I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.
Today, I am reading and commenting on Numbers 1-2.
A few weeks ago, I was looking up some information about the Exodus account. One thing I found was a statement that many historians do not believe the account in Exodus actually happened, certainly not anywhere close to the way it is described in the Bible. One of the reasons they were convinced of this was because the Sinai desert could not support the number of people given in today’s passage. I was curious about whether or not that was true, so I looked up the current population of Sinai. The Sinai Peninsula today has a population of about 600,000 people in total. However, the biblical account does not claim that the Israelites lived off of the land in the Sinai desert. It tells us that God provided the people with manna to live off of. So, the number of people which this passage describes only becomes a barrier to believing in this account if you do not believe in the ability of God to miraculously provide for His people.