3. Long enough. This initial phrase pointedly echoes the one in 1:6, thus establishing a rhetorical link between God’s command to Israel to move on from Sinai and His command thirty-eight years later for Israel to move on to the conquest after its peregrinations to the southeast of Canaan.

4. Though they fear you. Richard Elliott Friedman aptly notes that in Genesis 32, as Jacob/Israel drew near his brother after long years of separation, it was Israel who feared Esau and not the other way around.

7. For the LORD your God has blessed you. The initial “for” (ki) marks a clear logic of causation: because God has blessed all your enterprises, you have abundant wherewithal to pay for food and drink.

He has known. The Hebrew verb “to know” often suggests intimate knowledge—hence its use for sexual intercourse—and caring attention.

these forty years. Again and again in Moses’s valedictory speech that constitutes this book, he invokes the palpable experience that the people has undergone in all its years of wandering “in this fearful wilderness.”

8. Elath and Ezion-Geber. These are port cities at the northern end of the Gulf of Aqabah.

10. The Emim. This designation, evidently of legendary creatures, is probably related to the noun ʾeymah, “fear” or “terror.” Rephaim in the next verse is a well-attested Hebrew and Ugaritic term for ghosts or dwellers of the underworld. In verse 20, we are informed that the Ammonite name for these huge creatures was Zamzummim. Jeffrey H. Tigay plausibly represents this as an onomatopoeic term, “the Buzz-buzzers”—that is, people who speak an unintelligible, and perhaps frightening, language. This could also be, as Abraham ibn Ezra proposes, the Hebraization of a foreign gentilic term. Moshe Weinfeld speculates that it was the presence of megaliths in the trans-Jordan region that inspired these traditions of an aboriginal race of giants there.

12. the sons of Esau dispossessed them . . . as Israel did to the land of its inheritance. The writer confronts a theological problem posed by political history. All around him, he sees a constant flux of warring peoples, one group laying waste to another and seizing its territory. Upon this Hobbesian moral chaos of history, he strives to impose at least a degree of monotheistic order: it is God Who determines the inheritance of peoples, not only in the case of Israel, which has been promised it will succeed in overcoming the indigenous Canaanites and possessing the land, but also in the case of the other peoples of the region. The period of imperial incursions from the east from the late eighth century to the late seventh century B.C.E. would have given special urgency to this effort to account for the violent movements of history.

in their onslaught. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “from before their face,” but the clear implication is fear, as from an attack, and this preposition is often used after a verb such as “to banish.”

14. came to an end. The Hebrew verb tum means both “to come to an end,” or “to perish,” and “to finish doing something.” In verse 16 it is used in the latter sense but coupled with “dying.” The stylistic justification for the triple repetition is to convey emphatically the idea that this generation had absolutely and entirely died out. This pattern of repetition is phonetically reinforced by the word in verse 15 that means “to panic them,” lehumam, which is a rime riche with the last word of the verse, tumam, “they came to an end.” Panicking is what God regularly does to Israel’s enemies in order to rout them in battle. Thus, the Wilderness generation is not just left to die out but stricken with terror, impelling it to self-destruction.

18. Ar. If this is a precise site, it has not been located, but the context suggests that it designates the whole region inhabited by the Moabites.

21. through the Ammonites’ onslaught. The Hebrew says only “from before their faces.” As before, the element of fearfulness in that preposition is represented by “onslaught,” and “Ammonites’” is added to clarify an otherwise ambiguous antecedent of the pronoun.

23. the Caphtorim, who came out of Crete. Caphtor is the biblical name for Crete. This notice is historically accurate. The coastal plain, including Gaza, was invaded from the Mediterranean and successfully occupied by the Philistines, one of the so-called Sea Peoples, in the later thirteenth century and twelfth century B.C.E. They are first referred to explicitly in an Egyptian inscription that has been dated to the 1180s or the 1170s. Although the Hebrew writer does not directly ascribe this invasion of a Hellenic people to the LORD’s granting the territory to them as an inheritance, it does participate in the general pattern he is observing in which one well-established people is conquered and displaced by another.

25. the peoples under all the heavens. The Septuagint opts for the more expected idiom, “all the peoples under the heavens,” and it is conceivable that the Greek translators in fact had a Hebrew text before them which read that way, but it is also quite possible that they decided to smooth out a little stylistic wrinkle actually chosen by the Deuteronomist, one that equally conveys the sense of “everywhere on earth.”

26. words of peace. The evident contradiction between this and verse 24, where Israel is enjoined to provoke Sihon, has not been satisfactorily resolved.

27. On the road, on the road. The repetition clearly conveys the sense of “strictly and exclusively.”

30. hardened his spirit and toughened his heart. The language is close enough to the reiterated formula concerning Pharaoh in the Plagues narrative to suggest a typological connection between these two kings bent on Israel’s destruction. Sihon’s offensive against Israel, in the face of the Israelite proposal to pass through his territory peacefully and pay for food and water, is taken as justification for the implementation of the brutal practice of the ḥerem or “ban” (verse 34)—the massacre of the entire population. The persistence of the Amorites as a people suggests that this drastic report does not altogether reflect historical reality. The supposed application of the ḥerem to the Amorites may in fact have the function of defining political borders. The ḥerem was to be directed against the population of the promised land. In the parallel account in Numbers, where the ḥerem is not applied to Sihon’s people, the underlying assumption is that the promised land lies west of the Jordan, with only a special concession made to two and a half tribes to settle in trans-Jordan. As Moshe Weinfeld convincingly argues, the extension of Israelite dominion east of the Jordan chiefly occurred during Davidic and Solomonic times (tenth century B.C.E.), making it a long-established political reality by the time our later writer framed his account, in which this region is included in the promise of the land.

36. the town in the wadi. A wadi is a dry riverbed that fills with water during the rainy season, but in this case, the reference seems to be to a riverbed, or perhaps some small branch of it, that is no longer the site of seasonal inundation.

there was no city that loomed too high for us. The looming high (a single verb in the Hebrew, sagvah) reflects the perspective of the besieging army looking up at the fortified city situated on a height. Looming high is also stressed as a response to the reiterated perception that the indigenous peoples are “lofty,” a race of giants.

37. Only the land of the Ammonites you did not approach. This would be the hilly region farther to the east, whereas the Israelite advance is along the plain just east of the Jordan. Some recent scholars have accepted Jacob Milgrom’s proposal that here the verb q-r-b (“approach”) is used in a political extension of its cultic meaning, “to encroach upon,” though there is no compelling necessity to see that sense of the word in this verse.