Talk:Marah (Bible)

Moses' stick?
In the article, it is stated: "There is nothing necessarily miraculous about the sweetening of the water, since there is a type of barberry which grows in the desert and has the herbal property of sweetening brackish water". I do believe this wikipedia article severely misses something vital: namely the brackish water sources common to both the Sinai and the Negev desert which are processed at the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research in the Negev. There is (i) this Brackish water with 1/10 of the salinity of the Mediterranean, (ii) salt water from the sea itself and (iii) Artesian wells of drinkable sweet water.

There is popular science book by Gerhard Herm, a german journalist specialized in Documentations of History. From the reference: ''Die Phönizier. Das Purpurreich der Antike, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1987, (ISBN 3-499-18387-0 ): it is pointed out that Moses' stick or rod used to extract the sweet waters from the (brackish) bitter waters was actually an upside down funnel with a long'' stem - giving the appearance of a stick or rod from a distance. The bottom part of that stick would "grab" the sweet water from the Artesian well source before it mixed with the brackish or salty waters. At the top of the stem comes out the sweet water separated from the bitter waters. That's your "purification" process, not the plant mentioned in the wikipedia site. When you mixed waters of different salinities, you eventually get a homogeneous whole but it takes a while, depending on the interplay of mixing and anti-mixing agents. The short delay in time gives an opportunity for Moses' stick to get a hold of the sweet water. The trouble is that this source is in German only and not translated into English - but still valid nonetheless.

The Hebrews would have committed this event to memory via an oral culture which did not get written down in full until the Babylonian exile. However, by then, this simple upside down funnel would have been simplified to a mere stick or rod. (The Babylonians had no use for this simple but effective "technology" because they could get plenty of sweet water from the Tigris and Euphrates.)  As for the addition of special herbs to purify water, this is an old trick, but I doubt that it is effective enough. Potatoes take of salt from an over-salted soup or sauce, and there are many other herbs that draw salt out of a high salinity water, but the amount you can take out this way is small, and I doubt very much you get the magnesium salts. Finally, the Desert Institute in the Negev has gone a long way in exploiting this brackish water.

I suggest adding some of this material itself to the article. I have given you the reference. If there are no objections, I can do it myself.TonyMath (talk) 20:54, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

Here is a science article: broken tree branches can be used to filter water http://phys.org/news/2014-02-filter-sapwood-tree.html WootWoot (talk) 20:41, 26 February 2014 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.119.252.41 (talk)

The intro of the article
I suggest to delete the quote in the beginning of the article or at least to relocate it to the body of the article, since I don't think that an intro may consist quotes. 85.65.73.40 (talk) 05:59, 27 May 2013 (UTC)