Suppose I want to take my posse on a stroll across the bed of the Red Sea, and recreate the alleged escape method of Moses et al.
I have some factual questions before I get to the more theoretical questions.
How many Jews supposedly made it across
How many Eqyptians drowned?
More speculative questions:
3. Given 1 & 2, what is a reasonable corrider width?
4. Anyone know something about the, er topography – is that the right term for physical condition of the Red Dead seabed – whether a relative plain with gentle slopes at either side, or more mountainous?
5. Distance across the sea over which they supposedly crossed for a corridor length?
6. A transit time for the saved population plus enough extra time to fill the route with soon to be dead Eqyptians.
With these numbers we can come up with an estimated volume of water that would need to be displaced. And the remaining questions are the forces necessary to hold apart the two half-seas for the necessary time. I imagine that this amounts to thinking of it as a problem of two dam walls of sufficient strength to contain the volumes of water behind them. Assuming the map of a couple thousand years back is similar to today’s map, and that they would have transited as close to the northwest edge as possible, it look like the southeast wall would have to deal with a MUCH greater volume than the northwest wall.
The Red Sea is part of the great Rift that runs from down in Africa up to the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley. Is is quite deep, over 3000 ft. (1000 m.) over most of its length with the deepest part being over 8000 ft. (2500 m.)
Nitpick: That’s the number of males over the age of 20. Assume an equal number of females. There also must have been about 600,000 kids, as all the males over 20 died in the desert, but the succeeding generation, which made it into Cannan was almost as large as that one, also just topping 600,000 males over 20. So assuming that half of those were present at the Exodus (because those over 20 at the crossing into Canaan could have been born anywhere within the forty-year span, twenty years before and twenty years after the Exodus, so about half-and-half likely) and again, an equal number of females.
One little thing: It doesn’t require any energy to hold the water there. The only energy needed is to push the water into the two wall shapes, then once it’s there, it requires lots of force but no work or energy.
I can’t imagine that this can really be a GQ, with a factual answer.
Because there are more basic questions before we get to your ‘factual questions’.
Did this ever really happen?
Most of the people in the world today do not believe in the literal accuracy of the Bible.
What ‘Red Sea’ did they cross?
I’ve seen reports that this is a mistranslation, the original is closer to ‘Reed Sea’, and refers to a muddy, swamp area.
And the actual physical geography of this area could well have changed since that time. The Sahara desert, for example, has significantly expanded during recorded history.
So much of this depends on religious beliefs, it’s really hard to get a factual answer.
Nonsense. The OP did not ask anything with regard to the veracity of the Biblical story. He asked instead about the physics of a problem, using those parameters.