Zitat Kommentar zu Bamidbar 1:1

בחדש הראשון [AND THE LORD SPAKE UNTO MOSES] IN THE FIRST MONTH — The section which appears at the commencement of this Book was not spoken before Eyar (the second month; cf. Numbers 1:1): you learn, therefore, that there is no “earlier” or “later” (no chronological order) in the Torah. But why, indeed, did not Scripture open the Book with this section? Because it implies something disparaging to Israel (Sifrei Bamidbar 64:1) — that during all the forty years they were in the wilderness they offered only this single Passover sacrifice (Tosafot on Kiddushin 38b s. v. הואיל)

Was not said until Iyar. As it is stated (Bamidbar 1:1) “in the second month.”

בחדש הראשון, “in the first month;” The Torah writes here: במדבר סיני, “in the desert of Sinai,” and it did so also in Numbers 1,1, when that date was in the second year of the Israelites’ wanderings. This teaches that what was communicated to the Israelites on both occasions was told to them on the first day of the month. Here Rashi comments that the communication recorded there was not communicated to them until the beginning of the second month. This was to teach us that the author of the Torah did not feel obligated to order Moses to write things down in chronological order. Why did the Torah (Moses) not write this chapter at the beginning of the Book of Numbers? He did not want to commence this Book with recording matters which reflected negatively on the Jewish people. If you were to counter: what is so negative, seeing that in the Book of Exodus chapter 12,25, the people’s coming to the land of Israel and receiving it as their ancestral heritage was made conditional on their observing the laws connected with the Exodus? The fact is that had it not been for the people’s complaining as reported in chapter 11, they would have come to the land of Israel much sooner and the question of observing the anniversary of the Exodus in the desert would never have arisen. They would have entered the land of Israel during the month in which the event recorded in this chapter occurred. As it is, they moved away from Mount Sinai on the 20th day of the month of Iyar, and Moses told the people that there was only eleven days’ march to the land of Canaan from Mount Sinai. In fact, in expectation of this, Moses had invited his father-in-law Yitro to accompany them on that short journey in verse 29 of our chapter, indicating that they would move on forthwith. According to Rashi, the way Moses had formulated this invitation it meant that within a maximum of 3 days the Israelites would break camp and enter the Holy Land. They would have had ample time to prepare for the Passover which was to commence on the evening of the fifteenth of that month. Now, seeing that the Israelites had become guilty of the sin of demanding meat in an unfitting manner, and they had spent a whole month eating the quail, except for the ones who died from overindulging even earlier, the time to observe the Passover in the Holy Land had already passed. (Numbers 11,29) They were delayed again on account of having to wait until Miriam had been healed after she had spoken deprecatingly of her brother Moses. (Numbers 12,116). Subsequently, they were delayed for 40 days while Moses had to send out spies to pacify the doubters. To cap it all, the whole generation of the adults who had left Egypt were condemned to die in the desert for having preferred to return to Egypt rather than to trust the Lord to bring them to the Holy Land. All of this were events which Moses did not wish to record at the beginning of this Book.