Deuteronomy 3 Bible study: Let me go over

Numbers tells the battle with Og in three verses (Numbers 21:33-35). Deuteronomy tells it again, and Moses is now the one speaking. Numbers has "The LORD said to Moses, ‘Don’t fear him’" (Numbers 21:34); here, "The LORD said to me, ‘Don’t fear him’" (3:2). Numbers has "they struck him, with his sons and all his people" (Numbers 21:35); here, "We struck him until no one was left to him remaining" (3:3). Then Deuteronomy adds what Numbers doesn't say. "There was not a city which we didn’t take from them: sixty cities, all the region of Argob, the kingdom of Og in Bashan" (3:4). "All these were cities fortified with high walls, gates, and bars, in addition to a great many villages without walls" (3:5). The livestock and plunder were kept (3:7). The land taken from the two kings ran "from the valley of the Arnon to Mount Hermon" (3:8). And in an aside, Og's bedstead: "Behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron. Isn’t it in Rabbah of the children of Ammon? Nine cubits was its length, and four cubits its width, after the cubit of a man" (3:11).

Deuteronomy 3:26→leads to2 Corinthians 12:9

Moses asked, "Please let me go over and see the good land" (3:25), and the LORD said, "That is enough! Speak no more to me of this matter" (3:26), and gave him instead the view from Pisgah and Joshua to strengthen (3:27-28). Paul writes of his own prayer: "I begged the Lord three times that it might depart from me. He has said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Most gladly therefore I will rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest on me" (2 Corinthians 12:8-9). Paul doesn't cite Deuteronomy 3, and the link rests on what happened in the two prayers, not on shared words, so this is a reading. Some set the two side by side as prayers answered with something other than what was asked: Moses given the sight of the land and a successor, Paul given grace and "the power of Christ". Others keep them apart: Moses' answer came with the LORD's anger (3:26) and the verdict of Meribah (Numbers 20:12), while Paul's thorn was given "that I should not be exalted excessively" (2 Corinthians 12:7), so the two refusals answer different things.

עָבַרavarsay a-VAR

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "pass over, through, by, pass on". Strong's: "to cross over; used very widely of any transition". It is the chapter's word for crossing the Jordan, five times in 3:18-28: the eastern tribes "shall pass over armed" (3:18), "all the kingdoms where you go over" (3:21), Moses' prayer, "Please let me go over" (3:25), the answer, "you shall not go over this Jordan" (3:27), and Joshua, who "shall go over before this people" (3:28). Between the prayer and the answer, "the LORD was angry with me" (3:26) is vayyit'abber, a verb built on the same three root letters. Strong's keeps it under this same number (its list includes "provoke to anger"); Brown-Driver-Briggs gives it a separate entry: "be arrogant, infuriate oneself". Deuteronomy comes back to the LORD's answer: Moses tells Israel that the LORD said, "You shall not go over this Jordan" (31:2), and at the end the LORD tells him, "you shall not go over there" (34:4). After Moses dies, the LORD says to Joshua, "go across this Jordan" (Joshua 1:2), with this verb.