Note 212 — Chapter III · THE EXODUS OUT OF EGYPT (continued 2)

The contrast between such cases, where the names and details are as circumstantially stated as in the legal tablets of early Babylonia, and cases which rest merely upon the memory of tradition, will be clear at once from a reference to Numb. xv. 32-36. Here we have to do with tradition only, and accordingly no name is given, and the story is introduced with the vague statement that it happened at some time or other when the Israelites ‘were in the wilderness.’ The whole of the chapter is an interpolation which is singularly out of place in the narrative, and seems to have been substituted for a description of the disasters which followed on the abortive attempt of the Israelites to invade Canaan.