Apart from the miracles and great wonders which are told, the fact that most infuses amazement in historians, in the Exodus narrative, is the sudden formation of Israel with a population of 600,000 men over 20 years old (Num. 1,44-46; 2,32; 26,51). This information is usually considered legendary, because it does not seem possible that a group of slaves not even mentioned in the annals of Egypt, in a short period of time, may have reached so wide proportions without including women and children.
Not even in dream the vast deserts of Arabia and the Sinai Peninsula, with its torrid territory, would have the resources that were needed to feed so spectacular a contingent. Even today, after the unfathomable technological development of the last centuries, no more than a few thousand people dwell in those desert regions. Therefore, not even remotely, the population of Israelites who left Egypt can have approached the figures indicated in Numbers.
God can, of course, perform wonders, but we do not find one, in the entire Bible, that caused a nation to survive so long in contradiction with the normal conditions of existence. This cannot have happened, as well, in the sojourn of the sons of Israel in the wilderness.
Biblical data suggest that the opposite took place, i. e., that the number of Israelites who left Egypt was at most a few thousand. Exodus, for example, treats the Israelites settled in Egypt before the Exodus as a mere colony of oppressed slaves. The contrast between this description and the mighty army of 600,000 men with a high level of organization, which Numbers portrays, is impossible to surpass. Especially considering that the army of Israelites was formed in an inhospitable desert.
It cannot be forgotten that only 70 descendants of Jacob went down to Egypt. We know that their number increased greatly in the land of Goshen, but it is inconceivable that they could have reached a population of two million people in only 430 years, as suggested by the population of Israel in Numbers. When we read about the balanced battle of Israel against Amalek, shortly after the Exodus (Ex. 17:11), we realize that reality was quite otherwise. Amalek was a small tribe that lived in Canaan (Num. 13, 29; 14:43). Therefore, the group that braved the children of Israel in the wilderness, was not the entire tribe. Even so, Israel had great difficulties to defeat it, which indicates that their size and military organization were far from remarkable.
For reasons such as these, a challenge that arises, as we try to paint the portrait of the biblical Moses, is to explain the contrast between the information that presents Israel as a modest group of fugitives and that which depicts 600,000 men of war. To overcome the challenge, it is important to remember that, at the time of the Exodus, there were two contingents of Israelites in the Middle East. The first one consisted of the descendants of Jacob settled in Egypt. The other was constituted by the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who did not go to Egypt with the first group. The Hyksos seem to have been part of this last quota of Palestinian Jews.
Moses did not ignore the existence of the two contingents. He may even have made efforts to attract the Jews of Canaan to his group, during the pilgrimage in the desert. But this is far from justifying the population mentioned in Numbers.
The difficulty related to Israel’s population in the wilderness is therefore considerable. One cannot solve it, in the limits establisehed by traditional interpretation. There is, however, a way to explain the figures of Numbers. John Thompson showed that "the Hebrew term eleph [translated thousand in the chapters on the censuses] can have multiple meanings. It can be translated clan, a subgroup of a tribe, a military group" (Thompson, John Arthur. Archaeology and the Bible - when science discovers faith. 2nd ed., Sao Paulo: Christian Life, 2007. p . 86). Thousand is only one of the possible translations of the term.
When God told Moses to raise the census of the children of Israel, he said they were supposed to be counted one by one. In the exact words of Numbers, "Take the sum of all the assembly of the children of Israel, by their families , by their fathers’ households, according to the number of names, every male, head by head " (Num. 1,2). However, what happened next was that the sum was taken by round numbers (Num. 1,20-46). In each tribe, a few thousand and a few hundred men were counted. For instance, in the tribe of Reuben, 46 thousand and five hundred; in Simeon, 59 thousand and three hundred. And so on. Both thousands and hundreds are round figures.
It is worth noting that the hundreds expressing the number of men in each tribe are not followed by tens and units. This makes each number end, quite strangely, in its hundreds. Not even once the number of men in a tribe ends in 190, 180, 170, 30, 20, 10, 7, 6 or any number less than 200. We are led to conclude that these numbers do not meet God's determination to raise the census by name and one by one. If they did, there would be a lot of numbers ending in tens and units. Therefore, some information must be missing about the two censuses raised in the desert.
It is indeed not possible that random distributions of numbers like those that quantify the populations of the world would result in round figures. Similarly, it is not possible that the 26 sums of the two censuses would all lead to round numbers finishing in hundreds (400, 500, 700 etc.), never in tens or in units. So the thousands and hundreds of both censuses do not express measures of population, but something else.
A proper understanding of what was actually measured in the censuses can only be reached, when we consider the purpose implicit in counting the number of men "from twenty years old and upward [ ... ] able to go forth to war in Israel [ ... ] according to their armies" (Ex. 1,3). That purpose was not to determine the size of the population of Israel, but to constitute an army. In old times, censuses were seldom used for demographical purposes. Counting millions of people only to know the size of a population would be a luxury that very few nations could give themselves to. So, censuses had a very different goal. They were used to carry out mass military enrollment. In other words, to organize an apparatus of war. Women and children were not counted, in them, because they did not go to war.
Under this conception, the figures found immediately before the word eleph, in each census of Israel, do not indicate how many thousands of men, but how many military detachments existed in a tribe or in the nation as a whole. For example, in Reuben, the first census found 46 thousand and five hundred men,which means there were 46 detachments (thousands or elephs), out of which only 500 men remained. The conjunction and, which connects the 46 elephs to the 500 men indicates sum or addition. Therefore, there were the 500 besides the 46 detachments.
A close examination of Micah 5:2 helps us understand this a little better. In it, "groups of thousands" of Judah are military detachments (elephs) like those mentioned in the censuses. Micaiah says Bethlehem was too small to form one of these detachments. So we can infer that the military organization of the Book of Numbers was preserved long after the entrance of Israel into Canaan.
Nothing indicates that each of the "thousands" of Micah, invariably, consisted of a thousand men. It is likely that the number one thousand never occurred. The group did not need to have a certain number of members, provided that it could perform its missions with 501, 734, 990 or 2 thousand men. The same is true about the period of the wandering in the desert. During that period, Israel did not need groups of exactly a thousand effectives. So, they did not keep that number, but any other.
One may ask why each tribe had some elephs plus a few hundred men. Why some men were not included in the detachments? If we again exemplify with the case of Reuben, why the 500 men attributed to the tribe did not belong to its 46 elephs?
There are several possible explanations for this. One is that each tribe was assigned two military obligations: to keep military groups (elephs) of its own and to appoint a few hundred men to form the national detachments. The first requirement was fulfilled by the elephs related to each tribe, and the latter by the hundreds cited after the elephs.
For example, in Numbers 26,25, we read that Issachar had 64 deployments (elephs or thousands) and 300 men not allocated in them. Numbers 26,27 states that Zebulun had 60,000 men plus 500. In both cases, the thousands or elephs were groups belonging to the tribes, and the hundreds were designated to national regiments.
This interpretation may seem imaginative, but it is in accordance with the economic resources and the demographical dimension of nations in old times. In that context, the word eleph indicated a military group. We saw that, in Micah 5,2, the thousands of Judah were detachments or regiments with variable number of men. There is no reason to think that it was different in the book of Numbers. In that Penteuch book, eleph means a military group, not a thousand.
If it is so, the numbers of the two censuses tell us nothing about the population of Israel. We do not know how many men in the age of war the nation had, while walking in the desert. Much less what was its total population. However, nothing indicates that it included more than a few thousand people. Thomas Römer estimated that, in the sixth century b. C., the population of Judah was of 80 to 100 thousand people (RÖMER, Thomas. The so-called Deuteronomistic History – a sociological, historical and literary Introduction. Petropolis: Vozes, 2008. p. 111). Of course, ten centuries before, in a place so inhospitable as the Sinai and Arabic deserts, it was much smaller.
Thus we come to the conclusion that the 600,000 Israelites the Pentateuch says that left Egypt and wandered in the wilderness for 40 years may have been 600 military groups in which the nation was divided in order to face the dangers of the place and to conquer some lands in Canaan. The total number of men in these groups remains unknown, as well as the total population of Israel. But we know that the millions of people the censuses indicate never existed.
However, Israel’s eruption in Canaan, around 1540 b. C., and its conquest of several towns, including some walled, implies that the number of men greatly increased as the Group of Moses entered into several alliances during its pilgrimage. Such alliances are not improbable, since the desert and Palestine were inhabited by several bands and tribes. A merger with the Hyksos who withdrew from Egypt, around 1570 a. C., is also possible. It is the best available explanation for the spectacular growth in power implicit in the conquest of cities like Jericho. We know the power and experience of the Hyksos in the art of war. But even so, the existence of an extraordinary leader like Moses remains indispensable to complete the explanation, because mergers and alliances could hardly be successful without the organization made possible by the shade of a great leader.
From the time of the few thousand men who left Egypt, Israel must have reached tens of thousands on approaching the limits of the Promised Land. Of these, many were experienced warriors obedient to a military organization and commanded by Joshua, who assumed Moses role as he neared death. The exchange of a horde into an army seems to have been the work of Moses. His incessant labor and the success of his audacious actions produced the convergence necessary to the formation of an alliance that eventually allowed the Israelites to conquer the central region of Canaan.
For all these reasons, the most likely answer to the question "Did Moses exist?" is that we have to assume so. The basic story of the Pentateuch is internally unchallengeable and harmonious with almost all parallel evidence we know. What seemed legendary in its report, new studies show that may be true history. That is the case of the censuses of the nation of Israel.
But if the Pentateuch is internally consistent, how can the most important figure emerging from its pages have not existed? Moses existence and the acts he practiced are difficult to establish by direct proofs, given their remote location in time and the circumstances of ancient Israelites, but we must presuppose them to explain the Pentateuch and Israel. To explain, for example , the relationship of the Israelites with the Hyksos and Josephus information that the output of both was the Exodus, to explain the proven presence of Israel in Canaan, in the period of the judges and a whole list of similar things.
Overwhelming evidence of the Exodus or of Moses may be lacking, but it is the understanding made possible by faith that we seek. As believers, we need no more than faith in Scripture events; as men, we need to exercise our reason upon them. The exercise of reason does not allow us to understand everything, far from it. So, the field will always be open for faith. And by exercising our reason consistently, we will be able to accomplish God's first commandment to man, that is to be simply man, not beast nor angel. Who knows if, in the endless task of that thinking, which is not seeing as angels see nor doing without thinking as beasts do, the covering that veils remote History will one day be erected and we will be given to see its misteries. But while that day does not come, let us be satisfied with pursuing our double duty as men and believers, believers and men, not just one of them.
