Stations of the Exodus

The Bible lists 42 locations or "stations" visited by the Israelites following their exodus from Egypt. They are definitively listed in Numbers 33, but also are given at length in Exodus and Deuteronomy. Biblical commentators like St Jerome in his Epistle to Fabiola, Bede and St Peter Damian discussed them according to the Hebrew meanings of their names. Dante models the 42 chapters of the Vita Nuova on them.

Under the documentary hypothesis, the list 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 Book of Exodus and the Book of 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. It is tempting to suggest that the journey from Sinai to Zin was cut out of the fragmented version due to a copying error caused by the similarity in sound of "Sinai" and "Zin". However, as there are 42 locations in the full list, and the Israelites were said to have been in the desert for 40 years, it is possible that several locations in the full list were added to the list of destinations as a literary device.

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 the 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 Numbers 21:14-15, which references unknown events in the lost Book of the Wars of the Lord, and Numbers 21:16b-18a, describing the digging of the well at Beer.

List of the Stations of the Exodus

References