42 was the answer that Deep Thought provided… the question, however, in very Jewish fashion, is the greater mystery and so Deep Thought (the second-most-powerful computer ever created) set out to create the truly most powerful computer to find the question. The name of that computer? The Earth. These 42 locations metaphorically span the entirety of the planet, that in every place and every stage of the journey one can find traces of the question, and only in seeing the journey as a whole can one constellate the outlines of primal curiosity…
I have a question about what in fact and historically this wilderness might have been, for there is a difference between calling it a "desert" and a "wilderness". The former is barren, the latter unsettled. But with all these place names, it seems to be something else, and we know there are wars and skirmishes, so the "land" is contested. There are climatological reconstructions that can tell us just what fertility the land might have had at the presumed date of the wandering. Granted B'midbar is a liminal space, a psychic and spiritual domain, but the very precision of place names suggest one could have a different picture in the mind of what the Israelites went through.
42 was the answer that Deep Thought provided… the question, however, in very Jewish fashion, is the greater mystery and so Deep Thought (the second-most-powerful computer ever created) set out to create the truly most powerful computer to find the question. The name of that computer? The Earth. These 42 locations metaphorically span the entirety of the planet, that in every place and every stage of the journey one can find traces of the question, and only in seeing the journey as a whole can one constellate the outlines of primal curiosity…
I have a question about what in fact and historically this wilderness might have been, for there is a difference between calling it a "desert" and a "wilderness". The former is barren, the latter unsettled. But with all these place names, it seems to be something else, and we know there are wars and skirmishes, so the "land" is contested. There are climatological reconstructions that can tell us just what fertility the land might have had at the presumed date of the wandering. Granted B'midbar is a liminal space, a psychic and spiritual domain, but the very precision of place names suggest one could have a different picture in the mind of what the Israelites went through.