mosses wasn’t much of a navigator was he?
Hard to be a good navigator in the vast wasteland of a desert. Everything looks the same.
But, that was not the point of the story in the Bible.
The premise was that the 'tribes' were 'lost' because they kept walking in a circle around the same mountain.
They were 'stiff-necked'. This meant they didn't turn their head to notice that the same mountain was over the same shoulder all the time. The point was that they were STUBBORN and refused to listen. They didn't even want to listen to Moses. They blamed HIM for their own stubborn ignorance.
“Moses, Moses, everyone talks about Moses, he lead us around in the desert for forty years and took us to the one place in the Middle East that doesn’t have oil.” - Golda Meir