In the list of the Israelitish stations given in Numb. xxxiii. a careful distinction is made between the Yâm Sûph (ver. 10) and ‘the sea,’ through the midst of which the fugitives from Pharaoh passed safely into the wilderness. This ‘sea’ washed the southern extremity of the Shur or ‘Wall’ of fortification, the line of which was approximately that of the Suez Canal. If Dr. Naville is right, in the days of the Exodus it would have extended much further to the north than is at present the case; the Bitter Lakes, in fact, marking its northern boundary. But there are serious difficulties in the way of this hypothesis. The canal which, in the time of Seti I., already united the Pelusiac arm of the Nile with the Gulf of Suez, ran southward as far as the modern town of Suez, where its mouth can still be traced. Only five miles north of Suez, moreover, the fragments of a stela can still be seen, on which Darius commemorated his reopening of the old canal of the Pharaohs. Had the gulf really extended so far north as Ismailîya and the Bitter Lakes, this southern prolongation of the canal would be hard to understand. However this may be, the poets and later writers of the Old Testament came to forget what was meant by ‘the sea.’ It was confounded with the Yâm Sûph, and the scene of the Exodus was accordingly transferred from the Gulf of Suez to the Gulf of Aqaba. Dr. Winckler has recently endeavoured to show that besides Muzri or Egypt, the Assyrian inscriptions know of another Muzri or ‘borderland’ in the north-west of Arabia. If so, this second Muzri or Egypt might help to explain the confusion between the two seas. It is in the song of triumph over the destruction of the Egyptians that the confusion first makes its appearance. Here (Exod. xv. 4) ‘the sea’ and ‘the Yâm Sûph’ are used as equivalents, and the contents of the song are summed up at the end in the statement that ‘Moses brought Israel from the Yâm Sûph.’ But elsewhere in the Pentateuch the geography is accurate, and it is not until we come to the speeches in the book of Joshua that the two seas are once more confused together.[183] The same geographical error is repeated in two of the later Psalms, as well as in a passage of the book of Nehemiah.[184] The older Hebrew geography had by this time been forgotten; with the loss of Edom and its seaports an exact knowledge of the two arms of the Red Sea had faded from the memories of the Jews. But in the historical narrative of the Pentateuch all is still distinct and clear.