Numbers 9:23

23. They kept the charge of the Lord The lesson of trust in Jehovah and of patient waiting for his leadings was well learned, and always practised except on one memorable occasion, (Numbers 14:40-45,) when they presumed to advance without the guidance of the cloud, and met discomfiture and death. The term charge has special reference to following the guidance of Jehovah in marching and encamping, as is seen in Numbers 9:19. When we consider the proneness of men to lean upon their own understanding, and to direct their own steps, this record is highly creditable to the Israelites, especially in view of their long periods of encampment, when their entrance into the promised land seemed to be indefinitely postponed for reasons in the divine mind to them utterly incomprehensible. In this whole account of the cloud the fact of Jehovah’s guidance is reiterated again and again with emphasis. Maimonides says, that this particularity and repetition of statement was designed to confute the opinions of the Arabians and others, that the Israelites were so long detained in the “Wilderness of Wandering,” as Arabic writers style it, because they had lost their way, and therefore spent forty years in vaguely wandering over the desert. This, he observes, is a very idle conceit, as the way from Sinai to Kadesh-Barnea was a well known and frequented route, and not above eleven days’ journey, so that they could not be supposed to have missed it, and far less should have wandered in a bewildered condition forty years.