The Hebrew יָמָּה סּוּף (yam sûp)
can refer to the Red Sea—that is, the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba—as well
as the inland sea on Egypt’s eastern frontier that is known as “the Sea of
Reeds,” which will be argued is Lake Ballah. (James K. Hoffmeier, Israel In
and Out of Egypt: The Archaeological and Historical Background to the Exodus [Peabody,
Mass.: Hendrickson, 2026], 311)
Hebrew yam sûp, in
recent decades, has been widely accepted as meaning “reed sea” and referring to
one of the lakes between the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Suez—that is the Red
Sea.
. . .
With the rise of source criticism
in the last century, some scholars have contended that the inconsistency merely
reflects the multiplicity of oral and written traditions and their conflation
in the Pentateuch. This explanation is not very compelling when one considers
that the two terms occur in parallelism in the Song of the Sea, the putative
oldest witness to the sea crossing (see next section). Translating yam sûp
as “Reed Sea” or “Sea of Reeds” had not been seriously challenged until Batto’s
1983 study. (James K. Hoffmeier, Israel In and Out of Egypt: The
Archaeological and Historical Background to the Exodus [Peabody, Mass.:
Hendrickson, 2026], 349)
There are other reasons for not
relying upon the LXX to elucidate the name and location of Israel’s exodus sea.
First, the LXX does not actually translate the Hebrew term sûp;
rather, it offers a geographical interpretation. Second, its translation of the
Hebrew yam sûp is used in Hebrew for the sea through which the
Israelites passed (Exod 13:18; 15:4; Josh 24:6), the Gulf of Suez (Num 33:10,
11), and the Gulf of Aqaba (Exod 23:31; Deut 1:40; 2:1; 1 Kgs 9:”6), but the
LXX does not translate all occurrences of yam sûp by erythrá
thalássē. One such
variant is found in Judg 11:16. Jephtha’s retrospective on the exodus and
wilderness period is very brief, and it is unclear if he is referring to the
sea of passage or the Gulf of Aqaba. Apparently owing to this ambiguity, the
LXX simply transliterated the name of the sea as thalássēs siph.
The LXX’s inconsistent handling
of yam sûp in 1 Kgs 9:26 and Judg 11:16 ought to caution against
relying upon it to settle the meaning of the term sûp or the
intended location of the sea in Exod 14-15. Therefore, the search for the sea
of the exodus should rest primarily on the Hebrew manuscript tradition and not
on the LXX. (James K. Hoffmeier, Israel In and Out of Egypt: The
Archaeological and Historical Background to the Exodus [Peabody, Mass.:
Hendrickson, 2026], 359)
