So, in a couple weeks, the JWs move on in their Bible-reading slog to the book of Deuteronomy.
Take a gander at Deuteronomy 23:12,13:
A private place should be designated for use outside the camp, and there is where you should go. 13 A peg should be part of your equipment. When you squat outside, you should dig a hole with it and then cover your excrement.A peg should be part of your equipment. When you squat outside, you should dig a hole with it and then cover your excrement.
Sounds pretty simple, right? "Gotta go answer the call of nature, be back in 10" - right?
Except...
How many people were there? See Numbers 1:46
the total number registered was 603,550
And that's just the men!
WT Publications have stated repeatedly that the 600,000 men implied "3 million" total Israelites trekking thru the wilderness.
One example: https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102004325
In 215 years, a small number of Israelites in Egypt increased to as many as three million
That's a lot of people! Let's think about this for a minute.
How densely were those people packed together in their 40 year camping trip?
Let's say they were packed together really tight. Really really tight. Let's say they were packed together as tightly as modern-day Chicago, which has a population density of 12,000 people per square mile.
So, to fit 3,000,000 people packed together Chicago-style, you need 250 square miles.
If they were arranged in a perfect square, that's about 14 miles by 14 miles.
What if you're one of the poor schmucks who is camped right in the middle? If you've gotta go, you have to hike at least 7 miles - 2 hours - to get "outside the camp". Probably a lot longer, as you are walking through a densely populated area, stepping around, over, past, hundreds of thousands of people on the way.
Oh - and then to get back home, you've got to hike another 2+ hours.
God forbid you have to go twice a day - that's 8 hours a day walking just to do your business "outside the camp".
You can pick other shapes than a square of course, but to get to a reasonable amount of time to walk to "outside the camp" you've got an oblong shape 100+ miles, maybe 200+ miles, long. So, was there a 200 mile long string of Israelite camps in the desert? That would make communication a bit tricky.
And again - that assumes an unrealistic population density for the Israelite nomads as thick as that of modern-day Chicago. The problem exacerbates enormously with more reasonable population density estimates.
OR.....
Maybe the writers of Numbers and Deuteronomy just make $#!+ up that sounded good, but really didn't think things through?
Evidently there were no "continuity checkers" in the late Iron Age.
