In the book of Numbers (xxi. 14, 15) there is a quotation from ‘the Book of the Wars of the Lord,’ one of the old documents on which the history of Israel in the wilderness is based. The introductory words are unintelligible as they stand, thus testifying to the antiquity of the passage; all that can be made out of them is that they relate not only to the struggle between Israel and the Amorites at ‘the brooks of Arnon,’ but also to a previous war carried on by the Israelites ‘in Suphah,’ near the gulf of Aqaba.[[227]] Here the Israelites would have been on the borders of Edom, if indeed they were not in Edom itself; and it is therefore noticeable that the Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramses III., whose reign coincided with the period of the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert, declares that he had ‘smitten the Shasu (or Bedâwin) tribes of Seir and plundered their tents’ (ohélu). Ramses III. was the only Pharaoh of Egypt who had ventured to attack the Edomite Bedâwin in their mountain strongholds; while Canaan and the plateau east of the Jordan had been Egyptian provinces the inhabitants of Mount Seir had retained their independence. The synchronism, therefore, of this Egyptian expedition against, not the Edomites only, but ‘the Bedâwin of Seir’ and the war in which Israel was engaged ‘in Suphah,’ is, at least, worthy of notice. It may be that part of the training undergone by the Israelites in the desert for their future conquest of Canaan was the help they had rendered their kinsfolk of Edom in their contest with the old taskmasters of the Hebrew tribes.
However this may be, of the three leaders who had brought Israel out of the house of bondage, Moses alone survived the long sojourn at Kadesh. Miriam had died there; the death of Aaron also, if we may trust Deuteronomy, had taken place before the final departure from the great desert sanctuary. In any case, it had happened in sight of Kadesh, and before the march had commenced which was to lead the Israelitish tribes to the Promised Land. The time had now arrived when Israel felt strong enough once more to attempt its conquest; not, this time, by the road through the mountains of the south along which Chedor-laomer had marched to Kadesh, but from the plateau eastward of the Jordan where the kindred nations of Moab and Ammon had already established themselves. Here, too, the Israelites made their first permanent settlements in the land which they had marked out for their own.
The Canaanite population east of the Jordan was sparse and weak compared with that to the west. It had been further weakened by foreign conquest. Between the fall of the Egyptian empire and the Israelitish invasion the Amorites under Sihon had formed a kingdom and occupied the territory of Moab as far south as the Arnon. As in the age of the eighteenth dynasty, so too under the kings of the nineteenth dynasty, Egyptian rule extended over what is called in one of the Tel el-Amarna tablets ‘the field of Bashan.’ The so-called Sakhret Eyyûb, or ‘Stone of Job,’ a little to the north of Tell ’Ashtereh, eastward of the Jordan, has been discovered by Dr. Schumacher to be a monument of Ramses II.[[228]] The figure of the Pharaoh is engraved upon it, with his name beside him, as well as the figure of a deity who wears the crown of Osiris, and is represented with a full face, while his Canaanitish name is written in hieroglyphs.[[229]] At Luxor[[230]] Ramses claims Moab among his conquests, and we may therefore gather that up to the time of the Exodus the authority of Egypt had been restored throughout the country east of the Jordan. But the Libyan invasion shattered the strength of Egypt, and long before the close of the nineteenth dynasty its possessions in Palestine passed from it forever. This is precisely the period to which the Pentateuch refers the kingdom of Og in Bashan and the conquests of Sihon in Moab, and the Biblical and monumental evidence thus stand in complete agreement.
Moses had requested permission from the Edomite king to pass through his dominions. The Song of Moses (Exod. xv. 15) still speaks of the alûphim, or ‘dukes,’ of Edom, who had originally governed the country; but while the Israelites had been lingering in the desert, the ‘dukes’ had made way for an elective monarchy. The dissolution of the Egyptian power may have had something to do with this; possibly the invasion of Mount Seir by Ramses III. had produced the same result in Edom that the Philistine invasion produced among the Israelites, and had obliged them to elect a king. At all events, the first king of Edom, we read, was ‘Bela, the son of Beor.’ Bela, however, is merely a contracted form of Balaam, and in the first Edomite king we must therefore see Balaam, the son of Beor. What relation he bore to the seer from Pethor will have to be considered later on.[[231]]
It is not surprising that the Edomite king refused the request that had been made to him. To have admitted within his frontiers a large body of emigrants like the Israelites, many of whom were armed, might have been as dangerous as the passage of the Crusaders through the Eastern Empire proved to Constantinople. The Israelites were not strong enough to force their way through a hostile country, and very reluctantly, therefore, they once more turned southward to the Gulf of Aqaba, and from thence marched northward again to the east of Edom. Their route brought them to the southeastern part of Moab.
The people, we are told, bitterly complained of the length of ‘the way.’ It was not strange. The Promised Land, so constantly in sight, seemed always to recede as soon as it was approached. They had vainly attempted to enter it from the south; the Philistines kept garrison in the cities on the Mediterranean coast; and now, when a third and last mode of approach was undertaken, their brethren of Edom closed the path. The road, too, which they were thus forced to adopt led them through a desert, which the Assyrian king Esar-haddon describes as a land of drought, inhabited only by ‘snakes and scorpions, which filled the ground like locusts.’[[232]] These were the ‘fiery serpents’ that bit the Israelites and increased their miseries. A memorial of their sufferings lasted down to the age of Hezekiah. The brazen ‘seraph’ or ‘fiery serpent’ which had been wrought by order of Moses, and planted on the top of a pole, was religiously preserved in the chief sanctuary of the nation. Incense was burned before it, for it had been the means of preserving the people from the fiery poison of the snakes. But the idolatry of which it was the object brought about its destruction. The relic, which had been spared by the earlier kings and priests of Judah, was destroyed by Hezekiah, who realised at last that it was but ‘a piece of brass.’ It is true that doubts have been cast upon its having actually been a monument of the life in the wilderness; but it is difficult for the historian to understand how a modern critic can be better informed on such a point than the contemporaries of Hezekiah.[[233]]
Zalmonah, Punon, and Oboth were the next stages on the journey after Mount Hor. Then came Iye-ha-Abârim, ‘the Ruins of the Hebrews’—a name, it may be, which contained a reminiscence of the settlement of the Israelites in the country.[[234]] Iye-ha-Abârim was in the plain east of Moab, under the shadow of the mountain-range of Abarim. Then the stream of the Zered was crossed, and the emigrants found themselves in Moab. The banks of the Arnon were the next resting-place.
The nation retained but little recollection of the dreary years that had been passed in the wilderness. A few incidents alone were recorded which had broken the monotony of their desert life. But here, on the verge of Canaan and of conquest, the national consciousness awakened into new life. The song was handed down which had been sung when at some station in the desert the ground had been pierced and water found. ‘Spring up, O well!’ it said; ‘sing ye unto it. O well that hast been dug by princes, that hast been pierced by the nobles of the people, by (the direction of) the lawgiver, with their staves!’ Similar songs, according to Professor Goldziher, were sung in old days by the Arab kinsmen of the Israelites when they too dug wells in the desert and the refreshing water bubbled up from below.[[235]]
Arnon was now the boundary between Moab and the new kingdom of Sihon the Amorite. Sihon refused permission to the Israelites to pass through his territories, along the ‘royal highway,’ and endeavoured to stop their advance. But the tribes were no longer the undisciplined rabble who had fled from the Canaanites of Zephath, and the result of the struggle was the complete overthrow of the Amorite forces. The district between the Arnon and the Jabbok, which had been taken by Sihon from ‘the former king of Moab,’ was occupied by the Israelites, who accordingly established themselves midway between Moab and Ammon. It is on the occasion of this conquest that the Hebrew historian has preserved the fragment of an Amorite song of triumph which had celebrated the capture of Ar, the Moabite capital, and which was now embodied by the Israelites in a similar song of triumph for their own victory over Sihon.
Ammon was too strong to be attacked (Numb. xxi. 24), but ‘Moses sent to spy out Jaazer,’ not far from Rabbah, the future capital of the Ammonites, and the fall of the Amorite city of Jaazer brought with it the conquest of Gilead. The tribes of Reuben and Gad were settled in the newly-acquired districts, on condition, however, that they should acknowledge their relationship to the rest of the tribes, and help the latter in case of necessity (Numb. xxxii. 29-32; Judg. v. 15-17). Gilead had been conquered by Machir, a branch of the tribe of Manasseh (Numb. xxxii. 39; Deut. iii. 15; Judg. v. 14), and the conquest was subsequently extended further by armed bands under chieftains, like Jair and Nobah, who occupied outlying districts on their own account.[[236]]