Anonymous · 1400 BCE · overland

Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. A people walk out of Egypt in one night and take forty years to cross a distance a caravan could do in two weeks. The route is disputed at almost every point except its start and its end - and its end is a man on a mountain being shown a country he is not allowed to enter.

1. 1
   Rameses

   They leave in haste with unleavened dough on their shoulders, after ten plagues and a night of blood on the doorposts - six hundred thousand men on foot, the text says, besides women and children.

2. 2
   Succoth

   The first camp, and the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night. Pharaoh changes his mind and comes after them with six hundred chariots, and they are caught between the army and the water.

3. 3
   The Sea

   The sea goes back and they cross on dry ground with the water a wall on either side - and the Egyptians follow and do not come out. It is the founding event, and it happens in the dark.

4. 4
   Sinai

   The mountain smoking, the tablets, the golden calf, and forty years of law given to people who spend most of the passage asking to go back to Egypt where at least there were cucumbers.

5. 5
   Kadesh-Barnea

   The spies go north and come back saying the land is good and the people in it are giants - and the refusal to go in costs a generation, who are told they will die in the wilderness instead, and do.

6. 6
   The plains of Moab

   Forty years later a second generation arrives on the far side of the Jordan, opposite Jericho - and the whole of Deuteronomy is Moses talking to them before they cross without him.

7. 7
   Mount Nebo

   He goes up alone and is shown the land from Gilead to the western sea, and dies there at a hundred and twenty with his eye undimmed - and nobody knows his burial place to this day.