Thread by @JoelBaden

#Numbers 32:33-42

The distribution of the Transjordan

After all the requesting and haggling, finally Reuben and Gad get to it. As always, if we followed what happened in the stories before, we can see how to understand the division of the text here.

Remember that in P, Moses tells R&G that they will get the land formally only after the conquest, when Eleazar and Joshua will be in charge. So in 32:33, when Moses himself gives them territory, that can’t be P - that has to be E. As confirmed by the mention of Sihon.

Likewise in 32:34-38, where R&G build fortified cities and sheepfolds, that has to be P, because this is exactly what they said they’d do earlier in the P story. No need to build cities in E - the Amorite cities are already unoccupied and waiting for them.

A note here on how translations obscure source issues. There’s no Hebrew word “rebuild,” yet the NRSV and the JPS both use it here. Because translations are canonical, their job is actually to smooth over bumps in the text. Which is why you need Hebrew to do this well.

The two tribes in P aren’t rebuilding cities - they’re building them in territory that, in P’s mind, wasn’t previously occupied by anyone. But canonically, this territory was occupied by the Amorites from E, so canonically it must be rebuilding, not building.

The last section, 32:39-42, is E again, as the mention of this territory being Amorite makes clear, along with Moses again giving territory now rather than later, and the idea that there are already established cities to be conquered, rather than built anew as in P.

In all this there are a couple of later supplements, fairly readily identifiable and explainable. In 32:33, we suddenly hear about the half-tribe of Manasseh, which comes out of nowhere. Well, not actually out of nowhere - out of D.

When D retells this episode, it expands the tribes involved to include the half-tribe of Manasseh from the start. And it expands the Transjordanian territory conquered to include the territory of Og in the Bashan - which is also reflected in an expansion of Num 32:33.

You can see the tribal expansion syntactically. “Moses gave them” then a weird and seemingly unnecessary appositional phrase, but necessary because it changes the subjects of the entire story: “to the Gadites and Reubenites and the half-tribe of Manasseh.”

Here’s another little fun thing: in E, in the opening verse, it’s the Reubenites and the Gadites, in that order. In P, throughout, it’s the Gadites and the Reubenites, in that order. This expansion in 32:33 takes the P order, and adds the D half-tribe of Manasseh.

Finally, someone noticed that the names of these new cities in P didn’t quite match the names of the Transjordanian cities they were canonically “rebuilding,” so dropped in a pretty funny little note in 32:38: “some names being changed.”