2:9 & 13 - Then the Lord said to me, "Do not harass the Moabites or provoke them to war, for I will not give you any part of their land. I have given Ar to the descendants of LotLot as a possession." . . . 13And the Lord said, "Now get up and cross the Zered Valley." So we crossed the valley.
In comparsion to Moses' recall of the journey through Edom (vv2-8) this recall of Israel's journey through Moab is extremely contracted. Into just two verses here is packed:
a) a command: "Do not harass the Moabites, or provoke them to war"(v9a),
b) a double-beckered reason for the command: "for I will not give you any part of their land to possess it because I have given Ar to the descendants of Lot for a possession" (v9b),
c) a concluding command to move on: "get up and cross the Zered Valley" (v13a), and
d) a concluding report: "so we crossed the Zered Valley" (v13b).
Compared to the account of the Israelite encounter with Moab recorded in Num 22-25, this account is extremely lean. Here we hear no hint of the protracted service of Balaam who was hired to curse Israel, or of the latter's seduction by the Moabite women of Baal Peor. In a part of an address that seeks to affirm Israel's gain such as this, this omission of the threat that Moab had posed in the past is not surprising. What is clearly affirmed here, however, is the fact that Israel obeyed just as Yahweh commanded. The intrusion of the narrator's remark in vv10-12 makes it easy to miss the force of the concluding report in v13. Without that remark Moses' speech would have included only the two verses repeated above. Read on their own these two verses imply that—though the concluding verse (v13) states only that they obeyed to command to cross the River Zered—they also obeyed the earlier command not to harass the Moabites given in v9.
Low Chai Hok
©Alberith, rev., 2021