Stations of the Exodus

The Stations of the Exodus are the 42 locations visited by the Israelites following their exodus from Egypt, recorded in, with variations also recorded in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy.

According to the documentary hypothesis, the list of the Stations is believed to have originally been a distinct and separate source text. In this hypothesis, it is believed that the redactor, in combining the Torah's sources, used parts of the Stations list to fill out awkward joins between the main sources. The list records the locations visited by the Israelites, during their journey through the wilderness, after having left Egypt. Consequently, the parts which were inserted to join up the sources appear in suitable locations in the books of Exodus and Numbers.

However, a slightly variant version of the list appears in full at Numbers 33, and several parts of the journey described in the full list, most noticeably the journey from Sinai to Zin, do not appear in the fragmented version.

Both versions of the list contain several brief narrative fragments. For example " ... and they came to Elim, where there were twelve wells of water, and seventy date-palms...". It is a matter of some debate as to how much of the narrative is part of the original text of the list, and how much is extra detail added into it by the redactor.

The situation also occurs in reverse, where some brief texts, within parts of the list, and ascribed to the redactor, are usually regarded as not being part of the list of stations, albeit without much conviction. This is particularly true for, which references unknown events in the lost Book of the Wars of the Lord, and , describing the digging of the well at Beer.

Biblical commentators like St Jerome in his Epistle to Fabiola, Bede (Letter to Acca: "De Mansionibus Filiorum Israhel") and St Peter Damian discussed the Stations according to the Hebrew meanings of their names. Dante modeled the 42 chapters of his Vita Nuova on them.

Locating the Stations
Attempting to locate many of the stations of the Israelite Exodus is a difficult task, if not infeasible. Though scholars have conceded that it is at the very least plausible for the narrative of the Exodus to have some sort of historical basis, the event in question would be nowhere near the mass-emigration and subsequent forty years of desert nomadism described in the Tanakh. Even if the Exodus had occurred to the scale and sequence the modern Hebrew Bible ascribes to it, there are a plethora of issues in trying to examine the progression of the event outside the lack of material evidence. Descriptions of many of the stations lack recognizable distinguishing features or are very broadly defined. Examples include Marah, the fifth station, which is succinctly defined as a place where the Israelites found the drinking water to be exceptionally bitter, or the "Wilderness of Sin" which is simply described as the area between Elim and Mount Sinai. Many of the qualifiers used to ascertain the location are inconsistent or cannot be reliably placed, one such example being the Wilderness of Sin, an area whose location cannot be positively determined thanks to numerous traditions of the exact location of Mount Sinai. Locations central to the narrative of the Exodus such as the Sea of Reeds, Mount Sinai, and Raamses also lack positive identification, making it more difficult to plot a plausible map of the Israelite's journey correlated to the modern Sinai Peninsula. Other than that, geographical changes need to be taken into consideration. Features of desert environs such as Sinai are subjected to several weathering processes that can drastically alter local conditions in a matter of days, let alone the implicit 3,000 years since the Exodus and modern studies and surveys. Springs can dry up, wadis can radically change course, geological formations could erode or be swept away by the sands, etc. Additionally, if an Exodus truly occurred historically in some analogous or similar manner to that which is described in the Bible, the material culture of a group of newly freed slaves wandering in a vast desert would be admittedly scant and likely would not have survived nearly as long as, say, a sedentary village community or even city in a desert region. As such, identifying the stations of the Exodus are almost entirely conjectural.