We were emailed a question about a possible chariot wheel find in the waters marking the spot where the crossing might have occurred. The following is the response I, Helen, wrote with Barry's help (he is in Australia and I in California right now) after doing a bit of net research:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think you are referring to the Wyatt claims:
http://www.wyattarchaeology.com/red_sea.htm
http://www.pinkoski.com/redsea.html
http://www.arkdiscovery.com/red_sea_crossing.htm
http://www.exchangedlife.com/wyatt/redsea.html
Wyatt’s work, in other words, all sounds incredible and fascinating and wonderful….until you read the following:
http://www.tentmaker.org/WAR/
http://www.ldolphin.org/wyatt1.html -- the author of this article, Dr. Bernard Brandstater, is a very close personal friend of ours. We have stayed at his home in Redlands a number of times, and while we don’t agree with his SDA views, we do hold him in very high esteem and really enjoy and value our friendship with him. This report from him is entirely accurate.
Barry was still up in Australia (it’s the early morning hours as I write this) getting references for his new paper in order for his co-author to check tomorrow, so he just called me – thank you, Lord! – and I asked him about this. I learned a number of things. First of all, although Ron Wyatt is a documented fraud, he may have stumbled on something actually true regarding the crossing of the Gulf of Aqaba and the site of Mt. Sinai.
First of all, there is evidence that one of the ‘chariot wheels’ was planted for an amateur diver to find and that the other was the steering wheel from a wrecked boat. So I don’t know about the wheels at all, really. Because Wyatt was shown to be a fraud in so many other areas, even areas where he might have been right are put in doubt.
Barry, relying on eyewitness accounts of another friend who has been there to inspect the Wyatt claims, mentioned that Wyatt’s choice of a place of crossing would have been extremely difficult for two million or so Israelites, but that down near the mouth of the Gulf ships even occasionally ground today because of the shallowness of the water over a large section – a section which would allow up to a thousand people abreast to cross. In short, they could have crossed at either the Wyatt area or further down, but the ‘evidence’ of the wheels is in doubt.
Now, about the pillars – they are there. Alan Roberts even brought a bit of the granite back for Barry to see. It is red-pink granite. Alan was not well-enough versed in Hebrew to know what the inscriptions say, but there is a pillar on each side of the “Wyatt” area, and there is a possibility that they do, indeed, commemorate the crossing. Was it there, then? Or further down?
The sad thing is that Wyatt may have had something here, but with the man’s reputation for deceit so documented, it’s hard to know.
I had thought Wyatt was a fraud in everything, but he may have stumbled onto something here….
