Three thousand years ago, Semitic tribes shifted from an agricultural calendar based on the flood and ebb of the Nile in Egypt to periods of rain and intense heat in the Land of Israel. How did they all manage to get on the same page of the calendar? And did the change help them stick together over the millennia?
Little is known about how people sang, played, and danced to music at the time of the Exodus. So what’s a writer who needs a Spotify playlist for inspiration to do? Search for and find one of the best world musics you’ve never heard of: gnawa.
Fun fact: No camels were used during the Exodus. The “ships of the desert” only came into wide use centuries later. But what was it really like for Israelites to live as slaves in ancient Egypt, and what skills did they need to survive once they’d escaped? The modern nomads of the Levant, the Bedouin, provide some clues.
Of all the miracles in the book of Exodus, the most impenetrable to scientific reasoning would seem to be the parting of the Red Sea. . . . Who has ever seen waters “divided,” so that hundreds or thousands of people could go “through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left” (Exodus 14:22)?