2. two silver trumpets. After all the lists of the early chapters of Numbers, the visual pageantry of the Tabernacle furnishings, and the deployment of the tribal troops with their banners, sound enters the text—in essence, musical flourishes, a pageantry of sound. These particular sounds are in the first instance the signal for the forward movement of the camp, and so propel the whole story from the long stasis of the stay at Sinai into the narrative of wanderings that constitutes much of what follows. The hammered silver trumpets are more artfully wrought wind instruments than the shofar, the ram’s horn, with which they share some functions. The shofar is used for the call to battle, and for coronations; these trumpets serve the distinctive purposes of signaling the march in the wilderness and accompanying cultic celebrations.

5. a long blast. There is no scholarly agreement as to whether the Hebrew teruʿah means “a long blast” and the other term, teqiʿah, “a short blast,” or the other way around. The verb taqaʿ has the primary meaning of “stab,” and by extension, a stabbing or penetration of breath through the aperture of a wind instrument. This sense might perhaps lend itself better to the idea of a short blast. Teruʿah also means “shout,” without the aid of an instrument, and might be more prolonged.

9. let out a long blast . . . and be remembered before the LORD. Here the function of the trumpets is identical with that of the shofar. The trumpet blast rallies the troops, perhaps frightens the enemy, and is imagined as a means for alerting God’s attention to Israel, calling them to mind, being a “remembrance” before Him.

12. And the Israelites began on their journeyings. The marching order of the tribes laid out in the next fifteen verses is a precise implementation of the tribal deployment detailed in chapter 2.

21. bearers of the sanctuary. In contradistinction to the Gershonites and the Merarites, “bearers of the Tabernacle,” the burden of the Kohathites is not the structure itself but the cultic paraphernalia of the sanctuary.

and they would set up the Tabernacle by the time they came. As elsewhere, biblical idiom is parsimonious in stipulating the antecedents of pronouns. The first “they” would have to refer to the Gershonites and Merarites, who carry the Tabernacle; the second “they” would be the Kohathites.

29. And Moses said to Hobab son of Reuel the Midianite. We now leave the Priestly tabulations and pomp and ceremony and enter the first actual narrative episode of the Book of Numbers. The name of Moses’s Midianite father-in-law is a bafflement that has been resolved only by rather contorted harmonizing explanations. In Exodus, he is called Jethro, who also seems to be identical with Reuel, while here he is Hobab son of Reuel. It seems likely that these narratives draw on authentic ancient traditions about an alliance and kinship between Moses and the Kenite clan of the Midianites, and those traditions provided an etiological explanation for the peaceful cohabitation of the Kenites with the Israelites (compare Judges 4:17–22). In the traditional variants of these stories about the Kenites, Moses’s father-in-law may have been assigned different names.

We are journeying to the place. No foreshadowing is allowed to intrude. At this point, Moses, unwitting of the disasters that lie ahead, imagines that both he and the people he is leading are about to cross the wilderness and enter into the promised land.

the LORD has spoken a good thing. Literally, “spoken good,” with the obvious sense of “promised to confer all manner of good things.” By repeating the root in both verb and noun, Moses twice emphasizes (the second time in verse 32) that he means to have Hobab share in the good that God has promised Israel.

30. to my land and to my birthplace I shall go. These words are probably an explicit allusion to God’s first command to Abraham, “Go forth from your land and your birthplace” (Genesis 12:1). Hobab asserts the desire to reverse that direction, to go back to his own homeland instead of forging on to the land God has promised Israel.

31. do you not know our encampment in the wilderness? Previously in Numbers, and before that in Exodus, there was a heavy stress on the idea that the cloud over the Tabernacle would guide the people. Here, by contrast, human agency is stressed: Hobab, himself indigenous to the great wilderness to the south of Canaan, is to act as a native guide through this forbidding territory. It is conceivable that this story registers an actual historical memory of receiving help of this sort from the Midianites. Hobab’s response to Moses is not stated, but the later presence of his descendants among the Israelites suggests that he agreed to accompany them. Perhaps the end of this story was excised editorially in order not to diminish the idea conveyed in the next two verses that it was the Ark with the accompanying cloud that led Israel through the wilderness.

33. the Ark . . . journeying before them a three days’ march. Although the Ark was to lead the way, this three days’ distance is baffling, for in that case the Ark would not have been visible to the people who were supposed to follow it. A common scholarly solution to the problem is to see the second occurrence of “a three days’ march” as an inadvertent scribal repetition (dittography) of the first.

35. Rise O LORD. These words attributed to Moses are often referred to as the Song of the Ark. Although one recent scholar, Richard Elliott Friedman, has expressed skepticism about whether this is actually a poem, there is sufficient evidence of poetic structure and diction even in the brief fragment. Rhythmically, these two versets contain, respectively, four and three stresses, a pattern sometimes found in lines of biblical poetry. The word pairings, enemies/foes, scatter/flee, are a hallmark of parallelistic poetry. The concluding line (verse 36) uses a bit of emphatic synonymity, “teeming myriads” (literally “myriads of thousands”) that is marked as poetic diction and also appears, with the order of “myriads” and “thousands” reversed, in the poetic blessing for Rebekah, Genesis 24:60. “Rise,” as several commentators have noted, also has a military sense of “attack,” but the visual image of elevation is important—God, imagined as enthroned on the cherubim carved over the Ark, surges up like a warrior-king as the Ark is lifted to be carried forward. In the Hebrew text, the unit that verses 35–36 constitute is bracketed off from what precedes and follows by inverted letter nuns. This is a scribal device known from Late Antiquity for marking a piece of text that is out of place, or quoted from another source. Some have conjectured that the Song of the Ark is actually a quotation from the mysterious Book of the Battles of YHWH mentioned elsewhere. Whatever the source, the quotation may give only the opening lines of two poems rather than the integral text of the poems. In any case, this is the first of several fragments of archaic Hebrew poetry quoted in Numbers.

36. Come back O LORD to Israel’s teeming myriads. There is no explicit “to” in the Hebrew connecting “come back” with Israel’s myriads. The absence of the preposition has inspired a variety of ingenious interpretations, but one should keep in mind that biblical poetic diction—especially in the case of the more archaic layer of Hebrew poetry—exhibits a great deal of ellipsis, which is, after all, a means of eliminating extra syllables and heightening the compactness of the utterance. It thus seems reasonable to infer that “to” is implied here.