Moses, Science, and Water from Rocks

[excerpt from chapter 9 of my book, The Word Set in Stone: How Archaeology, Science, and History Back Up the Bible (Catholic Answers Press: 2023)]

“Hear now, you rebels; shall we bring forth water for you out of this rock?” (Num. 20:10; see also Exod. 17:6; Deut. 8:15; Neh. 9:15; Ps. 78:16,20, 105:21, 114:8; Isa. 48:21).

Colin Humphreys is the Goldsmiths’ Professor of Materials Science at Cambridge University and Professor of Experimental Physics at the Royal Institution in London. He has published more than 500 papers on electron microscopy, semiconductors, metals, and superconductors. He is also a past president of the physics section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. To get water from a rock, I cite material from his article “Science and the Miracles of Exodus”:

For a rock to give out water it has to be able to store water, so it has to be porous. Do porous rocks exist? The answer is yes, and porous rocks like sandstone and limestone can absorb huge quantities of water from rain. In fact, when they are underground we use them as aquifers, natural reservoirs of water, and we sink wells and bore-holes into them to extract the water.

If porous rocks, such as sandstone and limestone, are above ground, rainwater isn’t normally stored in them: it flows out through the pores. However, in a desert region . . . porous rocks . . . can develop a hard impervious crust, rather like cement. . . . If the crust of a porous rock is broken by a sharp blow, water can indeed flow out. . . .

We have seen that Moses obtaining water from a rock violates no physical laws. The biblical story fits what we know from science.' (Europhysics News, May/June 2005)

We know that sandstone and limestone are porous and can contain water. The Bible refers to “flint” in this regard twice (Deut. 8:15; Ps. 114:8). It could be that this was a reference to it being mixed with limestone or chalk, since this is often how it occurs in nature. Sandstone, shale, and limestone are common in the Sinai Peninsula. Porous sandstone is “widespread in the northern Gulf area.” (“Sinai Peninsula: An Overview of Geology and Thermal Groundwater Potentialities”: pages 25–38 of the book by Mohamed Ragaie El Tahlawi, Thermal and Mineral Waters [New York: Springer, 2014])

Granite is predominant in the southern Sinai Peninsula (where Mt. Sinai is located), but there is still water to be had (from rocks at that!). Arie S. Issar, professor emeritus in the Department of Environmental Hydrology and Microbiology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, is the author of "Water Shall Flow from the Rock: Hydrogeology and Climate in the Lands of the Bible." A description of this book illustrates how it supports the opinions promulgated in this section, about “water from a rock”:

Many times when the author saw the Bedouins of southern Sinai excavate their wells in the crystalline rocks, from which this part of the peninsula is built, the story of Moses striking the rock to get water came to mind. The reader will, indeed, find in this book the description for a rather simple method by which to strike the rock to get water in the wilderness of Sinai. Yet this method was not invented by the author nor by any other modern hydrogeologist, but was a method that the author learned from the Bedouins living in the crystalline mountains of southern Sinai. 

Thus, once we become acquainted with this scientific (geophysical) information, it’s reasonable to hold that some or even all of these “water-drawing” incidents can be explained naturally. But of course, it’s always possible that God led Moses and others to specific places where this phenomenon occurred.

As I’ve noted over and over in this book, just because a thing can be explained by natural laws and science, that does not automatically mean that it has nothing at all to do with God. God can use whatever he chooses to use for his purposes.