the north), and to the Jordan (on the west), and demanded that they should now restore these lands in peace. The plural אתהן (them) refers ad sensum to the cities and places in the land in question. The claim raised by the king of the Ammonites has one feature in it, which appears to have a certain colour of justice. The Israelites, it is true, had only made war upon the two kings of the Amorites, Sihon and Og, and defeated them, and taken possession of their kingdoms and occupied them, without attacking the Ammonites and Moabites and Edomites, because God had forbidden their attacking these nations (Deu 2:5, Deu 2:9,Deu 2:19); but one portion of the territory of Sihon had formerly been Moabitish and Ammonitish property, and had been conquered by the Amorites and occupied by them. According to Num 21:26, Sihon had made war upon the previous king of Moab, and taken away all his land as far as the Arnon (see the comm. on this passage). And although it is not expressly stated in the Pentateuch that Sihon had extended his conquests beyond Moabitis into the land of the Ammonites, which was situated to the east of Moab, and had taken a portion of it from them, this is pretty clearly indicated in Jos 13:25, since, according to that passage, the tribe of Gad received in addition to Jaezer and all the towns of Gilead, half the land of the children of Ammon, namely, the land to the east of Gilead, on the western side of the upper Jabbok (Nahr Ammân: see at Jos 13:26).[1]
Verses 14-15
Jephthah then sent ambassadors again to explain to him the true state of the case, namely, that Israel had neither taken away the land of Moab nor the land of the Ammonites. As a proof of this, Jephthah adduced the leading facts connected with the journey of the Israelites through the desert of Arabia to Canaan, by
- ↑ The explanation which Masius gives of this passage (Eatenus moao sursum in Galaaditidem exporrectam jacuisse Gaditarum haereditatem, quatenus dimidia Ammonitarum ditio Galaaditidem ab oriente ambiebat) is not sufficiently in keeping with the words, and too unnatural, to be regarded as correct, as it is by Reland (Pal. ill. p. 105) and Hengstenberg (Dissertations on the Pentateuch, ii. p. 29); and the reasons assigned by Masius, viz., “that the Israelites were prohibited from occupying the land of the Ammonites,” and “the Ammonites are not mentioned in Num 21:26,” are too weak to establish anything. The latter is an argumentum e silentio, which loses all significance when we bear in mind, that even the allusion to the land of the Moabites in Num 21:26 is only occasioned by the prominence given to Heshbon, and the poetical saying founded upon its fall. But the prohibition against taking the land of the Ammonites from them had just as much force in relation to the land of the Moabites, and simply referred to such land as these tribes still possessed in the time of Moses, and not to that which the Amorites had taken from them.
