re: #93 A hollow voice says: Abort SCOTUS

The Exodus story doesn’t make sense geographically — according to the Old Testament stories the Israelites spent forty years “wandering in the wilderness” to cover a distance of about 200 miles from the Red Sea area of Egypt to Canaan, the Promised Land. That’s not very quick. The “wilderness” between the two areas has been continuously populated for thousands of years with lots of small towns and villages that were substantial enough to leave traces of stone and mud-brick construction for the archaeological record, so it’s pretty much impossible that they never encountered other people in that forty years of travel.

My own guess is that the Israelites were actually a few familial tribes of itinerant bandits who raided the local villages for “manna” i.e. stored food, livestock and any nubile young women left over after their raiding. Eventually they settled down in one of the better parts of the area, “a land flowing with milk and honey”, and started rewriting their history and genealogy to make their ancestors look better.