> Old Testament? Last night I was struck by Exodus 14:22: "The waters
> were divided, and the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground,
> with a wall of water of their right and on their left." Water doesn't
> normally stand up in a wall, yet the text says it did.
Bill,
There was an article in the March 1992 issue of the Bulletin of the
American Meteorological Society (Vol. 73, No. 3, pp. 305-314) by a couple
of Israelis (Nof and Paldor), who calculated the effects on the Gulf of
Suez that would be produced by the natural causes (strong wind sustained
for several hours) that the Bible (Exodus 14:21) says the Lord used to
divide the waters. They concluded that these meteorological conditions
could expose an underwater ridge in sufficiently shallow water and,
interestingly, that in the solution of their equations the water surface
at the edge of the exposed land would be vertical although they conceded
that in actuality the sea level slope would probably have merely been very
large rather than perfectly vertical.
This is an example in which God's use of natural means has made it
possible for scientific investigation to lend support to an account widely
viewed as incredible.
Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado 80309-0395