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Stations of the Exodus

Wikipedia's first sentence called it “list of the 42 stations or mansions visited by the israelites following their exodus from egypt as described in”. Today it says “locations visited by the israelites following their exodus from egypt”.
Measured, not asserted. Every count, date and revision on this page was taken from Wikipedia's own history and checked against the live article. The words quoted are theirs.
Machine-checked against the full current article on 2026-08-03.
We saved snapshots of this article over twenty years; you are reading the 2020 one. Red dashes: removed from Wikipedia since. Pale dots: rewritten; the numbered note shows what it says now. 1 tap a number or a side note to jump between them
The opening as it read in 2020

Locations visited by the Israelites following their exodus from Egypt, according to Numbers 33 1641 Wanderings in the desert map 1585 Exodus map Tilemann Stella 's 1557 Itinera Israelitarum ex Aegypto The Stations of the Exodus are the 42 locations visited by the Israelites following their exodus from Egypt , recorded in Numbers 33 , with variations also recorded in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy .1 According to the documentary hypothesis , the list of the Stations is believed to have originally been a distinct and separate source text. In this hypothesis, it is believed that the redactor , in combining the Torah 's sources, used parts of the Stations list to fill out awkward joins between the main sources. The list records the locations visited by the Israelites , during their journey through the wilderness, after having left Egypt . Consequently, the parts which were inserted to join up the sources appear in suitable locations in the books of Exodus and Numbers . However, a slightly variant version of the list appears in full at Numbers 33, and several parts of the journey described in the full list, most noticeably the journey from Sinai to Zin , do not appear in the fragmented version. Both versions of the list contain several brief narrative fragments. It is a matter of some debate as to how much of the narrative is part of the original text of the list, and how much is extra detail added into it by the redactor. The situation also occurs in reverse, where some brief texts, within parts of the list, and ascribed to the redactor, are usually regarded as not being part of the list of stations, albeit without much conviction. This is particularly true for Numbers 21:14–15 , which references unknown events in the lost Book of the Wars of the Lord , and Numbers 21:16b–18a , describing the digging of the well at Beer .2 Biblical commentators like St Jerome in his Epistle to Fabiola , Bede ( Letter to Acca: "De Mansionibus Filiorum Israhel" ) and St Peter Damian discussed the Stations according to the Hebrew meanings of their names. Dante modeled the 42 chapters of his Vita Nuova on them. Accordingly, the notation in this Priestly source that Moses recorded the starting points of their various marches (v. 2) fits the genre. Some scholars, however, consider ch 33 a composite text extracted from other portions of Numbers, Exodus, and Deuteronomy." Gregory F.3

This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 957099651.
Today
Wikipedia's first sentence called it “list of the 42 stations or mansions visited by the israelites following their exodus from egypt as described in”. Today it says “locations visited by the israelites following their exodus from egypt”. Read the current article and compare.
201020152020Oct '232025
Counts in the opening at each snapshot. Green: the word gained ground. Red: it was cut. Grey: no change.

What Wikipedia says this is

Every article opens by defining its subject. This one was redefined since 2010, and today's defining sentence is their current revision.

Then

list of the 42 stations or mansions visited by the israelites following their exodus from egypt as described in

Now

locations visited by the israelites following their exodus from egypt

Struck red text is no longer in the article; dotted amber text was rewritten. Every revision id links to Wikipedia's copy; the text shown is our own saved copy. Data: /data. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA; quoted for the record; not affiliated with Wikipedia.

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