Forty Years in the Wilderness

The Biblical books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy contain long lists of ritual laws that God supposedly communicated directly to Moses on the holy mountain while the Israelites were wandering for forty years in the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula after escaping from slavery in Egypt.

Among these ritual laws, there are many that could not possibly apply to the nomadic Israelites. For example, they were supposed to put blood on their doorposts. Wandering, tent-dwelling nomads don’t have doorposts. They were also supposed to make ritual cakes out of wheat flour. Wandering nomads don’t raise wheat.

It is clear to most scholars of the Bible that these ritual commandments were projected backward from the period after Israel had become a settled country, when they had doorposts and wheat fields. Most likely, these rituals had become well established by the period of Greek occupation, just before Roman occupation. The priests then projected their rituals backward to the nomadic period of their history. By claiming that God Himself had thundered the commandments from the mountain, the priests could claim absolute authority (of God and of Moses) in matters of ritual and doctrine.

But fundamentalists believe that God actually commanded the Israelites to do all of these things, for example to use wheat flour (which they did not have) for making ritual tortillas during the lifetime of Moses. As far as I recall, the commandments in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy do not say, “Someday, you will be able to keep these commandments.” The commandments were given, period, some of them on pain of death.

The fundamentalists have set themselves up for this problem. Instead of reading the Old Testament books as ritual, they insist that they are history. The ridiculous situation of a poor wandering Israelite finding himself condemned to death for not having wheat flour is the result not of the ancient writings themselves, but of fundamentalist assumptions about them.