Commento su Deuteronomio 2:29

כאשר עשו לי בגי עשו AS THE CHILDREN OF ESAU DID TO ME — This does not refer to passing through their land (רק אעברה ברגלי) for Edom refused this, (cf. Numbers 20:18) but to the matter of selling food and water (also mentioned in the preceding verse).

והמואבים היושבים בער, these were not the other Moabites, of whom the Torah had written that they failed to welcome you with bread and water. (Deut. 23,5) The same is true of different sections of the descendants of Esau as I explained on verse 4. The Israelites detoured around the militant Edomites as reported in 2,1. It took a long time to make this detour.

כאשר עשו לי בני עשו, “as the descendants of Esau have done to me.” According to Rashi the subject is the food and drink that the Israelites were interested in buying while traversing the land of Sichon. The reference could not have been to the crux of the matter, the permission to traverse the land, as the descendants of Esau were known to have refused this, so how could Moses have misrepresented the facts? Ibn Ezra has a problem with such an interpretation, as we would be faced with the Israelites contradicting themselves when the Torah cites as a reason that the Moabites could never be accepted as converts the fact that they refused to offer food and water to the Israelites? (Deut. 23,5) He therefore understands the words כאשר עשו לי בני עשו, as referring to the fact that the Israelites had made a detour around the land of Edom not because the Edomites objected to their traversing the land in an orderly fashion, בדרך, בדרך, but because their king had objected. Moses asks to be given the same privileges as the בני עשו as opposed to the מלך אדום had been prepared to grant them. Only the king had been afraid that the Israelites instead of staying on a rural pass would march into a city. Many other commentators do not see a contradiction in what is written in Deut 23,5 with what is written here. There is a difference between volunteering to a thirsty nation some water and selling water to a nation that clearly has managed for 40 years without such “favours” from any other nation. G’d’s objection to the Moabites’ behaviour was based on their lack of humanity in denying much needed water to a nation that owed its entire existence to that nation’s founder Avraham having once rescued him from captivity and the second time from being included in the people who lost their lives in Sodom by praying on behalf of the “righteous“ inhabitants of Sodom. Some commentators feel that the line in Deut. 23,5 refers to the Ammonites, not to the Moabites. The Moabites had hired the services of Bileam to curse the Israelites, an act of extreme ingratitude that is quite enough to disqualify them from membership in the Jewish nation, and to enjoy the direct protection of the כנפי השכינה, the protectively outstretched wings of the Divine Presence. According to that view, at the time, the Moabites had offered bread and water.