Borders Israel Is Forbidden to Cross

“Then we turned” carries out the order of 1:40 to the letter, “by the way of the Red sea”. Thirty eight years are covered by the phrase “we compassed mount Seir many days”. Moses says “we”: he wandered with the generation that was condemned.

After the order to turn back in 1:40, this recollection reports nothing the LORD said for the whole time around Seir. The next divine word Moses records is this one, and it sets the people moving again.

“Turn you northward” reverses the direction of 1:40, which sent Israel south toward the Red Sea. For the first time since Kadesh the road points toward the land. The whole command is two clauses long.

In Numbers 20:14 Moses opened his message to Edom with “Thus saith thy brother Israel”, and Edom came out armed to block the road (20:18–20). Here the LORD says Esau’s descendants “shall be afraid of you”, and the warning is aimed at Israel: “take ye good heed unto yourselves”.

“A foot breadth” is literally “the treading of the sole of a foot”. In 11:24 the same measure is a promise: “Every place whereon the soles of your feet shall tread shall be yours”. In Seir it marks the ground where Israel may not set a claim.

Two different verbs for buying. For food it is shavar, the word for buying grain that Joseph’s brothers used in Egypt (Genesis 42:3). For water it is karah, which can also mean to dig, so some have read it as paying for the right to dig wells.

“He knoweth thy walking” means he took care of it, the knowing of a shepherd. Deuteronomy 8:4 adds particulars: “Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee, neither did thy foot swell, these forty years.” Israel has money to buy water because it has lacked nothing.

Elath and Ezion-gaber lie at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, where modern Eilat stands. “The way of the plain” is the Arabah road running north from there along the rift valley, which Israel took to go round Edom rather than through it.

Moab and Ammon descend from Lot’s daughters (Genesis 19:36–38), the account of their birth in a cave after Sodom. Deuteronomy does not hold that origin against them; their land is still a gift of God. Ar is Moab’s city or district on the Arnon (Numbers 21:15).

“Emims” means “terrors”, from emah, dread. Genesis 14:5 has the eastern kings smiting “the Emims in Shaveh Kiriathaim” in Abraham’s day. The parenthesis of verses 10–12 reads like a scholar’s note inserted into Moses’ speech.

“Giants” is Rephaim, the general name; each people had its own word for them. Rephaim is also the Hebrew word for the shades of the dead, rendered “the dead” in Isaiah 14:9. Og, 3:11 says, was the last of these Rephaim.

The Horims are the Horites, whose chiefs Genesis 36:20–30 lists as “the sons of Seir the Horite”. “As Israel did unto the land of his possession” speaks in the past tense of Israel’s own conquest, pointing either to the east bank just taken or to a writer looking back after the settlement.

The Zered is the gorge now called Wadi el-Hasa, running into the south end of the Dead Sea, the border between Edom and Moab. Numbers 21:12 names it as a camp. The command and its fulfilment are given in almost the same words.

The Hebrew verb tamam, “to be finished”, carries three verses: “wasted out” here, “consumed” in verse 15, “consumed” again in verse 16. Thirty eight years at Seir, added to the two years before Kadesh, give the forty of 1:3.

“The hand of the LORD was against them” uses the expression of the plagues: “the hand of the LORD is upon thy cattle” (Exodus 9:3). The hand that struck Egypt had been at work in Israel’s own camp.

The last two verses spoke of “the host”, the army; this one says “from among the people”. The fighting men are gone from both the ranks and the nation. The Talmud (Taanit 30b) dated the end of the dying to the fifteenth of Av; that is tradition, not this text.

Verses 16 and 17 form one sentence: when the men of war were dead, then the LORD spoke. The word that sends Israel toward Ammon waited on the last of those deaths, and the book ties the two together.

“This day” is urgent: Israel passes Moab’s border at Ar without stopping. Numbers 21:13 places the Arnon as “the border of Moab, between Moab and the Amorites”, which is where the next command will take them.

Centuries later Jephthah quoted this history to the king of Ammon, who claimed the land between the Arnon and the Jabbok: Israel, he said, “took not away the land of Moab, nor the land of the children of Ammon” (Judges 11:15). This verse is the ground of that argument.

Zamzummims may mean “murmurers” or “buzzers”, from the sound of their speech, a nickname given by the Ammonites. Many connect them with the Zuzims “in Ham” whom the eastern kings struck in Genesis 14:5.

The Ammonites’ capital, Rabbah, still kept a relic of these people in Moses’ time: Og’s “bedstead of iron”, nine cubits long, “is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon?” (3:11). The land of the former giants held the giant king’s bed.

“Even unto this day” is a phrase Deuteronomy uses for a later vantage point, as in 3:14 and 34:6, where “no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day”. It marks a note written for readers who could still see how things stood.

Azzah is Gaza. The Caphtorims came from Caphtor, usually identified as Crete, and Amos 9:7 names Caphtor as the place from which God brought the Philistines. The note ends on the coast, far from Moab, the widest reach of the parenthesis.

The Arnon is the deep gorge now called Wadi Mujib, cutting into the plateau east of the Dead Sea. “Begin to possess” is two imperatives, “begin, possess”; the verb “begin” returns in verse 25 and verse 31, three beginnings in eight verses.

The Song of the Sea had sung it: “Fear and dread shall fall upon them... till thy people pass over” (Exodus 15:16). Rahab confirms it in Joshua 2:9: “your terror is fallen upon us”. This verse says the dread starts “this day”, with Sihon.

Kedemoth, “eastern places”, later became a Levite town of Reuben (Joshua 21:37). “Words of peace” follow the rule of 20:10: “When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it.” Moses does so even when the outcome is already given.

“I will neither turn unto the right hand nor to the left” is literal here, the route of an army keeping to the road. Deuteronomy uses the same words for keeping the law exactly (5:32; 17:11; 28:14).

“Only I will pass through on my feet” means on foot and nothing more, taking nothing. It repeats the offer to Edom in Numbers 20:19: “I will only, without doing any thing else, go through on my feet.”

Judges 11:17 says Moab “would not consent” to let Israel pass, and 23:4 later bars Moabites because “they met you not with bread and with water”. This parenthesis claims only that food and water were sold. A sale to a passing army and a welcome are not the same thing, which may reconcile the texts.

“Hardened his spirit” is hiqshah, the verb used of Pharaoh in Exodus 7:3, “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart”. “Made his heart obstinate” is immets, to make strong or firm. Sihon is given the Pharaoh vocabulary, and the same outcome.

“I have begun to give Sihon” comes before the battle at Jahaz. The gift is already under way when Israel is told to begin taking it; the order of the verbs puts the LORD’s giving ahead of Israel’s fighting.

Jahaz lay on the plateau north of the Arnon (Numbers 21:23). Mesha’s inscription, centuries later, boasts that he took Jahaz back from Israel and added it to Dibon. Isaiah 15:4 names it among Moab’s towns.

“His sons” follows the Hebrew reading tradition. The consonants of the written text spell “his son”, singular, and the Masoretes marked it to be read as plural, one of many small spelling notes preserved in the scrolls.

“Utterly destroyed” is charam, to devote to destruction, the herem. It is the first time Deuteronomy uses the word; it will return as a command for Canaan in 7:2 and 20:16–17. Here it is recorded as done.

At Jericho even the animals were devoted, “ox, and sheep, and ass” (Joshua 6:21). Here the cattle are kept, as 20:14 later allows for cities far off. The herem varies in scope from one war to the next.

“Not one city too strong for us” is literally “too high for us”, sagevah. It answers 1:28, where the scouts reported cities “walled up to heaven”. The unnamed “city that is by the river” is probably Ar, down in the Arnon gorge.

The Jabbok is the river where Jacob wrestled through the night before meeting Esau (Genesis 32:22–30). Its upper course was Ammon’s border. Israel stops short of it, as it stopped at the border of Esau’s land in verse 8.