It is now possible, in the context provided by the preceding chapters, to examine the primary wilderness itineraries (Num. 21: 12–20; Num. 33: 1–49; Dt. 10: 6–7; and the itinerarynotes of P) one by one, in the hope of establishing the routes to which they refer. We begin with the fullest and longest text, Num. 33: 1–49. The three points already used to define the general outline of the route can also serve to divide it into four sections which can be studied separately.

RAMESES–YAM SUF

The first two places in the itinerary (prior to Etham ‘on the edge of the wilderness’) are generally agreed to have been in the eastern Nile delta and have been located with considerable precision on the basis of apparent references to them in Egyptian texts. Rameses is usually taken to be identical with Pr-rmśśw, the Ramesside city in the delta, which most scholars now locate at Qantir or at the neighbouring site of Tanis (San el-Hajar). An Egyptian equivalent also seems to exist for Succoth in Ṯkw, a name of an area in Wadi Tumilat which extends west from modern Ismailia, and just conceivably the Egyptian name for Tell el-Maskhuta there, to which ‘Pithom’ in Ex. 1: 11 is likely to refer. But some scholars regard ‘Succoth’ as a true Semitic name meaning ‘booths’ (compare the place of this name in central Transjordan (Gen. 33: 17 etc.)), in which case only its general location in the border area infiltrated by nomads can be fixed.

Among the geographical texts in the Pentateuch the wilderness itineraries form a group which provide especially precise information and share an unusually similar structure. The longest and most complete example is found in Num. 33: 1–49, but parallels to parts of this passage exist in a series of isolated verses in the main narrative of Exodus and Numbers, which show agreement with it in content and structure, and often in verbal details as well (e.g. Ex. 12: 37a). Shorter itineraries are to be found in Num. 21: 12–20 and Dt. 10: 6–7. These passages belong, from the point of view of their form, to a widely attested literary genre of the ancient world, which survives mainly in official documents. It is probable that this way of presenting a route was borrowed by the writers of the Old Testament from the repertoire of the archives of the Israelite royal court.

In view of their primary function – which is to describe routes – it is only to be expected that the geographical significance of the wilderness itineraries would be a topic of continuing interest to readers and interpreters of the books in which they occur. It is certainly this aspect of the texts which has received the greatest attention from scholars in the modern period, to the neglect, it must be said, of other features such as their formal characteristics.

The location of Mount Sinai in the south of the Sinai peninsula and of Kadesh at or near Ain Qadeis, together with the identification of ‘Yarn Suf’ as the Hebrew name for the Gulfs of Akaba and Suez, defines the general area to which the wilderness itineraries refer as the Sinai peninsula. Before passing to the detailed identification of the routes described it will be useful to take note of roads linking the points already identified which have been found practicable in the Biblical period and since. In the Sinai peninsula, as in other difficult terrain, it is not possible to travel by just any route: the physical features, particularly the mountain areas and the escarpments, prescribe certain routes from which all travellers have been bound to choose. It is probable that when the attempt was made to define the route taken by the Israelites through the desert use was made of descriptions of routes, oral or written, which were already employed by travellers.

Already in the Old Testament several routes are mentioned by name in the peninsula, but there has not been total agreement on their identification. It is even possible that the same route may have had different names, the choice depending on which way one was going. For our present purpose it is not necessary to become involved in this controversy, because the scholars involved do not disagree about what routes were in use but only about the names by which they were known.

In the preceding chapter we indicated the attitudes which we propose to adopt to the Biblical text and the traditions of interpretation contained in Jewish, Christian and Arabic sources. In addition we shall be guided by the principles of toponymy as set out by Aharoni. There are however special problems in the interpretation of the itineraries which need to be overcome if the routes described are to be identified with any degree of certainty at all. On the one hand a century and more of exploration has been unable to discover more than a handful of plausible equivalents for names in the itineraries, either in ancient texts or in recent Arabic nomenclature. But on the other hand, where possible survivals of the names do occur, there is often more than one such possibility. Fortunately there are a few places which are mentioned not only in the itineraries but in other parts of the Old Testament as well, so that these can be identified with some confidence and can then serve as indicators of the general outline of the routes described. For example, there is no doubt that the places named in Num. 33: 45b–49 lay on a route running north to a point near the northern end of the Dead Sea. That itinerary therefore has a fixed terminus. Other places whose identification is of programmatic significance are Mount Sinai (or the Wilderness of Sinai), Yam Suf and Kadesh.

At first glance the Hebrew and Aramaic texts appear to be unpromising material for a geographical inquiry such as this. Where there is any interest at all in the itineraries and the names that appear in them, the approach is generally that of the etymologising midrash. This kind of interpretation, which could find some justification in the Old Testament itself (cf. Ex. 17: 7; Num. 11:3, 34), deduces from a name something about the early history of Israel, assuming that the name was conferred on the place because of a specific occurrence in Israel's past. Even where this kind of exegesis is not present, the overall interest of the translators and commentators seems to be in non-geographical aspects of the Biblical text, either the harmonising of apparently contradictory accounts or the extracting of a universal halakhic principle from it. Yet such ‘spiritualising’ interpretations are not the whole of what these exegetes had to say about the text. There are some indications of an interest in geographical questions in the treatment of the itineraries. Unfortunately this most often happens in the Targumim, where the identifications are anonymous and there is often no sure way of distinguishing an early interpretation from a comparatively late one. In a few cases, where a tradition is attested elsewhere, it is possible to affirm that it originated in or before the Tannaitic period, for example.