Did two million Israelites leave Egypt?
Commentators have long been puzzled by the astounding figures given in Exod 12:37 of the Israelites leaving Egypt. If this is a rounded number of the military-aged men (compare Exod 38:26; Num 1:46), then the total for men, women and children would be around the 2 million mark. The logistical issues of feeding and sanitation for so many people, as well as movement through the desert, would be enormous. To help us imagine the scale of the problem, Desmond Alexander, an OT scholar, provides an example. If Israel went in columns of 50 in a line and each line took up 1m (3.3 feet) the entire mass would be 40km (25 miles) long. At a normal walking speed (5kmh or 3mph), the front of the column would arrive at a destination 8 hours before the end.[1]
The figures are also problematic from the perspective of archaeology.[2] For easier reference, I have compiled the figures given by Alexander into a table. Given the numbers below, as he points out, it is hard to make sense of Deut 7:1, which states that the Canaanites were more numerous (the sense of ‘greater’ in the Hebrew) and mightier than the Israelites.
One possible solution presented by several scholars is that the Hebrew for ‘thousand’ (eleph) means either ‘clan’ or a military unit here, which would make the total much lower. Since this is a consistent issue (battle numbers in the Bible seem improbably high when eleph is read as ‘thousand’), it alerts us to the fact that we may be misunderstanding the meaning, so we can make corrections.
[1] Desmond Alexander, Exodus, AOTC (Downers Grove, IL/London, UK: IVP/Apollos, 2017), 242.
[2] Ibid.
