TILL
What Dave doesn't see.... Well, let me take that back and start over,
because Dave does see very clearly that the purpose of the exodus absurdity
postings was to show that it is ridiculous to believe that these stories are
historically accurate; he is just ignoring the obvious. When Ralph argues
how much distance the Israelites would have covered if they journeyed just X
number of miles per day or week or month or year, he doesn't mean to imply
that we must understand that they absolutely had to have traveled that far
each day, week, month, or year. He is simply using a concrete illustration
to show how absurd it is to think that they could have traveled for 40 years
without finding their way out of such a relatively small area as the Sinai
penninsula. All of Dave's talk about what we think that they "should" have
done or that God "should" have done is a straw man that he sets up to beat
around on and take attention away from the obvious problems in this story,
and it also begs the questions of (1) God's existence and (2) his
involvement in the story.
Now we know that the Bible claims in Numbers 33 that the Israelites did 41
different encampments in the wilderness. I have presented a detailed
analysis of the population censuses in Numbers to establish that if these
figures are accurate we must assume that there were about 2.5 to 3 million
Israelites wandering in the wilderness. (I have posted this same analysis on
Jerry McDonald's list, and Bill Carrell, a Church-of-Christ preacher whom
some may remember when he subscribed to errancy, has agreed that this
analysis is correct.) I further presented a scenario that showed that if
all of these people marched 200 abreast with only 3 feet between the rows,
they would have formed a column almost 9 miles long. I suggested that if we
allow for the fact that they allegedly had flocks, herds, and "very much
cattle," this would have necessarily lengthened the column. Nevertheless,
if we imagine that the column was just 9 miles long and that when the
Israelites broke camp each time, they traveled only 9 miles (just long
enough for those who were at the back of the column to get out of the old
camp site), by the time they had camped 41 times, they would have covered a
distance that would have been equal to three times the width of the Sinai
penninsula.
I also presented another scenario that supposed that each person had only a
6-foot by 3-foot plot of ground to sleep on at night and that the tents that
they slept in accommodated an average of 10 people . This scenario showed
that the encampments would have had to have been about 9 square miles, so
the encampments would have been 3 miles by 3 miles if they were squares (as
descriptions in Numbers indicates). Therefore, if the Israelites had made
the encampments one after the other with no distance at all between them,
the camping spaces would have covered 123 continuous linear miles across the
desert.
None of this concerns what the Israelites "should" have done or what God
"should" have done. It simply takes biblical claims and analyzes them to
show what would have necessarily entailed if the stories are historically
true. So it is time for Dave to stop fighting straw men and address the
obvious problems in the exodus story, but don't look for him to do that.
Farrell Till
Skepticism, Inc.
jftill@midwest.net