Rainy Day Research

Okay, the Israelites were Canaanites, but they didn't call themselves Canaanites. Most of the other Canaanites probably didn't call themselves Canaanites either, that's what the Egyptians called them. What confused me was that Abraham was the legendary patriarch of the Israelites, and he came from Mesopotamia, which the Bible calls "The Land of the Chaldeans". Abraham was also the legendary patriarch of some other nations, but only the Israelites descended from Abraham's grandson Jacob (a.k.a. Israel). Jacob was probably born in Canaan, so that makes the Israelites Canaanites the same way that you and I are Americans, even though our ancestors came from Europe. On the other hand, by the time Moses came on the scene, the Israelites had been in Egypt for a couple centuries, so one might think that they would be called Egyptians, but the Israelites never really assimilated with the Egyptians, kind of like the blacks in America. The Israelites probably weren't slaves like the Blacks were slaves, more likely they were serfs or vassals of the pharaoh. According to the Bible, everybody in Egypt was a slave to the pharaoh because they sold themselves into bondage during a famine when the pharaoh was the only one who had any food stashed away because he had been warned in a dream that there would be a famine in seven years, but that's a whole nother story.

If the parting of the Red Sea was a natural phenomenon, it probably happened more than once. I read somewhere that there is geological evidence that a tsunami-like event happened in the Persian Gulf long before anybody lived there, which might be the inspiration for the Flood myth, but that's a whole nother story. The only thing this proves is that everything that happens doesn't get reported, especially back in the days before TV and the internet.

The part about the pharaoh's army getting drownded might be apocryphal, indeed, the whole Red Sea story might be apocryphal, which is why I brought the River Jordan into it. That story is more likely to be true because the River Jordan has been known to plug up like that even in modern times. If it happened right when the invading Israelites needed it to happen, it would have been thought to be a miracle by the people involved. Nowadays we would call it just a coincidence. A miracle is nothing but a coincidence with a perfect sense of timing. Anyway, the River Jordan event might have been the inspiration for the Red Sea story. The more likely scenario is that the Israelites just walked around the Red Sea where the Suez Canal is located now, but that doesn't make for nearly as interesting a story. Who would want to make an award winning movie about a boring story like that?