The Long Way Around - Exodus 13:17-18

13:17-18 – As the Israelites were being led out of Egypt, imagine all those people, millions of people and millions of animals and all their stuff and I would imagine the wagons and everything, just imagine the grandeur of such an event, not in materials but in scale! Apparently, on the way out of Egypt, there was a large road, a popular thoroughfare where the people probably imagined that they were going to be traveling on, but God took them another way, “through the way of the wilderness of the Red Sea, “lest peradventure the people repent when they see war, and they return to Egypt.”

Why would this massive road show the people war? TB notes that this large road was a trade route that was also known as “Way of the Land of the Philistines.” Trade routes are notorious for their thievery, highway robbers, etc, as well as this being known explicitly as a popular way for Philistines which are going to become mortal enemies to Israel. TB also notes that “it had Egyptian fortresses strategically located along this highway, both to monitor and guard Egypt from foreign invasion, and to protect the myriads of merchants and traders that traveled this route from the never-ending bands of robbers that attacked the caravans.

This meant that on this road, Israel would have been surrounded by the constant threat of attack from not only the Egyptian army and marauding bandits, but also the armies of the surrounding peoples as well, the Canaanites, the Hitties, etc. all the ones that were described earlier. But if the Israelites were millions of people strong, to include at least 600,000 men of fighting age, why would any other force dare to attack them? They would have had to known that they wouldn’t win. But maybe winning or total destruction wouldn’t have been the point.

TB makes an excellent point that this traveling band of Israelites wouldn’t have been seen as an easy target for highway robbery or anything like that, it was much more serious. At the time, Israel represented about 25% of Egypt’s entire population, and Egypt was a major world power at the time. The loss that Israel leaving represented in Egyptian politics and their place on the world’s stage was immense, so let’s consider just how significant an impact Israel would have on the area of land that they were going to occupy, wherever they ended up. Most other nations didn’t want them where they were because that would mean a loss of power and resources for them and their people. So the violence that they would perpetrate against Israel wouldn’t be of a mere nuisance measure, but would be meant to be a deterrent to them to stick around in the already occupied area.

It also probably wouldn’t have taken the death of all 600,000 men of fighting age to dissuade the Hebrews from furthering their journey and convince them to go back to Egypt. So instead of further proving His power over others, God decided to just avoid the topic altogether, and have them go a different way. It’s also pretty convenient that they went into the wilderness initially because that’s where they are going to stay for the next 40 years. TB ends the lecture noting, “Yahweh knew His people well enough to know that if they had to fight their way all the way to the Promised Land many, if not most, of the Israelites would simply give up and go back to Egypt. Back to the life they knew rather than risk death in war… what could be more human. We do that all our lives; forever timid about stepping fully into the new life that God has for us; forever trying to keep one foot in our familiar and comfortable old life, and the other into the changed and unknown way of walking with God.” And if that didn’t reach out and speak to me personally, then I don’t know what would.