by Farrell Till
Nine previous articles in this series have discussed the logistical improbabilities and, at times, impossibilities in the biblical tales of the Israelite wilderness wanderings in the Sinai region over a 40-year period. As improbable as the logistics were in the other wilderness tales I have examined, they dwarf in comparison to the problem of how three million Israelites and their enormous flocks and herds were able to survive for 40 years in a region where water was scarce. That water was scarce in the Sinai was recognized in the many texts that referred to the water shortages that the Israelites encountered in their wilderness journeys. The first such reference was made after the "chosen ones" had traveled three days into the wilderness.
Exodus 15:22 Then Moses ordered Israel to set out from the Red Sea, and they went into the wilderness of Shur. They went three days in the wilderness and found no water. 23 When they came to Marah, they could not drink the water of Marah because it was bitter. That is why it was called Marah. 24 And the people complained against Moses, saying, "What shall we drink?" 25 He cried out to Yahweh; and Yahweh showed him a piece of wood; he threw it into the water, and the water became sweet. There Yahweh made for them a statute and an ordinance and there he put them to the test.
Other passages refer to water shortages that the Israelites afterwards encountered on their journey, but for now let's look at some implications in the incident claimed in the passage just quoted. If the Israelites journeyed three days and found no water until they came to Marah, they must have either traveled three days in a desert region without water or else they carried with them the water they needed. Studies that have been done in desert survival show that it would have been unlikely that they could have traveled for three days in a desert region without water. The following quotation is from a survivalist website that discusses the number of days that one could survive in the desert at different temperatures with different quantities of drinking water available.
Without water you will last about 2 1/2 days at 48C (120F) if you spend the whole time resting in the shade, though you could last as long as 12 days if the temperature stays below 21C (70F).
If you are forced to walk to safety the distance you cover will relate directly to water available.
With none, a temperature of 48C (120F) walking only at night, resting all day, you could cover 40km (25 miles).
Attempting to walk by day you would be lucky to complete 8km (5 miles) before collapse.
At the same temperature with about 2 litres (4 pt) of water you might cover 56km (35 miles) and last 3 days.
The biblical text quoted above says that the Israelites journeyed three days, so they did not spend those three days sitting in the shade. They were marching in a desert region, so unless they were carrying water with them, they could have traveled only about five miles before they would have collapsed. Quibbling that they may have traveled only at night would not solve the problem of having to transport water with them, because the statistics above state that one could last only two and a half days without water if he/she spent that time resting in the shade. Hence, inerrantists, who claim that the wilderness wandering tales are historically accurate, cannot escape the need to explain how the Israelites could have transported with them enough water to provide them and their livestock with their daily requirements.
Studies conducted by the U. S. Army basically agree with the information in the survivalist site. The section quoted below underscores the extent of the problem that biblical inerrantists confront when they try to defend the biblical claim that three million Israelites and large flocks and herds of livestock could have found adequate water in the Sinai region to survive there for 40 years.
The subject of man and water in the desert has generated considerable interest and confusion since the early days of World War II when the U. S. Army was preparing to fight in North Africa. At one time the U. S. Army thought it could condition men to do with less water by progressively reducing their water supplies during training. They called it water discipline. It caused hundreds of heat casualties. A key factor in desert survival is understanding the relationship between physical activity, air temperature, and water consumption. The body requires a certain amount of water for a certain level of activity at a certain temperature. For example, a person performing hard work in the sun at 43 degrees C requires 19 liters of water daily. Lack of the required amount of water causes a rapid decline in an individual's ability to make decisions and to perform tasks efficiently.
Your body's normal temperature is 36.9 degrees C (98.6 degrees F). Your body gets rid of excess heat (cools off) by sweating. The warmer your body becomes--whether caused by work, exercise, or air temperature--the more you sweat. The more you sweat, the more moisture you lose. Sweating is the principal cause of water loss. If a person stops sweating during periods of high air temperature and heavy work or exercise, he will quickly develop heat stroke. This is an emergency that requires immediate medical attention. Figure 13-2 shows daily water requirements for various levels of work. Understanding how the air temperature and your physical activity affect your water requirements allows you to take measures to get the most from your water supply. These measures are--
Find shade! Get out of the sun! Place something between you and the hot ground. Limit your movements! Conserve your sweat. Wear your complete uniform to include T-shirt. Roll the sleeves down, cover your head, and protect your neck with a scarf or similar item. These steps will protect your body from hot-blowing winds and the direct rays of the sun. Your clothing will absorb your sweat, keeping it against your skin so that you gain its full cooling effect. By staying in the shade quietly, fully clothed, not talking, keeping your mouth closed, and breathing through your nose, your water requirement for survival drops dramatically. If water is scarce, do not eat. Food requires water for digestion; therefore, eating food will use water that you need for cooling.
All research conducted on this subject shows that survival in the desert is inextricably connected to the availability of water, so let's look now at the logistics that would have been involved in a three-day journey of three million people with large flocks and herds of livestock across a desert terrain. Logistics in biblical stories, of course, is something that biblicists never think about, but those who do take the time to examine the wilderness tales in terms of what would have been involved in doing everything claimed in the stories will have no difficulty seeing that their historicity is extremely unlikely.
On the eve of their exodus from Egypt, the god of the Hebrews instituted the Passover and ordered that month to be the first month of the Hebrew year (Ex. 12:2). This would have been the month of Abib [Nisan], which would have overlapped March/April in the Gregorian calendar presently used in western societies. The minimum temperatures for March and April in the Sinai region range from 54 to 59 degrees Fahrenheit and the maximum temperatures from 73 to 82, so the three-day journey mentioned above would have occurred at a time when the Israelites would have encountered temperatures that would have made water more critical to their survival than if this three-day journey had happened in the winter. The U. S. Army study of desert survival quoted above said that a person's water requirements would have been 19 liters [20 quarts approximately] per day in 43 degrees Centigrade or 108 degrees Fahrenheit. Since the three-day journey under consideration would have occurred when the temperature was well below 43C [108F], I will be generous and present a scenario in which the Israelites used only one-fifth of the daily amount in the army study.
Let's suppose, then, that the Israelites consumed only one gallon per person per day during this journey. That would mean that they consumed nine million gallons of water before they came to Marah. A gallon of water weighs eight pounds, so if each person carried his minimum daily requirement, he/she would have begun the journey burdened with 24 pounds of water in addition to what else may have been necessary to carry. Those who think that this would not have been an undue burden should take a backpack loaded with 24 pounds of books or other objects and begin walking. When fatigue sets in, they can then imagine what it would have been like to carry this load for an entire day or at least until it was lightened by the person's gradual consumption of his first day's ration, which consumption would have undoubtedly occurred during that day. The next day the journey would have begun with 16 pounds of water and so on until the entire amount was consumed on the third day. In a word, this would have been a strenuous three-day trip if each person had also carried his minimum daily requirement, but since many of the three million would have been children, some of the adults would have had to have begun the trip with even more than 24 pounds of water, and this scenario doesn't even consider what the minimum daily water requirements would have been for the large flocks and herds that the Israelites took with them (Ex. 12:38; Ex. 11:21-22).
To argue that each person carried his own water would be to ignore other factors involved in the wilderness-wandering tales. If, for example, each adult started out carrying three gallons of water, how did they transport other items that they would have needed to carry with them? An informed inerrantist should know that, as these tales were spun in the Bible, the Israelites had taken with them more than just the clothes on their backs. For one thing, they had a lot of gold, silver, and brass with them, which they later contributed to overlay furniture in the tabernacle (Ex. 25:1-3, 11, 17, 18, etc., etc., etc.) and to pay the taxes that were levied on each male during the census (Ex. 30:12-16). The overlays on the furniture were made of "pure gold" (Ex. 25:11), and the cherubim and mercy seat on the ark of the covenant were made of gold (25:18-19). The candlestick was made of "pure gold" (25:31), etc. In addition to this, the people had given gold to Aaron to make the golden calf (Ex. 32:2-3). The census tax brought in 100 talents and 75 shekels of silver (Ex. 38:25-26); the gold that was used for the work in the sanctuary was 29 talents and 730 shekels (v:24); 100 talents were used to make the sockets for the veil in the tabernacle (v:27); 1,775 shekels were used to make the hooks (v:28); 70 talents and 2,400 shekels of brass were used to make other accessories in the tabernacle (v:29). This all amounts to a weight of 299 talents and 4905 shekels. A talent equaled 75.6 pounds, so this means that the Israelites had to transport with them at least 22,604 pounds of precious metals. A shekel was .4 oz, so the 4,905 shekels would have increased the weight of precious metals to about 22,726 pounds or over 11 tons of gold, silver, and brass.
Who carried these metals? Divided among the adult population, this wouldn't have amounted to any substantial burden, but it would have increased the load that the adults would have had to carry in addition to their water supply.
Let's look at this problem in another way. To travel three days over desert terrain, three million people would have needed a minimum of nine million gallons of water just for themselves without any consideration of what their livestock would have needed. Nine million gallons of water would weigh 72 million pounds. That would have been 36,000 tons of water. To transport this much water, without burdening themselves and increasing their daily water requirements, these Israelites would have had to have had with them a fleet of tanker wagons (which their hasty exodus from Egypt would not have allowed them time to build). If we imagined that a tanker wagon could have carried 2,000 gallons of water and that horses or some other beasts of burden could have pulled a wagon weighing 16,000 pounds through a sandy desert terrain, the Israelites would have needed 4,500 such tanker wagons to transport just the water that the people would have needed. Only a hopelessly naive inerrantist would argue that this was how the Israelites supplied their daily water requirements.
Some inerrantists have tried to solve this problem by postulating that the Israelites had used pack animals--horses or some such--to transport their water, but this scenario would present another logistic nightmare. If one horse began the trip carrying 60 gallons or 480 pounds of water, the Israelites would have needed a caravan of 150,000 horses, each ladened with 60 gallons of water as the three-day march began. The minimum daily requirement of water for a horse, however, is 20-30 gallons per day in dry weather, so a horse that began the trip carrying 60 gallons of water would have had enough only to provide that horse with its own minimum daily requirement for the three-day march. There would have been none for the people.
Diehard quibblers have tried to imagine the Israelites traveling with a caravan of camels that transported their water (even though the exodus stories made no references at all to camels), but this is hardly a solution to the problem. For the sake of argument, let's suppose that the Israelites began their three-day march with a caravan of camels to carry their 9 million gallons of water. They would have needed 180,000 camels if each camel carried 50 gallons of water, which would have weighed 400 pounds. If we increased their load to 75 gallons (600 pounds), the caravan would have been 120,000 camels long. Although camels have been known to go up to 20 days without water, they should be given at least 20-40 liters [five to eight gallons] every two days.
If they are deprived of water for a long period e.g. 10 days, they should be allowed to spend up to 8 hours drinking water as it takes time to replenish all the body fluids.
In other words, camels are animals, so they need water. Whatever body weight they lose in dehydration over periods of water deprivation eventually has to be made up or else they will die like any other dehydrated animals. Over a three-day journey, a herd of 120,000 camels may not have created any short-term additional water problems, but over a period of 40 years, this many camels would have caused the Israelites many problems in their water management, as the following study of Australian camels indicates.
The permanent nature of many desert soaks and gnamma holes is threatened by camels. Trampling by camels may damage the vegetation of desert soaks, which could lead to the greater exposure of the water surface, resulting in their drying up (Dragon Tree Soak, ANCA, 1996). Camels drink some gnamma holes dry (Gibson Desert Gnamma Holes, ANCA, 1996).
So even if the Israelites had transported a three-day supply of water with their unmentioned camels, eventually these animals would have required large amounts of water along with the other livestock that the Israelites had with them and would have apparently been destructive to whatever water sources the Israelites came to along the way. We will see shortly what problems would have been involved in supplying water for herds of cattle and sheep during the 40-year Israelite trek through the Sinai. As just noted above, adding camels to their herds would have only complicated their water problems.
Let's now consider the claim that the Israelites also had with them "very much cattle" (Ex. 12:37-38). How much would be "very much"? We don't know, but it certainly doesn't sound as if the writer meant just a few head of cattle. According to one source, each cow or bull would have needed 10 to 17 gallons of water per day, depending on heat conditions. Thus, if the "very much cattle" of the Israelites had numbered only 10,000 head of cattle, they would have needed 100,000 to 170,000 gallons of water per day or 300,000 to 510,000 gallons over the three-day march.
Before inerrantists say that my estimate of the number of cattle the Israelites had is too high, let him consider Numbers 31, which claims that the Israelites took 675,000 sheep, 12,000 oxen, and 71,000 asses as booty in their massacre of the Midianites (v:22-34). At the end of their wilderness wanderings, the Reubenites and Gadites "had a very great multitude of cattle" (Num. 32:1). In order to have had a great multitude of cattle at the end of their wanderings, they would have had to have had sizable herds during their wilderness wanderings, and that is certainly implied in the scripture cited above, which says that the Israelites left Egypt with "very much cattle."
None of this gives us any exact numbers of cattle, but one would have to have his head in the sand to think that the various references to Israelite cattle in the wilderness meant that they had had only a few scattered herds. In "Sacrifices and the Size of the Hebrew Camps" and "Where Did They Get the Wood?" I showed that just the purification sacrifices for women in a population of three million would have required 25,185 lambs per year and that just one sin-offering per year for each of the 1.5 million adults would have required 1.5 million bullocks per year. In addition to these required sacrifices, there were "peace-offerings," "burnt-offerings," "trespass-offerings," and so on. In order to keep the ordinances that commanded these sacrifices, the Israelites would have had to have had flocks and herds that numbered into the millions; otherwise, the continuous sacrifices commanded in the Levitical code would have killed off their herds long before their 40-year trek had ended. Just celebrating the Passover would have required the killing of 100,000 male lambs, without blemish, each year. This number is predicated on the unlikely assumption that the average size of a group sharing a Passover lamb was 30 people.
Exodus 12:3 Tell the whole congregation of Israel that on the tenth of this month they are to take a lamb for each family, a lamb for each household. 4 If a household is too small for a whole lamb, it shall join its closest neighbor in obtaining one; the lamb shall be divided in proportion to the number of people who eat of it. 5 Your lamb shall be without blemish, a year-old male....
The gestation period in sheep is approximately 150 days or five months. Under carefully controlled conditions, modern sheep farmers are able to average three lambs per year in their ewes, but for the sake of argument, let's suppose that the Hebrew flocks were able to produce two lambs per ewe each year, with no mortality rate. Only half of the lambs would have been males, so in order to produce 100,000 males each year, the Hebrew flock would have had to have had 100,000 females, each consistently averaging the production of two lambs per year. Each ewe, not even considering the rams, would have needed a minimum of two gallons of water per day, and in order to produce 100,000 males each year, the ewes would have also produced 100,000 females each year. Just the ewes in the Hebrew herd would have need 400,000 gallons of water per day, and this doesn't even take into consideration how much would have been needed to water the cattle, horses, and [hypothetical] camels. Also when the male lambs were born, they would have needed water to sustain them to reach the one year of age when they would be slaughtered to celebrate the Passover. We are easily talking about a need for 600,000 gallons of water per day just for the sheep in the Hebrew flocks.
My point is that an enormous amount of water would have been required each day to maintain the three million Hebrews and their flocks and herds. Inerrantists who think that this is just a minor problem that can be brushed aside as of no consequence haven't taken the time to think the problem through. Those who grew up in cities and towns where water was always available by just turning a faucet may not see the enormousness of the water problem when they read the wilderness-wandering tales, but those who come from rural areas should know better. I am reminded of what a man said to me after I had completed my oral debate in Pekin, Illinois, with Kent Hovind, who had tried to explain how Noah could have taken specimens of all animals in the world aboard the ark and attended to their needs for a year with only seven other people to help him. This man approached me while I was talking to others in the audience and told me that he believed in God but did not believe that the story of the ark could have happened. He explained that he owned a livestock farm and was therefore familiar with the many problems involved in animal management. He told me that anyone who believes the ark story is someone who has not had any experience in tending animals. The subject of water access during the wilderness wanderings didn't come up in that debate, but I am sure that this man would also know that access to water in the wilderness would have posed an insurmountable problem to the survival of the Israelites and their large herds of livestock.
To illustrate this, let's just examine the story of the bitter water at Marah after the Israelites had journeyed three days into the wilderness. The biblical text doesn't say whether the water source at Marah was a well or a lake or an oasis, so to give biblicists as much advantage as possible, let's just assume that Marah was a lake 1,000 feet in diameter. A lake of this size in that region was very improbable, but if Marah were a lake of that diameter, it would have had a circumference of 3,140 feet. If we imagine that the Israelites took advantage of every running foot of terrain around a lake this big and that each person standing on the bank would have occupied an area only three feet wide, which would have allowed him/her enough room to dip water from the lake and then turn aside to carry the water bag away to allow the next person behind him to dip his/her water, such a scenario would have allowed only 1,047 people to be dipping water from the lake at one time. Now let's suppose that the people formed lines directly behind the 1,047 people who were the first to reach the lake. Let's further suppose that each person going to the lake for water had a 5-gallon water bag to dip into the lake to retrieve water that would be shared with four other people. This would mean that 1,047 lines, each of which contained queues of 573 people, would have had to have formed in order for just one gallon of water to be retrieved for all of the three million in the exodus horde. If each person in the 1,047 lines took only one minute to fill his/her five-gallon bag and then move aside to make way for the next person in line, it would have taken 9.5 hours for one gallon of water for each Hebrew in the exodus to have been retrieved from a lake of this size. Then the lines would have had to continue working on through the night in order to retrieve enough water to provide the needs of their large herds of livestock, even if we assume that the animals could have been kept back from stampeding into the lake to get water. In other words, retrieving water for the needs of three million people and their livestock wouldn't have been nearly as simple as the impression left by the biblical text that tells this tale.
Exodus 15:23 When they came to Marah, they could not drink the water of Marah because it was bitter. That is why it was called Marah. 24 And the people complained against Moses, saying, "What shall we drink?" 25 He cried out to Yahweh; and Yahweh showed him a piece of wood; he threw it into the water, and the water became sweet. There Yahweh made for them a statute and an ordinance and there he put them to the test.
A Bible believer who reads this would probably say to himself, "Hey, there was no water problem; God saw that the people got what they needed," but the scenario presented above shows that providing water for that many people would have been far more complicated than just throwing a piece of wood into the water. The complicated logistics involved in drawing water from limited sources for three million people and their large herds of livestock would have had to have been repeated over and over as the Israelites wandered through the Sinai for 40 years.
Two verses after the text quoted above, we read that the Israelites came next to a place called Elim.
Exodus 15:27 Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees; and they camped there by the water.
We know nothing about the size of these springs. Perhaps they were even wells, because the word ‘ayin is so translated in some places, and the KJV says that Elim was a place that had twelve wells of water. That these springs or wells couldn't have been very large is suggested by the fact that only 70 palms were growing around these 12 springs or wells. That would have been fewer than six trees per spring (well), so if they were pools or oases fed by springs, they couldn't have been very big. Getting water from these springs (wells) would have entailed all of the problems presented in the scenario above. There is just no way to make the water problem in the wilderness-wandering tales go away.
Inerrantists, of course, will insist that there would have been no water problem, because Yahweh miraculously provided them with water whenever they needed it, as claimed in the following text.
Exodus 17:1 From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as Yahweh commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. 2 The people quarreled with Moses, and said, "Give us water to drink." Moses said to them, "Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test Yahweh?" 3 But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, "Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?" 4 So Moses cried out to Yahweh, "What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me." 5 Yahweh said to Moses, "Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. 6 I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink." Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. 7 He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested Yahweh, saying, "Is Yahweh among us or not?"
Inerrantists will simplistically read a passage like this and think that there was no water problem, but they fail to keep in mind that the water that came from this "rock" would have had to have been enough to provide the needs of three million people and their flocks and herds as long as they were in the camp. As we saw above, serious logistical problems would have been involved in drawing enough water from a single source to provide just the minimum daily requirements for three million people, so we must wonder what the rate of flow was from this rock. If 100 gallons per minute had gushed from the rock, this flow would have taken 500 hours or 20.8 days for three million gallons to come out. Thousands would have died of dehydration while waiting to get water, and even those who had been the first to draw water would have died before getting another turn at the rock. If we assume that ten times this much (1000 gallons per minute) had gushed out, it would have taken over two days for each person to get a gallon of water. With a thousand-gallon per minute spring gushing water that couldn't even meet the minimum daily requirement of the three million Hebrews, their livestock would have perished by the thousands.
A similar incident was recorded in Numbers 20 to give the impression that whenever the Israelites needed water, Yahweh was Johnny-on-the-spot to bring it forth from rocks.
Numbers 20:1 The Israelites, the whole congregation, came into the wilderness of Zin in the first month, and the people stayed in Kadesh. Miriam died there, and was buried there. 2 Now there was no water for the congregation; so they gathered together against Moses and against Aaron. 3 The people quarreled with Moses and said, "Would that we had died when our kindred died before Yahweh! 4 Why have you brought the assembly of Yahweh into this wilderness for us and our livestock to die here? 5 Why have you brought us up out of Egypt, to bring us to this wretched place? It is no place for grain, or figs, or vines, or pomegranates; and there is no water to drink." 6 Then Moses and Aaron went away from the assembly to the entrance of the tent of meeting; they fell on their faces, and the glory of the LORD appeared to them. 7 Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying: 8 Take the staff, and assemble the congregation, you and your brother Aaron, and command the rock before their eyes to yield its water. Thus you shall bring water out of the rock for them; thus you shall provide drink for the congregation and their livestock. 9 So Moses took the staff from before Yahweh, as he had commanded him. 10 Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock, and he said to them, "Listen, you rebels, shall we bring water for you out of this rock?" 11 Then Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock twice with his staff; water came out abundantly, and the congregation and their livestock drank.
And the congregation (meaning all the people of Israel) and their livestock drank, but we saw above that getting enough water anywhere to meet the needs of "the congregation" and their livestock would not have been as simple as texts like these would have uncritical readers believe. According to Numbers 33:5-49, the Israelites stopped at 41 different places in their trek through the Sinai region, so there would have been at least 41 times during their wilderness wanderings that the "chosen ones" would have confronted the problem of drawing water from limited sources to meet their needs and the requirements of their livestock. Whoever wrote these accounts of getting water from rocks or twelve "wells" or "springs" just didn't take the time to calculate how big those springs and rock flows would have had to have been in order for the Israelites to get even their minimum needs.
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