Numbers 20:19-21

Amplified Bible, Classic Edition

¹⁹And the Israelites said to him, We will go by the highway, and if I and my livestock drink of your water, I will pay for it. Only let me pass through on foot, nothing else.

²⁰But Edom said, You shall not go through. And Edom came out against Israel with many people and a strong hand.

²¹Thus Edom refused to give Israel passage through his territory, ^[a]so Israel turned away from him.

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Footnotes

Numbers 20:21 Israel (Jacob’s offspring) did not fight Edom, the offspring of Jacob’s brother Esau, because of the Lord’s warning, later conveyed in definite instructions (Deut. 23:7). But what had begun as only a quarrel between twin brothers (Gen. 27:41) had now been passed on for generations and was to cost countless lives, extending throughout the Old Testament and into the New, where Herod, remotely related to Esau, tried to take the life of the Babe of Bethlehem, a descendant of Jacob. “See how much wood or how great a forest a tiny spark can set ablaze!” (James 3:5).