Moses and the Nomads

Sitting a chow tonight, i was discussing my thoughts on being in Mesopotamia with my battalion chaplain. He too was marveling at the region that we are in, how culturally and religiously significant to us this area has been. We saw nomads while on our way from the airport. Couple trailers, a tent and some camels. Modern day nomads! how they live out here is truly beyond my comprehension.

Reflecting with Chaplain Cobb, we realized that in 40 years, roughly 1 million Hebrews AND their gear AND their livestock roamed the Arabian Peninsula. He was reading Joshua and recounting the kings he conquered as they moved into the Promised Land. The army has a hard time logistically in MODERN times with GPS, computers etc, tracking and following gear and personnel. How Moses was able to maneuver and coordinate the movement of ALL those people, without modern tech, is mind boggling. and 1,000,000 people can cover a lot of ground in a day, 365 days/year, for 40 years!! not accounting for death, birth and injury to both person and beast, that is a HUGE amount of distance. imagine the swath of people! Figure the average person takes up say 4 square feet. They walk 2 miles in an hour, and figure they walked roughly 10 hours a day. So, mathematically, that's 422,400 square feet covered by each person, PER DAY. multiplied out, in 40 years, ONE person would log roughly 1,168,000 square MILES. That's the equivalent of them walking the ENTIRE Arabian Peninsula by them self.  Now you factor in the number of the hebrew nation, estimated by myself and the chaplain at possibly 1,000,000 people. if they stood still, not counting livestock or equipment, the amount of land they occupied STATIONARY is 758 square miles!

Needless to say, i'm pretty sure people saw the same landmarks, over and over. Chaplain Cobb wondered if it was possibly cooler then. I thought about it and determined that the 40 years of wandering was a punishment by God for the Hebrew's disobedience. I guess making each person walk 1.1 times the surface area of the Arabian Peninsula is pretty intense punishment, but i think God would not necessarily alter the temperature to make this endeavour any easier. he may have cranked the heat, there-by when they were finally allowed to enter the Promised Land, there would an even greater appreciation for the Lord and His guidance.  It wasnt to inconvenience them, like making it halfway to Texas from California only to turn around because your neighbor said you left the house wide open and they couldn't lock it up for you. No, this was about showing who was and IS ultimately in control. The Lord does things for very specific reasons and the stories of his wrath AND grace are passed to us as a guide of what to do and what not to do. Why then do we complain when we do exactly what our ancestors have done and get the same reaction from God?