The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 13:17 answers a question the Torah only gestures at. Why did God not send Israel by the short coastal road through the land of the Philistines? It was the nearest route. And yet God turned them south, into the desert.
The Targum tells a story to explain the detour. Long before the Exodus, two hundred thousand men of the tribe of Ephraim had calculated the end of the four hundred years of servitude and decided to leave Egypt early—thirty years before the appointed time. Armed with shields and lances, they marched out and went down to Gath to raid the Philistine flocks. But they had "transgressed against the statute of the Word of the Lord." The Philistines cut them down.
And here the Targum drops an astonishing identification. Those two hundred thousand slaughtered Ephraimites are the same dry bones the prophet Yechezekel later saw resurrected in the vale of Dura (Ezekiel 37:1-14). The vision of the valley of dry bones is the vision of the early-leaving tribe.
So why the detour? Because if the newly freed slaves saw the battlefield strewn with Ephraimite skeletons, they would panic and run back to Egypt. The long way was an act of mercy. God routed His people around a trauma they could not yet bear to see.
Takeaway: the Targum teaches that geography can be pastoral care, and that God sometimes hides the graveyard from the freed.