1. the whole community. Both Rashi and Abraham ibn Ezra understand this phrase as intended to underline the fact that the Wilderness generation has died out and that a whole new community of Israelites is now poised to enter the land. The widely shared inference is that the story has now reached the fortieth year of Wilderness wanderings.

And Miriam died. This isolated obituary notice is inserted here to provide a symmetrical frame for the two stories of Moses’s striking the rock and the rebuff of Israel by Edom. Miriam’s death stands at the beginning and that of her brother Aaron at the end.

3. And the people disputed with Moses. This story is a close counterpart to the episode of complaint at the beginning of the Wilderness wanderings, Exodus 17:1–7. Even the place-names overlap: this place is called Meribah (Disputation); the site of the murmuring in Exodus is called Massah and Meribah (Testing and Dispute). In the present episode, the people provide a fuller description of the awfulness of the great desert (verse 5), and no mention is made here, as it is in Exodus 17, that Moses fears he will be stoned by the people, though perhaps fear is implied in the report that Moses and Aaron “came away from [mipney] the assembly to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting” (verse 6), as into a place of refuge.

Would that we had perished when our brothers perished before the LORD. To mention the most recent episode, Dathan and Abiram and their followers were swallowed up by the earth, Korah and his people incinerated—instantaneous deaths that now seem preferable to slow death by thirst.

8. Take the staff. The fact that it is not referred to as “your staff” implies that it is a staff—whether Moses’s or Aaron’s—that has been set aside for keeping in the Tent of Meeting “before the LORD” (verse 9).

assemble the community. The crucial verbal stem q-h-l has been used in a negative sense: the mutinous assembling against Moses and Aaron. Now they are enjoined to assemble the community to be united in witnessing God’s saving power.

10. Shall we bring forth water for you from this rock? The verb for taking out or bringing out is the same one the people used (verse 5) to refer to their trajectory from Egypt into the wilderness. Both they and Moses attach the verb to the wrong subject because in both cases it is God who does the bringing out, not Moses and Aaron. Milgrom, building on an insight of the medieval French Hebrew commentator Bekhor Hashor, persuasively argues that Moses’s sin, for which he is condemned to die outside the borders of the promised land, is his presumptuous claim, at the very moment he is supposed to “sanctify” God in the eyes of the people, that it is he and Aaron who will bring forth the water from the rock. A venerable tradition sees Moses’s sin in his angry striking of the rock instead of speaking to it as he was instructed, but in the twin episode in Exodus 17, he is actually told to strike the rock, and such efficacious gestures with the staff have been an authorized part of Moses’s role as a worker of wonders from the beginning of his mission.

13. and He was sanctified through them. The antecedent of “them” is ambiguous, but the proximate noun that creates the fewest difficulties is “waters.” Moses and Aaron had the opportunity to proclaim God’s power in bringing forth the water from the rock. Although they failed in this, the gush of water from the rock that revived the thirsting people nevertheless proved to be a confirmation of God’s power, “sanctifying” Him, rather than being a demonstration of Moses’s ability as an arch-magician.

14. Thus said your brother Israel. The first two words of this clause are the so-called messenger formula that is conventionally used to introduce the text, whether written or oral, of a message (roughly like the salutation in a modern letter). Collective Israel identifies himself to Edom as “your brother” because they are in fact ethnic kin; according to Genesis, the eponymous founders of the two peoples, Jacob–Israel and Esau–Edom, were twins. The sending of messengers to Edom, as many commentators have noted, recalls Jacob’s sending messengers to his brother Esau after two decades of separation. This heir of Esau, however, behaves quite differently from his ancestor, flatly rejecting Israel’s claim to brotherhood and its accompanying request of transit through his territory.

15. Our fathers went down to Egypt. This recapitulation of history is in part intended to enlist a sense of Semitic ethnic solidarity against the non-Semitic Egyptian persecutors.

16. sent a messenger. In some of the varying accounts in Exodus, not God Himself but a divine messenger leads Israel out of slavery into the wilderness.

territory. The Hebrew gevul means either “territory” or “border.” In verse 23 the term obviously has the latter meaning.

17. Let us, pray, pass through your land. The Israelites are careful to use the most polite and deferential forms in this diplomatic petition.

the king’s road. This is a major north-south route from Syria through trans-Jordan to Egypt.

18. And Edom said. The obvious sense is “the king of Edom,” just as “France” in Shakespeare’s plays can mean “the king of France.”

You shall not pass. Following the principle of contrastive dialogue often evident in biblical narrative, Edom’s response, after Israel’s elaborate petition, is abrupt and blunt. His second response (verse 20) is even more abrupt, only two words in the Hebrew, loʾ taʿavor, “you shall not pass.”

19. highway. The Hebrew mesilah is a beaten track, and appears to be a synonym for the king’s road.

I will pay its price. As Rashi suggests, Israel now proffers a possibility of economic gain if Edom will grant transit rights.

21. and Israel swung away from him. In order to avoid a clash with the massed Edomite forces, the Israelites, instead of proceeding north by northeast, swing around (literally, “incline”) to the east, coming to a place of encampment perhaps fifty miles eastward at Hor the Mountain.

22. Hor the Mountain. This odd form reproduces the unusual word order of the Hebrew, used only for this mountain.

24. gathered to his kin. This decorous euphemism is used instead of the plain verb “die.” you both. “Both” is added in the translation to reflect the plural Hebrew verb that addresses both brothers.

rebelled against My word. The Hebrew says literally “against My mouth.” God had said, “I shall bring forth water”; Moses on behalf of himself and Aaron said, “Shall we bring forth water . . . ?”

26. strip . . . clothe. The divestiture of Aaron leaves him naked in his human vulnerability, without accoutrement of office, before the universal fact of death. But clothing his son in the priestly garb is also a concrete manifestation of the continuity of his line and its sacerdotal authority. This is one reason that traditional Hebrew commentaries see Aaron’s demise as a blissful death.

die there. Only now is the blunt verb of death introduced, after Moses has been twice prepared for the loss of his brother through the euphemism and the instructions of divestiture.

29. all the community saw . . . all the house of Israel keened. The textual unit that began with “all the community” arriving at Kadesh, where they disputed with Moses and Aaron, ends with all the community joined in mourning for Aaron. The biblical narrator’s characteristic impassivity does not allow us to know confidently whether these thirty days of mourning are merely a formal ritual or an expression of real sorrow. Aaron was often enough a target of popular resentment, as in the very recent episode of the waters of Meribah. But he was also often a welcome intercessor for the people. Rashi neatly catches the second possibility, the people’s reaction to the loss of a cherished leader: “When they saw Moses and Eleazar coming down and Aaron did not come down, they said, ‘Where is Aaron?’ He said to them, ‘He’s dead.’ They said, ‘Is it possible that the angel of death should conquer him who stood against the destroying angel and held back the scourge?’”