Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Deuteronomy · About this commentary
Lands Not Given to You
Deuteronomy 2:1-25
1 Then we turned, and took our journey into the wilderness by the way to the Red Sea, as Yahweh spoke to me; and we encircled Mount Seir many days. · WEB
Three neighboring countries are placed off limits because God gave them to somebody else, and Israel is told to buy its food.
Thirty-eight years pass in a single verse Deuteronomy 2:14, and the chapter that contains them is mostly about restraint.
Three times a border is approached and three times the answer is no. EDOM first: don't contend with them; for I will not give you any of their land, no, not so much as for the sole of the foot to tread on, because I have given Mount Seir to Esau for a possession Deuteronomy 2:5. Then Moab, because I have given Ar to the children of Lot Deuteronomy 2:9. Then AMMON , on the same ground Deuteronomy 2:19.
The reasoning is identical each time and it is the reasoning that matters. These lands are not spared because the peoples are innocent or because Israel is weak. They are spared because God has already assigned them. The same authority that is about to hand over Canaan has handed these to Esau and Lot, and the assignment is binding on the people who benefit from the other one.
That is worth stating plainly. A nation being given territory by God is told, in the same breath, exactly where the gift stops, and the stopping points are other nations' gifts from the same source. Nothing in the conquest that follows can be read as a general licence.
The instruction that goes with it is more remarkable still. You shall purchase food from them for money, that you may eat. You shall also buy water from them for money Deuteronomy 2:6. An army of several hundred thousand is told to pay retail, for water, in a desert, to a nation that would not have been able to refuse.
And the reason they can afford it is given at once: Yahweh your God has blessed you in all the work of your hands... These forty years, Yahweh your God has been with you. You have lacked nothing Deuteronomy 2:7. Forty years described as a period of provision rather than of punishment — which is a striking way to sum up a sentence being served.
The parenthetical notes about earlier inhabitants Deuteronomy 2:10–12 Deuteronomy 2:20–23 look like antiquarian padding and are doing something. Each records a people displaced by another people, in Seir, in Ammon, and on the coast — and one of them says so directly: it happened as Israel did to the land of his possession, which Yahweh gave to them Deuteronomy 2:12.
The point is that this is not unique. Populations have been moved before, by the same God, on behalf of nations with no covenant at all. Israel's case is not a special exemption from history; it is an instance of something God has been doing everywhere, and the notes are placed here so nobody can mistake the gift for a favoritism.
Only at the end does the restraint lift, and the wording changes completely: I have given into your hand Sihon the Amorite... begin to possess it Deuteronomy 2:24.
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