On their way to the Promised Land, the Israelites got resistance from the kingdoms of Edom, Ammon, Moab and Arad.
(Numbers 20:14-29, 21)

In reality, the Israelites would have met hardly any resistance in the 13th century: almost all the states and cities the bible mentions didn’t exist yet.

Edom lay barren in the 13th century, archaeology proves. It was uninhabited no man’s land. In the days of Moses and Joshua it certainly didn’t have a king to stop the Israelites passing through, as Numbers 20 tells us. Nor did it have a “large and powerful army” (Numbers 20:20).

As we discussed in more detail elsewhere on this site, Arad didn’t exist either in the times of Moses and Joshua. In Numbers 21, we read how the king of Arad supposedly fought with the Israelites. But in biblical times, the place was an abandoned ruin with only some scorpions to fight with.

In Numbers 21:21-35, we find the Israelites defeating yet another people that couldn’t have existed back then: the Amorites and their capital Heshbon. Excavations have shown that Heshbon wasn’t founded yet. The city was first founded only hundreds of years later, and even then, it was a small village for a long time.

Bible scholars believe that the conflicts outlined in Numbers were only written much later – at a time when places like Arad, Heshbon and Edom indeed were well-known, important places in the Middle-East.

Finkelstein and Silberman: "The bible unearthed" (2003)

William Stiebing: "Out of the desert? Archaeology and the exodus" (1989)