vocates of these views, apparently anxious to aggrandise the miracle to the utmost, and discarding from fair consideration the physical agency which Scripture expressly mentions as the direct means by which the passage was made practicable, have, however, overlooked or evaded the difficulty of explaining how the fugitives, with their flocks and herds, could have travelled over the sharp coral rocks, and vast quantities of sea-weed which cover the sea-bottom at these points. The obvious difficulty also, that a short way below Suez, the breadth of the sea becomes too great for the passage to have been effected within the limits of time given in the narrative, without some preternatural acceleration of speed, of which Scripture gives no hint or mention, has never been met satisfactorily. There is the yet greater difficulty that a wind strong enough to have produced upon deep water the extraordinary effect which is supposed, would have been much too violent for any man or body of men to have stood up against it. Lastly, there is the impossible supposition that Pharaoh and his host would have been mad enough to rush to their doom in this fearful chasm."
Of late years, however, the theory of a deep-water passage has been practically abandoned. Modern critics prefer an intelligent interpretation, according to known natural laws, of the words of Exodus xiv. 21, 22, which lay stress upon the east wind as the direct natural agent by which the sea bottom was for the time made dry land.
Major Palmer mentions the presence of marine shells in the Bitter Lake as showing that it was formerly filled with salt water from the Gulf of Suez. He says further:—"This communication subsequently became broken by the gradual elevation of the neck of land eleven miles long which now separates the lakes from the head of the gulf—an interesting fulfilment of the prophecy in Isaiah xi. 15—and the Lord shall utterly destroy the tongue of the
