Tall Tales In The Wilderness Wanderings (Part 9 of 13): Logistical Improbabilities in the Wilderness-Wandering Tales Getting the Whole Congregation Together

by Farrell Till

In the eight previous articles in this series, we have seen many logistical improbabilities--and sometimes downright impossibilities--in the biblical tales of the 40-year wilderness wanderings of the Israelites. Let's now imagine all 3 million Israelites standing together like packed sardines instead of lying down in their 6' x 3' plot that was allotted when we calculated what the minimum land area for an encampment would had to have been. Let's suppose that all three million could stand together on a plot that allowed a 2-foot by 2-foot area for each person. Where one person's four-square-foot plot ended, another one's would begin. Putting everyone together this compactly, all three million could have stood on a land area of 12 million square feet. In yards, the area of this plot of standing room only would have been 1,333,333 square yards. That would equal 275 acres of ground. (Of course, one would not have wanted to be in the very center of this mass of humanity when the mandatory trip out of the camp with one's trowel [Deut. 23:12-13] became necessary.) Anyone who grew up on a farm of any size should have an idea of how much land area this would be. The family farm that I grew up on in Missouri was only 120 acres or less than half this size. There would be no way that anyone could have stood in the middle of my family's farm and speak and be heard everywhere on the farm.

Why is this important? We read in many places in the exodus stories that Moses would sometimes call the entire congregation of Israel together to speak to them. The premise of Deuteronomy, in fact, is that of a speech that Moses made to "all Israel" (1:1). On some occasions, Moses would call the whole congregation together at the door of the tabernacle to speak to them: "And Yahweh spoke to Moses saying... assemble all the congregation at the door of the tabernacle, and Moses did as Yahweh commanded him, and the congregation was assembled at the door of the tabernacle" (Lev. 6:1-5). Now the dimensions of the tabernacle are recorded in Exodus 27:11-12, and its court at the front entry was only 50 cubits wide. Even if we accept the long cubit as a standard, this would have made the breadth of the court only 90 feet. So how could Moses have possibly assembled the entire congregation before the court of the tabernacle? If the people had stood in rows 90 feet wide, each row would have accommodated only 45 people, so 66,666 rows would have been necessary to get all of the people in front of the tabernacle entry. The rows would then have extended back from the entry to a distance of 25 miles. Needless to say, this would have made it impossible for Moses to have spoken to the entire congregation. Even if we put 135 people in each row, so that the rows would have extended 90 feet on each side beyond the width of the court, there would have been 22,222 rows of people stretching back for a distance of 8.4 miles.

Inerrantists will argue that "all of the congregation" didn't mean all of the Israelites in the exodus but only the adults. That hardly solves the problem, because if we cut the population figures in half to accommodate this quibble, that would simply halve the scenarios presented above, and no reasonable person can think that 1.5 million adults assembled on 137.5 acres of land or in a column 4.2 miles long could hear a speech that Moses was delivering without a public address system. Obviously, all of Moses speeches to "all Israel" or the "whole congregation" are simply more exaggerations in the fanciful tale of Israel's trek from Egypt to the promised land.