Where was Kadesh-barnea?

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Accepted Answer

Kadesh-barnea was an oasis on the southern edge of Canaan, where the Negev meets the desert of north-eastern Sinai. Most scholars place it at Ain el-Qudeirat, the richest spring of the region, and the mound beside it, Tell el-Qudeirat, in today's Egypt close to the border with Israel; the map point stands there, about 77 km south-west of Beersheba, 115 km from Hebron and 145 km from Jerusalem in a straight line. That fits the Bible's own description: the messengers to Edom say “we are in Kadesh, a city in the uttermost of thy border”, and the southern border of the land runs “from the south to Kadesh-barnea”. The site is not certain. The old name survives at Ain Qedeis, a smaller spring a few kilometres to the south-east, which nineteenth-century travellers such as H. C. Trumbull took for Kadesh; Qudeirat, with more water and a fort, won most scholars in the twentieth century after Woolley and Lawrence surveyed the area in 1914. Many now think “Kadesh” covered the whole group of springs. Ancient writers looked further east: Josephus buries Miriam on a mountain before Israel reaches Petra, and Eusebius set Kadesh in the desert that reaches to Petra. The text joins it to two wildernesses, Paran when the spies return and Zin when Miriam dies, and Genesis calls it “En-mishpat, which is Kadesh”. Deuteronomy gives the distance from Sinai as “eleven days' journey from Horeb by the way of mount Seir unto Kadesh-barnea”. From Kadesh Moses sent the spies, and here Israel refused to go up, so that the people stayed “in Kadesh many days”; Deuteronomy counts thirty-eight years from Kadesh-barnea to the brook Zered. Miriam died and was buried here, and the waters of Meribah flowed here. At Tell el-Qudeirat the excavators found Iron Age forts of about the tenth to the early sixth century BC, but nothing from the fifteenth or the thirteenth century BC, the dates held for the wilderness years. Some take this against the identification or the story; others answer that a camp in the desert leaves no ruins. The site has its own article on History Globe; this answer keeps to where it was.