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Thanks for the detailed response. Your numbers are certainly much lower than those of theologians and at least to me appear much more realistic.

How could 2 million people even move in unison? It would take the whole day just to get everyone started. This would have been even more problematic as the people became less and less enamored with Moses.

Asphalt, what do you think of Junior's numbers?

How could 2 million people even move in unison?

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

I've done a bit more research on Egypt. The Nile Delta represents 63 percent of the habitable land in Egypt and occupies 80,000 square kilometers, which gives us an area of about 127,000 square kilometers of habitable land between the First Cataract and the Mediterranean. There are also several oases in the desert, which taken together might bring the habitable areas to 150,000 square kilometers.

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).