1. the daughters of Zelophehad. Rashi, noting that this episode immediately follows a mention of the ten fearful spies, construes it as a special argument in behalf of the role of women as opposed to men in the Wilderness narrative: “The men say (Numbers 14), ‘Let us make us put up a head and return to Egypt,’ and the women say, ‘Give us a holding.’”

3. Our father died. The choice of the favored instrument of biblical narrative—dialogue—for making this case has expressive consequences. The issue of daughters’ inheritance in the absence of male offspring is not presented as an abstract legal precedent but as an impassioned plea for justice—“Why should our father’s name be withdrawn . . .? Give us a holding”—by these five young women who fear that the patriarchal system of inheritance will deprive them of their rights. Though the notion of daughters’ inheriting was exceptional in the ancient Near East, this story is something other than a feminist argument. The chief concern is not to lose the inheritance pertaining to the clan, not to allow the “name” of the clan to disappear. But since the holdings of the clans were defined within tribal territories, the whole system would have been upset if the daughters were to marry outside the tribe. The follow-up to this episode in chapter 36 therefore stipulates that they are obliged to marry within the tribe.

for through his own offense he died. This would most plausibly be the “offense” of all the adults of the Wilderness generation after the episode of the spies. The daughters assume, as Abraham ibn Ezra notes, that the active conspirators against the LORD in the Korah rebellion are to be punished more severely, by death and by denial of inheritance to their descendants.

5. Moses brought forward their case before the LORD. The idiom refers to inquiry of an oracle, but, unlike the Urim and Thummim (evidently divinatory stones or tokens) that Joshua is directed to employ at the end of this chapter, Moses is represented as engaged in dialogue with God.

7. a secure holding. The Hebrew is literally “a holding of an estate.” The two terms, ʾaḥuzah and naḥalah, are virtual synonyms, and the use of two synonyms linked in the construct state often expresses an intensification of the noun (compare ḥoshekh ’afelah, “pitch-dark,” in Exodus 10:22).

8. Should a man die. From the dramatized instance of the daughters of Zelophehad, the divine response to Moses’s inquiry now proceeds to a casuistically formulated law of inheritance that includes the contingency of a daughter as heir but also stipulates the lines of inheritance when the deceased has neither sons nor daughters.

14. since you rebelled against My word . . . to sanctify Me through the water. The sense of the somewhat loose syntax of this sentence is: My instruction, against which you rebelled, was to sanctify Me through the water (that is, by making manifest that it was I bringing forth water from the rock rather than claiming the deed for yourself and Aaron as you struck the rock).

16. Let the LORD, God of the spirits for all flesh, appoint a man. In this final dialogue between Moses and God, it is noteworthy that Moses, far from demurring about the fate of imminent death that has just been pronounced upon him, expresses his concern about the continuity of leadership and the future of the people he has led. The relatively unusual epithet, “God of the spirits for all flesh,” points forward to the need for a man “who has spirit within him” (either the “spirit of wisdom,” ruaḥ ḥokhmah, or the “spirit of God,” ruaḥ ʾelohim). All living flesh has an animating spirit or life-breath in it, but only the few are endowed with a spirit of understanding or visionary presence.

17. go out before them and come in before them. This idiom has the sense of “to lead in battle,” an appropriate role for Joshua, who will command the Israelite forces in the conquest of the land. The same two verbs are used in the next clause transitively, in the causative conjugation, and there the translation adds “on the march” to underscore the military implication of the idiom.

that the LORD’s community will not be like a flock that has no shepherd. Though the image of ruler as shepherd of the people is conventional in the ancient Near East, it also harks back, as Richard Elliott Friedman aptly observes, to Moses’s own beginnings as a shepherd and his first dialogue with God at the burning bush to which he had come while tending his sheep.

18. lay your hand upon him. In the event, Moses will lay both hands on Joshua. Jacob Milgrom, arguing that two hands were regularly used for the gesture of passing on leadership, reads “hands” here, against the Masoretic Text. Rashi ingeniously makes an interpretive point out of the discrepancy between “hand” and the plural “hands” in verse 23: “[Moses acted] more generously, more than he had been commanded. For the Holy One said to him, ‘and lay your hand’ but he did it with both his hands and turned [Joshua] into a chock-full vessel and filled him with his wisdom generously.”

20. something of your grandeur. The Hebrew hod (“grandeur,” “majesty,” “aura”) is typically associated with kings, or with God. The partitive mem that prefixes the noun is a clear indication of the difference in stature between Moses and Joshua—only a part of Moses’s grandeur is to be conferred upon Joshua. In any case, this notion of leadership presumes that the leader in his personal presence must manifest some sort of charisma in order to enlist the loyalty of those he would lead, “in order that the whole Israelite community will heed.”

21. inquire of him for the ruling of the Urim. Joshua’s lesser stature in comparison with Moses is reflected in the fact that he will be dependent upon an institutionalized intermediary—the high priest manipulating the oracular device of the Urim and Thummim—instead of speaking with God “as a man speaks with his fellow man.” The Urim and Thummim were evidently two stones or dicelike carved objects that yielded yes-or-no responses to inquiries. The two terms begin respectively with the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. More conjecturally, Urim might be related to the root ʾ-r-r, “to curse,” and Thummim to the root t-m-m, “innocent.”