How long did Israel wander in the wilderness?

Question

Accepted Answer

Forty years, counted from the Exodus to the crossing of the Jordan, of which about thirty-eight were spent between Kadesh-barnea and the brook Zered after the people refused to enter the land. The forty was a sentence: “your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years... each day for a year”, one year for each day the spies had spent in Canaan, until the generation that left Egypt had died. The map point stands on Kadesh-barnea, at the springs of Ain el-Qudeirat on the edge of the Negev. The Bible dates the stages closely. Israel left Rameses “on the fifteenth day of the first month”, reached the wilderness of Sinai in the third month, and left it “on the twentieth day of the second month, in the second year”. Then came Kadesh, where “ye abode in Kadesh many days”, and the long years of which almost nothing is told: “the space in which we came from Kadesh-barnea, until we were come over the brook Zered, was thirty and eight years”. Aaron died on Mount Hor “in the fortieth year”, Moses spoke the words of Deuteronomy “in the fortieth year, in the eleventh month”, and the people came up out of the Jordan “on the tenth day of the first month”, five days short of forty full years. Numbers 33 lists the camps along the way, forty-two stages from Rameses to the plains of Moab. The number is repeated throughout the Bible: they ate manna forty years, their clothes did not wear out for forty years, and Stephen and Paul both speak of forty years in the wilderness. The Synodal text of Joshua 5:6, following the Greek, reads that Israel walked in the wilderness forty-two years; the Hebrew has forty. On the Bible's own chronology the years run from about 1446 to 1406 BC, the map's convention; those who place the Exodus in the thirteenth century put them about 1260–1220, and many scholars take forty as the round span of a generation rather than a count of years.