Six hundred chariots. Fifty thousand horsemen. Two hundred thousand infantry. That was the army Pharaoh sent racing after the Hebrews barely three days after letting them go—and he had them cornered between mountain ridges and the sea with no way out.
The Hebrews had left Egypt in the month of Nisan, on the fifteenth day, exactly 430 years after Abraham first entered Canaan. Moses was eighty years old. They carried with them the bones of Joseph, fulfilling a promise made generations earlier (Genesis 50:25). They ate unleavened bread—flour barely warmed over gentle heat—because they had fled too quickly to prepare real food, and their supplies from Egypt lasted only thirty days. Six hundred thousand men of fighting age marched out, not counting women and children.
Moses deliberately chose a route through the wilderness rather than the coastal road through Philistine territory. Partly to avoid a hostile nation that had long quarreled with the Hebrews. Partly because God commanded him to bring the people to Mount Sinai. But also—and this is the detail Josephus emphasizes—so that if the Egyptians pursued them, they would walk straight into divine punishment for breaking their promise.
The trap worked exactly as planned, though not in the way the Hebrews expected. When the Egyptian army appeared on the horizon, the people panicked completely. Mountains blocked them on both sides. The sea blocked them ahead. The greatest military force in the ancient world blocked them behind. They had no weapons. No provisions. They turned on Moses, forgot every miracle God had performed, and were ready to throw stones at the man who had freed them.
Moses did not flinch. Standing in the middle of the terrified crowd, he gave a speech that Josephus records in full: "It is madness to despair of God's providence now, after everything He has done. God does not give help in small difficulties—He acts when no human being can see any possibility of rescue. These mountains, if God commands, will become flat ground. This sea will become dry land."