The Wilderness Narrative and Itineraries and the Evolution of the Exodus Tradition 3 Israel Finkelstein Abstract This chapter examines the Exodus and wandering tradition from the perspective of the archaeology of several pivotal sites in the desert. It poses the question, “What, how, and when did the biblical authors know about the southern desert?” The answer helps to reconstruct the history of the Exodus-wandering tradition from its vague beginning as salvation-from-Egypt memories in sixteenth to tenth century BCE Canaan, through the involvement of the Northern Kingdom along the desert trade routes in the first half of the eighth century, and the presence of Judahites in the south during the “Assyrian Century,” to the Priestly scribes in post-exilic times. Introduction Scholars that have attempted to deal with the historical reality behind the Exodus and desert wandering narrative (for the two being connected see, e.g., Dozeman 2000: 64) are for the most part divided into two camps. Members of one camp adhere to the traditional research notion that the biblical material portrays the situation in the Late Bronze Age, in the thirteenth century BCE—the time calculated according to the logic of biblical chronology (e.g., Kitchen 1998; Halpern 1993; Hoffmeier 1997, 2005). These scholars face two major problems: First, it is clear today that there was no significant scribal activity in Ancient Israel until close to 800 BCE (Finkelstein and Sass 2013), and hence, they need to assume an oral transmis- sion of the story with all its details over a period of four centuries with no infiltration of realities from the time passed. Second, there is no single piece of evidence to support a Late Bronze Age origin of the tradition that cannot be understood against the background of other, later periods (e.g., Na’aman 2011: 56–60). Members of the second camp propose that the text describes realities that fit the time of compilation of the text—in late-monarchic to post-exilic days (Redford 1992: 408–422; Van Seters 2001; Finkelstein and Silberman 2001: 48–71; Liverani 2005: 277–282). The main diffi- culty that these researchers face is in explaining the strong tradition of both the Exodus and the I. Finkelstein (*) Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel e-mail: fink2@post.tau.ac.il T.E. Levy et al. (eds.), Israel’s Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective, Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-04768-3_3, # Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 39