Tanach (JPS): Numbers: Numbers Chapter 33

This is a chapter from the Hebrew Bible (Torah, specifically Numbers 33 — "Mas'ei" in Hebrew), presented in the 1917 Jewish Publication Society English translation of the Tanach. The first half is a structured itinerary cataloguing all forty-plus encampments of the Israelites during their forty-year wilderness journey, tracing the route from Rameses in Egypt to the plains of Moab on the border of Canaan. The list is notably terse and formulaic — nearly every verse follows the identical pattern "they journeyed from X and pitched in Y" — punctuated by only a handful of annotations, most significantly the death of Aaron at Mount Hor in the fortieth year. The second half shifts abruptly from historical record to divine command, with God instructing the Israelites to completely dispossess Canaan's inhabitants, destroy their religious sites, and distribute the land by lot — with an explicit warning that failure to do so will result in the remaining inhabitants becoming a perpetual affliction. The passage is distinctive for combining dry geographic record-keeping with a theological framework that treats territorial conquest as both divine gift and conditional obligation.

Tanach (JPS): Numbers: Numbers Chapter 33

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