Deuteronomy2chapter 2

Deuteronomy 2:1-3

The order at verse 3 repeats the form of the order at 1:6, where the word at Horeb was that they had dwelt long enough in that mount. Verse 1 covers the years between Kadesh and this turn in half a sentence, and the count of thirty and eight years does not arrive until verse 14. Barnes reads verse 1 as a summary of the whole wandering and verses 2 and 3 as the command that ended it, sending them around the southern end of Edom.

Deuteronomy 2:4-6

The verb given governs both sides of this chapter. Mount Seir belongs to Esau by the same kind of grant that gives Canaan to Israel, so the conquest has a border drawn by the one who authorises it, and not so much as a foot breadth lies outside that border. Numbers 20:14-21 has Edom refusing passage and coming out with a strong hand, while this chapter has Israel going along the coast and buying food and water for money; Barnes reads the difference as the eastern frontier rather than the road through the middle.

Deuteronomy 2:7

Thou hast lacked nothing is the ground for the command to buy rather than seize, and Clarke reads it that way, since a people already given silver has no need of plunder. The same claim is pressed further at 8:4, where the raiment waxed not old and the foot did not swell, and Nehemiah 9:21 repeats it in a prayer many centuries later. He knoweth thy walking makes God the witness of the forty years and not only their cause.

Deuteronomy 2:8-9

Moab is spared on the same ground as Edom, and the grant is traced to the children of Lot rather than to Moab, which runs it back to Genesis 19:36-37. Numbers 22 has Balak of Moab hiring Balaam against this same people, and Henry sets the two side by side: a nation that meant Israel harm is still not Israel's to take. Chapter 23:3 will shut the Moabite out of the congregation without touching a mile of his land.

Deuteronomy 2:10-11

The word rendered giants is Rephaim, which is a people name, and Clarke says so outright. Emims is what Moab called them, and the Anakims are the measure of size the passage keeps reaching for. That measure is the report of the spies at Numbers 13:33, which 1:28 has already quoted back at Israel as the fear that cost the last generation its land, so the excursus is answering something the reader has just heard.

Deuteronomy 2:12

The Horims are the Horites of Genesis 14:6 and 36:20-21, and Esau took Seir from them the way Israel is to take the land ahead. The verse draws that comparison itself, as Israel did unto the land of his possession, which sets the conquest inside a pattern the chapter has now shown twice. Readers differ over which possession is meant, whether the ground east of Jordan taken from Sihon and Og later in this chapter, or the whole land spoken of as good as given.

Deuteronomy 2:13-15

Zered is given as the line that closes an era, thirty and eight years out from Kadesh-barnea, and by the crossing the generation of the men of war is gone. Numbers 14:29-35 is the sentence being served, where the carcases of the men numbered from twenty years old fall in the wilderness. Verse 15 states the cause of all those deaths in one clause, that the hand of the Lord was against them, which is the only place the chapter says it.

Deuteronomy 2:16-19

The word comes again only when the last of the men of war is dead, so the account resumes exactly where the sentence ends. Ammon is spared on the third turn of the same formula, and once more the grant is traced to Lot rather than to Ammon, which is Genesis 19:38. Judges 11:12-27 has Jephthah answer an Ammonite land claim by rehearsing these marches, that Israel took nothing of Moab or of Ammon and held only what Sihon had held, and he reckons three hundred years since, so the borders of this chapter were still being argued long afterward.

Deuteronomy 2:20-23

The aside widens past Israel's kin. Ammon's giants are called Zamzummims, and the Lord is said to have destroyed them before Ammon in the same words used of Israel's own wars, so the hand that grants a land is the hand that takes it from somebody else. The last case leaves the family altogether: the Caphtorims out of Caphtor drove out the Avims as far as Azzah, which is Gaza, and Amos 9:7 and Jeremiah 47:4 tie Caphtor to the Philistines, the people Israel would fight for centuries in that same coastal strip. Joshua 13:3 still lists Avites there.

Deuteronomy 2:24-25

Three times the chapter has said I will not give you, and here it says I have given into thine hand, so the conquest opens east of Jordan against a king who is neither Edom nor Moab nor Ammon. Verse 25 promises dread of Israel upon the nations under the whole heaven, which is what Exodus 15:14-16 sang before any of it happened. Joshua 2:9-11 has Rahab report it from inside Jericho and name Sihon and Og as the reason the country melted.

Deuteronomy 2:26-29

The embassy is the one at Numbers 21:21-23, told there in the third person and here by the man who sent it. Chapter 20:10 will make an offer of peace the required first move against a city, and this offer is that rule acted out before it is written down. Verse 29 argues from precedent, that Esau and Moab had already sold Israel food and water, which puts the transaction of verse 6 to work as a reference.

Deuteronomy 2:30-31

The wording is the wording used of Pharaoh at Exodus 4:21 and 7:3, and Joshua 11:20 will say the same of the Canaanite kings, that it was of the Lord to harden their hearts so that they should come against Israel in battle. The offer of peace at verse 26 stands in the text beside the hardening at verse 30, and readers have long divided over how the two hold together: Calvin treats the hardening as God's own act, while Henry writes that the embassy left Sihon without excuse. Paul takes up the Pharaoh case at Romans 9:17-18, where the same question is still being argued.

Deuteronomy 2:32-33

Jahaz is where Numbers 21:23-24 puts the same battle, and Sihon comes out into the open rather than holding Heshbon behind its walls. The Hebrew consonantal text at verse 33 reads his son where the reading tradition gives his sons, and Gill notes the difference along with the rabbinic comment that one son was as mighty as his father. The King James follows the plural.

Deuteronomy 2:34-35

Barnes renders the verb behind utterly destroyed as laid under ban, the word Leviticus 27:28 uses of a thing devoted, and here it covers the whole population of every city. Genesis 15:16 had set the term four hundred years before, that Abraham's seed would come back in the fourth generation because the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full, and verse 24 calls Sihon the Amorite. Cattle and spoil are kept in this campaign, which is where it differs from Jericho, where Joshua 6:18-19 puts everything into the treasury and Achan's keeping of it costs the next battle.

Deuteronomy 2:36-37

The victory and the restraint are reported in one breath, not one city too strong from Aroer to Gilead, and nothing whatever taken from Ammon. Numbers 21:24 gives a different reason for the Ammonite line holding, that the border of the children of Ammon was strong, where verse 37 says the Lord our God forbad us; both accounts stand in the canon, and it is the chapter claiming no city was too strong that gives the second reason. The land taken here is what Reuben, Gad and half Manasseh will ask for at Numbers 32.