Exodus 17 · Numbers 20 · An Iconic Story
Moses Strikes the Rock
It happened twice, thirty-eight years apart — and the difference between the two times is the whole story: the first striking was commanded, and the second one cost Moses the promised land.
Poussin puts the miracle in the corner. Moses is up at the left in red, small, his rod still raised against the cliff — and the entire rest of the canvas is thirst: people scrambling with jars and shells and cupped hands, a man flat on the ground drinking, mothers feeding children first, the camp tents just visible behind. The painting understands the chapter. The rock is not the subject. What a whole nation does when the water finally comes is the subject.
It Happened Twice
Exodus 17:1–7 and Numbers 20:1–13, told plainly — and told separately
The first time
Israel has been out of Egypt only weeks. They camp at Rephidim and there is no water, and the people turn on Moses so hard that he tells God, they are almost ready to stone me.
But the people thirsted for water there, and they grumbled against Moses: “Why have you brought us out of Egypt—to make us and our children and livestock die of thirst?”Thirst is not a small thing in a desert. The complaint is ugly, and it is also the complaint of people who are genuinely dying.
God's answer is strange and enormous. Take the staff you struck the Nile with. Take the elders with you, so there are witnesses. Go on ahead of the people. Behold, I will stand there before you on the rock at Horeb. And you shall strike the rock, and water will come out of it. Moses strikes it. Water comes out. He names the place Massah and Meribah — Testing and Quarrelling — because the people tested the LORD, saying, is the LORD among us or not?
And the LORD said to Moses, “Walk on ahead of the people and take some of the elders of Israel with you. Take along in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. Behold, I will stand there before you by the rock at Horeb. And when you strike the rock, water will come out of it for the people to drink.” So Moses did this in the sight of the elders of Israel.The one place in the chapter God says He will be standing is the exact place the staff comes down.
The second time
Thirty-eight years later, at the other end of the wilderness. The generation that left Egypt has died out. Miriam dies at Kadesh and is buried there. And again there is no water, and again the people gather against Moses and Aaron with the same complaint their parents made. Moses and Aaron fall on their faces, the glory of the LORD appears, and God gives the instruction — and it is not the same instruction.
And the LORD said to Moses, “Take the staff and assemble the congregation. You and your brother Aaron are to speak to the rock while they watch, and it will pour out its water. You will bring out water from the rock and provide drink for the congregation and their livestock.”Take the staff — and speak to the rock. The staff is in his hand, and the command is for his mouth.
Moses takes the staff. He gathers the assembly. And he says: Hear now, you rebels! Must we bring you water out of this rock? Then he lifts his hand and strikes the rock — twice. Water comes out abundantly, and the people and their animals drink.
Then Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly in front of the rock, and Moses said to them, “Listen now, you rebels, must we bring you water out of this rock?” Then Moses raised his hand and struck the rock twice with his staff, so that a great amount of water gushed out, and the congregation and their livestock were able to drink.He was told to speak. He struck. And the water came anyway.
And then God speaks to Moses and Aaron. Because you did not believe Me, to treat Me as holy in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land I have given them. The water is named Meribah again. Moses will lead them all the way to the border, see the land from a mountain, and not walk into it.
But the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not trust Me to show My holiness in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them.”God's own stated reason, in one verse — and it is not what most retellings say it was.
Here there is another Meribah. one place we met with before of that name, in the beginning of their march through the wilderness, which was so called because of the chiding of the children of Israel, Exod. xvii. And now we have another place, at the latter end of their march, which bears the same name for the same reason.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on Num 20:1
Six Places the Retellings Drift
and the first of them is the reason this page exists
Almost everyone who tells this story tells it as one event: Moses lost his temper, hit the rock, and lost the promised land. That is two stories pushed into one, and pushing them together turns an act of obedience into a crime.
THE FIRST STRIKING WAS NOT A SIN
At Rephidim God commanded it: “you shall strike the rock, and water will come out of it.” Moses did exactly that, and nothing goes wrong — no rebuke, no sentence, no consequence. The story that ends in judgment is the second one, thirty-eight years later. Merging them makes an obedience look like the crime it was not.
IT IS NOT EVEN THE SAME WORD
Exodus 17:6 uses tsur — the great rock, the cliff-mass, the word Moses later uses of God Himself: “the Rock, His work is perfect.” Numbers 20 uses sela five times — the crag, the rock-face. Two different Hebrew nouns, and neither one appears in the other's chapter.
IT IS NOT THE SAME PLACE
Exodus 17 is at Rephidim, “the rock at Horeb,” in the first year out of Egypt. Numbers 20 is at Kadesh, in the fortieth. Deuteronomy 32:51 even coins a name to keep them apart — Meribah-Kadesh — and Albert Barnes says plainly that the name exists to distinguish the two.
GOD DOES NOT SAY IT WAS HIS TEMPER
The stated reason is one sentence: because you did not believe Me, to treat Me as holy in the eyes of the children of Israel. Psalm 106 adds the rashness of his lips, and Deuteronomy twice says the LORD was angry with Moses “for your sakes.” Three witnesses, three angles — this page carries all three and rules on none.
HE DID FOUR THINGS THE TEXT MARKS
He called them rebels. He said “must WE bring you water.” He struck what he was told to speak to. And he struck it twice. Serious readers have weighted those four differently for centuries, and Scripture itemises none of them. The readings are below, with the names of the men who hold them.
“THE ROCK THAT FOLLOWED THEM” IS SCRIPTURE
It is not a legend that grew up later. Paul writes that Israel drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and that the Rock was Christ. Albert Barnes reads it soberly — their wants were ever supplied from Him, of whom the rock was only a symbol, and who went with them through all of it.
Two Rocks, Side by Side
Every row is filled from the text on both sides. Read down either column and the two events stay two.
Deuteronomy 2:14 gives the gap its figure: thirty-eight years between Kadesh-barnea and the brook Zered. Six of these seven rows differ. The one that does not is the water.
Between Nu 19:22 and Nu 20:1 there is a long and undescribed interval of thirty-seven years. the people abode in Kadesh--supposed to be what is now known as Ain-el-Weibeh, three springs surrounded by palms. It was their second arrival after an interval of thirty-eight years (De 2:14).
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), on Num 20:1
The water of Meribah - i. e. Strife. The place is called Meribah in Kadesh Num 27:14, and Meribah-Kadesh Deu 32:51. to distinguish it from the Meribah of Exo 17:2 ff.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869), on Num 20:13
A Staff Kept in the Sanctuary, and Two Places on a Disputed Map
the details the chapters assume their readers already know
The staff Moses carries in Numbers 20 is not a walking stick. It is the rod that turned the Nile to blood and split the sea — and by then it was being kept in the sanctuary as a memorial, which is why Numbers 20:9 says he took it from before the LORD. He went and fetched it out of the tent of the presence before he did what he did.
Take the rod - That with which the miracles in Egypt had been performed … This rod, as the memorial of so many divine interpositions, was naturally laid up in the tabernacle, and is accordingly Num 20:9 described now as taken by Moses from before the Lord.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869), on Num 20:8
Numbers 20 is also the chapter that empties Moses' life out. Miriam — the sister who watched the basket in the reeds — dies in its first verse, at Kadesh, and is buried there. Aaron dies on Mount Hor at the end of the same chapter, stripped of the priestly garments while his son watches. The chapter that costs Moses the land also takes both of the people he had grown up with.
In the first month, the whole congregation of Israel entered the Wilderness of Zin and stayed in Kadesh. There Miriam died and was buried.One verse carries the fortieth year, the return to Kadesh, and Miriam's death and burial.
Here dies Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron, and as it should seem older than either of them. She must have been so if she was that sister that was set to watch Moses when he was put into the ark of bulrushes, Exod. ii.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on Num 20:1
Where was Rephidim?
Jamieson, Fausset and Brown place it at Wady Feiran, a day's march from Mount Sinai, and Albert Barnes puts the Horeb rock in the same wadi “according to Arab tradition.” Barnes also notes that the Israelites had rested at two other stations, Dophkah and Alush, before they got there. These are careful identifications by careful men, and they are still identifications.
pitched in Rephidim--now believed, on good grounds, to be Wady Feiran, which is exactly a day's march from Mount Sinai, and at the entrance of the Horeb district.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), on Exo 17:1
Where was Kadesh?
Jamieson, Fausset and Brown propose Ain el-Weibeh, three springs surrounded by palms. The more common modern identification is Ain el-Qudeirat, with the nearby Ain Qadeis, in the north-eastern Sinai. Both are proposals about the same well-attested place; Scripture names it and does not map it, and the story does not depend on the answer.
And between the two chapters sit thirty-eight years that Numbers barely narrates. Deuteronomy 2:14 gives the figure — from Kadesh-barnea to the brook Zered — and the book that records forty years of wandering in detail simply skips most of them. Whatever the wilderness generation did for water in all that time, Scripture does not say.
He called the name of the place Massah, and Meribah - מסה Massah signifies temptation or trial; and מריבה Meribah, contention or litigation.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1832), on Exo 17:7
What the Text Refuses to Tell
four silences — and the first one is at the very centre of the story
The hardest question this page raises is one Scripture does not answer. It gives the charge and withholds the itemisation, and every account of exactly what Moses did wrong — including the careful ones below — is a reader's work on top of a verse.
Which of Moses' four acts God counted against him
Numbers 20:12 names unbelief and a failure to treat God as holy in front of Israel. It does not say whether the weight fell on the calling of names, the “must we,” the striking, the second blow, or all four together. Commentators have divided the weight differently for sixteen hundred years, and this page presents their divisions as their work.
Whether Aaron did anything at all
God's sentence names Moses and Aaron together, twice (Num 20:12, 24). But the story gives Aaron no line and no action — he gathers the assembly with Moses and that is all. The text simply includes him, and never explains what he did. Nothing should be built on that silence in either direction.
What the wilderness generation drank in between
Scripture records water from the rock at the beginning of the wandering and at the end of it. About the decades in between it says nothing at all. Paul's sentence in 1 Corinthians 10:4 about a Rock that followed them is the closest thing to a comment on the gap, and Barnes reads it as exactly that.
How Moses took it
Deuteronomy 3:23–27 records him asking once — please let me cross over and see the good land — and being told not to raise the matter again. Numbers records no reaction whatsoever. He simply goes on leading them, for another chapter and another book, toward a border he already knows he will not cross.
“And That Rock Was Christ”
this one is not the church's reading of the story — it is the New Testament's
Most Old Testament pictures of Christ are read into the story by later readers, and this page usually says so. Not here. Paul takes the wilderness water and says the thing outright, in a letter, as an argument: the Rock was Christ. Everything else in this section stands on that sentence.
I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud, and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.An apostle's own reading of these two chapters — and the reason this beat needs no help from anyone.
It is questioned whether the water thus supplied ceased with the immediate occasion; see 1Co 10:4, the general meaning of which appears to be that their wants were ever supplied from Him, of whom the rock was but a symbol, and who accompanied them in all their wanderings.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869), on Exo 17:6
And once that sentence is on the table, the shape of the two chapters starts to matter. The rock is struck once, at the beginning, on God's own command, with God saying He will be standing on it. After that, what Moses is told to do is speak to it. Hebrews says the same shape about Christ: offered once for all, after which what remains is asking.
And by that will, we have been sanctified through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.Once for all. Not a sacrifice that is repeated whenever the need comes back.
Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.And afterwards: draw near, and ask. The striking is finished; the speaking is not.
Said plainly: Exodus and Numbers do not draw this line themselves. Neither chapter says the striking means anything beyond what it does. It is 1 Corinthians that identifies the Rock, and Hebrews that supplies the once-for-all — and the two halves put together are what lets a reader see the pattern. The pieces are the New Testament's; the joining of them is a reading, and a very old one. Once for All takes up that half of it.
There is one more sentence, and Jesus says it Himself. At the Feast of Tabernacles — the feast whose water-drawing ceremony remembered the wilderness — He stands up on the last and greatest day and offers the thing the rock gave.
On the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stood up and called out in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. Whoever believes in Me, as the Scripture has said: ‘Streams of living water will flow from within him.’” He was speaking about the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were later to receive. For the Spirit had not yet been given, because Jesus had not yet been glorified.If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. Said at the feast that remembered the water in the desert.
Upon Christ's grace: That rock was Christ, 1 Cor. x. The graces and comforts of the Spirit are compared to rivers of living water, John vii. These flow from Christ, who is the rock smitten by the law of Moses, for he was made under the law.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on Exo 17:5–6
Upon God's providence even in the greatest straits and difficulties; And upon Christ's grace; that rock was Christ, 1 Cor. x, 4. The graces and comforts of the Spirit are compared to rivers of living waters, John vii, 38, 39; iv, 14.
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765), on Exo 17:5
The people of the fathers thirsted, Moses touched the rock, and water flowed out of the rock. Did not grace work a result contrary to nature, so that the rock poured forth water, which by nature it did not contain?
Ambrose of Milan· On the Mysteries 9.51 (397), on Exo 17:6
The two strikings read as the two beams of the cross
Augustine, preaching on John, takes the second blow at Kadesh and reads the double striking as the two pieces of wood on the cross. It is beautiful and it is ancient, and it is plainly the church's devotional reading rather than anything Numbers claims — Numbers presents the second blow as a fault. This page keeps it, and keeps it labelled.
The rock is Christ in a sign, the true Christ in the Word and in the flesh. And how did they drink? The rock was struck twice with a rod. The double striking prefigures the two pieces of wood on the cross.
Augustine of Hippo· Tractate on the Gospel of John 26.12.2 (430), on Num 20:11
Why Moses Was Barred — the Readings, and Who Holds Each
three witnesses in Scripture, and three careful men who weigh them differently
Scripture gives the sentence three times, from three angles, and they do not say the same thing. Read all three before reading anyone's explanation of them.
But the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not trust Me to show My holiness in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them.”God's own words: unbelief, and a failure to treat Him as holy in front of Israel.
At the waters of Meribah they angered the LORD, and trouble came to Moses because of them. For they rebelled against His Spirit, and Moses spoke rashly with his lips.The psalm adds what the narrative does not: they embittered his spirit, and he spoke rashly with his lips.
The LORD was also angry with me on your account, and He said, “Not even you shall enter the land.And Moses' own retelling adds a third angle — “for your sakes” — which he repeats at Deuteronomy 3:26.
What follows are readings, not verdicts. Each man below is weighing the same four acts, and each lands somewhere slightly different. None of them is contradicting the others so much as looking at a different part of it.
The reading that weighs the manner
Barnes reads the two strokes and the “ye rebels” together as one thing: a leader who had stopped pointing at God. His last sentence is the sharp one — the question “must we” sends the people to the wrong address.
The command Num 20:8 was Speak ye unto the rock. The act of smiting, and especially with two strokes, indicates violent irritation on the part of Moses; as does also his unseemly mode of addressing the people: Hear now, ye rebels. The form too of the question, must we, etc., directs the people not, as ought to have been the case, to God as their deliverer, but to Moses and Aaron personally.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869), on Num 20:11
The reading that weighs the disobedience
Clarke is careful to say “some or all” — he lists the particulars and does not insist he knows which one carried the sentence. His first particular is the plainest: God said speak, and Moses judged that speaking would not be enough.
Because ye believed me not - What was the offense for which Moses was excluded from the promised land? It appears to have consisted in some or all of the following particulars: 1. God had commanded him (Num 20:8) to take the rod in his hand, and go and Speak To The Rock, and it should give forth water. It seems Moses did not think speaking would be sufficient, therefore he smote the rock without any command so to do.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1832), on Num 20:12
The reading that weighs how little it took
Basil goes the other way, and it is the reading that stings. He is struck not by how bad it was but by how small — a moment of wavering in the mouth of the meekest man in Scripture, and the sentence came at once.
The people were murmuring because there was no water. Moses merely had said to his people, 'Can we bring you forth water out of this rock?' Thus he wavered only slightly, yet for this alone he immediately received the threat that he should not enter into the land of promise, which was at that time the chief of all the promises made to the Jews.
Basil of Caesarea· Preface on the Judgment of God (379), on Num 20:10
And through all of it, one fact that ought to stop a reader: the water came out anyway. God gave a whole nation and its animals what they needed through a man He was in the act of sentencing. Matthew Henry says it without softening either half.
Moses must a second time in God's name command water out of a rock for them, to show that God is as able as ever to supply his people with good things, even in their greatest straits an in the utmost failure of second causes.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on Num 20:8
Read the Great Books
the works that have carried this teaching — go further than this page
Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments
Albert Barnes · 1832–1869
Barnes is the commentator who keeps the two events apart on purpose — the Meribah-Kadesh note above exists precisely to distinguish them — and his reading of the manner of the second striking is the most quoted there is.
READ IT FREE AT CCEL →Commentary on the Whole Bible
Matthew Henry · 1710
Henry sees both Meribahs at once — one at the beginning of the march and one at the end, the same name for the same reason — and refuses to let the mercy in the second one go unmentioned.
READ IT FREE AT CCEL →Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament
John Wesley · 1765
Wesley's note on Exodus 17 is where the rock, 1 Corinthians 10 and John 7 are held together in three lines — and his note on Numbers 20:24 is the most gracious sentence anyone has written about Moses being barred.
READ IT FREE AT CCEL →Commentary on the Bible
Adam Clarke · 1832
Clarke enumerates the particulars of the offence more carefully than anyone, and — unusually for a commentator with a list — declines to say which item on it carried the sentence.
READ IT FREE AT CCEL →The Man Who Could Not Bring Them In
He named the place Massah and Meribah because the Israelites quarreled, and because they tested the LORD, saying, “Is the LORD among us or not?”The name the first rock kept: Testing and Quarrelling — and the question underneath both chapters, “is the LORD among us or not?”
Thirty-eight years apart, the same question and the same answer. Israel asks whether God is among them; God gives them water both times. The difference between the two days is not whether God provides — He does, at Rephidim and at Kadesh, for a generation that deserved it no more the second time than the first. The difference is what a man was told to do, and did not do.
And the sentence that fell on Moses is not the last word about him. Wesley reads it the gracious way, and the way the New Testament reads the whole arrangement: the law and the priesthood that could bring Israel to the border could never bring them in. Someone else had to do that — and the man who could not enter had already told them his name.
God would not have Moses and Aaron to carry the people into Canaan, for this reason also, to signify the insufficiency of the Mosaical law and Aaronical priesthood to make them perfectly happy, and the necessity of a better, and to keep the Israelites from resting in them, so as to be taken off from their expectation of Christ.
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765), on Num 20:24
GO ON FROM HERE
Built from MannaFest's research brief on the great stories of the beginnings and the gate-verified Exodus 17 and Numbers 20 quote pool — public-domain commentary quoted word for word (Matthew Henry, John Wesley, Adam Clarke, Albert Barnes, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, Ambrose of Milan, Basil of Caesarea, Augustine of Hippo). Hebrew word data checked against the site's word-level text of both chapters. Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible, fetched live. Locations are given as the proposals they are: Rephidim at Wady Feiran (Jamieson-Fausset-Brown) and the Horeb rock in the same wadi by Arab tradition (Barnes); Kadesh at Ain el-Weibeh (Jamieson-Fausset-Brown) or, on the more common modern identification, Ain el-Qudeirat / Ain Qadeis. Artwork: Nicolas Poussin (1649), public domain, licence verified at Wikimedia Commons.