Page 27 - Biblical Backgrounds

The Wilderness wanderings as an event and a conceptual background

(Exodus 13-40, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy)

Connect…

The journey to the promised land could have taken as little as 11 days. The wilderness wandering ended
up lasting 40 years. What happened? The Jews left Egypt and crossed the Sinai Peninsula. Many changes
in direction, physical and spiritual direction, happened as a result of the events that occurred during this
trip. Moses led them out of Egypt. Joshua led them into the promised land. They left being willing to
worship idols like the idols of Egypt, and they arrived having been taught to worship God alone. The
wilderness wandering lives in Jewish culture as both an event and as a fundamental conceptual
foundation for approaching God and their future. Much like the exodus, the wilderness wandering has
served as a conceptual foundation within Judaism for years. It shaped how they, and by extension, much
of the early church, perceived their relationship with God. In this section, we will examine the
backgrounds of the actual wilderness wanderings. Then we will examine the conceptual background
that developed as a result of remembering the event.

The Lesson ...

The wilderness wandering is an event and a conceptual foundation.

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There were likely between two and two and a half million Israelites who left Egypt. According to the
author of Hebrews, these people traveled “by faith” (Heb. 11:29). The people of God, then, ultimately
trusted God to provide for them. Vos further highlights that the people had been living for 400 years in
permanent villages. In light of this, the people were not prepared in any meaningful sense for this
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journey. It was an act of trust to pack up quickly and leave everything they had ever known for the land
God had promised to His people. Starting from the numbers given in Exodus 38:26 (which indicates that
there were 603,550 men over twenty years old), Vos estimates that there were about one-half to two
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million people in total.

This wandering was a period of great significance in the life of the Jewish nation. Indeed, we can say
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that this was the period in which the Israelites truly became a nation. God specifically established them
as his people by giving them the law, the priesthood, the sacrificial system, and the tabernacle.

Crossing the Red Sea

On 24 October 2014, the website World News Daily Report (WNDR) published an article reporting that
chariot wheels and the bones of horses and men had been discovered at the bottom of the Red Sea,

49 Voss, Nelson's New Illustrated Bible Manners and Customs, 83.
50 Ibid., 83.
51 Voss, Nelson's New Illustrated Bible Manners and Customs, 84.
52 Ibid.

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