The Pulpit Commentary — Numbers — Section 9

monuments which are everywhere found--Oloisters, hermitages, walls, gardons, and fountains; and, lastly, there is an evident possibility that thore was a much great.er supply of water in the w4dys, more abundant rain-storms, and the possi- bility of eoonomising the BUpplies thus gained by a use of the same appliances which were common elsewhere in countries similarly situated and conditioned" (' Geography of Palestine,' VoL L p. 380. Clark's' For. Theol. Lib.'). And of com'88 the ability of the Israelites to procure support for themselves and their flocks would be largely increased if it was not imperative, as is often arbitrarily asserted, that they should keep constantly together, but if, on the contrary, it was permissible to disperse themselves abroad among the more fertile localities. Nor need this have been impossible though considerable bodies of armed men. should haye been. required to guard them from the attacks of hostile tribes, since the entire army was 600,000 strong, and could easily have spa.red a few detachments for such a purpose had that been necessary. Of this, however, there is no evidence; and if Moses fed the flocks of Jethro in the Sinaitic desert for forty years without the presence of a military guard, it does not seem unreasonable to conclude that Moses' countrymen, especially when assisted by the mixed multitude (:l~:P, plebs promiscua, hi·i,.,~Toi; ).aoc, a swarm of foreigners, though by a slight chang;in the punctuation it might be ma.de to mean inhabitai::.ts of the desert, or wandering Arabs or Bede.wean, who had joined themselves to Israel on the eve of the exodus), might be competent in the same region and for the same number of years to feed their own. But without enlarging further on this controverted problem, it may be satisfactory to note that the general accuracy of the views here propounded is recognised by Ewald, •who thus writ.ea:-" We cannot, therefore, fail to see that then the peninsula must have supported a far more numerous population than now; in a condition of. great privation and trial certainly, of which indeed in all the traditions there is frequent complaint, but still so that a frnga.l and laborious people would not absolutely perish if only they ma.de the trials themselves the sources of warning and strength. From the present number of the inhabitants of a country which has, moreover, been utterly neglected by the human hand, no certain conclusion respecting its earlier state can be drawn; and that peninsula is not the only country from whose present scanty population we should never have guessed the former density of human life. . . . . This only we can perceive, although the country has not yet been thoroughly explored in all directions by intelligent Europeans, that it is by no means one vast sandy plain, ... but shows clear indications of having been formerly much more erlensively cultivated. Moreover, we cannot exactly know how far the various tribes may have straggled out from Kadesh to procure subsistence; for it is clear that Kadesh was only the resting-place of Moses and the tabernacle, and the meet- ing-place of the community on appointed days(' History of Israel,' Vol. II. p. 197). 3. The third difficulty in connection with the size of the congregation may be dispoeed of in a few sentences. That 600,000 soldiers should not have found the conquest of Oanaan so hard a matter as the Biblical narrative represents might seem an obvious conclusion, were it not that it rests upon two unwarrant- able assumptions: (1) that the Oanaanites were neither numerous uor powerful, wheree.e they were both, having thirty-one kings, and possessing ma.my towns• (Josh. xii 7-24); and (2) that the warfare in which Israel engaged was one in which victory was determined by purely military considerations, whereas the siege of Jericho (1,'bid. vi. 2) and the defeat at Ai (ibid, vii. 4) were witnesses to the contrary. But, in truth, the ease or diffi.culty of the conquest of Oa.naan is largely a matter of opinion, and ii is at least in this oonnection wteresting to note  THE BOOK OF NUMBERS.