Page 29 - Advanced Biblical Backgrounds Revised

The Lesson ...

The wilderness wandering as event and conceptual foundation.

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; 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.

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There were likely between two to two and a half million people Israelites that 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
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400 years in permanent villages. In light of this, the people were not prepared in any meaningful sense
for this 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.

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This wandering was a period of great significance in the life of the Jewish nation. Indeed, we can say
that this was the period when 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,
thereby supposedly proving archaeological proof of the Biblical narrative about the escape of the
Israelites from the Egyptians. Here is an excerpt from that article:

Egypt’s Antiquities Ministry announced this morning that a team of underwater archaeologists had
discovered that remains of a large Egyptian army from the 14th century BC, at the bottom of the Gulf of
Suez, 1.5 kilometers offshore from the modern city of Ras Gharib. The team was searching for the
remains of ancient ships and artifacts related to the Stone Age and Bronze Age trade in the Red Sea area
when they stumbled upon a gigantic mass of human bones darkened by age.

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

51 Ibid.

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