Deuteronomy 2:1

This chapter is a continuation of Moses' first address. It presents the great Lawgiver as speaking in the first person and recounting certain events of his forty-year leadership of the Jewish people, events with which his audience was already familiar and thus not requiring any such thing as a verbatim, in sequence, recounting of all the events mentioned. Nobody but Moses could have produced a speech like this. The speculative and unbelieving enemies of the Holy Bible, vainly endeavoring to make all revelation from God nothing of any more substance than human imagination operating in some kind of a spiritual evolution, have proposed many theories about Deuteronomy, but the key to all of them is that which makes Deuteronomy, fraudulently forged in the name of Moses, hidden in the temple, "discovered" in 621 B.C., during the reign of Josiah, etc., to have been the very first part of the Bible ever committed to writing! To this nucleus, dozens of redactors, editors, revisers, etc., added the rest of the material that constitutes what is commonly called the Pentateuch. Such foolish and unsupported theories have no possibility whatever of being true, and "Today, the majority of scholars believe that Josiah's law book contained (at least) the whole Book of Deuteronomy (and possibly also the entire previous books of Moses) `in its original form!'"[1]

"Then we turned, and took our journey into the wilderness by the way to the Red Sea, as Jehovah spake unto me; and we compassed mount Seir many days. And Jehovah spake unto me saying, Ye have compassed this mountain long enough: turn you northward."

"Ye have compassed mount Seir many days ..." Orlinsky stated that "compassed" here is erroneous, and that the accurate rendition is "skirted the hill-country of Seir."[2] An undetermined part of the "many days" mentioned here was spent at Kadesh, and Blair was of the opinion that this was because of "a copious supply of water at that location."[3] As for those "many days" of this whole period, "There is an approximate thirty-seven year interim between Deuteronomy 1 and Deuteronomy 2, and this reached thirty-eight years by the time they reached the Zered river (Deuteronomy 2:14)."[4] We have already noted the reason for the fact that not much is given in the Bible with regard to Israel's activities during the greater part of that entire forty-year period. Of course, scholars like Von Rad seem to be distressed because the sacred account "is completely insufficient to fill up this period adequately!"[5] Critical scholars are blind to the reason why Israel's activities were thus passed over by the sacred narrator. Having already rebelled against God, nothing that that generation did afterward was worth reporting.