Diogenes the Cynic

History speaks through archaeology.

Upwards of 2 million Israelites supposedly spent 38 of their 40 years at one small oasis (Kadesh Barnea) in the Sinai. Two million people is a city. Cities leave footprints. The Israelites left not a potsherd.

Iskander

History speaks through people and archaeology may confirm or suggest.




The Tabernacle in the wilderness

Israelites and any other nomadic tribe living there would have had their footprints on the sand blown clean by the wind and their tents dissolved in the sands of time.

But the word of the Israelite men and women still warm our hearts and fire our imagination:

17 You brought them in and planted them on the mountain of your own possession,
the place, O LORD, that you made your abode,
the sanctuary, O LORD, that your hands have established.


The song of the sea, Exodus 15
,

sotto voce

Egyptians made sure of that.

Perspicuo

Not even the Nazis could do that! Are you suggesting the Egyptians wanted to erase all evidence of the Jews and also had the technology to do so... metal detectors of such excellence that nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is left for archaeologists to find. It's barely short of calling the Egyptians omnipotent.

Chili

. . . and as dry as it looks there even a fencepost would not rot in a thousand years. But it does serve the image well as deserted under God on earth as opposed to Eden as oasis, and so maybe that is what their abandonment by God was like.

Sheshbazzar

What the Hey! Its just another Biblical MIRACLE! .....one of hundreds.

(that always works to 'explain' away anything and everything :banghead

You done knows dat da Bible's always gots to be Gawds TRUFF dont'cha?
jus' cain't be no ol made up hoss-sheet in da Bible. No sir'eee!





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outhouse

isnt arguing the fact there were never israelites enslaved in Egypt ever, a bit off topic??

I understand were talking about evidence left in Bethlehem, but even that has more imagination then Israeli's in Egypt with both the birth stories and a enslaved race fictional.

So was there a small population then despite a mythical birth legend? Its possible as already stated

Sheshbazzar

Bethlehem here, Bethlehem there, or Bethlehem someplace else, simply swapping locale for mythological events, will never magically transform them into being historical facts.

DCHindley

Hmmm,

Looks a little like one of them thar smoke houses that fire up behind every 10th house around here durin' deer huntin' season.

DCH

Sheshbazzar

That camp looks kind of deserted.

Over 600,000 adult males, plus women and children, say somewhere around 2 million people, plus all their livestock, remaining after all of the original 1.5 million died and were buried in the wilderness, likely most during their 38 year stay at the tiny oasis of Kadesh Barnia.

This is around the population figures of modern Huston Texas, or Chicago Illinois, only with no fresh water system nor sewage disposal.
Latrine pits were evidently only to be placed outside of the camp. Pity those poor bastards that needed to take a 40 mile walking round trip every time they needed to relieve themselves. Perhaps that's what killed off one and a half million of them?

One and a half million Hebrew graves in the desert. To put this in perspective, Arlington National Cemetery, in operation since 1864, or some 147 years, only contains about 300,000 graves.
Yet there are supposed to 1,500,000 Hebrew graves out there, and archaeologists can't even locate 100.