Numbers20chapter 20

Numbers 20:1

Between the last verse of chapter 19 and this one sits most of the thirty-eight years the book never narrates, and Deuteronomy 2:14 is where they are counted. The camp is back at Kadesh, which is where the sentence of chapter 14 fell. Miriam is the first of the three whom Micah 6:4 names as sent before Israel to die, and Aaron is buried before this chapter ends. Exodus 2:4 has her watching the ark of bulrushes and Exodus 15:20 has her leading the women with a timbrel, and her death is given one line.

Numbers 20:2-3

Exodus 17:1-7 is the first Meribah and this is the second, the same complaint at the start of the wandering and at the end of it. The verb behind chode is rib, to bring a suit, and it is the root of the name given to the place at verse 13. Their wish, that they had died when their brethren died before the Lord, takes its sense from 16:49 and from the sentence of 14:29, so the second generation asks to be given what the first was given.

Numbers 20:4-5

The charge is the one their fathers made at Exodus 17:3 and again at Numbers 14:3, that Moses brought them out here to kill them. The four things they say this place lacks, seed and figs and vines and pomegranates, are close to what the spies carried back out of Canaan at 13:23, where the cluster came with pomegranates and figs. They measure the wilderness by the produce of the land their fathers turned down.

Numbers 20:6-7

Moses and Aaron leave the assembly and go face down at the door of the tent, which is the posture they took at 14:5, 16:4, 16:22 and 16:45. Each of those times the glory appeared and something was settled. Here the glory appears and the word that follows it is an instruction rather than a sentence.

Numbers 20:8

The instruction carries two verbs and the whole chapter turns on which one is acted. Take the rod, and speak ye unto the rock, so the rod is carried and the rock is addressed. At Exodus 17:6 the word was smite the rock, and there the striking was the obedience. The rod is commanded in the same breath here, and the thing it is carried for is the speaking.

Numbers 20:9-10

The rod taken from before the Lord is the rod kept before the testimony, and which rod that is has holders on both sides. Gill reads it as Aaron's rod that budded and was laid up at 17:10, while Keil and Delitzsch read it as the rod of Moses that did the signs in Egypt. What Moses says to the assembly is his own and no part of it was given him, hear now, ye rebels, and the question after it puts the water in the hands of two men, must we fetch you water out of this rock.

Numbers 20:11

He was told to speak and he struck, and he struck twice. The water comes abundantly all the same, and the congregation and their cattle drink, so the people lose nothing by what he did. 1 Corinthians 10:4 says of the rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ, which is the New Testament stating the link itself. The older reading, that a rock struck once and afterward only spoken to shows one offering never repeated, is held by Matthew Henry and taught by Chuck Missler, and the New Testament does not say it.

Numbers 20:12-13

The reason given here is unbelief and a failure to sanctify God before Israel, and the price of it is the land. Moses tells it differently three times in Deuteronomy, at 1:37, 3:26 and 4:21, where he says the Lord was angry with him for your sakes, and both accounts stand in the canon. Verse 13 answers verse 12 with the same word, since Moses did not sanctify him and he was sanctified in them anyway. Meribah means strife, and the place is named for what the people did.

Numbers 20:14-16

Moses addresses Edom as thy brother Israel, which reaches back to Esau and Jacob in Genesis 25 through 33, and Edom is asked as kin rather than as a neighbour. The message is a short history given to a stranger: the fathers went down into Egypt, the Egyptians vexed them, they cried and were heard, and an angel brought them out. Deuteronomy 2:4-5 supplies the other half of the case, that Israel was forbidden any of Edom's ground because it was given to Esau for a possession.

Numbers 20:17-19

The terms give away every advantage a passing army has. Israel keeps to the king's high way, leaves the fields and the vineyards and the wells alone, and turns neither to the right hand nor to the left. When Edom refuses, Israel raises the offer and promises to pay for water that the first message had already waived. Numbers 21:22 puts nearly the same request to Sihon, and that refusal ends in a battle while this one ends in a detour.

Numbers 20:20-22

Edom answers a request with an army, and Israel turns away, though this is the people who beat Amalek at Rephidim and who take Sihon and Og in the next chapter. Deuteronomy 2:4-6 gives the reason from God's side, that Edom's land was Esau's by grant and Israel was to buy meat and water of them for money. Obadiah 10-14 charges Edom with this and worse on the day Jerusalem fell, and Amos 1:11 says he cast off all pity and kept his wrath for ever. The road to mount Hor is the long way round a brother's border.

Numbers 20:23-26

The ground for Aaron's death outside the land is named as the water of Meribah, so the sentence of verse 12 is read back over both brothers. Aaron is stripped of his garments and Eleazar is clothed in them while Aaron is alive to watch it, which Adam Clarke reads as the ordinary form of transferring an office, by investing the successor in the robes. Hebrews 7:23-24 takes up this very thing, that the Levitical priests were many because death stopped them, and that the priesthood of Christ passes to no one. Gathered unto his people is the phrase used of Abraham at Genesis 25:8 and of Isaac at Genesis 35:29.

Numbers 20:27-29

They go up in the sight of all the congregation, so the nation watches the priesthood change hands. Aaron dies on the top of the mount and two men come down where three went up. Deuteronomy 10:6 places his death at Mosera, and readers hold two accounts of that: Mosera as the name of the district with mount Hor a place inside it, or two records of the same stage kept side by side. The mourning runs thirty days, which is the term Israel keeps for Moses at Deuteronomy 34:8.