THE ROUTE OF THE CHILDREN OE ISRAEL 



1015 



in settling all dates for events the other 

 side of the Christian era, but the data for 

 Bible dates are superior to all other 

 human records. Scholars have followed 

 up ingenious clues, have made such good 

 tvse of known astronomical facts and the 

 unbroken sequence of Jewish feasts, that 

 they venture to fix not only the year, but 

 even the month and the day, when the 

 Children of Israel left Raamses in the 

 land of Egypt, and also the date of the 

 crossing of the Jordan and their entrance 

 into the Promised Land.* 



Great confusion of thought has gath- 

 ered round the words "miracle" and 

 "supernatural." As a recent writerf has 

 well said, "Everything we admire is liter- 

 ally a miracle," and among primitive 

 people of all nations almost anything 

 unusual was taken as "a sign and a won- 

 der." "To most ages of mankind there 

 has been no dividing line between the 

 natural and non-natural ; so much is in- 

 explicable to the untrained mind that no 

 trouble was taken to define whether an 

 event would happen in the natural course 

 or not." We modern thinkers have prac- 

 tically abolished the distinction between 

 the "natural" and the "supernatural," but 

 many fail to realize that we have done 

 greater violence to the "natural" than to 

 the "supernatural." We now distinguish 

 sharply between the co-natural and the 

 non-natural and make less use of the 

 "supernatural" because of the confusion 

 of mind occasioned by its mistaken uses. 



THE APPEARANCE OE QUAIL, THE STOPPAGE 



OF THE JORDAN, AND THE WONDERS 



OE THE EXODUS CONFIRMED BY 



PRESENT CONDITIONS 



"A strong east wind drives the Red 

 Sea back ; another wind blows up a flock 

 of quails ; cutting a rock brings a water 

 supply to view, and the writers of these 

 accounts record such matters as wondrous 

 benefits of the timely action of natural 

 causes." Modern believers in Divine 

 Providence, and no one can accept either 

 the blind-chance theory of the universe 



* Auchincloss, April 19, 1477, and March 21, 

 14.37, B. C. 

 f Petrie, Researches in Sinai. 



or that we are helpless automata, see in- 

 contestable evidence of God's care in the 

 coincidence of these wonderful events 

 with the desperate needs of the Children 

 of Israel. With more light from many 

 sources we shall modify our conceptions 

 of many of these occurrences, but the 

 facts will stand as long as the granite 

 cliffs of Sinai. 



The passage of the Suez arm of the 

 Red Sea at the outset, the appearance of 

 the quails, and the crossing of the Jordan 

 forty years later are by no means the 

 greatest difficulties and wonders of the 

 Exodus. Those who have wandered over 

 the sand dunes of the desert, have lost 

 themselves among the shallow lagoons, 

 and have watched the rise and fall of 

 the tides among the inlets about Suez 

 will have little difficulty in conceiving 

 what may have happened in combination 

 with "a strong east wind." 



There is good authority for an entire 

 stoppage of the flow of the Jordan by a 

 landslide near Tell ed-Damiek during the 

 13th century, and those who saw people 

 walk across the brink of Niagara Falls, 

 when the river bed was almost dry by 

 reason of an ice gorge above, will not 

 tarry long on the passage of the Jordan.* 



After we left Elim and were approach- 

 ing the seacoast one of our cameleers 

 suddenly rushed ahead of us some 25 

 yards and a moment later returned with a 

 live quail in his hands which he had just 

 caught. This event occurring at the very 

 region where the Children of Israel were 

 so abundantly fed by the flocks of quails, 

 wearied by their flight over the Akaba 

 arm of the Red Sea, was a wholly unex- 

 pected exemplification of the phenomenon 

 of the Bible. It was the same east wind 

 blowing over the same sheet of water 

 into the maze of valleys that brought us 

 our quail so weary as to be easily caught 

 by the Bedawy of today. There is abun- 

 dant confirmation from other sources 

 that our experience was by no means 

 unique. 



The problem of the rainfall in the 

 Sinaitic Peninsula, which does not seem 



* A. D. 1267. See Palestine Exploration 

 Fund Quarterly, July, 1895, pp, 253-261. 



