Numbers21chapter 21

Numbers 21:1-3

Israel vows before the battle and the terms are destruction of the cities rather than plunder. The place is called Hormah, a name Numbers 14:45 had already used for the ground where the fathers were driven back after going up without leave, and Judges 1:17 records the name being given again by Judah and Simeon. Keil and Delitzsch read 14:45 as using the later name in advance, and the three passages stand in the text as they are written.

Numbers 21:4-5

The long way around Edom is what Edom's refusal at 20:21 cost them, and it turns the march back south toward the Red sea. The complaint holds two things at once, that there is no bread and that they loathe the bread they have, since the light bread is the manna of Exodus 16. In Exodus a complaint of this kind was answered with food or water, and from Numbers 11:1 onward the same complaints are answered with fire, with plague, and here with serpents.

Numbers 21:6-7

The word rendered fiery is saraph, the burning one, the same word behind the seraphim of Isaiah 6:2 and the fiery flying serpent of Isaiah 14:29. The confession repeats verse 5 back exactly, that they had spoken against the Lord and against Moses, so the sin is named in full before the remedy is asked for. Moses prays for people who had just spoken against him, as he did at 11:2 and at 14:13, and 1 Corinthians 10:9 names this episode by name among the things written for the church.

Numbers 21:8

The remedy is a likeness of the thing that is killing them, lifted where the whole camp can see it, and the entire cure is a look. Nothing is asked of the bitten man except that he look, and the promise covers every one that is bitten. John 3:14-15 applies this to the Son of man in so many words, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up, which makes it one of the few types in the Torah the New Testament states outright.

Numbers 21:9

God said to make a fiery serpent and Moses made it of brass, and the Hebrew words for serpent and for brass share their consonants. The thing that healed Israel was kept, and 2 Kings 18:4 records what became of it, that Hezekiah brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made because unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it. He called it Nehushtan, a piece of brass, and the cure had become the idol.

Numbers 21:10-13

Four stages carry Israel from the desert to the border of Moab, and one of them carries the end of the sentence passed at Kadesh. Deuteronomy 2:14 says the space from Kadesh-barnea until they came over the brook Zered was thirty and eight years, until all the generation of the men of war were wasted out from among the host. Arnon is named as the border between Moab and the Amorites, and that line decides whom Israel may fight, since Deuteronomy 2:9 forbids any quarrel with Moab.

Numbers 21:14-15

Scripture names a book here and does not preserve it, the book of the wars of the Lord, quoted for a few lines about the Red sea and the brooks of Arnon. Joshua 10:13 and 2 Samuel 1:18 cite the book of Jasher the same way, so the text quotes outside records in other places too. The quoted lines are compressed and the translators divide over them, some reading a string of place names and others a fragment of a war song, and the American Standard Version opens it as Vaheb in Suphah rather than what he did in the Red sea.

Numbers 21:16-17

Water is promised at Beer before anybody asks for it, and the words are gather the people together, and I will give them water. At verse 5 these same people had said there is no water, and in chapter 20 the want of water cost Moses the land. Here Israel sings over a well, and the song before this one was at the Red sea in Exodus 15:1.

Numbers 21:18-20

The well is given by God and dug by the princes and nobles with their staves, and one verse records both. The phrase by the direction of the lawgiver is read of Moses commanding the work, and it is also read of the ruler's staff, the word Genesis 49:10 puts between Judah's feet, and the older commentators divide over which is meant. The stages end at the top of Pisgah, where Balak will take Balaam at 23:14 and where Moses will be shown the land and die at Deuteronomy 34:1.

Numbers 21:21-23

Israel asks Sihon for exactly what it asked Edom at 20:17, passage along the highway with nothing taken from field or vineyard or well. Edom refused and Israel turned aside, and Sihon refuses and comes out to fight, so the outcome follows from who attacked whom. Deuteronomy 2:26-30 tells the same approach and adds a reason Numbers withholds, that the Lord thy God hardened his spirit and made his heart obstinate, and both accounts stand as they are written.

Numbers 21:24-25

This is the first land Israel holds and lives in since Egypt, from Arnon to Jabbok, and the cities are occupied rather than levelled. Genesis 15:16 had told Abraham his seed would come back in the fourth generation because the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full, and the Amorite is the first nation Israel dispossesses. Jabbok is the brook where Jacob wrestled at Genesis 32:22-24, so the northern boundary of the new holding carries the name of that night.

Numbers 21:26-27

Heshbon was Moabite ground until Sihon took it from the former king of Moab, and the detail matters because Deuteronomy 2:9 had forbidden Israel to distress Moab or meddle with their land. Israel takes Heshbon from the Amorite who held it, and Judges 11:12-27 has Jephthah argue that whole case back at the king of Ammon three hundred years later. The chapter then hands the account over to the poets, they that speak in proverbs, and lets them tell it.

Numbers 21:28-30

The song is an Amorite victory piece about the fall of Moab, made when Heshbon was taken from Moab, and Moses puts it into the record now that the singers themselves have fallen. Chemosh is named as the god of Moab, the god 1 Kings 11:7 says Solomon built a high place for. Jeremiah 48:45-46 takes these same lines up again against Moab centuries later, so a taunt made by Amorites ends in the prophets.

Numbers 21:31-32

The verb settles what the last chapters had only promised, that Israel dwelt in the land of the Amorites. Jaazer is spied out and taken, and the tribes who see this pasture will ask for it at 32:1-5, where Reuben and Gad name Jazer and Gilead as a place for cattle. The request that splits the inheritance across Jordan begins with the ground taken in this verse.

Numbers 21:33-34

Og comes out to Edrei and God says fear him not, for I have delivered him into thy hand, which is the assurance Joshua and Caleb gave at 14:9 and the camp refused. Deuteronomy 3:11 adds what Numbers withholds, that Og remained of the remnant of the giants and that his bedstead of iron was nine cubits long and four cubits broad. That ties him to the Rephaim of Genesis 14:5, smitten at Ashteroth Karnaim, the city Deuteronomy 1:4 gives as Og's own, and back to the report the ten spies brought at 13:33.

Numbers 21:35

None is left alive and the land is possessed, which closes a chapter that opened with a Canaanite king taking Israelites prisoner. Psalm 135:10-11 and Psalm 136:19-20 keep Sihon king of the Amorites and Og king of Bashan in Israel's praise by name, so these two battles became liturgy. The generation sentenced at Kadesh is gone and its children are taking ground.