Week 7 Numbers
Chapter thirty-three begins: these are the journeys of the sons of Israel.
Most of the chapter is a long list of unfamiliar place names where the tribes camped. Kibroth-hattavah Hazeroth Rithmah Rimmon-perez. They could be lunar craters for all I know.
After I’d read the chapter I went back and counted the names and found forty-two but I did it quickly so it’s probably not exact. So let’s say about forty place names in forty years. One per year on average.
I looked at the map in my bible. It only has a couple of dozen of the forty place names along the bold red line of the Exodus Route, and half of those have question marks beside them. So there’s a bit of best-guess-ing about actual geographic locations.
The trip eventually landed Israel at the north end of the Dead Sea in Moabite country – just across the river from the Promised Land. That’s maybe 450 kilometres in straight-line distance from Egypt. A long trip. But not forty years long.
Those forty years in the wilderness are usually called wilderness-wanderings. But the trip wasn’t random. I flipped back to Exodus: throughout all their journeys whenever the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle, the sons of Israel would set out. So at the very least it was something like directed-wanderings.
I finished thirty-three, and since the end was in sight read through to the end of Numbers.
Note: quote from Numbers 33:1 & Exodus 40:36 (NASB)