Introduction
CONCLUDING NOTE TO THE ITINERARY.
This itinerary differs from that in chap. 21 in the mention of different stations and more of them. These apparent discrepancies may be easily accounted for by the fact that the space occupied by the encampment of the Israelites, an army of six hundred thousand men with their families and flocks, when once they reached the inhabited country with its towns and villages, where every spot had its own fixed name, must have extended over several places, so that the same encampment might be called by one or other of the places upon which it touched. See Numbers 21:18, note.
Scholars are quite well agreed in the opinion that the stations given in Numbers 33:19-35, between Rithmah, near Kadesh, and Ezion-geber, refer to the journeys of Israel after the exclusion at Kadesh, during the thirty-seven years of wandering. “An examination of the names of the seventeen stations occupied by Israel during their wanderings shows that the encampments were selected in the neighbourhood of water and vegetation.” Edersheim. Their fewness is because they were occupied for long periods.
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