Comentários de Citação sobre Deuteronômio 2:1

ויבאו בני ישראל, “The Children of Israel arrived, etc.;” the arrival of which the Torah speaks were was during the fortieth year of their wanderings. Their lengthy detour around the territory of Edom who had denied them passage and whom G-d had not allowed them to harass in any way, had now been completed. It had commenced at Kadesh Barnea, and was concluded in the desert of Tzin. The Torah summarises this period here although it comprised 18 separate moves during which the Tabernacle had been erected and taken apart each time. In Numbers 33, 1936, the details of these moves have been recorded for posterity. The first encampment was at a place called Ritmah, the last at the edge of the desert of Tzin. Concerning that period we read Moses recalling in Deuteronomy 2,5: ונפן ונסע המדברה דרך ים סוף ונסב את הר שעיר ימים רבים, “we turned around and journeyed toward the desert in the region of the sea of reeds and marched around Mount Seir, for many years.” That period concluded there in verse 8 with: “we detoured our brethren the children of Esau that dwell in Seir, from the way of the Aravah from Eilat to Etzion Gaver.” From there they arrived at Kadesh, boundary of the Kingdom of Edom, as stated in Numbers 33, 36: “they journeyed from Etzion Gaver and encamped at the desert of Tzin, at Kadesh. What is missing here is only G-d’s warning not to harass the people of Edom (Compare Deuteronomy 2,5).

And Moses wrote their departures for their journeys according to the command of the Lord. And afterward he reversed the order, [saying] these are their journeys for their departures, and it does not say “according to the command of the Lord.” I will explain this in three ways. The first is that in some journeys they went forward and in some they turned backward. For at first, they turned back and encamped before Pi-hahiroth (Exodus 14:2). Rashi explained that they went backwards towards Egypt. And likewise, in Deuteronomy (2:1) it is written And we turned and traveled to the wilderness, Rashi explained that because they misbehaved, they turned toward the wilderness. And similarly in Parashat Eikev (Deuteronomy 10:6), from Beeroth Bene-jaakan to Moserah, they went back eight journeys. It turns out that most of the journeys in which they went forward and not backward, which were according to the command of the Lord, are called their departures for their journeys, because they turned their faces away from the place they had left, which is called their departures, and their faces were toward their journeys which were ahead of them. But when they turned backward because they had misbehaved through sin, it was not according to the command of the Lord, and this is called their journeys for their departures because they returned and traveled to the place they had left, which is called their departures, as they turned their faces toward Egypt.

'אחד עשר יום מחורב וגו, who is wise enough to understand these words [that after 40 years the Israelites found themselves only 11 days from Mount Chorev? Ed] We must understand that the reason why Moses inserted this verse here is that in verse 19 we are told: “we set out from Chorev and traveled the great and terrible wilderness that you saw, along the road to the hill country of the Emorites and we came as far as Kadesh Barnea (which is close to the land of Israel and from where the spies were sent out.) As a result, we remained in this desert for forty years. This was due to our sin as recorded in Deuteronomy 2,1-7. Moses is simply contrasting the fact that the journey from the Sea of Reeds to the borders of the Holy Land was a distance of 11 days’ travel and had been covered in that amount of time [after deducting the encampments, especially the eleven and a half months at that mountain Ed.] whereas the rest of the journey, on account of the sin of the spies, took all these years.