In the preceding article in this series, I hypothesized that the Fourteenth Station of the Exodus, Hazeroth, was located at ‘Ain el-Hudhera, a well in the east of the Sinai Peninsula. In doing so, I was not breaking any new ground, as ‘Ain el-Hudhera has been the most popular candidate for Hazeroth ever since the Swiss traveler and Orientalist Johann Ludwig Burckhardt suggested it in 1812 (Burckhardt 495).
The Thirty-Third Station of the Exodus is called Kadesh, and its locality is still a matter of keen scholarly debate. It is usually thought to be the same place as Kadesh-Barnea.
Hazeroth and Kadesh are both mentioned several times in the Pentateuch, in both the narrative account of the Exodus and in the catalogue of the Forty-Two Stations of the Exodus, which is given in Numbers 33. What is curious, though, is that none of the eighteen Stations that are listed in Numbers 33 between Hazeroth and Kadesh receives a single mention in the narrative of the Exodus.
In the final verse of Numbers 12, we are told:
And afterward the people removed from Hazeroth, and pitched in the wilderness of Paran. (Numbers 12:16)
The Wilderness of Paran, however, is not one of the Stations listed in Numbers 33.
In the following chapter, Moses sends out twelve spies to reconnoitre the land of Canaan. When they return, ten of them report that the Canaanites are too strong for the Israelites to conquer and they recommend that the Israelites remain in the wilderness. Only two of the twelve, Caleb and Joshua, urge Moses to proceed with the invasion of Canaan. The people murmur and contemplate a return to Egypt. A member of the Tribe of Levi, Korah, leads a rebellion against Moses. He and his followers are burned alive by fire from Heaven. When some of the Israelites object to Moses about this treatment, they are struck down by a plague. For their disobedience, God condemns the Israelites to wander in the wilderness for another thirty-eight years, so that only Caleb and Joshua may live to enter the Promised Land. These events are recounted in Numbers 13-19.
In the first verse of Numbers 20, we read:
Then came the children of Israel, even the whole congregation, into the desert of Zin in the first month: and the people abode in Kadesh; and Miriam died there, and was buried there. (Numbers 20:1)
In an earlier article, we saw that Paran may simply be an alternative name for Sinai:
James Strong derives Paran from a primitive root meaning to gleam:
In an earlier article in this series, we saw that some commentators derive Sinai from a root meaning to shine (Orr 2802). So perhaps Paran and Sinai are just different names for the same place.
What about Zin, which Strong (p 100) derives from an unused root meaning to prick, or a crag? Are the Wilderness of Paran and the Wilderness of Zin two different places? In Louis Ginzberg’s The Legends of the Jews, we read:
On the twenty-seventh day of Siwan Moses sent out the spies from Kadesh-Barnea in the wilderness of Paran. (Ginzberg 267)
These events occur shortly after the incident at Hazeroth which led to Moses’ sister Miriam being afflicted with leprosy for seven days (Ginzberg 262). There does, then, appear to be grounds to conclude that the Israelites passed from Hazeroth to Kadesh, which was in the Wilderness of Zin or Paran. Where does that leave the eighteen intervening Stations?
Hazeroth to Kadesh
How far was Kadesh from Hazeroth? In Numbers 10:11, we are told:
And it came to pass on the twentieth day of the second month [ie Iyar], in the second year, that the cloud was taken up from off the tabernacle of the testimony. (numbers 10:11)
This describes the Israelites’ departure from the Mountain of God. They then travel for three days in the wilderness before reaching the next Station, Kibroth Hattaavah. A further day—assuming they only stayed overnight at Kibroth Hattaavah—brings them to Hazeroth, where they remain for at least seven days, waiting for Miriam to recover from her leprosy. They then depart from Hazeroth. As Iyar has 29 days, this would take place on 1 Sivan or later.
According to Ginzberg, they reach Kadesh on or before 27 Sivan The journey from Hazeroth to Kadesh, then, may have taken up to four weeks. It stands to reason, therefore, that there would have been several encampments between Hazeroth and Kadesh.
However, Numbers 20:1 contradicts Ginzberg’s timeline:
Then came the children of Israel, even the whole congregation, into the desert of Zin in the first month: and the people abode in Kadesh; and Miriam died there, and was buried there. (Numbers 20:1)
If they left the Mountain of God on 20 Iyar and arrived in the desert of Zin in Nisan (the first month), the journey would have taken them almost one year! Most commentators, then, believe that this verse describes the Israelites’ second arrival in Zin, near the end of their Forty Years in the Wilderness:
This was the first month of the fortieth year after their departure from Egypt ... The transactions of thirty-seven years Moses passes by, because he writes not as a historian but as a legislator; and gives us particularly an account of the laws, ordinances, and other occurrences of the first and last years of their peregrinations. The year now spoken of was the last of their journeyings; for from the going out of the spies, chap xiii., unto this time, was about thirty-eight years ... (Clarke 678)
Goethe and the Exodus
Over the centuries, the story of the Exodus has exercised the minds of many disparate scholars. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe shone his searching intellect on the subject. Goethe was a freethinker, and he was not afraid to test Holy Scripture in the crucible of scorching criticism.
Goethe did not doubt that the Exodus was based on a historical event, but he believed that the narrative had been contaminated by later scholars to such an extent that the Biblical account could no longer be accepted without being severely edited and “corrected.” He came to the conclusion that the Exodus had not taken forty years, as recounted in the Old Testament, but a mere two years. He suggested that the invasion of Canaan went ahead, just as Caleb and Joshua advised, shortly after the first and only arrival in Kadesh.
In order to reconcile the list of 42 Stations of the Exodus (Numbers 33) with this hypothesis, he rejected eighteen of these Stations as fictitious. These are the Stations between the Fourteenth (Hazeroth) and the Thirty-Third (Kadesh) Stations (note that Goethe’s numbering of the Stations is slightly different from mine):
But where will the remaining thirty-eight years go?
These have caused scholars a lot of trouble, as have the forty-one [sic] stations, of which there are fifteen [recte twenty-one], of which the narrative tells us nothing, but which, when included in the catalogue, caused the geographers a great deal of pain. Now the interpolated stations are happily as fabulous as the surplus years; for sixteen places, of which we know nothing, and thirty-eight years, of which we learn nothing, are a perfect recipe for getting lost in the desert with the children of Israel.
If we compare the stations of the narrative account, which are associated with remarkable events, with the stations of the catalogue, one will very quickly distinguish the blank place names from those which have some historical context.
What one should take special note of is that the narrative takes us straight from Hazeroth to Kadesh, whereas the catalogue omits Kadesh after Hazeroth and only lists it after Ezion-Geber, following the interpolated series of names. (Goethe 1960:218-220)
In support of Goethe’s hypothesis is the fact that these eighteen Stations are only mentioned in the catalogue of Stations given in Numbers 33. None of them is mentioned anywhere else in the Pentateuch. This alone ought to give us pause. This is not the first time we have come across this phenomenon. Of the fourteen Stations we have already looked at, three are mentioned only in Numbers 33:
7: By the Red Sea
9: Dophkah
10: Alush
But the hypothetical route we have been reconstructing requires these encampments to bridge gaps between Stations 6 and 8, and between Stations 8 and 11.
An alternative hypothesis, then, is that the original narrative required these stations but never gave them names. In other words, the Israelites did encamp at these eighteen places, but the names recorded in Numbers 33 were made up by later scholars. If it took the Israelites nineteen days to march from Hazeroth to Kadesh—wherever that was—then they would have been obliged to halt eighteen times on the journey.
Kadesh
But where was Kadesh? Goethe mentions briefly the possibility of there being two places called Kadesh—a theory that still has its adherents today—but he quickly rejects the notion:
The story, when carefully shorn of all interpolations, speaks of a Kadesh in the Wilderness of Paran and immediately afterwards of a Kadesh in the Wilderness of Zin; from the first the spies are sent out, and from the second the whole mass of Israelites moves off after the Edomites refuse to allow them to pass through their territory. From this it follows automatically that it is one and the same place; for the planned trek through Edom was a result of the failed attempt to penetrate into the land of Canaan from this side, and so much is clear from other places that the two deserts often encountered, Zin in the north, Paran in the south, and Kadesh in an oasis as a resting place between the two deserts. (Goethe 1960:220)
I find myself in broad agreement with Goethe: the Israelites proceeded with the invasion of Canaan shortly after arriving in Kadesh for the first and only time. But before dismissing the eighteen interpolated Stations as fictitious or accepting them as genuine, we must first discover the true location of Kadesh.
To be continued ...
References
- John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels to Syria and the Holy Land, The Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, London (1822)
- Adam Clarke, The Holy Bible ... With a Commentary and Critical Notes, Volume 1, G Lane & C B Tippett, New York (1846)
- Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, Volume 3, Translated from the German by Paul Radin, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia (1911)
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hermann and Dorothea, Ellen Frothingham (translator), Roberts Brothers, Boston (1874)
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Israel in der Wüste, Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verständnis des west-östlichen Divans, West-östlicher Divan, in Erich Trunz (editor), Goethes Werke, Band 2, Fifth Edition, Christian Wegner Verlag, Hamburg (1960)
- James K Hoffmeier, Ancient Israel in Sinai: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Wilderness Tradition, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2005)
- James Orr (General Editor), The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Volume 4, The Howard-Severance Company, Chicago (1915)
- Karin Schutjer, German Epic/Jewish Epic: Goethe’s Exodus Narrative in Hermann und Dorothea and “Israel in der Wüste”, The German Quarterly, Volume 80, Number 2 (Spring 2007), pp 165-184, American Association of Teachers of German, Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken NJ (2007)
- James Strong, Hebrew and Chaldee Dictionary, in The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Eaton & Mains, New York (1890)
Image Credits
- From Serabit el-Khadim towards ’Ain el-Hudhera: Google Maps, Map Data © 2020 Mapa GISrael, ORION-ME, Fair Use
- Map Symbol Plane Clip Art: Openclipart, Public Domain
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Joseph Karl Stieler (artist), Neue Pinakothek, Munich, WAF 1048, Public Domain
