1. king of Arad. Arad was a town in the central southern Negeb. Archaeological investigation raises doubts as to whether it existed in this early period. The whole account here of battles and conquests around the southern and eastern perimeters of Canaan appears to be a complicated interweaving of retrojections from a later period with fragmentary historical memories. The comments here will concentrate on the literary articulation of the account without attempting to sort out the layered phenomena of historical report.

he did battle with Israel. Although the way of Atharim has not been identified, the preceding narrative encourages the inference that the Israelites are advancing eastward along the southern border of Canaan, avoiding any penetration into Canaan proper. The king of Arad, then, hearing of their movements, takes the initiative in leading an expeditionary force southward across the border against them. This act of aggression, rewarded by the initial taking of captives, is what prompts the Israelites to their vow of utter destruction.

2. put its towns under the ban. The Hebrew verb heḥerim (cognate noun, ḥerem) means to devote to utter destruction, with any booty taken to be dedicated to the cult rather than retained for private enjoyment. The place-name Hormah memorializes this grim practice.

3. into his hand. This clarifying phrase (a single Hebrew word) is lacking in the Masoretic Text but is reflected in a couple of ancient versions.

4. the Red Sea. In the present context, yam suf could not refer to the Sea of Reeds, the marshy lake region in northern Egypt, as it appears to do in Exodus, but would plausibly be the Red Sea, the body of water for which the term is used in the Book of Kings.

5. we loathe the wretched bread. The probable literal sense of the Hebrew is “our very self [nafsheinu as an intensive form of the first-person plural pronoun] loathes the wretched bread.” The intensive sense is transferred in this translation to the extremeness of the verb “loathe.” But there are two more physiological meanings of nefesh that are also possible here: “appetite” or “gullet.” Perhaps the people are saying that they retch when they try to eat the bread. The complaint here repeats the pattern of a whole series of murmuring episodes that began in Exodus 17. The one notable difference in this instance is that the people revile the very stuff that God has given them as a bounty to sustain them in the wilderness—the manna. This denigration of a divine gift may explain why, in contrast to the earlier episodes, God immediately responds with lethal punishment.

6. viper-serpents. The Hebrew uses two words that, to judge by their bracketing elsewhere as parallel terms in poetry, are synonyms: neḥashim and serafim. The second word, transparently derived from the root that means “to burn,” is also used, in Isaiah 6, for “fiery angels” (from which the English “seraph” is taken); that application of the term to snakes appears to come from the burning effect of the venom. Although it is unlikely that the serafim were fire-breathing dragons, as some fanciful commentators have claimed, this is still another instance in which kernels of historical recollection have been expanded into myth. Israelites who wandered through the wilderness would no doubt have been regularly exposed to the threat of venomous snakes native to the desert. Here, however, the poisonous creatures are suddenly and miraculously dispatched by God against Israel as a relentless attacking force.

7. the serpents. The Hebrew employs a singular, collective noun, a common idiomatic pattern for animals in biblical usage.

9. a serpent of bronze. The Hebrew is neḥash neḥoshet. Rashi vividly catches the point of the wordplay: “It was not said to him ‘of bronze,’ but Moses said, ‘The Holy One calls it naḥash and I’ll make it out of neḥoshet’—a pun.” The word magic of replicating serpent/naḥash in bronze/neḥoshet reinforces the device of sympathetic magic whereby the sight of the bronze image of the serpent becomes an antidote for the serpents’ poisonous bite. Interestingly, a small bronze serpent, evidently used in the local cult, has been found at Timnah (where Solomon mined copper) near Eilat, the region in which this incident is reported to have taken place.

14. the Book of the Battles of YHWH. This is one of several lost books mentioned in the Bible. The tetragrammaton is represented in this instance as YHWH rather than as “the LORD” in order to intimate the archaic character of the book’s title. One may conjecture that this ancient—probably poetic—book was not preserved for the canon because it was felt by later authorities to be too mythological in nature, representing YHWH as a warrior-god in direct combat with Israel’s enemies—as He figures in the Song of the Sea—rather than working through the agency of Israel, as is the typical case in the Bible’s historical narratives.

Against Waheb in a whirlwind. The quotation from the Book of the Battles of YHWH is fragmentary, and it is not easy to determine what it might be about. The first two place-names are preceded by the accusative prefix ʾet but no verb is included in the quotation. It seems reasonable to infer that a verb of violent action, suggesting something like “to storm,” with YHWH as subject, was present in the text immediately before the words actually quoted. In this translation, the implication of the accusative prefix is represented by “against.” Sufah, the word for “whirlwind,” is construed by many to be a place-name (otherwise unattested), but given the subject of divine battling, “whirlwind” makes better sense.

16. Beʾer, which is the well of which the LORD said. Beʾer means “well” in Hebrew. The narrative here invokes an apparently familiar episode of God’s providing water in the desert but does not directly report it. Instead, we have the quotation of a second archaic poem that celebrates the discovery of the well. Such well-songs are actually current among later Bedouins: when life in the parched desert is so dependent on water, the discovery of an underground spring is an occasion for musical thanksgiving.

18. Well, that captains dug, / the people’s nobles delved it. Although Abraham ibn Ezra wants to identify these leaders as Moses and Aaron, it is far more likely that this ancient bit of song registers a less historically anchored celebration by desert tribesmen and their chieftains, who, hyperbolically, are said to have dug into a water source using their staffs of authority as digging implements.

20. the steppes of Moab. These notations of itinerary indicate that the Israelites have at this point completed their march to the east and are poised for a northward drive. The Moabites and the Amorites inhabit the region that is part of present-day Jordan; most of the towns mentioned are about a day’s march to the east of the Dead Sea. The northernmost area mentioned is Bashan, which is above the Dead Sea.

22. Let me pass through your land. Although the language repeats the salient elements of the diplomatic message to the king of Edom, there is no recapitulation of the enslavement in Egypt, perhaps because the Amorites are not a “brother” people like the Edomites.

23. Sihon did not let Israel pass through his territory. His response is the same as that of the king of Edom with one difference: he does not even honor the Israelites’ request for free passage with an answer but instead musters his forces for an attack against them, like the king of Arad.

24. the edge of the sword. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “mouth of the sword,” an image correlated with the idiomatic usage in which the sword is said to “consume.”

from the Arnon to the Jabbok. Both these rivers run north to south, the Jabbok on the border of Canaan. The impregnable border of the Ammonites is to the east.

25. all its surrounding villages. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “all its daughters.” In biblical idiom, the city figures as a mother and the little settlements in its vicinity are daughters.

26. the first king of Moab. The expression could conceivably mean “the former king of Moab,” as Baruch Levine contends.

27. Therefore do the rhapsodes say. In the anthologizing spirit of this entire section, we are given still another quotation from an old poem, one that evidently was a popular subject for recitation by the rhapsodes (moshlim) of this region. The poem could not be Israelite in origin, for it celebrates the greatness of the Amorite city Heshbon and its conquest of Moab. This text seems to be a Hebrew translation or adaptation of Amorite epic material celebrating a military victory famous throughout the region.

28. For fire has come out from Heshbon, / flame from the town of Sihon. The style of the poem is manifestly traditional, relying heavily on formulaic phrases and formulaic word-pairings. This line, which has numerous analogues in the poetry of the Prophets, is a textbook illustration of the formulaic construction of a line of parallelistic verse: fire/flame; Heshbon/the town of Sihon, the verb “come out” doing double duty for both versets, with the added element “town of” (qiryat) providing an accented syllable that a second verb would yield and thus preserving a three-beat rhythm in each verset.

29. You are lost. The Hebrew verb means “to be lost,” “to perish,” “to vanish.”

Chemosh. He is the patron deity of Moab.

His sons he has turned into fugitives. Although the verb could be a passive masquerading as a third-person singular transitive, it makes better poetic sense to construe Chemosh as the subject: the god of Moab has been compelled to make his own sons fugitives.

30. And their mastery is lost. The Hebrew waniram is obscure. The initial Masoretic vowel would make it a verb. This translation, following a construction endorsed by Rashi and many modern scholars, reads it as a noun, weniram. That noun, nir, has the primary meaning of “yoke,” and then by metaphorical extension, “mastery” or “rule,” and, alternately, by metonymic extension, “plowed field.” An attractive alternative reading offered by the Septuagint is weninam, “and their descendants.”

33. Og king of Bashan. According to the tradition registered in Deuteronomy 3:1–11, Og was a giant, but there is no indication of that in the present report.

troops. The collective noun ʿam usually designates “troops” in any sort of military context, though the conjunction of ʿam with “land” in the next verse raises the possibility that it might reflect here its more general meaning of “people.”