A Little More Goshen and On to Asia

Again… Sorry this is late. We’ve had no internet access for three days. My posts about our final days will come from the good old USA.


This has been a day of important places, but not impressive places.

We visited several likely places that would have been stops for the Hebrews in the first few days of the Exodus. In some places, there was nothing there to start, so nothing remains. Still, it was interesting to again walk in the same steps of the Hebrews fleeing Egypt and Pharaoh.

Exo 12:37 "The Israelites journeyed from Rameses to Succoth. There were about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children."

This is the rural village that sits at the site of Succoth. This is not on the normal tourist track. They may get 2-3 busses a year and the kids of the town turned out in force to welcome us. This mud brick structure is from a period later than then Moses was there.

We next went to a place that may be the remains of a “sea of Reeds”
Exo 13:18 "So God led the people around by the desert road toward the Red Sea. The Israelites went up out of Egypt armed for battle."

OK, trust me on this one, “red sea” is a mistranslation. It should be “reed sea”. A whole series of lakes and swamps were on the eastern border of Egypt and represented their boarder with Sinai. For the most part, when the Suez canal was built, these lakes and swamps were naturally drained and have dried up. You can still see them on maps over 150 years old. This is a small section of what large areas would have looked like.

Near this site, was the location of a city built in later times that sat on the Egyptian boarder. It’s called Tampahnes. This was the city that the Prophet Jeremiah was forced to go to after the fall of Jerusalem at the close of his life. Very little has been excavated there, but we‘re sure this is the spot.
Jer 43:7 "So they entered Egypt in disobedience to the LORD and went as far as Tahpanhes."

Finally, we crossed the Suez canal into the Sinai.

There we saw the Bitter lakes area…again mostly drained by the canal and not much to look at now.
Exo 15:23-24 "When they came to Marah, they could not drink its water because it was bitter. (That is why the place is called Marah.) {24} So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, "What are we to drink?""

Finally, we stopped at a traditional place called Moses Springs. It was an obvious place for Moses to stop, since all the Israelites could buy trinkets from the Sinai Bedouin.

We’ll pause tomorrow morning before we head to St. Catherine’s at the base of a traditional site of Mt. Sinai (Jebu Musa) deep in the southern Sinai mountains.

PS…It’s possible this may be my last post in Egypt. I don’t expect an internet connection at St. Catherine’s and the last night before we leave I may not have time (Shawn and I have a 4am flight out…so we need to be at the airport at 2am…aghhhhhhhhhhhhhh).

Two final notes:

One this has been a great trip and I’ve seem some stuff I have heard and read about for years. I looking forward to getting home, but I have had a wonderful time.

Second…I wanted to post this earlier: How about a Egypt blog contest!

Who can guess what this is? There will be a prize for the first correct answer posted in the comments.