Parting Of The Red Sea & Lake Erie Seiches

**Photo credit**: photo by wews, from the article by Trent Magill for ABC News 5 Cleveland, “Say whaaat? Seiche!”, 11-27-25.

An article written for ABC News 5 Cleveland explained what happened on 11-26-25 on Lake Erie:

Seiche… Pronounced SAY-sh. Now that we’re all on the same page… Let’s figuratively dive in!

Lake Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes. . . . water levels can change QUICKLY… It’s called a seiche.

It’s created by strong winds blowing over Lake Erie. Think of the lake as a bathtub. The wind blowing over the lake will push water in the same direction. West winds pile water up against the eastern basin. That water has to come from somewhere… that’s right… the western basin.

We saw that this morning (we’re still seeing it, just not to the same degree) as winds gusted over 40mph. Lake Erie’s water level dropped near Toledo OVER 4 FEET! On the other end of the lake, Buffalo, the water level was over 4′ higher than normal. . . .

You can walk to places you normally can’t, but always know the latest forecast and don’t get caught out when the water starts to return! (Trent Magill, “Say whaaat? Seiche!”, 11-27-25)

On 26 November 2025 at about 4:30 PM ET, my wife and I saw with our own eyes, extraordinary extended dry lake bottom (see photos on an accompanying Facebook page) on the shore of Lake Erie, just north of Monroe, Michigan (about 40 miles from our house), for quite a ways out. According to Wikipedia, “Lake Erie”: “The shallowest section of Lake Erie is the western basin where depths average only 25 to 30 feet . . .”

I actually cited this phenomenon, which is not all that infrequent, as an argument from analogy for a possible natural explanation for the parting of the Red Sea, in my book, The Word Set in Stone: How Archaeology, Science, and History Back Up the Bible (Catholic Answers Press: March 2023), on pages 113-114:

[Carl] Drews . . . stated,

On December 1–2, 2006 and January 30–31, 2008 there were strong windstorms over the Great Lakes that caused extreme surge events on Lake Erie. In both cases the wind came from the west, producing displacements between the water levels at the western and eastern ends of the lake of 4.2 m [13.8 feet] in 2006 and 5.1 m [16.7 feet] in 2008.

This is noteworthy because Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes (about 30 miles from my home in Michigan) is a shallow body of water, as far as lakes go, with an average depth of 62 feet. Thus, the differential in water level between western and eastern ends of the lake (it’s about 241 miles long) amounted to 22 percent of the average depth in the 2006 storm and 27 percent in 2008.

To provide a mental image of what this means, I have a small pool in my backyard that is 4 feet deep and 15 feet in diameter. The equivalent difference in water level, compared to these storms on Lake Erie, would be a difference of depth of 10.6 inches higher on one side of the pool compared to the other (analogy to the 2006 storm), or 13 inches (analogy to 2008). We can readily observe, then, that such wind events could cause dry land to appear in shallower bodies of water, especially if the winds are significantly stronger.

Footnote 140: Carl Drews, “Using Wind Setdown and Storm Surge on Lake Erie to Calibrate the Air-Sea Drag Coefficient,” Plos One 8(8) (August 19, 2013).

The seiche or wind setdown event on Lake Erie yesterday (a four foot drop in the western basin) was significantly smaller than earlier ones in 2006 and 2008, per the above. It was an eight-foot differential between the western and eastern part of the lake, which is 58% as much as the 2006 event and 48% as much as 2008. In other words, on the western part of the lake in 2006, the drop in water depth in the western part of the lake was 6.9 feet, and in 2008 it was 8.35 feet, deep enough — by the way — for men to drown in if they can’t swim. Drops in water levels on the Great Lakes can sometimes occur very rapidly.

Here is the biblical account:

Exodus 14:15-16, 21-22, 26-28 (RSV) The LORD said to Moses, “Why do you cry to me? Tell the people of Israel to go forward. [16] Lift up your rod, and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it, that the people of Israel may go on dry ground through the sea. . . . [21] Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the LORD drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. [22] And the people of Israel went into the midst of the sea on dry ground, the waters being a wall to them on their right hand and on their left. . . . [26] Then the LORD said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand over the sea, that the water may come back upon the Egyptians, upon their chariots, and upon their horsemen.” [27] So Moses stretched forth his hand over the sea, and the sea returned to its wonted flow when the morning appeared; and the Egyptians fled into it, and the LORD routed the Egyptians in the midst of the sea. [28] The waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen and all the host of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea; not so much as one of them remained.

Exodus 15:8, 10, 12 At the blast of thy nostrils the waters piled up, the floods stood up in a heap; . . . [10] Thou didst blow with thy wind, the sea covered them; they sank as lead in the mighty waters. . . . [12] Thou didst stretch out thy right hand, the earth swallowed them.

Note how a natural phenomena, “a strong east wind all night” is mentioned in 14:21 and “thy wind” again in 15:10. Wind is also mentioned in the plague of the locusts:

Exodus 10:13, 19 So Moses stretched forth his rod over the land of Egypt, and the LORD brought an east wind upon the land all that day and all that night; and when it was morning the east wind had brought the locusts. . . . [19] And the LORD turned a very strong west wind, which lifted the locusts and drove them into the Red Sea; not a single locust was left in all the country of Egypt.

God is sovereign over the weather and the natural laws that He created (as the Bible states many times). One could argue that here, God may have acted through a natural event that He knew would take place at exactly the right time, to save the Hebrews (water level dropping) and drown the Egyptians (when the water returned to normal). It may also have been miraculous. Either way, it’s God’s doing and His will that was fulfilled, and He used a human being, Moses, to participate in it, as His representative, as He also often — perhaps even usually — does.

Those who have studied these passages closely, and know both the Bible and science, believe that it was not literally the Red Sea that we know today, involved in this incident. But that’s a long discussion. My present task is to prove that events not unlike what the Bible describes are quite possible: dry land can appear where there was, before, four, six, or even eight or more feet of water, in a large lake or a sea.

A “strong wind all night” (Ex 14:21) is exactly what happened in Lake Erie last night (a west wind in this case; i.e., one that blows from the west to the east). Sometimes also, east winds can blow the water over to the west end of the lake, just as the Bible refers to an “east wind” and a “west wind” in Egypt (Ex 10:13, 19 above). So, for example, I found the following pair of comments in an “Ohio Game Fishing” forum, from September 11, 2005:

I was fishing out of Lorain [a little west of Cleveland] yesterday . . . and the waves picked up . . . and there [were] white caps. I just don’t understand why . . .

I was out yesterday also and less than 2′ went 2′ to 4′. The wind was out of the East, which means bad news for Lorain and West.

In this present incident on Lake Erie, there was a gale force wind of up to 50 mph, which is part of the “gales of November” (also known as “the witch of November”) that sunk the SS Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975: almost exactly fifty years ago, as I write. I have visited the spot right (Whitefish Point) near where it happened, and the museum there. It’s Michigan folklore. Most people have heard the famous song about it by the late Canadian singer Gordon Lightfoot (I’m even half-Canadian!). The waves on that fateful night were 35 feet high. Last night in the middle of Lake Erie they were 20 feet high. Gale force winds are considered to be between 39-54 mph.

In my book I cited the scientist Carl Drews, who, in a 2010 article, cited by New Scientist, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, NPR, and many other news outlets or scientific journals, speculated on the event recorded in the Bible, known as the “parting of the Red Sea.” His theory suggested a crossing in the freshwater lakes and marshes not far south of the Mediterranean Sea. But he was not the first to approach the broad topic from a scientific perspective. Oceanographer Doron Nof and meteorologist Nathan Poldor, among others, whom they cite, wrote an article on 1 March 1992, entitled, “Are There Oceanographic Explanations for the Israelites’ Crossing of the Red Sea?” (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 73, issue 3, pp. 305-314).

It’s probable that the Gulf of Suez, a narrower body of water to the northwest off of the Red Sea (varying in width from 12 to 20 miles) was also known as “the Red Sea” in ancient times. Nof and Poldor believe that its northern end may have been where the biblical crossing took place. The Sinai Peninsula lies across it to the east. They explain their reasons for why they believe that the conditions in this area of the Gulf of Suez could plausibly correspond to the biblical account:

Qualitative descriptions of the water behavior in the northern edge of the gulf is given in Har-el (1983). These descriptions suggest that when strong winds blow from the southeast, the waters of the Gulf of Suez spread some 8 to 9 km [5 to 5 1/2 miles] northward along the Suez Canal. Har-el suggests that this happens every 20 years or so and is typically associated with a sea level rise of almost 2 m [6 1/2 feet]. In contrast, when a strong wind blows from the northwest, the low tide is exaggerated. There are also reports that Napoleon was almost killed (during a crossing at a shallow region) as a result of a “sudden high tide.” The Suez Canal company states that the usual difference between high and low water is 80 cm and that the maximal difference is more than 3 m [9.8 feet]. A scientific analysis of the sea level fluctuations for the period 1956-1966 was made by Sharaf El Din (1975). He speaks of tides, varying atmospheric pressure, and sea level variations of up to 140 cm [4.6 feet], but it is not clear what are the direct causes of those variations. . . .

[O]ur approach in this study is to relate the Red Sea crossing to natural oceanographic phenomena. We shall show that a relatively simple oceanographic process related to a northwesterly wind pushing the water offshore and the water returning as a fast high-amplitude nonlinear wave (once the wind relaxes) can explain the “parting of the sea.” The Gulf of Suez provides an ideal body of water for such a process because of its unique geography; as stated earlier, it is rather long, narrow, and shallow. (p. 307; my bracketed comments)

It is expected that, in most cases, the wind will relax gradually (over a period of, say, a day), allowing the water to gradually return to its prewind position. Obviously, such a return would not impose any danger to humans because one could easily escape its arrival. A sudden (i.e., within several minutes) relaxation of the wind or a sudden change in its direction would, however, cause a severe response. Under such conditions, a rapidly advancing nonlinear gravity wave will cover the exposed area within minutes, preventing any possible escape. After discussing these points in some detail, it will be argued that our proposed wind crossing mechanism has much in common with the original biblical description because it involves pre-event winds, receding water, and a rapidly returning wave. (pp. 307-308)

[H]urricane winds . . . would give a rather high sea level drop of about 5.8 m [19 feet] and a (corrected) receding distance of about 3 km [1.9 miles], whereas a wind . . . corresponding to a strong storm [winds about 57% as strong] . . . would give a sea level drop of about 2.5 m [8.2 feet] and a (corrected) receding distance of about 1.2 km [3/4 mile]. (p. 311)

[Calculations suggest] a Gulf of Suez setdown time of about ten hours for moderate winds and several hours for strong winds. This is in agreement with the biblical description of a wind blowing the entire night prior to the crossing. (p. 311, my bracketed comment]

[I]f the wind relaxes or changes its direction abruptly (say, within several minutes) then the water returns as a fast nonlinear gravity wave or a “bore.” Namely, since the water behind the front of the nonlinear wave has larger depth than the water ahead, the back travels faster than the front and the wave ultimately breaks (e.g., Stoker 1957; Lighthill 1978). . . . for a wind setdown . . . corresponding to a storm, the entire receding area would be flooded in just 4 min[utes]. (p. 312)

Furthermore, if, due to natural geological processes, the bottom topography in biblical times were slightly different than it is today and contained a ridge . . . then crossing in “the midst of the sea” with water on both sides is certainly possible. In this context, it is appropriate to point out that sea level variations on the order of meters also occur from time to time in some of the Great Lakes. For instance, Lake Erie, which, similar to the Gulf of Suez, is long and narrow, is regularly subject to fluctuations of about 1 m during winter storms (see, e.g., Csanady 1982). (p. 313)

The average depth of the Suez Canal is 130 feet (shallowest at its northern end), with a maximum depth of 230 feet, and it’s 190 miles long. The average depth of Lake Erie is 63 feet (25-30 in its western basin), with a maximum depth of 210 feet, and it’s 241 miles long.

[I]t is not clear whether such events are likely to happen every 50, 100, or 500 years. However, it seems that an occurrence of such events is certainly possible. Moreover, it should be stressed that a rapidly changing wind is not required in the case of a long ridge . . . Specifically, if the ridge is long, so that crossing the sea by walking on the exposed bottom would take, say, 10 hours, then even gradually returning waters could cause drowning. (p. 313)

Believers can find the presence and existence of God in the creation of the wind with its particular properties just as they find it in the establishment of a miracle. Some may even find our proposed mechanism to be a supportive argument for the original biblical description of this event. (p. 313)

See the photos we took yesterday, on my Facebook page. Since the water dropped by four feet, the area near the shore that is usually less than four feet deep was dry, and that’s what we saw.

This is section 164 — in Part IV — of my free book (posted on my blog), The Word Set in Stone: “Volume Two”: More Evidence of Archaeology, Science, and History Backing Up the Bible.

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A Facebook friend, Gary Bennett, objected in the combox of my posting of this article on my Facebook page, and I replied, then sleptic-of-my-theory Eric Phillips also chimed in:

Gary: But that’s not a PARTING, that’s a receding. Exodus 14:22 clearly describes a wall of water on the right and on the left. As described in Exodus 14:22, it would be as much a miracle as Jesus raising the dead twice, or feeding the 5,000 on a few loaves and fishes.

I’m assuming you read my article. If so, you missed this part, that I cited from a scientific article on the topic:

Furthermore, if, due to natural geological processes, the bottom topography in biblical times were slightly different than it is today and contained a ridge . . . then crossing in “the midst of the sea” with water on both sides is certainly possible.

So all we need is a ridge or a sandbar, which is common in large bodies of water, especially in shallower places (I’ve walked on several sandbars, myself, in Lake Huron), provided that the elements of a seiche or wind setdown event are in place.

Gary: I truly believe it’s as miraculous as is the Eucharist, not a use of nature.

It would still be supernatural, in the sense that God communicated to Moses when to command the sea to part, and made the water come back just at the right time to drown the Egyptians. But it all could have been technically “natural”: since all the elements can be observed scientifically today. I just saw, myself, a dry lake bed two days ago, where the water is usually up to four feet deep. That’s many thousands (millions?) of tons and gallons of water being displaced; and then it returns within a day. And it’s caused by strong sustained winds: precisely as the Bible describes the Red Sea parting.

Eric Phillips: Dave, water on both sides isn’t the same as walls of water on both sides.

If we look up the Hebrew for “wall” (chomah: Strong’s word #2346), the unabridged Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon notes that it can have three meanings: 1) wall of a city, 2) wall of a building, and 3) in this instance, “figurative of waters of Red Sea”. B-D-B notes other figurative uses of “wall” / chomah:

1 Samuel 25:15-16 (RSV) Yet the men were very good to us, and we suffered no harm, and we did not miss anything when we were in the fields, as long as we went with them; [16] they were a wall to us both by night and by day, . . .

God said to Jeremiah:

Jeremiah 1:18 . . . I make you this day a fortified city, an iron pillar, and bronze walls, against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, its princes, its priests, and the people of the land. (cf. 15:20: “fortified wall of bronze”)

Isaiah 26:1 . . . he sets up salvation as walls and bulwarks.

The idea, then, seems to be that the water on both sides had the characteristic of being a protection for the Hebrews, and in light of what happened, this is absolutely true: it eventually came back to its normal state — quickly and dramatically, as we know can actually occur — and drowned the Egyptian enemies. I’m inclined to believe, drawing both from B-D-B and another observation I will shortly note, that both elements were present: the water would have looked a bit like a “wall” (probably not nearly as big as the 50s film Ten Commandments portrays it) but the primary meaning (if B-D-B is correct, and that is the expert linguistic source), is the notion of “protection”.

Technically, it only has to be high enough to drown the Egyptians when it returns, and that’s only seven feet or so (for those who can’t swim). And we know that this, and more, is possible. I would also think that even if it is literally or primarily a miracle (i.e., God creates two “walls of water”) that the walls wouldn’t likely be higher than the sea level in which they occur (in other words, a “parting” wouldn’t likely make the water even higher than it naturally is). The ridge is still below sea level, because it’s normally covered up.

Eric: metaphorical walls don’t make any sense. You’d have to be really wed to this theory, to find that interpretation attractive. And that wouldn’t make sense either. Even if you could prove the parting was a natural phenomenon, the timing would be just as miraculous.

I respect what the biblical linguists say about Hebrew and Greek words. My view also incorporates a “physical” wall to some extent, but also incorporates the meaning of protection. We use that in English today. We’ll say, “x puts up [emotional and/or conversational] walls when I try to discuss y with him” etc. I presuppose always that there was a historical event here. Of course, the timing is miraculous and supernatural as I said in my book and recent article and comments. Something actually happened. I think my take is as reasonable as any other, at least from what I know at this point.

Eric: . . . the text . . . doesn’t say they were walking between walls that had water at the top of them, it says the waters themselves were the walls. I don’t have a problem with “explaining the Scripture in natural terms.” I do have a problem when the natural explanation depicts a different scenario than the one in Scripture.

I think it could quite well be that the “wall” of sea water that Exodus refers to is the sort of optical illusion that we have in large bodies of water: when we approach them it appears as though they have an “upward” orientation: looking higher than the shoreline which is, by definition, higher than the sea or lake level. This would be the phenomenological language that the Bible habitually uses. When one approaches an ocean or a Great Lake (as in my beloved Michigan) it looks as if the water is “above” the observer. In fact, this is how it looked when we took our photos of partially dry Lake Erie: you can barely make it out in our cell phone photos, but the water in the distance did indeed look a bit like a wall. It even had whitecaps.

I found an actual explanation of this in a Quora discussion: “When I stand on the beach the surface of the ocean looks higher than me. Why?” Someone answered:

What you perceive—the ocean surface appearing higher than you—is a consequence of geometry, perspective, and optics. Key factors:

Horizon and curvature — Earth is curved. Your eye has a limited line of sight tangent to the sphere; that tangent meets the sea at the horizon. Objects at the horizon are at a much greater distance and lie on the Earth’s curved surface; they are not physically higher, just far away and at the tangent line.- For a standing person, the horizon is below eye level by a small angle; however distant sea surface beyond the horizon wraps away, so the visible waterline can look elevated relative to nearer features.
Perspective and angular size — Perspective makes distant flat surfaces appear to converge and rise relative to nearer ones. When you look out to sea, the near beach and your feet are at a steep viewing angle; the far sea is seen at a shallow angle, so its apparent elevation in your visual field can be higher than immediate foreground. . . .
Local visual references and cognitive cues — Without nearby vertical references (trees, buildings), the brain judges elevation using the shoreline and the visual horizon; that can produce the illusion that the sea surface is higher than you when in fact it is level at mean sea level.

Eric [to me]: that doesn’t make sense, because the Egyptians were coming at the them from the west. It didn’t matter if they did have walls on their north and south. And while we’re considering directions, the wind came from the wrong direction (the east) for the seiche explanation.

You miss the point here. The protection of the “walls” was metaphorical in the sense explained, with related cross-references right from B-D-B. And it was literal in the sense that the water came crashing back and drowned the Egyptians. Whether the walls were north and south is irrelevant to both these things. As to the supposed “wrong direction” of the wind in the biblical text, the scholars I cited wrote:

Qualitative descriptions of the water behavior in the northern edge of the gulf . . . suggest that when strong winds blow from the southeast, the waters of the Gulf of Suez spread some 8 to 9 km [5 to 5 1/2 miles] northward along the Suez Canal.

OT Hebrew didn’t have the terms “southeast” or “northwest”, etc. So the biblical “east wind” could simply refer to the wind from the southeast referred to above, which blew the waters of the Gulf of Suez towards its northern terminus, in which case the Hebrews would have crossed south of that gathering of water, west to east, just as a western wind blew Lake Erie to the east — what I witnessed two days ago — and the western shore became dry and “passable” from north to south.

Eric: Also, the linguists weren’t supporting the theory.

They don’t have to. Their use is to inform us of what Hebrew and Greek words mean in each context that they occur. Do you actually have your own belief or opinion on all this or do you just try to tear down everyone else‘s opinion without offering any superior alternative?

Eric: your quotation from the Hebrew dictionary does nothing to support your theory. The metaphor in (3) is that the waters were piled high like walls.

That’s what this standard lexicon believes is true of the word in this passage. Your dissent is duly noted. I respectfully go with their opinion over yours, since they are the experts. In any event, the biblical text doesn’t say “high” in Exodus 14:22, 29. It simply says, “the waters being a wall to them.” I already noted that this “wall” needed to only be about seven feet, to be able to drown the Egyptians. It’s not like the massive “Niagara Falls” of Charlton Heston and “Hollywood theology.” Seems like maybe you have that in your head.

Eric: Dave, okay, a southeast wind, fine. So that could account for the wall of water on the north. What about the one on the south?

I already addressed this: a ridge or sandbar that goes from east to west, that is higher than the surrounding seabed during a wind setdown event or seiche, accounts for it. The water would be lowered enough to cross on the ridge, since the ridge becomes exposed.

Eric: The superior alternative in this case, I think, is “We don’t really know how it happened, because this explanation has some problems.”

Well, I find it quite plausible, and the more you engage in your relentless skepticism and I come up with replies, the more I am confirmed in my opinion, through the weakness of your objections. I think what happened is a natural event, timed in God’s providence, that we have observed happening between the Sinai Peninsula and Egypt (Gulf of Suez), and in Lake Erie, 40 miles from my home, described partially in typically Hebraic phenomenological language. And I think I have plausibly explained the latter specifically regarding this case by noting the illusion of the ocean “rising” above us when in fact it does not. So, I believe that it’s both real events and phenomenological language. Both/and. God’s protection was expressed metaphorically, and that then became real when the water came crashing back. A wall of water is what it looks like, either from a shore or on a ridge out in the (lowered) water. That was seen even in my own photos of the seiche on Lake Erie two days ago. It’s just not as high as we tend to think, from the old movie with the bass-voiced God.

You still haven’t given us any plausible alternative theory as to what happened in the Red Sea incident.

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Photo credit: photo by wews, from the article by Trent Magill for ABC News 5 Cleveland, “Say whaaat? Seiche!”, 11-27-25.

Summary: I note similarities of “seiche” events on Lake Erie with the biblical parting of the Red Sea, and cite a 1992 article on a possible “parting” in the Gulf of Suez (part of the Red Sea).