This page was originally produced in June 2017.
have been reading a fair bit lately on Kadesh or Kadesh Barnea. Here’s some of what I’ve learned. For more you can see the Wikipedia article, which is fairly detailed but definitely a work in progress.
The upshot of all this is that almost all scholars today identify Kadesh (Barnea) as being a single site, locating at what is now Tel el-Qudeirat in the northern Sinai, now part of Egypt, about 8 kilometers east-southeast of the Egyptian village of Quseima.
There are many variant spellings of Tel el-Qudeirat. Some substitute Ain or Ein, with or without an apostrophe in front of the word, for Tel. Some spell the first word Tell, or exchange it for Wadi. The el- alternates with al-, or is omitted altogether, or appears without a hyphen. The Q is sometimes exchanged for a K, the ei exchanged for ai or e. Sometimes the location is called Tel Qadesh Barnea or Tel Kadesh Barnea or Tell Kadesh Barnea. The permutations are endless. Similar permutations exist for Ain Qudeis. I’ve chosen the forms that seem to come up most often in Google Books searches.
Anyhow, Tel el-Qudeirat is widely regarded as the biblical Kadesh/Kadesh-Barnea. The nearly unanimous belief of modern scholars is that there was only one site called Kadesh. We may illustrate this near-unanimity with a quote from Yigal Levin: “A very few modern scholars have claimed that there were, indeed, two sites by the name of Kadesh” (The Boundaries of the Land of Canaan and the Empire of Necho, p. 65).
The reason for choosing two sites is based on the fact that the Bible identifies Kadesh sometimes as being in the “wilderness of Paran” and sometimes in “the wilderness of Zin.” Medieval Jewish commentators, attempting to square this circle, came up with two different proposals. Maybe the wilderness of Zin and the wilderness of Paran were right next to each other, and Kadesh was on the border. Maybe the book of Numbers refers to two Kadeshes, one to the west and one further east.
For the most part, contemporary scholars have not attempted to reconcile these passages, but simply see the discrepancy as just the sort of thing that happens in mythical accounts like the Exodus, compiled from a variety of sources and not quite put into a fully coherent form. You could compare, for example, the exaggeratedly high and exaggeratedly low estimates for how many Israelites were involved in the Exodus. Was it 2 million plus, as the census of Numbers says, or were the Israelites really badly outnumbered by the Canaanites and too few to occupy the land of Canaan, according to Deuteronomy 7, which says that each of the 7 nations inhabiting Canaan were more numerous than the Israelites, and that the Israelite population was so small that the land would fill with wild animals (!) if the Canaanites were driven out all at once.
Numbers 33 purports to give a chronologically ordered list, recorded by Moses at Yahweh’s instruction, of the places where Israel went during their forty years in the wilderness between Egypt and Canaan. It starts on the day of the Israelite departure from Egypt, and ends immediately preceding the conquest of Canaan. In this list, the Israelites only stop at Kadesh once, at the very end of the forty-year period. In fact, a close comparison of Numbers 20:1 and following verses with Numbers 33 would seem to have them arriving at Kadesh in the first month of the 40th year. A good deal earlier in the list, they stay at Hazeroth. From Hazeroth they go to Rithmah, from Rithmah to Rimmon-perez. But according to Numbers 12-13, the place they went after Hazeroth was in fact Kadesh, and according to Deuteronomy 2 the incident that occurred there happened only two years into the forty-year journey.
For a more in-depth accounting of the various ways the Bible gets its itineraries mixed up with regards to Kadesh, see here. If the Pentateuch doesn’t keep its itinerary in order, and doesn’t have a consistent notion of how many Israelites there are, a detail like the exact location of Kadesh could just as easily get mixed up.
The Bible never says anything to indicate that there are two Kadeshes. You don’t find phrases like “the other Kadesh.” You just find discrepancies, both chronological and geographical, which then force people who are committed to the historical accuracy of the Pentateuch to do things like theorizing a second Kadesh. But if there were two Kadeshes, why does the text not say so at any point? And why aren’t both Kadeshes recorded in the Numbers 33 itinerary? The answer is easy, though difficult for some to swallow.
The evidence, in line with the nature of the Pentateuch in general, is most clearly in line an editorial process that mixed multiple traditions, imperfectly remembered, into a Pentateuch which has a storyline that is mostly coherent but ragged around the edges.
Further Reading
Steven DiMattei. On his website, he walks through the problems regarding Kadesh in great detail: here.
Israel Finkelstein (2010), “Kadesh Barnea: A Reevaluation of Its Archaeology and History.”
Yigal Levin (2006), “Numbers 34:2-12, The Boundaries of the Land of Canaan, and the Empire of Necho“, particularly the parts about Kadesh.
H. Clay Trumbull (1884). Kadesh-Barnea: The Importance and Probable Site. The way this source treats the Exodus is outdated — the Exodus is now generally treated as fictional or so close to fictional that a detailed “wilderness history” of the Israelites cannot be recovered from it. However, Trumbull’s work on Kadesh Barnea is important enough that it is still cited today (see Levin, 2006, p. 65).