At the time of this writing, I am 38 years old. That makes me officially old enough to remember a time when GPS and turn-by-turn navigation systems weren’t a thing, but young enough to have spent most of my life using them.
We take for granted how much this technology has changed our life. Not only can we determine the quickest route to a location, now we can also set it to avoid toll roads, construction, and traffic jams. And in a lot of modern day vehicles, we can do it while we’re driving. All we need to do is hit our voice button, tell the car where to go, and it populates our dashboard with real-time directions.
Moses didn’t have GPS, but when he left Egypt, he had something even better: God Himself guiding them via a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud.
The route that God chose to take the Israelites to Canaan was unorthodox, but relatively safe. According to Exodus 14:2, God took them away from the coast of the Mediterranean and towards the Red Sea. Presumably, this is to avoid any interactions with the Egyptians and the Philistines, since God knew His people would panic at the first sign of conflict.
The specific locations mentioned in this verse are lost to us today. Scholars have spent hundreds of years trying to determine their exact location, with varying degrees of success. That doesn’t mean the information is irrelevant, though. On the contrary: The specificity of these names gives credence to a local understanding of the terrain that only someone who had walked it would understand.
To Pharaoh’s eye, however, it looked like the Israelites were lost. He sees their route (most likely through his spies) and notices that they’ve been “shut in” by the wilderness. With nothing but water and desert bordering Israel on three sides, Pharaoh has a direct route straight to Israel’s camp.
In today’s world, the area directly in front of Israel is the Sinai Peninsula, occupied by tribes who have lived there for hundreds of years and tourist groups. At the time of Moses though, it was an inhospitable desert, deemed Egypt’s first line of defense against invasion by Eastern powers. The idea that Israel could cross any part of it without a vast support network was laughable by anyone’s standards.
Any savvy military commander would drool at the opportunity to re-capture Israel. After all, they had no place to go except backwards; moving forward into the desert meant certain death. For Pharaoh, this gave him all the motivation he needed to pursue the Israelites, round them up, and bring them back to Egypt.
The only thing that stopped him was one of God’s most famous miracles.
