1And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 2“Make you two silver trumpets, hammered work you shall make them, and they shall serve you for calling the community and for the journeying of the camps. 3And when they blow them, all the community shall meet with you at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. 4And if but one they blow, the chieftains, the heads of Israel’s thousands, shall meet with you. 5And if you blow a long blast, the camps that are encamped to the east shall journey on. 6And if you blow a long blast a second time, the camps that are encamped to the south shall journey on, a long blast they shall blow for their journeyings. 7And when the assembly is gathered, you shall blow but let out no long blast. 8And the sons of Aaron, the priests, shall blow the trumpets, and they shall become for you an everlasting statute for your generations. 9And when you come in battle in your land against the foe who assails you, you shall let out a long blast with the trumpets and be remembered before the LORD your God and be rescued from your enemies. 10And on the day of your gladness and at your fixed seasons and on your new moons, you shall blow the trumpets over your burnt offerings and over your communion sacrifices, and they shall become for you a remembrance before your God. I am the LORD your God.”
11And it happened in the second year in the second month on the twentieth of the month that the cloud lifted from the Tabernacle of the Covenant. 12And the Israelites began on their journeyings from the Wilderness of Sinai, and the cloud abided in the Wilderness of Paran. 13And they journeyed on from the first by the word of the LORD through the hand of Moses. 14And the banner of the camp of the Judahites journeyed first by their divisions, and over its division, Nahshon son of Amminadab. 15And over the division of the tribe of Issacharites, Nethanel son of Zuar. 16And over the division of the tribe of Zebulunites, Eliab son of Helon. 17And the Tabernacle was taken down, and the Gershonites and the Merarites, the bearers of the Tabernacle, journeyed on. 18And the banner of the camp of Reuben by their divisions journeyed on, and over its division, Elizur son of Shedeur. 19And over the division of the tribe of Simeonites, Shelumiel son of Zurishaddai. 20And over the division of the tribe of Gadites, Eliasaph son of Deuel. 21And the Kohathites, the bearers of the sanctuary, journeyed on, and they would set up the Tabernacle by the time they came. 22And the banner of the camp of the Ephraimites by their divisions journeyed on, and over its division, Elishama son of Ammihud. 23And over the division of the tribe of Manassehites, Gamaliel son of Pedahzur. 24And over the division of the tribe of Benjaminites, Abidan son of Gideoni. 25And the banner of the tribe of Danites journeyed on, the rear guard for all the camps by their divisions, and over its division, Ahiezer son of Ammishaddai. 26And over the division of the tribe of Asherites, Pagiel son of Ochran. 27And over the division of the tribe of Naphtalites, Ahira son of Enan. 28These are the journeyings of the Israelites by their divisions as they journeyed on.
29And Moses said to Hobab son of Reuel the Midianite, Moses’s father-in-law, “We are journeying to the place of which the LORD said to us, ‘It will I give to you.’ Come with us and we shall be good to you, for the LORD has spoken a good thing for Israel.” 30And he said to him, “I shall not go, but to my land and to my birthplace I shall go.” 31And he said to him, “Pray, do not leave us, for do you not know our encampment in the wilderness? And you will serve us as eyes. 32And so, if you go with us, by that good which the LORD will do for us, we shall be good to you.”
33And they journeyed on from the mountain of the LORD a three days’ march, with the Ark of the LORD’s Covenant journeying before them a three days’ march to scout for a resting place for them. 34And the LORD’s cloud was over them by day as they journeyed on from the camp. 35And it happened, as the Ark journeyed on, that Moses would say,
“Rise O LORD, let Your enemies scatter,
and Your foes flee before You!”
36and when it came to rest, he would say,
“Come back O LORD to Israel’s teeming myriads.”
CHAPTER 10 NOTES
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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.