Tracing the Israelites’ Journey Through the Desert Sands

For generations, explorers and researchers have searched for signs of the Israelites’ journey through the desert after leaving Egypt. Some have tried to match ancient place names with descriptions from the Torah. Others followed the natural landscape mentioned in the text, places like Mount Hor and Migdol. Many simply hoped to find any kind of remnant. After all, according to tradition, 600,000 people died in the desert. Could their burial places still be found?

It’s not as simple as it sounds. Most human remains naturally break down over time. If we still had bones from every person or animal that ever lived, there wouldn’t be any room left on Earth.

And then there’s the sheer size of the desert. Not even one percent of the vast Sinai Desert has been properly excavated. Who knows what still lies hidden beneath the sand dunes and rocky hills? In Egypt, for example, archaeologists still discover ancient pyramids buried under the sands every few years.

Scholar Richard Elliott Friedman points out how misleading some claims can be. “Some archaeologists have said, ‘We scanned Sinai and found nothing.’ But an Israeli archaeologist laughed when he heard that and told me, ‘They sent five jeeps, that was a survey, not an excavation of the entire Sinai Peninsula.’ Even if we dug up all of Sinai, what would we expect to find from people who wandered from Egypt to Israel over 3,000 years ago? One archaeologist shared that a vehicle lost in the 1973 Yom Kippur War was recently found buried under sixteen meters of sand. Sixteen meters in just forty years! Imagine how deep something could be buried after 3,000 years...” (Richard Elliott Friedman, The Exodus, p. 17).

According to Jewish tradition, the Israelites would often gather and bury the bones of their loved ones in family graves. This may suggest that even those who died in the wilderness were eventually brought to rest in Israel, their bones carried home by descendants.

And even when archaeologists do find ancient artifacts in the Sinai Desert, it's hard to tell if they belonged to the Israelites. Dating objects is tricky. A tool or bone from two hundred years ago can look a lot like one from 3,000 years ago. Experts sometimes date items based on what materials were used. For example, the "Iron Age" began around the time of the Exodus. During this time, iron tools became more common. So if a site has lots of iron tools, it's probably from that later period.

But here's something to think about. The Israelites in the desert weren’t part of a city. They weren’t farming or building permanent homes. Even if iron tools existed in the world at that time, how would they have gotten them? And why would they need them? According to the Torah, they ate manna from Heaven. They didn’t plant or harvest crops. They were wanderers.

That’s why some of the most puzzling archaeological findings in the desert might actually make sense. Researcher M. Heymann writes: “We don't have a clear explanation for how these desert settlements existed so far from water. We don’t know what they ate. Grinding stones were found, which shows they had grain—but they didn’t seem to grow it themselves. Sickles, which are used for harvesting, were found in very small numbers. There’s some evidence of trade, but not enough to support an entire community.” (M. Heymann, Nomads and Settlers in the Negev Highlands, 1998, pp. 109, 112, 113).

So if they didn’t grow food and didn’t trade much but had grain, where did it come from? It’s a mystery that lines up with the Torah’s description of manna, a miraculous food that fell from the sky.

Yehoshua Etsiyon also describes intriguing finds. “The most significant discoveries were burial fields scattered across the Sinai and the Negev Highlands. Sometimes graves were grouped closely together; other times they were more spread out. The types of graves varied, some were stone mounds (called tumuli), and others were actual structures. Near these graves, archaeologists found signs of places where people camped or lived temporarily. Usually, the remains were circular structures around a courtyard. These burial fields and camps suggest that a huge number of people once passed through Sinai in a short period of time.”

So where did they get water? The Torah says that water came from miraculous sources like the rock that brought forth water through Miriam’s well. And what did they eat? Again, the Torah answers: manna from Heaven.

In the end, searching for proof of the Israelites’ desert journey is a difficult task but not a hopeless one. The desert still holds secrets, and each new discovery could bring us one step closer to understanding our past.