This is a chapter I had to break out the Bible Atlas to follow. If you've never given it much thought before, an atlas is a serious Bible aid you should have in your home library. Even if you only own two books. Make the third a Bible atlas. Here is the chronicle of Israel's wanderings, but it doesn't make much sense to us modern readers, does it? Not, unless, you're familiar with Palestine and the area. This is a travelogue of forty years worth of national movement, but we can't even follow it. Unless you've got an atlas. Mine, I bought it in Bible college. I've never regretted it. Reading this chapter, I could look from verse to map, map to verse and follow the route the Israelite's took as they in turn followed the Lord's pillar through the wilderness.
Granted, they don't know for sure where Mt. Sinai is, nor where many of the places between the crossing of the Red Sea and Mt. Sinai are. It's assumed it's on the Sinai Peninsula (hey, they do actually share a name), but the mount assumed to be Sinai does have a disappointing lack of evidence that ever hundreds of thousands of people camped there. There have actually been a number of explorations trying to identify the real Mt. Sinai, and they range from the Sinai peninsula even into Saudi Arabia, in what was then the land of Midian and Arabia. We still don't know. So for the portions leading up to and leading directly away from Sinai, those places are actually a bit up in the air. We do know, however, where Kadesh-Barnea, and that for much of that 40 years' wanderings they seem to have been going relatively in circles. What more could they have done, with years stretching before them and never wandering far from the land they would eventually go in? Eventually, though, they find themselves camped in the Plain of Moab, poised across the Jordan for Jericho, ready to go in.
Tomorrow's Reading: Numbers 34:1-35:5
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