes on and we think about

something that has happened,

a lot of times our memory actually

and our details actually improve with time

because we can really process it as well.

You thought you were going to lose Rory,

and you could have potentially died yourself.

Yeah, that's true.

Then your memories are very vivid.

The sequence of seeing the wheel,

him coming over, pointing at him,

watching his eyes just get big,

grabbing onto it,

stirring up the silt.

I'll never forget,

"I'm out of air" sign and that point.

That part is very, very vivid.

Now, I love the fact that people are looking

for these things and I'm hoping some day,

we're actually going to find really

good evidence of Pharaoh's army,

but when I look at what's been seen so far,

I'm a little skeptical.

The human brain tends to lock on things

that are weak arguments.

We all do it all the time.

Scientists do it.

Non-scientist do it.

So we all have to be very careful,

to think very critically through issues.

So the people who found wheels at the bottom of the Red Sea,

more than likely they found a coral colony.

It's not a wheel at all.

Or they found something modern.

Those are the first two answers for the question.

If it's ancient, that's an extraordinary claim.

So what you're saying it's not wrong to look.

We need to look but we also need to verify.

Be very careful when we draw a conclusion based

on a little bit of evidence.

As a strong proponent of this site,

there's so much we have from the biblical narrative

that if we're trying to find a location

with a well-preserved army at the bottom of the sea

and we're hoping to recreate chariot parts at every turn,

I think that really does a disservice to the site and

to the credibility of it.

What I find interesting is that,

to my knowledge,

of all the crossing locations

this is the only one where people are searching

for physical evidence.

It's true that so far,

none of these finds have been verified as dating

to the time of the Exodus,

nor have they brought up anything

for archaeologists to examine.

But then again,

none of the other crossing sites

have verified remains either.

(suspenseful music)

Ultimately, finding chariot wheels

does not determine the nature of this miracle.

And it's the scale of the miracle

that has fascinated me all these years.

(upbeat music)

A miracle is something that God does for us.

He wants to speak to us.

He wants to get our attention.

So when Moses, for example, parted the Red Sea,

it was something that God did to blow their minds.

In Exodus chapter 9 The Lord told Moses to go

to Pharaoh and give him a message.

"But for this purpose I raised you up.

"Why? To show you my power

"so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth."

That's what God is doing in the Exodus,

and a natural event would not have accomplished it.

It needed a divine intrusion to overcome

the greatest army on the planet.

So what you're saying is that God was communicating

that this was a big event.

This was him acting in history.

That is exactly what he says is the point

of the Exodus to make much of him.

And the greater we minimize such a reality

by viewing it in naturalistic terms,

the more we are minimizing the very glory of God.

And that's a dangerous thing to do.

It sounds good to say that it must be a sea because,

I guess, it might somehow you think the miracle

was a greater miracle if it occurs at the ocean

or something like that.

But if one takes a naturalistic view of events here

and attributes those to the Lord,

because of the fact that it happened

at the right point in time,

and the right point in space,

means to me it was a miracle.

Do you think that it was miraculous?

Yes, but not in the sense

that we think of miraculous as in spectacular.

It's not "Cecil B. DeMille" miraculous.

These are things we wrestle with,

I wrestle with them.

I'm not prepared to jump one way

or the other on all of these things.

He could have delivered them

a thousand other less dramatic ways.

He chose not to.

He chose to do it in such a way

that it was for maximum effect

that they would never forget it,

that they would talk about it for millennia

because no one ever parts bodies of water.

It never happens.

It's like somebody rising from the dead.

That doesn't happen,

so if it does happen,

you can be sure it's a miracle.

(orchestral music)

During this investigation of the Red Sea Miracle

I've uncovered six steps for the journey

from Egypt to Mount Sinai with two main approaches.

The Egyptian approach puts the sea crossing near Egypt,

and has everything happening on a smaller scale.

It has about 20,000 Israelites crossing

a small desert within a few days.

A detour takes them to a dead end at one

of the shallow marsh lakes along the border.

These locals are supported by connecting place-names

in the biblical text to Egyptian meanings

and sites such as the "Sea of Reeds" for Yam Suph.

Most using this approach favor naturalistic explanations

for the miracles of Exodus,

with a natural wind causing the parting of the waters.

The miracle was in the timing.

The Hebrew approach has everything happening

on a much larger scale,

with millions of Israelites taking many days

to cross the Desert

of the Sinai Peninsula before turning,

to end up trapped between mountains

and the sea at the deep waters of the Gulf of Aqaba.

It maintains that the Egyptian place-names

don't actually fit the Bible,

and instead puts more emphasis on the full biblical account

and its descriptions of how and why the events happened.

It notes that Aqaba is the only sea the Bible directly links

to the Hebrew name Yam Suph.

Many in this group interpret Suph to mean "End"

relating to the end or boundary of the Promised Land

and the end of the Egyptian army.

In this approach,

these waters are parted with a spectacular miracle

that holds up great walls of water.

This is only explainable by the direct intervention of God.

There are also hybrids of these two approaches.

Some put the crossing on the northern tip of Aqaba,

but through shallow waters parted naturally.

I know there are reasons why most people

today choose the Egyptian approach.

But I personally lean towards the Hebrew approach

and its view of the Exodus on a grand scale.

Because I think it matches what the Bible is describing.

Now, whether God works in spectacular ways

is an important question.

Because it impacts how I view God,

and how I live my life.

And as I came to discover,

it's really what this film is about.

But, do miracles still happen today?

(suspenseful music)

I'm here at North Central University

where my parents met, eventually married,

and a little while later

I was born just over there at Swedish Hospital.

Well, I too would come to North Central,

and it was during that time that I began

to have an interest in filmmaking.

In fact, I believed that someday

I would have a movie in the theaters.

Forty years later that dream came true.

On January 19, 2015 my first film

"Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus" was shown nationwide.

I saw it with my wife Jill, in New York City,

at a theater in Times Square.

January 19, 2015 was a big day for John Smith as well.

Because that was the day he drowned.

It was portrayed in the

20th Century Fox feature film, "Breakthrough".

When I heard that he was coming from Missouri

to attend my old college,

North Central, I decided to contact him.

There were just too many connections.

I get a phone call from my mom.

She calls me and she asks

if I wanna go to the gym that day because it's a holiday.

I said, of course, I love the game of basketball.

So whatever I can do to play I'll do it.

She said, "I love you."

I said, "I love you too."

Eight seconds later,

all three of us fell through the ice.

(ice breaks)

(water splashing)

Were your lungs filled with water?

When they pulled me out,

I was a fountain.

It was coming out of my eyes, my ears, my nose, my mouth.

They rushed me to the hospital and there I laid lifeless

for over an hour they did everything medically

and physically possible they could.

My mom arrived, they rushed her in.

And Dr. Kent Sutterer said,

"You can go. You can go talk to him."

And what's amazing to hear about this unique story

is that two of the people in there,

Alex Giddens and Keith Terry,

they will vouch that when my mom walked in the room,

not just the atmosphere changed,

but the physical temperature in the room changed.

And when she prayed something rushed up my body

so powerful that it pushed all three of them back.

Holy Spirit, I need you now.

I need you now. (whimpering)

Please don't take my son.

(crying)

Please, bring life back into John, please.

And when she prayed that instant,

(beep) I got a pulse and everything just turned hectic.

They were transporting me into a helicopter

to Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital

in the city.

Dr. Jeremy Garrett who is an expert

in hypothermia and drowning.

He said, "This is uncharted territory.

"We've never heard of this.

"There is a 99% chance that he will not make it overnight

"and I hope you're prepared for that."

And that's what he told my mom.

My mom got up in his face and she pointed at him.

She said, "You do what you do best.

"I hear you're the best.

"My God will do the rest."

John Smith was clinically dead for 1 hour

and 8 minutes when his mother prayed for him.

He fully recovered with no brain damage

and was medically cleared after 40 days.

Today, you've got hundreds of millions of people

who claim to have witnessed miracles.

Nobody would say that all those were genuine miracles.

But today I don't think Hume himself would dare start

with the presumption that we have no

credible eyewitness evidence for miracles.

He says, "No respectable people."

We have people with doctorates,

we have medical doctors,

doctors of philosophy,

so many people,

and people actually who are in our academic environment

are sticking our necks out to talk about this.

To be able to demonstrate that God,

from a scientific perspective,

had done some kind of intervention in human life,

you would have to be able

to demonstrate it repeatedly under controlled conditions.

And that would then convince scientists

that this was something that was believable

from a scientific perspective.

People today, even if they saw miracles,

some of them are saying,

"I wouldn't believe in it."

Yeah. Then they'll say,

"Give me medical documentation."

In a number of cases we do have medical documentation.

And so, what happens when we give the

medical documentation, some people will say,

"Well, no, you have to have this happen all the time."

If it happened all the time when you did a certain thing,

we would say,

"Well, that just fits the law of nature."

It's not a miracle anymore.

It's amazing, in a world full of chaos,

the amount of questions we get of

"Why me and not someone else?"

He gave me a second chance at life.

I don't deserve it.

I don't, I wasn't serving the Lord when I drowned,

and it's a miracle that I'm here.

How do you answer the question when there are people

that are praying for a miracle and they don't get one?

Yeah. (sorrowful music)

Just this past weekend before you filmed me,

I lost a very good friend, Nabeel Qureshi.

Thousands of people were praying for him,

a number of people were fasting.

If faith could always make something happen,

Nabeel would still be alive,

but that's not the way it works.

My wife and I have been through seven miscarriages.

My wife is from Africa,

it's very important to have a child.

Clearly it doesn't always happen.

It's not like you push a button and it happens.

This is a relationship with God and God still has the choice

and God knows more than we do.

(vehicles engine revving)

I first started asking questions

about miracles in 2005.

I went back to the old neighborhood

where I grew up as a kid,

not far from where I had my first hamburger

at the White Castle.

It was just across the street from Sears department store

where my mother often took me.

Have you ever heard of the story of Moses and the Exodus?

Yes.

Do you actually think that miracles happen today?

Yes, I do.

Why?

Because I had two twins about six months ago

and they were born at 23 weeks,

and they're breathing right now, they shouldn't be alive.

And that's a miracle.
And that's a miracle.

Yes, I believe the Red Sea was parted supernaturally.

In fact, when I was a kid,

I got into an argument with another child in Sunday school.

And I almost went so far as a challenge him

to come down to the Mississippi River.

I'd part it, based on my faith.

So yeah, that's definitely supernatural.

Do you actually think

there's such a thing as miracles?

Yeah.
Why?

Because, with miracles there comes hope.

And there's always room for hope.

In the last weeks of finishing this film,

my hometown of Minneapolis erupted

in riots from the tragic death of George Floyd.

It happened very nearby.

In fact, at the location of these interviews

the businesses were burned and destroyed.

We are at a Red Sea Moment in our history on many levels.

Where everything seems like it could be lost.

And it's going to require something greater

than can be solved at a natural human level.

Just like with the Israelites.

Part of the purpose of the Exodus is to give hope

to a people in desperate need

of more deliverance because the curse,

even though they're delivered from Egypt, the curse remains.

And they continue to struggle with sin,

and the presence of death is always at their doorstep.

If God overcame the greatest enemy,

will he not also do everything else we need?

This is why the prophets are able to use the Exodus

as a pattern for a greater Exodus.

They'll talk about a second Exodus that is to come

and they associate that second Exodus

with the Messiah.

There are times in all our lives

when we face a Red Sea moment,

and we need a miracle.

I just want to believe they can still happen today.

I want to have the faith to pray,

believing that God hears me and is able.

Even if I don't get the answer I expect,

I don't want to stop asking.

(ambient music)

Because some of these problems will only be solved

with a miracle from God.

(hopeful music)

(orchestral music)

The last step of this pattern is Destination.

It's where Moses brought the Israelites

back to worship God and receive the Ten Commandments.

(gentle music)

If they crossed here and they will leave Egypt

on this side and they will enter

into the land of Midian,

which is called Madjan today in Arabic.

And they aim for a specific mountain, Mount Sinai.

Where Moses spent 40 years.

So somewhere in that region is the mountain.

Yes, somewhere among these ridges you should look

for the highest mountain.

Was Mt. Sinai in the Sinai Peninsula

or further east in the ancient land of Midian?

This is my next challenge.

(bright upbeat music)