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 Division of the Promised land
  Ezion-Geber  to  Damascus

The Exodus as written in the Bible was never intended to be a road map. Thomas B. Dozemen suggested it is a "Scriptural Map." A detailed study of the path is ambiguous at best. J. Maxwell Miller says the writers of our earliest copies did not have a comprehensive knowledge of the Transjordan area. My own search bears witness to this fact, there are conflicts. Did the Israelites go through Moabite territory or did they circle around the eastern (desert) side. Or is it possible they circled Moab on the west side? There are at least fourteen mountains proposed as Mount Sinai. Every opinion hinges on the suggestion of where Mount Sinai is. Even the Great Pyramid has been suggested.

For a person accustomed to seeing the scriptures as nothing less than the immutable, infallible, revealed Word of God. It is disconcerting, for example, to see how large a role human emotions and motivations--and not always the noblest ones--had on the writing of the Bible. I had considered the entire Bible as the Book of Revelations says:
Rev 22:18 I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, if any man shall add unto them, God shall add unto him the plagues which are written in this book:
 Rev 22:19 and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life, and out of the holy city, which are written in this book.
Much of the Old Testament is best seen through the lens of two related rivalries, one between Israel and Judah and the other between two circles of priests. Scholars discovered the existence of two separate, competing texts within the Old Testament. These were called J and E for their respective names for God--J (pronounced as Y by the researchers, who were Germans) stands for Yahweh and E for Elohim. J consistently exalts Judah at the expense of Israel; E consistently does just the opposite. In other words, in the days of the divided kingdom, two competing Torahs existed, each claiming the status of the Word of God. To put it even more bluntly, partisan politics intruded on the writing of sacred scripture. Ironically, J and E were later combined into one text, called JE, sometime after 722 B.C., when refugees from the Assyrian conquest of Israel fled to Judah, bringing E with them. Why were the two conflicting scriptures merged? According to Friedman because the Israelite contingent was too large and influential to be ignored.

If the influence of partisan politics on the Bible is disconcerting, then the effect of the squabbles between priestly circles is even more troubling. In the pursuit of advantage, power, and income, these two schools of clerics were ready to put words into the very mouth of God. The fall of Israel and the union of J and E did nothing to quell this competition. The Aaronids, so called because they were believed descended from Aaron, were firmly in power at the court in Jerusalem, but they still had competition in the form of the priesthood of Shiloh. The Shiloh priests, called Mushites   because of their presumed descent from Moses, had been out of power at court ever since the death of David (the Mushite chief priest had supported a rival of Solomon's as David's successor, and had been banished for his lack of political acumen), but they still wielded considerable influence. An Aaronid priest composed the source text we now call P ("Priestly," because of its emphasis on law, sacrifices, and other topics of clerical interest) as an answer to JE. Why did JE need answering? Because JE elevated Moses and denigrated Aaron, the ancestor of the Jerusalem priesthood. P undertook to reverse that situation, and to further improve the lot of the Aaronids by restricting the priesthood to descendants of Aaron (relegating all other Levites, including their Mushite rivals, to a secondary role) and centralizing sacrifice in Jerusalem (where the Aaronids were in power). Someone from the Mushite circle--in Friedman's opinion, probably the prophet Jeremiah or his scribe, Baruch--fired a return salvo at P called D (for "Deuteronomist," because D includes Deuteronomy). D elevates Moses and other Mushite heroes, commands the people to take care of impoverished Levites (such as the Shiloh priesthood), and even goes so far as to call P's emphasis on sacrifices a lie! Finally, in what must be one of the most astounding ironies of all time, someone known as R (the Redactor) combined all these disparate sources into one document, which forms the core of the Old Testament we have today. (Who Wrote the Bible, by Richard Elliott Friedman)

The Bible is still, and will always be, solid evidence of God’s work on this Earth. He has always used people to manifest His message in ways that are difficult to understand. Christ brought down the mighty Roman Empire by an act of Love. He ended the line of Pharaohs, conquered Europe and then put an end to all other worship in the Americas. Understanding how the Spanish  soldiers killed so many Aztecs, Mayans and Incas is difficult and troubling. Ordering Joshua and the Israelites to kill women and children does not fit into the modern human psyche. In Numbers 31 Moses scolds the Israelites for taking women captive and not killing them. I believe God has purposely designed all things to conceal hard facts in order to make believing a matter of faith. This is the part Evolutionist do not get and you wouldn’t expect them too. It is beyond science and is a spiritual matter(1Col.2: 1-16). It puzzles me how so many cling to Darwin’s theories when he refuted them himself. It is very evident there is a hidden agenda. The last few months of Darwin’s life were filled with Gospel music and Scriptural readings. He was quoted as saying “These were unformed theories of a young man, and I was astonished how fast they grew.”

Did the Exodus of Israelites really happen? Yes and my opinion is just one more of the many throughout the centuries. The path of these ancient encampments begs for an answer to the similarities of the traditional paths. The local Bedouins could not have arranged this order. If an unbiased archeologist would do a thorough dig he would find evidence earlier than Finkelstein’s iron age (1100 B. C.) If this turns out to be the case then how do we explain the lack of encampments on the East side of the Dead Sea?