occasion be called the sea of the Philistines (Exod 23:31) or the sea of Jaffa (Ezra 3:7).11 It must be emphasized, however, that Cazelles’ conclusion owes more to the desire to find confirmation for the hypothetical Reed Sea of the Bible than to the internal evidence of the Egyptian texts. While it is true that papyrus grows in marshy areas, Egyptian p3-ṯwfy would scarcely ever have been understood as referring to a body of water, apart from the biblical term yam sûp. As observed above, the identification