Tracing the Exodus Route

Exodus and Numbers give a detailed itinerary: from Rameses to Succoth, then Etham and Pi-hahiroth, across the sea, and on through the wilderness to Mount Sinai and Kadesh-barnea (Exodus 12:37; 13:20; 14:2; Numbers 33). Many of these places cannot be located with confidence today.

Some of the setting can be tested. Excavations at Qantir in the eastern Nile Delta have uncovered Pi-Ramesses, the capital Ramesses II built in the 13th century BC, which many identify with the store city Raamses of Exodus 1:11. James Hoffmeier of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School excavated forts at Tell el-Borg on the “Ways of Horus,” Egypt’s military road along the coast. That road matches “the way of the land of the Philistines,” which Exodus 13:17 says Israel avoided.

Mount Sinai has been placed at Jebel Musa in southern Sinai, venerated by Christians since at least the 4th century. St. Catherine’s Monastery at its foot is a Greek Orthodox monastery still in use today; rabbinic tradition did not fix the mountain’s location. Other proposals put Sinai in northern Sinai, in the Negev (Har Karkom), or in northwest Arabia, ancient Midian, which some critical scholars such as Frank Moore Cross have favored. One Arabian candidate, Jebel al-Lawz, was made popular by independent explorers such as Ron Wyatt and Bob Cornuke; most archaeologists, including evangelical ones, reject it. Excavations at Tell el-Qudeirat, the site most often identified as Kadesh-barnea, where Numbers says Israel spent much of the wilderness period, found Iron Age fortresses but nothing earlier.

Scholars disagree on what this absence means. Some argue that a large migration would leave traces, and that their absence counts against the story as history. Others note that nomadic camps rarely survive and that the Egyptian setting fits the story well. Many critical scholars think the story grew from the memory of a smaller group, and some doubt any exodus took place; others see the itinerary as reflecting the geography of a later period.