Masei

"These are the journeys of the children of Israel" — the whole route from Rameses to the plains of Moab recorded stage by stage, forty-two encampments across forty years, from the Passover morning when Egypt buried its firstborn, past Sinai and Kadesh, to Mount Hor where Aaron died in the fortieth year, and down to the Jordan opposite Jericho.

On the plains of Moab the instructions for the crossing are given. Dispossess the inhabitants, destroy their carved images and high places, and settle the land by lot, clan by clan; those left will become "barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides." The boundaries of the land are drawn — the south from the wilderness of Zin, the western border the Great Sea, the north to Mount Hor and Lebo-hamath, the east down the Jordan to the Salt Sea — and the men who will apportion it are named: Eleazar, Joshua, and a chieftain from each tribe. The Levites, landless, receive forty-eight cities with their pasturelands from the tribes' holdings.

Six of those cities are cities of refuge, three across the Jordan and three in Canaan, where one who kills a person unintentionally may flee from the avenger of blood until standing before the congregation for judgment. The line between murder and manslaughter is drawn carefully — iron tool, stone or wood in hand, ambush and enmity versus the sudden shove or the dropped stone — and the manslayer remains in the refuge city until the death of the high priest. No ransom is taken for a murderer's life, or for the manslayer's early return, "for blood pollutes the land." The book of Numbers closes by returning to the daughters of Zelophehad: so that no inheritance move from tribe to tribe, they are to marry within their father's tribe — and they marry their cousins, sons of Manasseh — "these are the commandments and ordinances that the LORD commanded by the hand of Moses to the children of Israel in the plains of Moab, by the Jordan at Jericho."