1. by the LORD’s direction. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “by the LORD’s mouth.” God sets the itinerary, not Moses.

there was no water for the people to drink. In an alternating structure (A B A), the sequence of three “murmuring” episodes exhibits respectively complaints about lack of water, lack of food, and again lack of water.

2. disputed. The Hebrew verb often appears in judicial contexts, where it means to bring a legal complaint or disputation (the cognate noun riv). Riv is the term used in verse 7 in the phrase translated as “the disputation of the Israelites”; the name given the place there, Meribah, derives from the same root and means something closer to “contention.”

Give us water. The Masoretic Text shows a plural form of the verb, which might suggest that Aaron is implicated with Moses in the complaint the people make. But several ancient manuscripts have a singular form for “give,” which seems more plausible, since the people have “disputed” or quarreled with Moses alone.

Why do you dispute with me / and why do you test the LORD? Moses gives weight and solemnity to his words by casting his reply in a neatly scannable line of parallelistic verse, as he does again in speaking to God a moment later. As in the episode at Elim, he identifies the complaint against him (first verset) as a complaint against God (second verset). Thus, the poetic parallelism becomes a vehicle for expressing the inseparability of Moses’s leadership from God’s.

3. brought us up . . . to bring death on me and my children. This sort of switch from first-person plural to first-person singular is good idiomatic usage in biblical Hebrew, especially in dialogue assigned to a collective entity. The switch allows the sharpness of the complaint to become more vivid as the prototypical individual speaker representing the people laments his own imminent death and that of his children.

4. Yet a little more and they will stone me. From the very beginning, at the burning bush, Moses had been doubtful that the people could trust him and accept his leadership. Now he feels something like desperate fear—that the people will actually kill him (an idea that Freud would understand as an accomplished fact).

5. Pass before the people. As both Rashi and Abraham ibn Ezra note, this might well be a direct response to Moses’s expression of fear that the people will kill him: passing before the enraged people would be rather like running the gauntlet, and it is this that God compels him to do as the prelude to the demonstration of divine saving power.

the staff with which you struck the Nile. This staff was recognized by the people as the instrument Moses used to unleash awesome destruction against Egypt. Now, as Rashi observes, they will see that it can also be an instrument of benefaction.

7. Testing and Dispute . . . disputation . . . testing. The arrangement of the terms is neatly chiastic, just as the first pair of nouns here stand in a chiastic relation to the verbs “dispute” and “test” in verse 2. Ibn Ezra, who reads with the eye of an accomplished poet as well as that of a philologist, firmly identifies the pattern.

8. And Amalek came and did battle with Israel. Rashi comments astutely on the sequence of episodes, the attack by a fierce enemy following upon the provision of water to the thirsty people: “You say, ‘Is the LORD in our midst or not?’ By your life, the dog comes and bites you and you come and cry out to Me, and you will know where I am.”

9. tomorrow. The Masoretic cantillation marking places “tomorrow” at the beginning of the next clause, which makes the adverb a modifier of when Moses will take up his station, but it probably makes better sense as part of the instruction to Joshua about when he will be fighting.

11. when Moses would raise his hand. This gesture neatly cuts two ways. It could merely be the gesture of a general holding up a commander’s baton or a standard (compare the reference to a “banner” in verse 15) in order to encourage his troops to attack, or the hand holding the staff could be the conduit, as in the earlier portents, for an influx of divine power. Throughout the passage, the Hebrew noun yad characteristically slides between “hand” (verse 9) and “arm” (probably here and surely in verse 12). It is worth retaining “hand” in all instances to catch the sense of thematized repetition in the Hebrew: Umberto Cassuto, who has a certain fixation on the discovery of repeated terms exhibiting formulaic numbers, notes that yad recurs precisely seven times in this episode.

12. And Moses’s hands grew heavy. This could also be construed as “were heavy,” i.e., they were heavy to begin with because Moses was an old man. The plural suggests that he raised both hands simultaneously, the one with the staff and the empty one, in a kind of spread-eagle gesture.

his hands were steady. The Hebrew appears to use an abstract noun instead of an adjective—conceivably, an emphatic form: “his hands were steadiness.”

13. disabled. Several commentators have observed that the unusual verb here, ḥalash (evidently derived from a root that means “weak”) has a punning echo in Deuteronomy 25:18, where the Israelite stragglers attacked by Amalek are referred to as neḥeshalim (the same root with a reversal of the last two consonants). It should be noted that others, from Rashi to several twentieth-century scholars, think that this odd verb means “to decapitate.” In any case, this image of a sword-wielding Hebrew commander cutting down the enemy is the first representation of Israelites evincing martial prowess rather than watching as God performs wonders and does battle for them.

14. Write this down as a remembrance in a record. In Genesis, with a certain degree of historical verisimilitude, the patriarchs give no evidence of using writing. Here it is assumed that writing is a primary mode of commemoration in the culture. It must be said that literacy is an early phenomenon in ancient Israel, though it is difficult to determine how far it might have extended, or whether it extended, beyond a learned elite. (In Judges 8, Gideon appears to assume that any lad he would encounter on the road would be capable of writing things down.) “Record” here reflects Hebrew sefer, which is used for anything cast in writing—a parchment or papyrus scroll that might contain narrative, inventorial, or genealogical material; a letter; and also what we would call a book.

I will surely wipe out the name of Amalek. The noun zekher, though cognate with “remembrance,” zikaron, in the previous clause, here bears its usual meaning of “name,” as in 3:15. The written record will continue to memorialize odious Amalek, but the nation will lose its “name,” its posterity—an ultimate curse in the ancient Near East. In all this, as in the Plagues narrative, history is transformed into symbolic typology. Ancient Israel was surrounded by enemies—the Canaanite peoples with whom it fought for territory, marauders like the Midianites to the east and the Amalekites to the south, and the great empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Historical survival required nearly continual armed conflict. But distinctions are made among enemies, and Amalek here becomes the very type of the ruthless foe that seeks to annihilate Israel. (Hence much later, in the Book of Esther, Haman will be cast as a descendant of the Amalekite king Agag.) This nation, then, becomes the enemy of God Himself, Who pledges its utter destruction.

16. For hand upon Yah’s throne. The hand is most likely an image of vow taking in this obscure, and probably archaic, sentence. There has even been some speculation that these words could be a quotation from the lost “Book of the Battles of YHWH” mentioned elsewhere (see the note on Numbers 21:14). The meaning of kes, the word translated as “throne,” has been widely disputed, and the term has been sometimes emended. The interpretation that goes back to Late Antiquity that it is a variant—archaic form?—of kis’ei, “throne,” has the attraction of not exhibiting excessive ingenuity, and the idea of God’s taking a vow by placing His hand on the divine throne is plausible.

from all time. The Hebrew noticeably says “from,” mi, and not l^e, “for.” Perhaps the meaning is the same, though this formulation could suggest a kind of mythic recess of ages, God warring against Amalek as far back as anyone can conceive and until this foe is destroyed.