“You shall have a place outside the camp and you shall go out to it; and you shall have a stick with your weapons; and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it, and turn back and cover up your excrement. Because the LORD your God walks in the midst of your camp,” – Deut 23:11-14 Now, let’s calculate. If each person relieved himself only twice a day (an obviously low estimate), and each deposit used one square foot of land surface (also a pretty low estimate), that means that every day, the Israelites turned 93 acres of land into a sewage lagoon. If they stayed in the same spot for a month, around 4 ½ square miles would be consumed – a veritable poop farm. During their 40 years in the wilderness, 2,160 square miles would have been used (that’s 1,357,800 acres). No wonder it was wilderness. When you consider that there were two million people living in tents, and every one of them had to leave the camp to go to the bathroom – a bathroom that moved farther away every day, they must have spent half their life walking. If we assume that the camp had a population density equal to modern Hong Kong (which is totally ridiculous, but we’ll give the Bible the benefit of the doubt, again), it would have occupied at least 44 square miles. That means that if you lived in the center of the camp, you would need to walk 3.7 miles, each way, every time you went to the bathroom. You would need to plan your bathroom breaks hours in advance. And, by the time you returned, you would need to go again. You’d think that God could have come up with a better system. The camp of Israel was approximately the same population as the greater Vancouver or Cincinatti area. Just imagine yourself living in one of those two cities. Now, imagine that every time you had to go to the bathroom, you had to walk outside the metropolitan area, find an unused spot, dig a hole with a stick, do your business, cover it up, and then walk home. This is the best system that the Almighty of the Universe could think of. Not only that, if we assume that each of these persons spent only two minutes digging their hole and doing their business, that means that at any one time, there would be an average of 5,500 persons simultaneously squatting on their holes. It must have looked like a pooping convention." Fred Titanich The Atheist’s Book of Bible Stories c | 
