After travelling through the desert for nearly three months, the Israelites camped before Mount Sinai. There, God appeared to Moses and made an agreement or covenant with him. God declared that the Israelites were his own people and that they must listen to God and obey His laws. These laws were the Ten Commandments which were given to Moses on two stone tablets, and they set out the basic principles that would govern the Israelites lives.
The book of Exodus says that after crossing the Reed Sea, Moses led the Hebrews into the Sinai, where they spent 40 years wandering in the wildnerness. Three months into the desert, the Hebrews camped at the foot of the Mountain of God. On the mountain, God appeared to Moses - and changed everyone's lives. The precise location of the Mountain of God has always been a mystery. One suggestion is that it's Mount Sinai, the highest peak in the southern desert.
Every night of the year, pilgrims and tourists set off in the cool hours of the morning to make the arduous three hour climb to the top. No-one really knows if this is the Mountain of God. We know very little about the ten commandments. We don't know when or where they were written or who wrote them. One theory is that they could only have been written only when the Hebrews had settled in the Promised Land because only then could the commandments have been enforced.
But the first commandment seems more likely to have come out of one man's meeting with his God in the desert. Moses himself could have been the author of some of the commandments. He had been taught to read and write in the royal nursery. The Israelites then spent 40 years in the desert. When they finally approached the land of Canaan, Moses died and Joshua became their new leader.
The story goes that Moses led two million Hebrews out of Egypt and they lived for 40 years in the Sinai desert - but a century of archaeology in the Sinai has turned up no evidence of it. If the Hebrews were never in Egypt then perhaps the whole issue was fiction, made up to give their people an exotic history and destiny. Some archeologists decided to search instead in the Nile Delta: the part of Egypt where the Bible says the Hebrews settled.
They combed the area for evidence of a remarkably precise claim - that the Hebrews were press-ganged into making mud-bricks to build two great cities - Pithom and Ramses. Ramses II was the greatest Pharaoh in all of ancient Egypt - his statues are everywhere.
Surely his city could be traced? But no sign could be found. There were suggestions it all been made up by a scribe. Until a local farmer found a clue: the remains of the feet of a giant statue. An inscription on a nearby pedestal confirmed that the statue belonged to Ramses II. Eventually, archeologists unearthed traces of houses, temples, even palaces.
Using new technology, the archaeologists were able to detect the foundations and they mapped out the whole city in a few months. The city they had discovered was one of the biggest cities in ancient Egypt, built around BCE. But was this city actually built by Hebrew slaves? There is a reference in ancient Egyptian documents to a Semitic tribe captured by Pharaoh and forced to work on the city of Ramses.
A clay tablet lists groups of people who were captured by the Pharaoh and one of the groups was called Habiru. Could these be the Hebrews? No-one can be sure. The story of the infant Moses being set adrift in a basket bears remarkable similarities to an old Babylonian myth about a great King called Sargon who was discovered as a baby in a basket in a river.
Between and BCE, Jewish scribes in Jerusalem set out to record all the old tales of their people, handed down from generation to generation. What if the scribes had wanted to add a bit of spice to their tales to make them more interesting? Could they have used the myth of Sargon and made up the tale of Moses? It's certainly possible as we know the Jews were captured by the Babylonians in BCE and held in exile in Babylon modern Iraq for some time.
They could have picked up the Sargon legend there. Egyptologist Jim Hoffmeier studied the original Hebrew text. He found that key words in the story - bulrushes, papyrus, Nile, riverbank - were all ancient Egyptian words, and not Babylonian.
But what about the name 'Moses'? It is an Egyptian name meaning 'One who is born'. It uses the same root as 'Ramses'. It's hard to believe that a Hebrew scribe, one thousand years later, could have come up with a story using authentic Egyptian words.
Well actually there are many stories of babies being put in baskets and exposed or put in water. This was an ancient way of putting a child out to the fate of the gods. Today people put babies in baskets and put them on church doorsteps. The Bible says that when Moses was 80, he was living peacefully as a shepherd in the desert.
One day, as he was tending his flock, he heard the voice of God coming from a burning bush. God ordered Moses to go and force the Pharaoh to let his Hebrew people go. At first Moses was afraid, he didn't think he could do this. Then God gave him special powers. Did Moses hear the voice of God?
Clinton Bailey, an expert on Bedouin folklore, believes that such a desert experience is perfectly plausible:. If you have to survive out here in this heat and in this desolation You're closer to God And I have seen Bedouin praying on their own in the middle of the desert Whatever happened, this was a turning point for Moses and the Hebrew people. Jews believe that at the moment the Hebrews forged a special and unique relationship with God.
In return, God gave them the right to occupy a certain land. It was the Promised Land: the land we now know as Israel. From that moment on, Moses resolved to lead his people out of Egypt to the land of milk and honey. The Bible claims that Moses was rescued by the Pharaoh's daughter, who adopted him. He was then educated and brought up in the palace as a prince. Can this possibly be true? The picture we have here is very authentic because the young boys in ancient Egypt were under a tough master.
In fact we have the testimony of some of the scribes who talked about how their scribe master beat them when they were lazy and made sure they wrote their letters right. Of course we have no proof but what's interesting is that during the general period we place Moses, during this time non-royal children were also introduced. The royal children of foreign kings, kings from Canaan, Syria, were entered into this institution to learn how to read and write. The Pharaohs did keep records, the records show that palaces had nurseries where royal children were educated, and that they did bring foreign children into these nurseries.
It may have been easy for the Pharaoh's daughter to introduce a baby she had found into one of these nurseries. Epidemiologist Dr John Marr believes most of the ten plagues could have been caused by polluted water in the Nile poisoning fish and setting off a tragic chain of events.
Meanwhile, Professor Costas Synolakis, a leading tsunami expert, believes a massive volcanic eruption on the Greek island of Santorini in BCE could have generated a giant tidal wave that struck the Nile Delta. This incredibly powerful wave could be linked to the parting of a 'reed sea' in the delta that could explain how the story of the 'Red Sea' parting into two walls of water was written centuries later. In the Bible, the ten plagues and the parting of the Red Sea are miracles — acts of God working through nature.
Can any of them be explained scientifically? A camp of this size would be approximately five miles by five miles square assuming only 1, square feet per family. One located in the center of the camp would require a hike of 2. Another problem is the estimated population of the nation of Israel compared to the estimated population of Egypt at this time. It is estimated that the whole population of Egypt at the time of the exodus was between 2 and 5 million. According to the above estimates of the population of Israel, the people of Israel would be greater than the entire population of Egypt.
Another problem is the large number of people is not possible with the number of generations available from Levi to the exodus. The average number of children born to the descendants of Yaacov is three to five. If we assume that the twelve children of Yaacov had 5 children, and the generation of Kohath, Amram and Moses each had 5 children, the maximum number of people men, women and children , descended from Yaacov at the time of the exodus, would be approximately 7, The Hebrew text of Exodus states; " about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children ," but the Hebrew text can also be translate as " about six hundred chiefs eleph on foot are the warriors apart from the children " The Hebrew word eleph can mean "thousand" or "chief," compare Strong's s , and We now have a group of warriors that would find the chariots of Pharaoh a formidable army.
If we also assume that each chief head of the family included a wife and 5 children we have about 6, people, which correlate with previous calculation of possible descendants from Levi to the exodus. Translating the word eleph as "chiefs" will also work for the census records found in the book of Numbers.
RSV Numbers the number of the tribe of Reuben was forty-six thousand five hundred. The Hebrew of this passage could also be translated as; "The number for the tribe of Rueben is 46 chiefs and ". With this alternate translation we have 46 chiefs and family members.
When we apply this method to the remainder of the tribes we come to a total number of chiefs and 5, others. In summary, it would appear that the slavery of the Israelites in Egypt lasted about years and approximately 6, individuals traveled from Egypt to Mt. One reader posed an important question concerning this article. The English translations typically say, ".. His army also would have included his horse and foot soldiers. If there were six hundred thousand men, then there were perhaps two million Israelites in all, and this number presents a number of difficulties.
They would have formed one of the largest populations anywhere in the world at that time. Could the land of Goshen have supported such a large population? Their exodus was one of the largest migrations in the history of the world. When they traveled, they must have formed a column more than ten miles long. These are the kinds of questions scholars have asked, with many concluding that whoever wrote the Bible must have inflated the numbers.
There are two ways to handle this objection. One is to believe that the Bible does indeed mean to say that , Israelites that is, men, plus women and children came out of Egypt, and therefore this is exactly how many people there actually were. Christianity Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for committed Christians, experts in Christianity and those interested in learning more. It only takes a minute to sign up. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search.
I want to know if they had enough space in which to live. The Bible mentions that there were many places they did not obtain. Could the Israelites feed themselves? And the people of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children. Some Scholars believe that the total number of Israelites who left Egypt during the exodus, women and children and old men included, was around 2. In the second year after the Israelites left Egypt, Moses took a census of the men in Israel able to fight—all the able-bodied men age twenty and above from all the tribes except the Levites.
The number of warriors was , Numbers — The Levites were not counted because God commanded Moses to exclude them from the census verse Instead of going to war, the Levites were to stay and guard the tabernacle verse Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon, and from the great river, the Euphrates—all the Hittite country—to the Great Sea on the west.
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