Asphalt, what do you think of Junior's numbers?
Jeff, Jeff, you ask such simple questions. Why, the line up in eighty rows of twenty-five thousand of course
Actually, I would just be guessing. For one thing, being less enamored with moses (very good, you have a basic knowledge of the Bible) would not necessarily make them less inclined to follow him. They are alone in the desert. What other choice do they have? As for taking the whole day? It very well could have taken quite some time. It would be difficult, no doubt abou that, but they had a cloud to guide them. When you have hundreds upon hundreds of miles of desert, you can space yourselves out pretry well.
As for Junior's numbers, I don't know. I'm at the liibrary right now and the computers are screwy so I can't really do much. When I get home I'll take a look
Now, taking the population density figure of 20 per square kilometer gives us a population of 3 million in classical times. This is a pretty good sized population for any country of that period or even up through the Middle Ages.
Anyway, as can be seen if 2 million folks suddenly uprooted and high-tailed it to Canaan, the social and economic upheaval would be greater than even what I postulated earlier as this is two-thirds of the population.
And, it gets worse.
The land of Canaan (the land of milk and honey) is roughly the size of modern Israel with all the territory captured in the 1967 wars. This entire area is only about 22,000 kilometers in size and is roughly about as productive (we'll be nice) as the Nile valley. This means that at classical levels of agriculture it could support maybe a half million people. The Israelites would have conquered the place and promptly starved to death as their supply of manna had been cut off once they left the desert (notice, I'm giving Scripture the benefit of the doubt here).