Most of these passages could be explained by the admission that the
scribes in later years added sentences here and there by way of
interpretation. But that admission would of course discredit the
infallibility of the books. Other difficulties, however, of a much more
serious kind, present themselves.

In the first verse of the twentieth chapter of Numbers we read that the
people came to Kadesh in the first month. The first month of what year?
We look back, and the first note of time previous to this is the second
month of the second year of the wandering in the wilderness. Their
arrival at Kadesh described in the twentieth chapter would seem, then,
to have been in the first month of the third year. In the twenty-second
verse of this chapter the camp moves on to Mount Hor, and Aaron dies
there. There is no note of any interval of time whatever; yet we are
told in the thirty-third chapter of this book that Aaron died in the
fortieth year of the wandering. Here is a skip of thirty-eight years in
the history, without an indication of anything having happened meantime.
On the supposition that this is a continuous history written by the man
who was a chief actor in it, such a gap is inexplicable. There is a
reasonable way of accounting for it, as we shall see, but it cannot be
accounted for on the theory that the book in its present form came from
the hand of Moses.

Some of the laws also bear internal evidence of having originated at a
later day than that of Moses. The law forbidding the removal of
landmarks presupposes a long occupation of the land; and the law
regulating military enlistments is more naturally explained on the
theory that it was framed in the settled period of the Hebrew history,
and not during the wanderings. This may, indeed, have been anticipatory