Introduction to Desert Wanderings (with Jeff Cavins) (2025)
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What is the purpose of the Desert Wanderings period?
Hi, I'm Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Bible in a Year podcast, where we encounter God's voice and live life through the lens of Scripture. The Bible in a Year podcast is brought to you by Ascension. Using the Great Adventure Bible timeline, we'll read all the way from Genesis to Revelation, discovering how the story of salvation unfolds and how we fit together. into that story today. Today, I'm joined by Jeff Cavins once again to introduce the fourth biblical period of the Great Adventure Bible Timeline. You know, we've gone through the other timeline periods. We've looked at the early world. We looked at the patriarchs. We just finished Egypt and the Exodus, and now we're in the fourth biblical period called Desert Wanderings.
Before we begin, a couple of reminders. One is the Bible translation that I'm using Always is the Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition. I'm using the Great Adventure Bible from Ascension. If you want to have your own Catholic Bible in a Year reading plan, you can visit ascensionpress.com slash Bible in a Year. And lastly, if you have not yet subscribed, you can subscribe in your podcast app. So not only do you get that downloaded to your phone or at least alerted on your phone every single day, but also more people can learn about this podcast the more people subscribe. So with all that being said, let's get started. Once again, Jeff, thank you so much for being back with us again and teaching us about this next period of the desert wanderings. The books we're reading from are Numbers and Deuteronomy, and I'm just really excited to launch into this next biblical period.
How does the book of Numbers relate to the desert experience?
Yeah, it's exciting. Thanks for having me back again. Yeah, we're going to look at Numbers as the primary narrative book for the desert wanderings. And in the Bible timeline, it is the color, kind of a tan, standing for the desert, you know, the desert experience. And then the supplemental book is going to be Deuteronomy.
Awesome. Yeah, and so they're kind of overlapping a little bit, but in some ways they're really different. Is that safe to say? Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's safe. What else do you want to know? No, I'm kidding. That's all I wanted to note. It's kind of the same, but kind of different. That's all.
No, it is safe to say that Numbers is the narrative, but Deuteronomy is a second law. It's a second set of laws that are given due to the hardness of Israel's heart at this particular time. But it's chalk-filled with wonderful, wonderful guidance and wisdom for us. And we can talk about that, particularly in the area of how do you live your life when you're going into a country where it is diametrically opposed to the message of God? Like that's ever going to happen, right? Yeah, that may be once in a while. So we're going to look at that. But there's a number of very important things that take place in this relatively small period of salvation history, which is about 40 years.
Right. And those 40 years are covered by the narrative book in Numbers, which is interesting because one of the things that we find out, it's like, as you noted, the narrative book being Numbers is typically, I think, for a lot of people, the one where we don't lose the story, we are traveling with the people of Israel and with the covenant people of God. And so that in some ways we look forward kind of maybe more eagerly to that narrative book, the book of Numbers. But at the same time, as you noted, the book of Deuteronomy has so many powerful words of encouragement, words of law, words of just direction from the Lord. That can immediately be applied to our life, as well as the fact that numbers can sometimes, well, even the fact that it's called the book of numbers might mean that some sections might be a little bit hard to get through because they're not going to be so much narrative as much as it's going to be counting or giving off a list of names of people that we might not be familiar with.
What do people do with that?
Right. Well, you know, there are sections of the Bible that seem rather boring, whether it's numbering off the tribes and telling us how many numbers, number of people there are in each particular tribe, or so-and-so begot so-and-so begot so-and-so. And while they might be boring, they're actually very critical, very important.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the purpose of the Desert Wanderings period?
0:04–1:25
2
How does the book of Numbers relate to the desert experience?
1:25–5:33
3
What is the significance of the spies' mission in Numbers?
5:33–8:39
4
How do the Israelites' actions impact their journey?
8:39–11:30
5
What role do the tzitziot play in Jewish tradition?
11:30–18:12
6
What are the key themes in the book of Deuteronomy?
18:12–31:05