Thirty-Eight Years of Wandering in the Wilderness

Of the forty years in the wilderness, two are described in detail and thirty-eight are almost blank. Numbers lists forty-two encampments but says little about the decades themselves. The people moved by a sign: when the cloud rose from the Tabernacle they travelled, and when it rested they stayed, whether two days, a month or a year. The camp was strictly ordered—the Tabernacle at the centre, the Levites around it, then twelve tribes, three to a side, each under its own banner. Manna fell every morning; their clothing, Moses says, did not wear out and their feet did not swell. And every year people died: the Exodus generation was passing under the decree, and of all the men over twenty only Joshua and Caleb lived to enter the Land. These were years without chronicle, in which former slaves could not stop being slaves while their children grew up free, knowing only the desert, the Torah and the cloud above the tent.

Here the chronologies differ not by years but by a century. Seder Olam Rabbah places the Exodus in 1313 BCE. The prevailing academic date is the thirteenth century, the time of Ramesses II: its firm anchor is the stele of Pharaoh Merneptah of 1208 BCE, the first mention of Israel outside the Tanakh, where Israel is already in Canaan. A minority of scholars holds to the fifteenth century, reckoning by the plain count of I Kings 6:1 — four hundred and eighty years from the Exodus to Solomon's Temple. The timeline shows the prevailing dating.