A CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL COMMENTARY

on

NUMBERS

by

GEORGE BUCHANAN GRAY, M.A., D.D.

Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis in Mansfield College, Oxford

EDINBURGH

T. & T. CLARK LIMITED, 59 GEORGE STREET

for

T. & T. CLARK LTD, EDINBURGH

0 567 05002 5

Latest impression 1986

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The

INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL COMMENTARY

on the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments

general editors:

S. R. DRIVER

Regius Professor of Hebrew, University of Oxford

A. PLUMMER

Master of University College, University of Durham

C. A. BRIGGS

Edward Robinson Professor of Biblical Theology, Union Theological Seminary, New York

PREFACE

It is five-and-thirty years since the English translation of Keil’s Commentary on Numbers, which had been published in Germany five years before, appeared. Neither the Speaker’s Commentary, nor any other English Commentary on the book published since, possesses any independent value. Keil’s interpretation started from a standpoint which was at the time professedly, and recognised to be, conservative, and which the advance of scholarship in the interval has increasingly shown to be untenable. It is unnecessary to say more to indicate the need for a new English Commentary.

In Germany a second edition of Keil’s work appeared in 1870, Dillmann’s Commentary in 1886, and Strack’s in 1894. To Dillmann the present writer is greatly indebted. But even since 1886 standpoints have changed, and knowledge on many special points has increased. It is the aim of the present Commentary to enable the reader to look at and interpret the Book of Numbers from these new standpoints in the light of the new, as well as of the old, knowledge.

Two new German Commentaries are announced as likely to appear shortly:* these, of course, have not been available for use in the preparation of the present volume. A few monographs on certain sections of the book have recently appeared, and Paterson’s critical edition of the text was published in 1900; but in the main the new material for the interpretation of the book has had to be sought in more general works on Lexicography, Textual and Literary Criticism, Archæology, and Anthropology. Inscriptions and Monumental Evidence have cast less direct light on Numbers than on many of the books of the Old Testament. On the other hand, several sections of the book, when viewed from the standpoint of modern anthropological study, especially as represented in the works of Tylor and Frazer, gain greatly in intelligibility.

Many of the works to which the writer has been mainly indebted will be found in the List of Abbreviations (p. xvi); others, in the literature given at the beginning of several sections of the Commentary and in the footnotes. Special reference may be made here to the volume ...