'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.' Exodus 14:21

Could this most famous of all stories have any basis in fact?

If you read the bible in the original Hebrew, the word 'red' is mistranslated. In the Hebrew bible Moses and his people cross the 'yam suph' - the Sea of Reeds.

Now this is a strange story, I mean you can imagine trying to cross the Red Sea would be horrendously difficult but a Reed Sea is something quite different. This is marshland areas and this is probably what they crossed. Ancient Egyptian texts mention an area called Patchoufy: The Reeds. This is probably what they crossed.

'So Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the sea returned to its normal course when the morning appeared. And as the Egyptians fled into it, the LORD threw the Egyptians into the midst of the sea.' Exodus 14:27

How then do we account for the sea coming back and inundating the soldiers?

If you're talking about a shallow reed swamp of maybe two or three metres maximum of water, this sort of thing is physically possible. In fact it's been witnessed within the last 100 years... The Egyptian army might not have been completely decimated. Many of the horses would have been killed, chariots would have been stuck in the mud.

What about the famous image of a great canyon of water? Could this have any basis in reality?

Computer simulations of the Santorini eruption show that the collapse of the island would have triggered a mega-tsunami - a 600 foot wave travelling at 400 miles an hour.

Floyd McCoy , a tsunami expert says this was one of the largest waves in history and must have reached Egypt.

We find evidence, believe it or not, on the deep ocean floor. The tsunamis actually scraped across the bottom of the ocean floor in the Mediterranean and disturbed the sediment. We can find that sediment. That gives us some indication of the directions they went .. The computer model showed us waves radiating out all over the Mediterranean, reaching the Nile Delta.

Could the tsunami have divided up the waters of the Reed Sea? If you look at ordinary waves you can see that just before they break, the water withdraws from the shore. A mega-tsunami would syphon billions of gallons of water - not just from the shore but from connecting rivers and lakes - creating dry land for as long as two hours.

We should think of a two-metre tsunami wave like a rapid change of the sea level by two metres along the coast, and that can can travel several kilometres inland. The destructive force of the wave could easily destroy an army.

Is there any other evidence for this theory?

In 1994, the Philippine island of Mindoro was hit by a tsunami and an earthquake. The earthquake caused a massive crack in the bed of a lake about a mile inland. An eye-witness said he saw the water like a waterfall in the centre of the lake just go down. After a while, he could see the bottom of the lake, he said 'I thought I could even walk through.'

Then the tsunami arrived one mile further down the river and swept away a 6,000 ton barge lying on the shore. The mega-tsunami which hit the Nile delta was a thousand times more devastating than this one.