Numbers34chapter 34

Numbers 34:1-5

The borders are drawn before a single field is taken, and the land is said to fall unto Israel for an inheritance, which is the language of the lot that verse 13 states outright. The south line runs from the wilderness of Zin past Kadesh-barnea to the river of Egypt, so the edge of the inheritance touches the place where the spies came back and the sentence of chapter 14 was passed. Abram was promised ground reaching to the Euphrates at Genesis 15:18, and the lines given here stop well short of it.

Numbers 34:6-9

Each border is fixed to something that does not move, the great sea on the west and a mountain and a mountain pass on the north. The mount Hor of verse 7 is a different mountain from the mount Hor where Aaron died in chapter 20, which stood south by Edom; Barnes reads this one as the western crest of Lebanon, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown take the doubled Hebrew name as a high double mountain in the same range. Zedad and Hazar-enan are named again in Ezekiel 47:15-17, where the same northern line is drawn for a division of the land still to come.

Numbers 34:10-16

The east line comes down past the sea of Chinnereth, which the Gospels call the sea of Galilee, then follows Jordan to the salt sea where the south line began. Everything inside those four borders is Canaan, and verse 13 gives it to nine tribes and a half, because Reuben, Gad and half Manasseh had asked in chapter 32 for the pasture on the far side of Jordan. Joshua 22:24-25 records the fear those tribes carried afterward, that Jordan had been made a border and their children would be told they had no part in the LORD.

Numbers 34:17-20

These are the names of the men: The dividing is put into the hands of two men, and Eleazar the priest is named before Joshua the captain. Joshua and Caleb are the only men of the first census whom the sentence at 14:29-30 left alive, which 26:65 states again, so the two who said the land could be taken are the two set over its dividing, Joshua at the head of the work and Caleb first among the princes. One prince comes from each tribe that will receive ground, which is why ten names follow for nine tribes and a half, and why Levi is absent, holding no inheritance by 18:20.

Numbers 34:21-29

The order of the tribes in this list matches none of the other lists in the book, not chapter 1, not chapter 2 and not chapter 26. Clarke reads it as the order in which the tribes came to hold their ground, running from Judah in the south to Naphtali in the north, while Barnes says only that the arrangement belongs to this passage alone. Apart from Caleb, none of these ten men is heard of again in Scripture, and every prince who served in chapter 1 has died under the sentence of 14:29. Verse 29 closes with a commission to divide land none of them had yet stood on, and Joshua 19:51 records Eleazar, Joshua and the heads of the tribes doing it at Shiloh.