Numbers 14:4 — nittenah rosh, ‘let us give ourselves a head’: the one sentence Nehemiah quotes back

The scouts have finished speaking and the chapter opens on a sound: the whole congregation lifting up its voice and weeping all night. ⚠ The Hebrew of v1 does something English cannot easily keep. It puts a feminine SINGULAR verb first — vattissa, ‘and she lifted up’ — with ‘the whole congregation’ as its subject, and then switches mid-sentence to a masculine plural, vayyittenu, ‘and they gave’, for the same subject and the same single voice. A collective noun taking first a singular and then a plural verb is ordinary Hebrew, but the effect here is not decorative: the congregation acts as one throat and then as six hundred thousand men. Numbers 12:1 (already on these pages) opened on the same trick with the opposite arithmetic — two people named, one feminine singular verb.

The wish in v2 is said twice, and the doubling is the point. Lu matnu… lu matnu — ‘if only we had died… if only we had died’ — once for Egypt and once for the wilderness, as though the two were interchangeable. It is worth noticing what they are asking for: not to go back, not yet, but simply to have been dead already. By v29 they will have been taken at their word, in the wilderness, exactly as specified. This is the chapter's grim engine — v28 says so out loud: as you have spoken in my ears, so I will do to you.

⚠ And then v4, which is the verse the rest of the Bible remembers. Nittenah rosh ve-nashuvah Mitzraymah — literally ‘let us GIVE a head, and let us go back to Egypt.’ The idiom is odd; Hebrew has ordinary verbs for appointing a leader and uses none of them. This translation keeps the strangeness rather than smoothing it, because the phrase occurs in exactly one other verse in the whole Hebrew Bible, and that verse is quoting this one. Nehemiah 9:17 (not yet on these pages) prays the nation's history back to God and says of this generation: they hardened their neck, and GAVE A HEAD to return to their slavery. Checked against the Hebrew of both: nittenah rosh here, vayyittenu rosh there, and nowhere else.

⚠ Nehemiah adds one word this chapter does not: he says they did it to return to their SLAVERY. Numbers lets them say ‘Egypt’ and leaves the reader to supply what Egypt was. And the shelf here is unanimous in reaching for a military word the Hebrew does not use — KJV and Geneva print ‘let us make a captain’, ASV the same, NIV ‘We should choose a leader’. None of them lets an English reader see the phrase Nehemiah is quoting.

Numbers 14:9 — tsel, their SHADE has turned away: the one word not one version checked here keeps

Four men are on their faces or tearing their clothes, and two of them make the shortest case in the chapter. Joshua and Caleb dispute nothing factual — Numbers 13's note said Caleb had already granted every fact in the scouts' report and quarrelled only with its conclusion, and that is exactly what happens again here. Their argument is three sentences long, and the middle one is a metaphor the whole shelf translates away.

⚠ Sar tsillam me-aleihem — ‘their SHADE has turned aside from over them.’ Tsel is shadow, and in this climate shade is not an ornament of safety, it IS safety: the thing that stands between a body and the sun. To say the shade has moved off a people is to say the one thing keeping them alive has stepped away. ⚠ Every version checked on both shelves resolves the image into an abstraction. KJV and Geneva read ‘their defence is departed from them’ and ‘their shield is departed from them’; ASV ‘their defence is removed from over them’; NIV ‘Their protection is gone’; Douay-Rheims ‘All aid is gone from them’. The Spanish shelf converges on the same solution from its own direction — RV60 and the Reina-Valera antigua both read ‘su amparo se ha apartado de ellos’, shelter rather than shade, and NVI drops the noun entirely for ‘No tienen quién los proteja’. The NWT 1984 and TNM 1987 land in the same place from a third direction — ‘their shelter has turned away from over them’, ‘su amparo se ha apartado de sobre ellos’ — though both keep, with ASV, the Hebrew’s me-aleihem, from OVER them, where their nearest Spanish neighbour RV60 has only ‘de ellos’. Ten versions, two languages, and not one shadow. The reading is not wrong — protection is what the metaphor MEANS — but a reader of any of them cannot see that the sentence is about the sun.

⚠ The clause before it is stranger still, and here the shelf splits in an interesting place. Ki lachmenu hem — ‘for they are our bread.’ Not ‘we will eat them’: they ARE bread, a flat equation. KJV, ASV and Geneva keep it as an equation (‘they are bread for us’); NIV turns it into an action (‘we will devour them’) and Douay-Rheims into a capability (‘we are able to eat them up as bread’). ⚠ The NWT 1984 keeps the equation too (‘for they are bread to us’) — and then its own NWT 2013 revision abandons it for ‘for we will devour them’, which is the NIV’s sentence word for word. One verse, one translation tradition, and the literal reading is in the older edition — one of two places in this chapter where a version’s revision has to be read as its own witness rather than as the same voice. (The other is tenu’ati at v34, where both of these editions move again, and in the other direction.) On the Spanish shelf the antigua is the literal one — ‘porque nuestro pan son’, they are our bread — while RV60 moves to ‘los comeremos como pan’. And the NVI does something none of the English versions manage: ‘¡Ya son pan comido!’ is a living Spanish idiom for easy prey that happens to keep the actual word bread. It is the freest rendering on either shelf — and not the only one of its kind: the TNM 2019 reaches for the very same idiom (‘son pan comido para nosotros’), where its own 1987 edition had kept the flat equation (‘porque son pan para nosotros’). Two Spanish versions, revised decades apart and by different hands, both found the one phrase that is natural and still made of bread.

⚠ And the land that eats. The scouts said in 13:32 that Canaan is ‘a land that eats up its inhabitants’. Caleb and Joshua answer with the same image reversed: the inhabitants are the meal. The argument between them is not about facts but about which end of the sentence Israel is on.

The congregation's reply, in v10, is to propose stoning them. Israel had come close before — at Exodus 17:4 (already on these pages) Moses tells God ‘a little more and they will stone me’ — but that is Moses reporting a mood, with a different verb (saqal), about himself. Here the congregation says it out loud as a proposal, using ragam, and says it about the two men who have just spoken up for God. The glory appears in the middle of the sentence, before anyone can pick up a stone.

Numbers 14:11-12 — ‘they will not BELIEVE’, and the offer God has made once before

⚠ The verb in v11 is the one this whole project has been tracking. Lo ya’aminu bi — they will not believe in me — is the hiphil of aman, the root behind ‘amen’, with the preposition be. Two places already on these pages use exactly that construction, and a third uses the same root, and the chapter is the negation of all three. Genesis 15:6: Abram he’emin in Jehovah, and it was counted to him as righteousness — a man believing a promise he could not see. Exodus 14:31: after the sea, vayya’aminu — and they believed in Jehovah and in Moses his servant — the same people, the same verb, the same preposition. And Numbers 12:7, one chapter before the scouts went out, where God calls Moses ne’eman, TRUSTED, in all my house — the same root, though a passive participle rather than this verse’s active verb-plus-be. The people who believed at the sea will not believe now; and the sting in the sentence is with all the signs I have done among them — Abram believed with no evidence at all, and these have seen everything. ⚠ The shelf mostly translates the verb and loses the noun — KJV ‘ere they believe me’, ASV ‘not believe in me’ — while the NWT 1984 prints ‘how long will they not put faith in me’, which puts the word faith on the page in English where both of those print only ‘believe’. That matters at the far end of this chapter rather than at this one: the closing note sets v11’s aman against v44’s aphal by way of Habakkuk 2:4, where the pair is faith against swelling — and against KJV and ASV the NWT is the one of the three that lets an English reader see half of that antithesis in the verse itself.

The other verb, na’ats, is harsher than ‘despise’ suggests: to treat as contemptible, to spurn something offered. It returns in v23 to define exactly who is excluded — not the frightened, but ‘those who spurned me’.

⚠ Then v12 makes an offer, and it is the second time it has been made. At the golden calf, Exodus 32:10 (already on these pages) reads ve-e’eseh otekha le-goy gadol — ‘and I will make you into a great nation.’ Here it is ve-e’eseh otekha le-goy gadol ve-atsum mimmennu — the identical clause with three words added: and mightier THAN THEY. Set the two Hebrew sentences side by side and the only difference is a comparison to the people standing there. Both times the offer is to start over from Moses, which is to say: to do to Israel what was nearly done at Babel and undone at Abraham. Both times Moses refuses it without appearing to notice it was an offer.

⚠ The instrument named is dever, pestilence — the fifth of the Egyptian plagues, turned around and aimed the other way. It is a different word from the maggefah that kills the ten scouts in v37, and this translation keeps them apart.

Numbers 14:17-18 — Moses quotes God back to God, and leaves out the mercy

Moses' argument has two halves and neither is about Israel deserving anything. The first is reputation: the Egyptians will hear, and they will TELL the inhabitants of Canaan, and the report will be that Jehovah could not finish what he started (v16). It is the same argument he used at the calf, developed further — there he asked why the Egyptians should say it, here he traces the rumour's route from Egypt to Canaan to ‘the nations’.

⚠ The second half is a quotation, and what it omits is the note. V17 asks that the koach — the power — of my Lord be great, ‘as you have spoken’; and then v18 supplies the words being invoked. They are the formula proclaimed at Sinai in Exodus 34:6-7, already translated on these pages. Set this project's own English of the two passages side by side and the gaps are visible without any Hebrew at all. Exodus 34 reads: Jehovah, Jehovah, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in steadfast love and truth, keeping steadfast love to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin — yet he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and upon the children's children, to the third and to the fourth generation. Numbers 14:18 keeps slow to anger, abundant in steadfast love, bearing iniquity and transgression, and then the punishing clause entire and word for word. ⚠ One difference there is this translation's and not the Hebrew's, and it should be said plainly: the verb is nosei in both places, and Exodus 34 on these pages renders it ‘forgiving’ while this chapter renders it ‘bearing’. The Hebrew idiom for pardon is to LIFT a sin off someone and carry it, and in this chapter that verb is load-bearing — it runs six times and ends up doing the punishing as well as the forgiving (see the closing note), so the carrying sense is kept visible here. A reader comparing the two chapters is seeing one Hebrew word and two English ones.

⚠ What has gone is almost every expansion on the side of mercy: the doubled name, ‘a God merciful and gracious’, ‘and truth’, ‘keeping steadfast love to the thousandth generation’, and the third term ‘and sin’. What remains untouched is ‘he will by no means clear the guilty’ and the generations of visitation — shortened only by dropping ‘and upon the children's children’. A man pleading for a condemned nation quotes the merciful formula in its harshest available abbreviation. Readings differ on why, and this translation takes no vote: it may be that he is holding God to a self-description and editing the hard half out would weaken the quotation, since the whole force of v17 is as YOU have spoken; it may be that the two attributes he keeps are precisely the two he needs, patience and loyalty, which buy time rather than acquittal. What is not in doubt is that he asks for pardon in v19 having just recited the clause that says pardon is not automatic.

⚠ And there is a quieter argument inside the request. Moses asks that God's POWER be great, and then defines greatness of power entirely by forgiveness — not one word of what follows is about strength. He has just used the same word two verses earlier for the thing everyone already grants (‘you brought this people up by your koach’, v13), and at the calf the same word again (‘with great koach and a strong hand’, Exodus 32:11). Bringing a nation out of Egypt is the kind of power nobody disputes. Moses proposes that not destroying them is the harder kind.

The word he uses for what God does with sin is a carrying word. Nosei avon in v18 is literally ‘LIFTING iniquity’, and v19's ‘just as you have BORNE this people’ is the same verb again — see the closing note, because that verb is about to be turned around on the people who used it first.

Numbers 14:20-21 — ‘I have forgiven’, and the word ‘but’: pardon that cancels no consequence

God's answer is two words in Hebrew. Salachti kidvarekha — I have forgiven, according to your word. The verb salach is reserved in the Hebrew Bible for God: people forgive each other with other verbs, and this one has only ever had one subject. Moses asked for it in v19 with the same root, and got back the perfect tense — not ‘I will’ but ‘I have.’

⚠ And then the next word is ve-ulam: BUT. The pardon is real and the sentence follows immediately, in the same speech, with nothing withdrawn. Whatever salachti did, it did not mean the generation would enter the land. This is the chapter's hardest idea and the shelf does not soften it: the versions differ on the verb (KJV and ASV ‘I have pardoned according to thy word’, Geneva ‘I have forgiven it, according to thy request’, Douay-Rheims ‘I have forgiven according to thy word’, NIV ‘I have forgiven them, as you asked’) but every one of them then prints the ‘but’.

⚠ V21 coins a formula. Chai ani — ‘as I live’ — is God swearing by the one thing he cannot swear by anything greater than. Checked against the whole Hebrew Bible: this is its first occurrence. It appears nowhere in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, or the thirteen chapters of Numbers before it; it occurs twice in THIS chapter (vv21 and 28) and then not again until Isaiah, after which it becomes standard prophetic speech and turns up in Ezekiel more than a dozen times. The oath by which God will later swear at the prophets is minted here, and the first thing sworn by it is that this generation will not see the land. (Deuteronomy 32:40 has a near relation, chai anokhi le-olam, with the longer pronoun.)

‘These ten times’ in v22 has been counted literally since antiquity — the Talmud counts them out as two at the Red Sea, two over water, two over the manna, two over the quail, one at the golden calf, and one in the wilderness of Paran, which is this chapter (Arakhin 15a), so on that reckoning the tenth provocation is the one being sentenced — but Hebrew also uses ‘ten times’ simply for ‘over and over’, as Laban's changing of Jacob's wages does (Genesis 31:7, already on these pages). Both readings are old and neither is settled; the count is reported here, not adopted.

⚠ Caleb's exemption is granted for something the text does not explain. Ruach acheret — ‘another spirit’ — and then an idiom this translation keeps whole: vayemalle acharai, ‘and he filled up after me’. The shelf renders it ‘wholly followed’ and that is what it means, but the picture is of filling something completely rather than following at a distance. Note who is missing from v24: Joshua is not mentioned. He is added in v30 and v38, but in the first announcement of the exemption Caleb stands alone — one of the seams this chapter shows rather than sands.

Numbers 14:29-34 — the census becomes the death-roll, and forty days become forty years

⚠ The sentence is pronounced over a specific list, and we have the list. V29 condemns kol-pekudeikhem le-khol-misparkhem mi-ben esrim shanah va-malah — ‘all your NUMBERED ones, by your whole number, from twenty years old and upward.’ That is not a general description of adults. It is, word for word, the formula of the census that opens the book: Numbers 1:45-46 (already on these pages) counts kol-pekudei bnei-yisrael… mi-ben esrim shanah va-malah, everyone able to go out to war, and reaches 603,550. The book called Numbers is named for that count. Thirteen chapters later the same roster, in the same words, is the list of who will die in the desert — the war-roll read back as a death-roll, with two names struck off it.

⚠ The word for the bodies is deliberately degrading. Peger is a carcass, the word used of animal corpses, and it lands three times in five verses (vv29, 32, 33). KJV and Geneva keep ‘carcases’, Douay-Rheims ‘carcasses’; ASV softens to ‘dead bodies’ and NIV to ‘bodies’; the NWT 1984 stays with the carcasses. V32's Hebrew adds an emphatic pronoun that is awkward to keep in English — u-figreikhem ATTEM, ‘and your carcasses, YOURS’ — and the shelf keeps it two different ways: KJV fronts it (‘But as for you, your carcases’), and ASV does the same with its softer noun (‘But as for you, your dead bodies’), while the NWT 1984 leaves it fastened to the noun where the Hebrew has it, ‘the carcasses of YOU yourselves’, as does the TNM 1987 with ‘de ustedes mismos’ — a distinction the TNM 2019 then drops again. It is worth adding that the 1984 edition prints every plural ‘you’ in capitals as a matter of policy, so a chapter that keeps switching between addressing one man and six hundred thousand is the kind of chapter where that typographic tic earns its keep — setting the fathers' corpses against the children of v31 who go in.

The children are given back the exact word the parents used against them. In v3 the fear was that ‘our wives and our little ones will become la-vaz’, plunder. V31 answers: ‘your little ones, of whom you said they would become la-vaz — them I will bring in.’ The thing they were most afraid of losing is the only thing they are promised to keep.

⚠ V33 uses a word that does not belong to the Torah's vocabulary yet. Zenuteikhem — your whoredoms. The verb ‘to prostitute’ is common enough in the five books; the NOUN zenut occurs in the Torah only here, checked against the Hebrew of all five books. It is otherwise a prophets' word — Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Hosea build the whole Israel-as-unfaithful-wife metaphor out of it — and it arrives, once, centuries early, in a verse about the wilderness generation. ⚠ The other half of v33 is the reverse: ro’im means SHEPHERDS, and here it is the English shelf that interprets and the Spanish shelf that stays literal. KJV, ASV, Geneva and Douay-Rheims all read ‘wander’ or ‘wanderers’; NIV prints ‘Your children will be shepherds here for forty years’ — and it is not alone among the English, since the NWT 1984 reads ‘YOUR sons will become shepherds in the wilderness forty years’, and its 2013 revision keeps the shepherds. On the Spanish side every version keeps the herding — RV60 and the antigua ‘andarán pastoreando en el desierto’, NVI ‘serán pastores por el desierto’, the TNM 1987 and TNM 2019 ‘llegarán a ser pastores en el desierto’. The sentence is not really about aimlessness. It is a job description: the generation that wanted farmland gets forty years of pasture.

⚠ V34 is the verse with a long afterlife. Yom la-shanah yom la-shanah — ‘a day for a year, a day for a year’, said twice — converts the scouts' forty days into forty years, and in doing so states a principle of correspondence that Ezekiel 4:6 (not yet on these pages) later reuses word for word — checked against the Hebrew, it repeats the doubled yom la-shanah yom la-shanah and pairs it with this chapter's own verb, ‘you shall BEAR the iniquity’ — and that the entire tradition of prophetic date-calculation has been built on ever since: the day-for-a-year reckoning behind the medieval readings of Daniel's weeks, behind William Miller's 1844, and behind the 1914 chronology of the Watch Tower movement. Whether a sentence passed on one generation was meant to be a key to unrelated prophetic numbers is exactly the question, and this translation does not answer it; it notes that the verse says nothing about any other prophecy and that everything after Ezekiel is inference.

⚠ And the last word of v34 is one of the rarest in the Bible. Tenu’ati occurs, in any form, in exactly two verses in the whole Hebrew Bible — here, and Job 33:10 (not yet on these pages), where Job complains that God ‘finds tenu’ot against me; he counts me as an ENEMY to him.’ The root is nu, to restrain or override, the verb this translation later renders 'overrides' when a father overrides his daughter's vow (Numbers 30:6, now on these pages), where it stands one clause away from salach, this chapter's other rare word). So the sense is God's refusal to let something stand. ⚠ The shelf, faced with a word it cannot check anywhere, scatters in five directions: KJV and Geneva ‘my breach of promise’ — which makes God the party who broke faith — ASV ‘my alienation’, Douay-Rheims ‘my revenge’, NIV ‘what it is like to have me against you’. The Spanish shelf scatters too, and differently: RV60 and the antigua both read ‘conoceréis mi castigo’, my punishment, while NVI has ‘sabrán lo que es tenerme por enemigo’. The NWT 1984 and TNM 1987 begin in ASV’s camp — ‘what my being estranged means’, ‘lo que significa mi desapego’ — and then both of their own revisions cross the floor, the NWT 2013 to ‘what it means to oppose me’ and the TNM 2019 to ‘lo que significa oponerse a mí’. ⚠ Four modern versions in two languages, working independently, arrived at ‘enemy’ — and they are the ones closest to the only other occurrence, where the parallel line in Job supplies that exact word. It is the clearest case this chapter offers of the shelf's freest renderings turning out to be its best-evidenced ones.

Numbers 14:36-37 — dibbah comes due, and a word the scribes marked

The ten die first, and they die of the thing they said. Dibbah — the bad report — is the word Numbers 13:32 used of what they brought back, and Genesis 37:2 (already on these pages) used of what Joseph brought to his father; that chapter's note on these pages said dibbah's two other famous appearances were both fatal and named 13:32 as one of them. This is where it turns out to be fatal. They do not fall in battle, and they do not wait forty years: they die lifnei Jehovah, before Jehovah, by maggefah — a striking-blow, a different word from the dever threatened in v12.

⚠ V36 carries one of the Masoretic text's ketiv/qere readings, and it changes who did what. What is written in the consonantal text is vayyillonu — ‘and they grumbled’, the scouts themselves. What the Masoretes direct to be READ is vayyallinu, a causative: ‘and they MADE the whole congregation grumble.’ The difference is between men who complained and men who organised a complaint, and the printed Hebrew above preserves both, as the scroll does. This translation follows the qere, with the written form standing in the text for anyone who wants it.

V38 is a sentence with no verb of its own doing: Joshua and Caleb ‘lived’. Out of twelve chieftains sent, two are alive at the end of the chapter, and Numbers 13's note on the name-list had already done this arithmetic in advance — ten of the twelve are never named again anywhere in the Bible, and this is the verse that makes them anonymous.

Numbers 14:44 — vaya’pilu: a verb that occurs twice in the Bible, and the other place is ‘the righteous shall live by his faith’

They mourn, and then they do the opposite of what mourning would suggest. In the morning they go up — ‘here we are, and we will go up to the place Jehovah spoke of, for we have sinned’ — which is obedience one day late, and therefore not obedience. Moses' answer keeps a phrase this translation has been keeping all through Numbers: overim et-PI Jehovah, ‘crossing the MOUTH of Jehovah’, the same pi that Numbers 13:3 used for ‘at the mouth of Jehovah’ and that Numbers 12:8 used for mouth to mouth.

⚠ Then v44 uses a verb that occurs in exactly two verses in the Hebrew Bible. Checked against the whole text: the consonants ayin-pe-lamed turn up in sixteen verses, but fourteen of those are two different nouns — the Ophel, the citadel-mound in Jerusalem, and the tumours that afflict the Philistines in 1 Samuel. As a VERB it appears here, vaya’pilu, and in Habakkuk 2:4, upplah, and nowhere else. Habakkuk 2:4 is this: ‘Look — puffed up, not upright, is his soul within him; but the righteous shall live by his EMUNAH.’ (Habakkuk 2 is not yet on these pages. The verse is the one Romans 1:17 — already on these pages — builds on, and Galatians 3:11 and Hebrews 10:38 quote it too, though neither of those chapters is translated here yet.)

⚠ Which means Habakkuk's antithesis is this chapter's two failures, in this chapter's two roots. Habakkuk sets upplah — the swollen, self-reliant soul — against emunah, faith, from aman. Numbers 14 fails at both ends and uses both words to do it: in v11 the people will not ya’aminu, and in v44 they ya’pilu. First they would not go when told to, because they did not believe; then they went when told not to, because they were swollen. The two are not opposites. They are the same refusal to take God's word as the thing that decides, and the Hebrew names them with the two roots one later prophet would set against each other.

⚠ The shelf cannot agree what the verb means, which is what you would expect of a word with one comparison. KJV, ASV and the NWT 1984 print ‘they presumed’; Geneva ‘they presumed obstinately’; NIV ‘in their presumption’. Douay-Rheims goes somewhere else entirely — ‘they being blinded went up’ — which is the Latin tradition resolving the obscurity toward darkness rather than swelling, the usual pattern on this shelf where Douay's divergences trace to the Vulgate rather than the Hebrew. The Spanish shelf agrees on stubbornness without the swelling: RV60 and the antigua ‘se obstinaron’, NVI ‘se empecinaron’. The TNM is the one Spanish version that goes to daring rather than stubbornness — ‘se atrevieron’, in both its 1987 and 2019 editions — which is nearer the swelling, and nearer what the English shelf’s ‘presumed’ is reaching for. This translation prints ‘pushed on’ — keeping the forward motion and the refusal, and leaving the swelling to this note.

⚠ And the detail that decides the battle is a piece of furniture that stays put. The ark and Moses did not move from the middle of the camp. Numbers 10:33 (already on these pages) had the ark travelling out in FRONT of the column, three days ahead, looking for a resting place; here the army goes up and the ark does not, and the text lets the reader draw the conclusion. ⚠ It is worth resisting the obvious inference, because the text does not draw it. Israel’s very first battle — Exodus 17:8-13, already on these pages — was fought against this same Amalek, under this same Joshua, and WON, at a time when the ark did not yet exist. So the ark is not the variable. Moses names the variable himself in v42: Jehovah is not among you.

⚠ Hormah is a name-pun and a wound. They are beaten ad ha-Chormah, as far as Hormah — and Chormah is built on cherem, the root for something devoted to destruction. The place where they are destroyed is called Destruction. Numbers 21:3 gives the naming its own story, in which Israel finally wins there; the reader meeting the name here meets it as an epitaph.

⚠ Deuteronomy tells this ending differently, and the differences are worth stating plainly. Deuteronomy 1:43-45 (already on these pages) says they were struck by the Amorites, not the Amalekite and the Canaanite; adds that the enemy chased them ‘as bees do’ and that the rout ran ‘in Seir’; and closes with a scene Numbers does not have — the people weeping before Jehovah, and Jehovah not listening. ⚠ It also replaces the rare verb: where Numbers has vaya’pilu, Deuteronomy 1:43 has vattazidu, from zid, the ordinary word for acting presumptuously. That is the second time the pair has done this — Numbers 13's note observed that Deuteronomy replaces this chapter's scouting verb tur with two commoner ones. The retelling consistently trades the strange word for the plain one, and a reader of Deuteronomy alone would never know either word had been unusual.