A few people have expressed interest in the Exodus debate, a couple on the thread itself.
8upwidit2 has expressed an interest through an email and is happy for me to respond here at the forum.
I am sure there are many other issues that will crop up that general members would like to discuss, so I think the thread merits a peanut gallery.
8upwidit2 provided the following response which was hidden at the original thread.
Sorry to interrupt you guys, and I am truly enjoying the exchanges. But we also have to consider another issue in the discussion of time required getting from one place to another.
If there were only 3 feet between each row and 10 people per row, using the 3 million people figure, there would be 300,000 rows encompassing 900,000 feet of people in line..that's 171 miles long.
Assume for arguments sake, they went directly to the Red Sea. If the Red Sea was 120 miles (as Brian stated) from where they left captivity in Egypt, Israelites were already at the Red Sea shore before nearly a million of them even left their starting spot.
How long did it take for the entire group to even leave "captivity"? My fuzzy math tells me the leaving took 29 days if they traveled 24 hours a day.
But if we consider the stopping and camping and just ratting off, they probably traveled only 10-12 hours a day. This doubles the leaving time to 58 days and the last of the group getting to the Red Sea as many as 80 days after the first of the group. The first of the group would have been waiting for the rest to get there for just less than 3 months.
We also know that the pharaoh, whomever he was, "noticed that they had fled" and pursued them. Could this be the epitome of not paying attention to not notice 3 million people leaving for nearly 3 months?
How does this compute with the traveling/camping time listed in Exodus? Isn’t this another issue of the numbers just not working out?
My response is:
The scenario is actually worse than you first suspect. You haven't taken into consideration that for 3 million people we would expect to have around 300 000 cattle of various descriptions as well! Add carts to this and the scenario is even more implausible.
John Bright estimated that the column of Israelites would be well over 300 miles long, and would stretch all the way across the Sinai desert and back again.
There is something far wrong with the number given by the Bible, least of all is the fact that it is impossible for 70 people to become 3 million in just over 430 years (Some texts 215 years).
Brian.
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