17. POINTS NOW MADE CLEAR. In view of all that this study of the route of the exodus has disclosed, it is evident that several points which have been commonly overlooked or undervalued in the biblical narrative and in the monumental records, are of unmistakable importance in the resolving of that route. 1. A prominent feature in the Bible narrative is the Great Wall of Egypt, which stood as a border barrier between the Delta and the desert, from the Mediterranean Sea to the modern Gulf of Suez. The existence of that Wall is established beyond all fair questioning. It was variously known, by the Hebrew name of Shur, by the Egyptian name of Khetam or Khetamoo, and by the Semitized Egyptian name of Etham. The desert beyond the Great Wall, eastward, was known interchangeably, as the Desert of Shur, and the Desert of Etham. It was into that desert that the Israelites made their exodus from Egypt. 2. There were three great highways out of Egypt eastward. They are mentioned in the Bible text by their former well-known descriptive titles: the Road of the Land of the Philistines, the Road of the Wall, and the Road of the Red Sea, or the Road of the Wilderness of the Red Sea. These three roads are clearly referred to in the Egyptian monumental records. The face of the country on the eastern borders of Lower Egypt, and beyond, shows where must have been the course of these roads; and it still gives traces of them severally. The sure location of these roads, respectively, fixes important points in the route of the exodus. 3. The numbers of the Israelites, and the requirements of the Bible narrative forbid the suggestion that any city or town was a starting-point, or a stopping-place, in the route of the exodus; hence the hope of determining that route by any discovery of the ruins of one town or another in Lower Egypt, is based on a miscon ception of both the letter and the general tenor of the Bible narrative. The Israelites started out from their scattered homes in the district of Rameses-Goshen, and made their general rendezvous at Succoth, in an extensive camping field along the line of lakes of which Lake Timsâh is the centre. Thence they moved forward toward the Great Wall, and encamped within it, at some point near the northernmost of the three roads desertward. From that camping-place they were turned southward nearly the entire length of the Isthmus, and made their final camp, before the exodus, at a region bounded eastward by the western arm of the Red Sea, westward by a prominent watch-tower such as guarded each of the three roadways out of Egypt, northward by Hahiroth, and southward by an image or shrine of the Semitic Egyptian dualisticdivinity Ba'al-Set. 4. It would appear from the Bible narrative, that while there was haste in the starting out of the Israelites from their homes in Rameses-Goshen to their Succoth-rendezvous, there was no pressing haste in their subsequent movements, until the time of their midnight crossing of the Red Sea. The indications of the narrative would point to, from say ten to twenty days, or more, between the passover-night and the night of the crossing. Moreover, there is nothing in the text that justifies the belief that there was but a day's journey between any two of the stations named as the great landmark camping-places; while there is every reason to believe that several days must have been taken in passing down along the Great Wall, from the encampment near the Philistia Road to the encampment by the Red Sea. Hence, there can be no help to an identifying of any particular site, by its supposed single day's distance from another site. 5. The northernmost stretch of the western arm of the Red Sea was then practically at the present head of the Gulf of Suez. Whatever difference existed must have been a slight one. Hence the last camping-field of the Israelites must have been near the northern shore of the Gulf of Suez, as being near the exit, through the Great Wall, of the Red Sea Road (which corresponded with the modern Hajj route into and over the Red Sea desert). The crossing of the Red Sea must have been from that starting-point. 6. Whatever disclosures may be made by further explorations in the region of eastern Lower Egypt, must be studied and viewed in the light of these facts, which by the Bible narrative and the monumental records are already made clear and definite beyond a peradventure. |