DID YOU KNOW?
The answer
Israel spends forty years in the wilderness between Egypt and the promised land — long enough, the text says, for a whole generation to pass before entering.
Why it’s interesting
Forty is one of the Bible's signature spans — forty days of rain in the flood, forty days Jesus fasts in the desert. It tends to mark a long, testing stretch rather than a stopwatch figure.
Scholarly consensus
You can know the Bible.
Not just the stories, but the history, authorship, and scholarship behind it.