Egypt
We spent two days in Egypt after an 8 hour drive through the Sinai Peninsula and the Dessert of Sin (the Sinai Dessert). I was hoping to be able to get up at midnight to climb to the top of Mt. Sinai, but that wasn’t on our itinerary. Sinai means “tooth.” Sinai isn’t a single mountain, but an entire range of mountains, that look like “teeth.” The Red Sea has two arms to it, one arm flows on either side of Sinai – Agaba and Suez.
Egypt is a very ancient country, with some artifacts we saw dating back 3,000-5,000 years! Egypt has an interesting religious culture. They had worshiped their rulers as gods, as well as other gods like Ra, the sun god who had the head of a falcon or Anubis, who had the head of a jackal. There had been a small Jewish population in Egypt after the time of Jeremiah when Jewish exiles were given refuge in Egypt. This Jewish settlement would have been where Joseph and Mary fled with the baby Jesus when they escaped King Herod’s wrath.
Christian tradition records that about 10 to 20 years after Christ’s ascension, St. Mark, the Gospel writer and missionary companion to St. Paul, traveled to Alexandria, Egypt to do mission work. There he started the Coptic Orthodox Church. We visited the oldest church in Egypt which is a Coptic Church that marks the place where the Holy Family were to have stayed while in Egypt. Interestingly, there are still walls to a Roman fortress right next to the church. Tradition says that as a carpenter, Joseph would have worked for the Romans building the fortress until the angel called the Holy Family back to Israel.
Egypt used to be a Christian country with a significant Christian population called the Coptic Christians. Today only 15% of the population is Coptic Christian. 85% is Sunni Muslim. There are only a few hundred Jews still living in the country.
We prayed for our bus driver Mohammed because traffic in Cairo is insane! There are no lanes, just suggestions. Traffic was a mixture of tour buses, regular cars, three-wheeled cars imported from India, bicycles, donkeys and camels. We also praised God that we do not live in a third world country. Egypt used to be a world power and the bread basket of the world. Now it imports 80% of its food and most of its people live in extreme poverty.
For me, Egypt was nowhere near as interesting as Israel. Israel is the Promised Land, where Joshua, Ruth, David and Gideon lived, worked, led and judged. Israel is the place where John baptized; where Jesus lived, bled, died and rose again; and where the Christian Church was born on the temple steps on Pentecost.
Egypt is only biblically important because Joseph went from slave to second in command and moved his family there; Moses grew up in Pharaoh’s household and was used by God to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt to the Promised Land; and Joseph and Mary fled with Jesus to safety in Egypt.
While in Egypt we had to take our shoes off and then walked into a few Muslim mosques, spent a few hours in the Cairo Museum seeing mummies of crocodiles and snakes and seeing all the artifacts from King Tut and other Pharaoh’s tombs, sat on and crawled inside pyramids, and viewed the Sphinx. There is no Egyptian records of the Israelites ever being in Egypt. Except for one small 3-inch hieroglyphic in the museum that we weren’t supposed to touch. (I still did.)
Egypt is a very ancient country, with some artifacts we saw dating back 3,000-5,000 years! Egypt has an interesting religious culture. They had worshiped their rulers as gods, as well as other gods like Ra, the sun god who had the head of a falcon or Anubis, who had the head of a jackal. There had been a small Jewish population in Egypt after the time of Jeremiah when Jewish exiles were given refuge in Egypt. This Jewish settlement would have been where Joseph and Mary fled with the baby Jesus when they escaped King Herod’s wrath.
Christian tradition records that about 10 to 20 years after Christ’s ascension, St. Mark, the Gospel writer and missionary companion to St. Paul, traveled to Alexandria, Egypt to do mission work. There he started the Coptic Orthodox Church. We visited the oldest church in Egypt which is a Coptic Church that marks the place where the Holy Family were to have stayed while in Egypt. Interestingly, there are still walls to a Roman fortress right next to the church. Tradition says that as a carpenter, Joseph would have worked for the Romans building the fortress until the angel called the Holy Family back to Israel.
Egypt used to be a Christian country with a significant Christian population called the Coptic Christians. Today only 15% of the population is Coptic Christian. 85% is Sunni Muslim. There are only a few hundred Jews still living in the country.
We prayed for our bus driver Mohammed because traffic in Cairo is insane! There are no lanes, just suggestions. Traffic was a mixture of tour buses, regular cars, three-wheeled cars imported from India, bicycles, donkeys and camels. We also praised God that we do not live in a third world country. Egypt used to be a world power and the bread basket of the world. Now it imports 80% of its food and most of its people live in extreme poverty.
For me, Egypt was nowhere near as interesting as Israel. Israel is the Promised Land, where Joshua, Ruth, David and Gideon lived, worked, led and judged. Israel is the place where John baptized; where Jesus lived, bled, died and rose again; and where the Christian Church was born on the temple steps on Pentecost.
Egypt is only biblically important because Joseph went from slave to second in command and moved his family there; Moses grew up in Pharaoh’s household and was used by God to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt to the Promised Land; and Joseph and Mary fled with Jesus to safety in Egypt.
While in Egypt we had to take our shoes off and then walked into a few Muslim mosques, spent a few hours in the Cairo Museum seeing mummies of crocodiles and snakes and seeing all the artifacts from King Tut and other Pharaoh’s tombs, sat on and crawled inside pyramids, and viewed the Sphinx. There is no Egyptian records of the Israelites ever being in Egypt. Except for one small 3-inch hieroglyphic in the museum that we weren’t supposed to touch. (I still did.)
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