What was the route of the Exodus?

Question

Accepted Answer

The Bible gives the stations, not the roads: Israel left Rameses in the eastern Nile Delta for Succoth and Etham, turned back to the sea and crossed it, went three days to Marah, then by Elim and Rephidim to Mount Sinai, which they reached in the third month; from Sinai they went by Kibroth-hattaavah and Hazeroth to Kadesh-barnea on the edge of the Negev; after thirty-eight years in the wilderness, by Mount Hor and the way of the Red Sea round Edom, up through Moab past the Arnon, Dibon and Heshbon to the plains of Moab at Shittim opposite Jericho. Summed in straight lines from station to station as the map places them, the way comes to about 1,250 km, more than three times the 383 km from Rameses to Shittim as the crow flies; Rameses to Sinai alone is about 325 km in a straight line. Exodus says that “God led them not through the way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near”, the coast road to Gaza, “but God led the people about, through the way of the wilderness of the Red sea”. Deuteronomy remarks: “There are eleven days' journey from Horeb by the way of mount Seir unto Kadesh-barnea”, about 240 km in a straight line, and adds that “the space in which we came from Kadesh-barnea, until we were come over the brook Zered, was thirty and eight years”. From Mount Hor “they journeyed from mount Hor by the way of the Red sea, to compass the land of Edom”, and at the end “the children of Israel set forward, and pitched in the plains of Moab on this side Jordan by Jericho”. Numbers 33 lists some forty camps in all. Only a few of the stations are placed with confidence: Rameses at Qantir, Succoth at Tell el-Maskhuta, Kadesh-barnea at the springs of Ain el-Qudeirat; the rest depend on where Mount Sinai is put, and the map follows the southern route to Jebel Musa, the tradition since the fourth century, while others lead Israel along the coast, across the middle of the peninsula, or into north-western Arabia. No camp has left traces that archaeology can date, and the map's year of 1446 BC is one convention; many scholars put the Exodus in the thirteenth century BC or doubt that it happened as told. The crossing of the sea and the site of Sinai are treated in their own questions.