It actually describes a place where they camped.
And if you just do the cubic footage or the cubic mileage of the place,
you would need, to hold all the people, you would need like skyscrapers,
like apartments in Japan, okay, to get everybody in there.
It just can't work.
Any comments on the number of people that were involved in the Exodus?
Was it millions? Or do you have any thoughts on that?
Yeah, yeah. Again, listen to the podcast, the Exodus series,
we go over all this in mind numbing detail.
That's what we do on the podcast, we specialize in mind numbing detail.
The short... We do! Yep.
The short answer is, I don't think we're dealing with millions and millions of people.
You know, mathematically... again, you gotta listen to the podcast,
because there are some good ways to illustrate the problem.
I reference, in those episodes, an article by a guy, a friend of mine named David Fouts,
who did his dissertation on large numbers in the Old Testament.
And specifically, this is part of the problem.
There are different solutions to the large numbers,
but I actually kind of liked where he lands. And that is;
large numbers, based on Akkadian parallels, were a deliberate literary device
designed to glorify the victory of the Deity.
And so, it's not that the references are unhistorical.
Okay, there were lots of people there.
But if you were writing history, according to the conventions of the day,
you would write it in such a way that the numbers would get inflated like that.
And everybody would know what you're doing.
Let me give you one illustration, if you lined up 2 to 3 million people,
like the conga line thing, okay? Like, if you just line them up,
it would take like X number of days to go past a given point.
Okay, count everybody that goes past that rock.
Like, three days later, the last one goes, and the narratives conflict with that.
They just don't work.
There are places in the route, where the past is too narrow,
it'd be like Larry, Moe and Curly trying to get through the doorway at the same time
and running into each other. It just literally can't work
in the days that are part of the itinerary, part of the description.
So, you just run into things like that.
There's a passage in Deuteronomy that says Israel was the least
of seven or eight nations in the area.
That means there's like seven more that are bigger than them.
And it actually describes a place where they camped, and if you just do the cubic footage,
or the cubic mileage of the place, you would need, to hold all the people,
you would need like skyscrapers, like apartments in Japan
to get everybody in there.
It just can't work. Okay. And so scholars have known this for years.
And, you know, there's a way to say, well, ʾelep, the word for thousand
can also mean a chieftain. That's true.
And if you do that semantic substitute, it drops the number down a lot,
to where it's workable.
But the problem with that approach is that not every place where ʾelep occurs
really lends itself to that substitution.
So, does it work or not? Do we care or not?
Do we go with it anyway, or... but again, Fouts has a different approach to it.