by
Damien F. Mackey
The
people of Israel had witnessed the miraculous and had the miraculous ever
before them in the form of the Glory Cloud (popularly known as the Shekinah).
Introduction
After the miraculous
Exodus from Egypt, a sign that was meant to be remembered down through the
generations (cf. Deuteronomy 6:6-7), Moses and his people sang of the
Lord’s power and glory (Exodus 15:1-21).
Moses, so
eager when in Egypt to free his people - but having succumbed to the comforts
of married life during his long sojourn in Midian, hoping that the Lord might
consider someone else for the daunting task - was now fully reconciled again to
what the Lord was asking from him.
Family life
seems to have become a matter of secondary importance – though there will soon
be a moment of controversy regarding his Midianite wife, Zipporah.
But it would
not be long before the people of Moses, the Israelites, despite all that had
recently happened, took to their customary grumbling again. Only 2 verses into
the next chapter of the Book of Exodus do we read (16:2-3):
In the desert the
whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said
to them, ‘If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we
sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought
us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death’.
At the
forefront of this would be that ungrateful Reubenite pair, Dathan and Abiram (“Jannes
and Jambres” as St. Paul would much later call them, 2 Timothy 3:8).
Some fellow Levites
would also rise up in rebellion against Moses.
And so, even,
would Moses’ own older brother and sister, Aaron and Miriam.
God detests ingratitude.
Psalm
105:21-25 (Douay version) sums up what the Lord had done for Israel and how
ungrateful Israel had repaid Him:
They forgot God,
who saved them, who had done great things in Egypt, Wondrous works in the
land of Cham: terrible things in the Red Sea. And he said that he would
destroy them: had not Moses his chosen stood before him in the breach: To turn
away his wrath, lest he should destroy them. And they set at nought the
desirable land. They believed not his word, And they murmured in their
tents: they hearkened not to the voice of the Lord.
The C20th world,
too, had forgotten God, prompting Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to recall the old
lament: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened”.
Still, we have forgotten
Him, hence our world gone utterly mad.
The people
of Israel had witnessed the miraculous and had the miraculous ever before them
in the form of the Glory Cloud (popularly known as the Shekinah).
The Gentile
nations, aware of all of this, were also meant to acknowledge the might and
power of the Lord. When they didn’t, when peoples like the Amalekites, the
Ammonites and the Moabites, the giant king Og of Bashan, hindered Israel on its
path to the Promised Land, the Lord rose up in fury against these as well.
The historical context
As I have noted
previously:
My purpose has been, not so
much theological and interpretive, as an effort to show that the Bible is real
history, with a firm archaeology (and sometimes geology) underpinning the whole
of it.
Geographical corrections have
also proven to be a crucial part of this task.
Possibly no
other part of the Bible lends itself more satisfactorily to an archaeological
investigation than does the Exodus and Joshuan Conquest.
It should be
- and indeed is - in plain sight.
Sadly
however, as we have read, the yoking of the Bible to an overblown chronology
(by the likes of Dr. Albright and Fr. Louis Hugues-Vincent) has resulted in the
massive amount of archaeological evidence for the Exodus and the Conquest
becoming completely overlooked, with a different (and totally unsuitable) era
preferred by the experts.
As we have
determined, Moses departed Midian not long after the termination of the cruelly
oppressive Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt, whose last ruler, briefly, was a
female. Moses and Aaron would now face the Thirteenth Dynasty pharaoh, a
man of military background, Neferhotep I. Archaeologically, it was this
providential point in time, when workmen are found to have abandoned their
sites at places like Illahûn, that Egyptianised ‘Asiatics’ (the fleeing
Israelites) would depart from Egypt, later to be replaced by Non-Egyptianised
‘Asiatics’, the Hyksos invaders.
These, we
shall probably meet as the Amalekites.
Dr. Immanuel
Velikovsky had called the Hyksos invasion of a greatly weakened Egypt “the
Eleventh Plague”.
Grumbling
Israel
The manna
with which the Lord would so providentially feed in abundance the grumbling
Israelites was almost certainly not a purely miraculous phenomenon, like the
quails which also came, since both have been experienced in this desert region.
Rightly,
though, the manna has become a symbol of the Blessed Eucharist.
Later, the
famous image of the bronze serpent suspended on a pole will become a symbol of
Jesus Christ on the Cross, and will be biblically interpreted as such (John
3:14): ‘Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son
of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life
in him’.
Return to Mount Sinai
The Exodus route taken by
the Israelites to Mount Sinai, and the identification of the mountain, have
become the topic of interest of countless articles and videos.
But no two
of these seem to agree.
Immediately
to be rejected are those interpretations that do not take into consideration
that a great mass of nomadic people wandering in desert regions would be in
need of regular drinking water stopping points, wells, along the way.
The beauty
of professor Emmanuel Anati’s proposed Exodus route is that it has been
determined by one who has had decades of archaeological experience in the
regions and has duly taken into account the need for drinking water, not to
mention the location of the tribes mentioned in the Exodus account: Midian,
Amalek, etc.
Previously,
it has been suggested that a location of the Sea of Reeds closer to Egypt than
Anati’s Lake Serbonis would be preferable, and that – while his location of
Israel’s encampment in the Karkom Valley appears to fit very well indeed – the
holy mountain may not actually be his choice of Har Karkom there, but rather a
mysterious mountain right in the centre of the Karkom Valley, as identified by professor
Anati’s colleague, Flavio Barbiero.
Both the
professor and Flavio Barbiero appear to be in harmony, though, with the
location of Rephidim and its important water source (they locate it at Beer
Karkom), about which we next read (Exodus 17:1-7):
The whole
Israelite community set out from the Desert of Sin, traveling from place
to place as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but
there was no water for the people to drink. So they quarreled with Moses
and said, ‘Give us water to drink’.
Moses replied, ‘Why
do you quarrel with me? Why do you put the Lord to the test?’
But the people
were thirsty for water there, and they grumbled against Moses. They
said, ‘Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to make us and our children and
livestock die of thirst’?
Then Moses cried
out to the Lord, ‘What am I to do with these people? They are almost ready
to stone me’.
The Lord answered
Moses, ‘Go out in front of the people. Take with you some of the elders of
Israel and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the
Nile, and go. I will stand there before you by the rock at
Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it for the
people to drink’. So Moses did this in the sight of the elders of
Israel. And he called the place Massah and Meribah because the
Israelites quarreled and because they tested the Lord saying, ‘Is
the Lord among us or not?’
Israel’s
grumbling had become so insistent that places were even named after it.
