The Red Sea

The Hebrew name of the Red Sea, Yam Sūph, “Sea of Reeds,” the water the Israelites cross at the climax of the Exodus. The qualifier sūph means “reeds, rushes,” and is itself a loan from Egyptian ṯwfy, the papyrus-marsh; the name describes the reed-thickets at the sea’s northern head, not its colour. The same name is used for the Gulf of Aqaba, where Solomon based his Red Sea fleet at Ezion-geber (1 Kings 9:26), so Yam Sūph covers both arms of the sea’s forked top.

The name is the original behind one of the most familiar phrases in Western literature, and it does not mean “red.” When the Septuagint translators turned the Hebrew into Greek they rendered Yam Sūph as Erythrà Thálassa, “Red Sea,” and that gloss, carried through Latin into every Western Bible, replaced the reeds with a colour the Hebrew never had. The Egyptian loanword buried in the name is a fossil of the marsh-geography of the crossing; the sea of the Exodus is, in the language that first told the story, a sea of reeds.

The Greek name of the Red Sea, Erythrà Thálassa, “Red Sea,” though in classical usage the term reached far beyond the modern one: for Herodotus and the geographers it covered the whole northwestern Indian Ocean, the Red Sea proper together with the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. The first-century merchants’ handbook of the India trade is named for it, the Periplus Maris Erythraei, “Voyage around the Erythraean Sea.”

The Greeks could not say why the sea was red, and rather than the water they blamed an eponymous king, Erythras, said to have ruled its shores. The name’s lasting consequence, though, was scriptural: the Septuagint used Erythrà Thálassa to translate the Hebrew Yam Sūph, the “Sea of Reeds,” and so a colour the Greeks themselves could not account for became, through the Greek Bible and its Latin heirs, the name of the sea the Israelites crossed. A name no one could explain was laid over a Hebrew marsh and outlived every correction.

The Latin name of the sea, Mare Rubrum, “Red Sea,” translating the Greek Erythrà Thálassa; beside it Latin also kept the direct transcription Mare Erythraeum, so the Greek name reached Rome in both a translated and a borrowed form. Pliny, like the Greeks before him, applied the name broadly to the seas south and east of Arabia.

It is through the Latin that the colour-name became universal in the West. The Vulgate’s Mare Rubrum in the Exodus account carried “Red Sea” into medieval and modern European usage, completing the chain that began when the Septuagint glossed the Hebrew reeds as Greek redness. By the time the name reached the vernaculars, the marsh at the head of the sea was wholly lost behind a colour twice translated.

The Syriac name of the Red Sea, yammā d-sōp, the rendering in the Peshitta of the Hebrew Yam Sūph. The Peshitta Old Testament was translated directly from the Hebrew rather than from the Greek, and so it keeps the Semitic sūp, the reeds, where the Septuagint had reached for a colour.

This is the counter-case to the Greek Bible. Two ancient translations of the same Hebrew name diverge: the Septuagint made the Sea of Reeds red and handed that error to the whole Western tradition, while the Syriac, working within the same Northwest Semitic word-stock as the original, simply continued sūp into Aramaic. The eastern churches’ Bible thus never inherited the mistranslation the western one did; reading the Peshitta, one crosses a sea of reeds.

The Arabic name of the Red Sea, Baḥr al-Qulzum, “the Sea of Clysma,” after the port of al-Qulzum at its northern head, near modern Suez; the place-name Qulzum is itself the Greek Klysma arabized. Al-Masʿūdī and Yāqūt use it as the standard name, the sea being the artery of the trade between Egypt, Arabia, and the Indian Ocean that the early caliphate inherited.

The Arabs, like the Hebrews before them, named the whole sea for what sat at its near head: where the Hebrew Yam Sūph fixed on the reeds of the northern shore, Baḥr al-Qulzum fixed on the harbor town at the same point, the gateway to the canal route toward the Nile. The colour-name al-Baḥr al-Aḥmar, “the Red Sea,” that modern Arabic uses came later; the classical name belongs to the port, not the colour. Each culture at the head of the sea named the entire expanse for whatever stood at its own end of it.