Study Desk

Then Moses told the people, "The Lord wants to punish the Midianites. So have our men prepare for battle.

They are the ones who followed Balaam's advice and invited our people to worship the god Baal Peor. That's why the Lord punished us by killing so many of our people.

So we want to give the Lord all the gold jewelry we took from the Midianites. It's our gift to him for watching over us and our troops."

So Moses and Eleazar placed the gold in the Lord 's sacred tent to remind Israel of what had happened.

So they went to Moses, Eleazar, and the other leaders of Israel and said,

but he was so angry with the others that he forced them to wander around in the desert forty years. By that time everyone who had sinned against him had died.

The land on this side of the Jordan River will be ours, so we won't expect to receive any on the other side.

So Moses gave the tribes of Gad, Reuben, and half of Manasseh the territory and towns that King Sihon the Amorite had ruled, as well as the territory and towns that King Og of Bashan had ruled.

So Moses gave the Machirites the region of Gilead, and they settled there.

Israel left the Egyptian city of Rameses on the fifteenth day of the first month. This was the day after the Lord had punished Egypt's gods by killing the first-born sons in every Egyptian family. So while the Egyptians were burying the bodies, they watched the Israelites proudly leave their country.

I will show you how to divide the land among the tribes, according to the number of clans in each one, so that the larger tribes will have more land than the smaller ones.

so they will have a total of forty-eight towns with their surrounding pastures.

I, the Lord , live among you people of Israel, so your land must be kept pure. But when a murder takes place, blood pollutes the land, and it becomes unclean. If that happens, the murderer must be put to death, so the land will be clean again. Keep murder out of Israel!

So Moses told the people that the Lord had said: These men from the Manasseh tribe are right.

and remained part of the Manasseh tribe. So their land stayed in their father's clan.

The Lord our God has blessed us, and so now there are as many of us as there are stars in the sky.

Moses said to Israel: The Lord had commanded us to leave Mount Sinai and go to the hill country that belonged to the Amorites, so we started out into the huge desert. You remember how frightening it was, but soon we were at Kadesh-Barnea,

and I told you, "We have reached the hill country. It belongs to the Amorites now, but the Lord our God is giving it to us. He is the same God our ancestors worshiped, and he has told us to go in and take this land, so don't hesitate and be afraid."

It seemed like a good idea, so I chose twelve men, one from each tribe.

You stayed in your tents and grumbled, "The Lord must hate us—he brought us out of Egypt, just so he could hand us over to the Amorites and get rid of us.