ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #3 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Thanks, Dr. Adams. My name is Nick. I have a question about the travels depicted in Genesis and Exodus. At the end of the book of Genesis we leave the story when Jacob and his family go down to Egypt. And then after the exodus, God leads all the tribes of Israel back to the Promised Land. I've always wondered: How far did they have to go? And how long would it have taken them? >> This raises the question of how big the world of the Bible in general is, Nick. And perhaps we should step back and begin with an overview of the Old Testament world and then deal with specific questions about distances and time of travel. The region that we think of as the world of the Old Testament extends from the borders of Pesia in the ancient times or modern Iran in the east to Greece and Libya and Africa in the west. By air that's a distance of about 1500 miles. And in the north-south scale, it extends from the Black Sea in the north to the southern border of Egypt, what's now the border between Egypt and Sudan in the south. That's about 1300 miles from north to south. So the total area of the world of the Old Testament is about 2 million square miles. Now, that's a huge geographic area that encompassed the whole of the known world, not just in biblical times but for a very long time. It's also a very important part of the world. It's the seat of human civilization as we know it. It's the source of language. It's the part of the world where law began, where art began and music began. So much of the history of the world and its people is here in this region. It's a huge area. But in practice, the distances that we're concerned about are not actually all that great. For example, in Genesis we're told that God called Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees in Babylon. We'll talk about that later. And he called him and eventually sent him to Jerusalem. The distance from Ur to is Jerusalem as the crow flies is about 500 miles. So it's not really all that far. And from Memphis or Cairo in modern Egypt to Jerusalem is about 275 miles. So even closer. of course, they didn't travel by air as the crow flies. And most ground transportation at that time was done by foot. In a later age Julius Cesar once boasted that his army, his Roman imperial army, could cover 40 miles in a single day. And that's probably true, they could. But they probably couldn't do it every day. That's a long march even for a Roman army. Probably a better maximum average for the Roman army was 25 miles a day as an average. And that was -- would be the same really whether you're traveling by foot or by camel or by donkey because travel by camel or donkey isn't all that much faster than traveling by foot. A more realistic daily average for land travel in general in the ancient world was probably something more along the lines of five or ten miles a day. At that rate, 500 miles from Ur to Jerusalem -- keeping in mind that they didn't travel in a straight line. They followed the course of the rivers and then down the 275 miles from Cairo to Jerusalem -- would have been major journeys. The Bible doesn't tell us of how long it took for Abraham and Sara to go down from Canaan to Egypt. But it probably would have been a month in each direction. Plus the time that they stayed there. 275 miles, if you average five to ten miles a day, it's probably going to take you a good month to travel. And if they spent some time there and came back, the journey could have been easily six months or a year. The same with Jacob's sons going down to meet Joseph in Egypt. We don't think about it. But they were probably gone from Jacob's home for a third or a fourth of the year. Three or four months for that journey because of the way that travel was. Now, they didn't always travel by foot. Sometimes they were able to travel on the rivers. Because the world of the Bible is really dominated by three major river systems. And we'll take just a second to look at each of these in turn. The first in Mesopotamia. The area of Babylon, Assyria or Mesopotamia in general is dominated by two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. These begin up in the north up in the Caucus Mountains in Armenia and they flow southeastward into the Persian Gulf. And they bring water from the mountains in the northwest into Mesopotamia and watered the land that we call Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers. Mesopotamia, that's what it means in Greek. Between the rivers. In between the rivers. The Euphrates is about oh, 1780 miles long. About 1200 miles of that is navigable by boat. At its widest point it's about 400 yards wide. So it's a fairly major river. It was so important in the biblical world that in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, the Euphrates is simply called ***Hanahar, the river. It's the river that dominates -- it's really like in America we might think of the Mississippi as the river, you know, in comparison with all other rivers. And that's how they thought of the Euphrates. Even in Jerusalem. That's how important the Euphrates was. The Tigris is a little smaller. It's just a little over 1,000 miles long. 1146 miles is the usual length that's given. And it was important. But it wasn't as dominate as the Euphrates. In the land of Canaan and Palestine, the world, you know, where Israel was, the Levant as we sometimes call it, the land is dominated also by two rivers. The Orontes, which we don't hear so much about in the Bible, and the Jordan. Both of these rivers begin their course in the mountains of Lebanon. The Orontes flows north from the mountains of Lebanon and -- flows north and eventually makes a little turn and enters the Mediterranean Sea just north of where the later city of Antioch was in Old Testament times. The city of Ugarit was just a little to the south of that there. The Jordan flows south from the mountains in Lebanon near Mount Hermon and flows through a great geological rift, the Jordan Rift Valley, and empties into the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is the lowest point on the earth. The surface of the Dead Sea is 1285 feet below sea level. And the Dead Sea is about 1300 feet deep. So the floor of the dead sea is more than 2500 feet below sea level. It's the lowest point on the face of the earth on the land mass of the earth. The region that's defined by the flow of these two rivers, the Orontes to the north, the Jordan to the south, is called the Levant. The northern Levant we think of today as Lebanon, Syria, Phoenicia in ancient times all the way up really to the southern part of Turkey, southeastern part of Turkey, and the southern part of the Levant. The part that we're more aware of in biblical studies is Canaan, Jordan and the nations that were gathered around Israel in that time. Egypt, too, is dominated by a major river. In some ways more than these others. The River Nile, the name comes actually from a Greek word ***nalos meaning the river valley, is an even longer river. It's 4184 miles long. It actually begins as two rivers, the Blue Nile and the White Nile. The Blue Nile begins its course near Lake Tana in modern Ethiopia. The White Nile begins its course near Lake Victoria in what is modern Uganda in southeastern Africa. These two come together at Khartoum in Sudan. A very strategic location. And I was actually in Khartoum a few years ago. And I went to the spot where the Blue Nile and the White Nile came together and I was standing there. And I was looking at them. And I was with a Sudanese pastor. I said, "This is the Blue Nile. That's the White Nile. They both look brown to me." And he said Actually at some times of the year because of the way the water drains from the mountains, the Blue Nile is actually clearly darker in color than the White Nile. And the two come together and you can actually see them mixing together. So while they are not actually blue and white, they are sort of darker and lighter color. But the Nile, as I said, from its -- at its longest point is 4184 miles long. It drops over 6,000 feet from its height in the mountains to the Mediterranean Sea. And each of these rivers is in its own way vitally important to the history of the region. And we'll talk a little more about them as we go along, especially the Nile since most of our story in Exodus is set in Egypt. And the Nile is important for this. But these were not only -- these rivers were not only important for transportation. Life itself in the ancient world depended upon these rivers. In Mesopotamia and Egypt in particular the annual flooding of the Euphrates and the Tigris and the Nile were so important that they became the subjects of critical religious observances in those places, as well. And that in Egypt in particular there are -- special religious rituals and practices arose in an attempt to ensure that the cycle of the seasons, which included the appropriate flooding of the Nile, would continue, that the gods would pay attention and would keep the Nile flowing in its correct course. We'll be talking about this a little more later on. Because in the plague narratives, several of the plagues deal with the Nile and the flow of the Nile. And we'll see how Yahweh reveals himself in relation to the gods of Egypt and uses the Nile to do that. Well, then to sort of wrap up here by taking a look at the major political regions as they developed around these areas, first turning to Mesopotamia, most of the area of Mesopotamia is dominated by two political entities that we come to call Babylon and Assyria. Babylon is the kingdom that was ultimately formed in the southern part of Mesopotamia. Assyria was the kingdom that came to dominate the northern part of Mesopotamia. Moving west from there, we have another nation that we call Aram or the land of the Armeans. That's very important for biblical history. Moving again east -- rather west and a little south we come to the Levant. Canaan and Lebanon. We've already talked about those. Also we should mention the land of the Hittites or Anatolia as it's sometimes called, which is on the margins of the story of the Bible. we get Hittite individuals like Uriah the Hittite mentioned in the Bible. But the Hittites themselves don't come into the story of the Bible directly. Then of course we get Arabia to the south, which again is marginally important for biblical history. And Egypt which is vitally important for our story in the book of Exodus. And we'll talk more about the geography of Egypt as we move through the course. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***