Fox and Talen's Blurty

The Straight Poop On The Exodus
My father wanted me to stop reading the Fighting Fantasy books when I was nine. He wanted me to stop reading them because he was convinced there was a demonic element to them - that the books which were, basically, about a lone guy in a world full of things that could randomly and arbitarily kill you but was somehow going to survive and save the world one way or another, was somehow actually a gateway into believing genuine, honest-to-god, real-world magic. They believed I could cast spells by inventing number systems and were cautious about my use of oragami because they saw a textbook that referred to the sacred geometry. They were worried about all the fiction I saw when I was growing up. Fighting Fantasy, Disney films, and even more advanced stuff like The Belgariad. There was only one proxy that made a story automatically acceptable - if the story could be easily seen as a Bible parallel.

So I thought, sitting down, with an afternoon to work with... why not have a go at that? Why not actually look at one of the Bible stories that my dad regards as a fact, and see how well that works? Because there's a creeping sense I've been getting lately, something I'm trying to put into words about the environment in which I was raised, which disturbs me the more I consider it. Now, rather than dismantle a full story, I thought I'd leap to something I could manage with science because I had an idea as to applying numerical tools to the information in question. The story in question is the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.

So I asked my dad - how many people left Egypt in that one night? His answer was a very simple one: Two million people, plus livestock.

Two million people. Two million people. Two million people plus animals. Two million people. This number is fine to say from a pulpit. Extolling it emphasises the miraculousness of the event, but the thing is, miracle working is just like a magic trick. Narratively speaking, you have to use the miracle to make a bridge in the minds of the listeners, and that emphasises the specialness in the narrative. People don't like the unlikely, or the impossible. And the miracle misdirects their attention. When you have people swallowing ten plagues across Egypt - and I can go onto them later - you can simply have the population of Israel walk out of Egypt without any problems.

So what does two million people mean? Really? Really really? Because repeating it over and over only gives a vague impression. People don't really handle expanded numbers well, and it's kinda funny the way we think we do grok them. Especially when you translate those numbers to long-term effects. People don't realise the gulfs in space, for example - you can watch any sci-fi series and see as every planet and star is basically a long trip to the shops rather than anything else. You can see people talk about 'a million dollars' and they talk about things like cars (the majority of even the plushest cars tend to run barely a half a million, and the cars that cost closer to a million tend to cost even more in upkeep), or property (property being worth a million dollars is pretty reasonable when you consider what people pay for it and the way it doesn't go anywhere). When you start talking about scientific values or populations, that's when people's grasp on numbers like a million become meaningless. They just think in terms of chunks, and they don't tend to chunk it up very well.

The classic image of the Exodus is these two million people in a line or column about, well, a dozen or more people across, then trailing off behind those dozen. Okay, makes sense to anyone who's been on a hike, right? You don't have to be able to track the people behind yourself, you just need to be able to keep an eye on the guys in front. Plus, we're talking about the desert. It's not like we're guna get lost, it's nice and flat. That's not the problem. The problem is length.

When you go walking with your friends, you probably don't all hug close. You have about a meter of personal space around yourself at any given point in time. Again, this is presuming we're just talking about the people, just the people, ignoring their camping supplies or their animals. Assuming they're all moseying along, carefree, like we're talking about the street-walking bummery, with about half a meter of personal space to each side, and about a meter behind them - because, you do by default keep some distance between yourself and the guy in front of you? - how big is this column? Well, if we assume the leading face of this group is merely twelve guy, you're looking at a column that's about 6 meters wide and 166,666 meters long. A HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SIX KILOMETERS.

Well, fuck!

So what if we adjust that number of the face. Clearly, that twelve is pretty silly - it's just me using sunday school stories (remember, those things we tell kids) to handle a real logistical concern. Two million people don't just file along like that - but then, they also don't travel without horse, pack, and cow, which the Bible makes clear they did have. I'm throwing out things that make my case stronger in this. Yet even then, I concede that the dozen-guys-at-the front image is wrong, and instead we'll let this mass bulge out a bit.

What say that this grid of two million folk is just a quarter as wide as it is long? Then you're looking at a face, the face that's following just Moses, that's about three hundred meters wide.

Okay, let that one filter into your head. You have just Moses, maybe Aaron and Miriam at the head of a column of guys three hundred meters wide. What are some things that are three hundred meters wide?

Well, there's this. Or this. Or what the heck, four of these! Think about that! And this means that if you're off on the sides of this column of travellers, Moses is a hundred and fifty meters away Buhwhah? Have you ever tried to maintain control and direction over a group like that?

Now, when I criticised Death Note, I did so with the argument that the whole thing required a very small, petty, scared world, a world roughly the same size as the writers' highschool classes. The way gossip blossomed around the world, the way everyone seemed to react to shit in roughly the same way, and the way everything was grotesquely simplified all spoke to me of not a world afraid, but rather, a few dozen people, people just like the authors. This is the same writing that plagues the Bible. Why?

The guys who wrote the Bible didn't know what two million people meant. Fuck, I doubt the number two million is mentioned there. Even if they had, there's no way they'd have seen two million people concentrated. Heck, even now, these people - yes, I use 'these people' to refer to ill-educated idiots who exalt in espousing bronze age idiocy, so, yes, Americans in this context, - can't tell the difference between 30,000 people and 1,500,000 people. What's the difference, in easy form? Well, ignoring the simple math (FIFTY TIMES AS MANY PEOPLE), thirty thousand people using the same area mass I'm using for the children of Israel, all in a square, represents about a hundred and seventy meters of square space. Or for further comparison: 1.5 million people is less than half the population of Sydney. 30,000 people is one-and-a-half times the capacity of the Win Stadium.

I'm getting off-track - as I so often do. The wonder of this kind of exercise is it causes me to stretch my brain and remember formulae I let lie fallow since I was in high school, and that kind of thing excites me. I want to apply these formulae to all areas of life (you should see some of the numbers I've got written down that aren't going into the article).

Alright, so a hundred and fifty meters to see Moses. Do you know why we call normal vision '20/20'? It's because 20 feet is the distance at which most people (hence 'normal') can differentiate two objects from one another. At either side of the column, you're going to have a hard time telling Moses from another member of the column who's technically on your left, unless Moses is way out in front - and with the dust kickup and the level of detritus you have moving when you have people on the move, chances are that that's too far away.

So if we limit the column to twenty feet on either side, what number do we wind up with...?

Twelve meters.

Duhshitwhat?

Didn't I throw that number out as a silly, Sunday School story angle?

Seems it's the most reasonable one I can find, too. I mean, I tried - the Bible makes no note of even reasonable technological devices they could have used to guide a population that large (even as the apologists leap to claim they were used, hahahah, nice literalism, fuckheads), it makes no note that god miraculously guided them - in fact, the Bible made a big point of the fact that the Israelites were kinda pissy that the only person receiving any divine guidance was Moses. If God had set up a landing strip or sets of lights, it would have worked out far more easily and he wouldn't have had the problems he did with getting these people to move around. Then again, the story of the Israelites is basically a chain of sequential incidents highlighting that the only thing that could match God's unreasonable dickishness was the Israelites' nanosecond-measurable forgetfulness as to that same God's dickishness. Either way.

If we presume this is true, we're talking about a column of people about twelve people wide - again, ignoring cattle, camp, and assorted crap - that's over a hundred and fifty kilometers long. A hundred miles long. Using this number of a hundred and sixty-six kilometers as our gauge, we get to the next part of my objection to this story.

Oh yes, you probably knew this was coming.

We're going to talk about poop

Now, your average stool is 100 grams. These numbers, I won't lie, aren't great - but I can say with no small amount of confidence that nobody I know has pulled one out of the loo to weigh it in a plastic baggy, or if they had, they're not about to argue with me about it. You poop, on average, three times a day, so we're talking about 3*100*2,000,000 grams of feces every day. How much is that? Six hundred tons

SIX HUNDRED FUCKING TONS. EVERY FUCKING SAY. And it's not like this stuff is neatly being disposed of, and this is still ignoring the cattle and livestock and such. If this stuff is being disposed of neatly, then it's being shifted out into piles. Now, either some people are shifting this poop a few hundred meters away (and you gotta remember, the Israelites had strict rules as to what was and what wasn't clean, to the point where you had to get all your masturbating done on the sabbath afternoon if you wanted a chance to go to temple next sabbath, but this is before that law had been bestowed. For all we know, these guys were noshing away on pork, and we do know they were uncircumcised, since it wasn't until after the Law was dispensed that Moses went on his disgusting little foreskin-collecting blood orgy. So what's going to happen to six hundred tons of shit?

Well, one can hope that these Israelites were smart enough to keep it separate from their foodtstuffs and whatnot, since if they didn't, there wouldn't be two million of them long. On the other hand, it wasn't until the rise of the British empire that it became common knowledge that people shouldn't get shit near their food. It's easy to look back with the eye of a storybook-reading modernist and assume, assume that these things went in place because we're projecting our values back on them. But this is in Exodus. They don't even know - get this, they don't even know that murder is wrong!

Isn't that a hoot? Some fucking chosen people!

(Remember, God loves everyone equally, he just loves the Jews more. Let that one spin the literalist propellor.)

What makes this worse is the length of it all. A hundred and sixty kilometers of people do not move quickly. According to most sites I could find, human walking speed is about five kilometers an hour, presuming a young, healthy male. Now, the children of Israel were not as fit or as healthy as we are. Racist, I know, but we're talking about an era of human history where humans lived to be about forty (unless you're one of the chosen of God, in which case you live to a hundred and your eighty-year olds can murder giants). So again, presuming no cattle, presuming no horses, presuming none of the murdering and adultery slowed these people down, and presuming no children, or no elderly men (you know, thirty year olds), you're looking at 5 kilometers an hour, and let's give 'em the ability to set up and pull up their tents in an hour total. This means seventeen hours of the day are spent walking. No food breaks, no poop breaks (hah), none of that - and you're looking, once more, at a transit time of 75 kilometers a day.

This means that the back of the line wouldn't have caught up with the place the front of the line had gotten up to. The people in the arse of the line would be walking through yesterday's camps from the front line. Through the miraculously-dug privy holes, past the literal tons of shit that the front half of the line created, and so on, all the while crawling along at seventy-five miles a day.

This is just one logistical problem with the departure of Israel. We could go on - we could talk about the impact it would have had on the Nation of Egypt. We could talk about the Plagues. We could talk about the calf of Baal, we could talk about God talking about other gods, we could talk about the supposed reproduction rate required for a population to maintain itself when it's two million people dying off at the age of forty. The thing is, we're not told to look at that. This is before Manna, before the law, before any of this stuff, on the way to Mt Sinai - but I digress.

This entire idea, of two million people migrating, en masse, by foot, from Egypt, is a logistical nightmare, unfeasible in the extreme, and made worse by the first encounter that the Red Sea. The red sea is, on average, about two hundred kilometers across. To cross from Egypt to the Sinai peninsula, across the narrower parts of the Red Sea is a trip of a mere sixty-four kilometers.

Assuming our population of two million completely healthy, long-legged, modern men are keeping up their good clip, that should take them merely ten hours to cross. Ten hours for the guys who came across at the front to cross. The guys at the back? They're not getting across until they catch up. They guys at the back of the queue are over a hundred kilometers away. Remember, they're being pursued by people on chariot at this point, and yet, somehow, these chariot-bound guys are able to arrive at just the nick of time to fail to stop them finishing the crossing.

This all sounds ridiculous, right? Of course it does. It'd be better organised than that. It'd have to be better organised. There would have to be a wider column, there would have to be more people leading than just Moses. There would have to be better ways to handle this, and while we're at it, people would need to already have a good reason not to murder one another, and there would have to be ways to dispense with the shit out of the whole column and so on and handling the animals and speeding up the children and ... well by this point, you have to wonder if the Biblical account is leaving out more than it's providing.

The story is written from the fanciful position of the ignorant. It only works if you don't think about things. Compared to nonsense like Die Hard 4.0 and Death Note, the Bible is a far more offensive example of idiocy, because there are intelligent, adult people who believe it's true and believe it's not only true, but that its completely unjustifiable self-confirmed status as factual justifies embracing the further idiocy of this bronze-age pack of fantasy myth-weavers in a modern era with people who are raising kids, determining policy, and making medical decisions that impact the lives of people who have no such pre-existing bias.

I guess what I'm getting at here is that I finally understand why my father was so worried about the culture I was absorbing, why he was so afraid of me losing my ability to determine reality from fantasy. It's because he unknowingly or otherwise, had not this same grasp. My father lives in a world where there is a literal devil, where conspiracy genuinely suppresses information like the very real video footage of demonic entities, where science is an orthodoxy. He lives in a very, very scary world, haunted by ghosts, where he, as a man with military training, is helpless. My father is a man full of fear living in a world of demons.

Current Mood: depressed