Numbers 33 is an itinerary listing stops made by the children of Israel on their 40-year trek from Egypt to the Promised Land. The account begins, "These are the stages of the people of Israel, when they went out of the land of Egypt by their companies under the leadership of Moses and Aaron" (verse 1). This language, reminiscent of Numbers 10, frames the journey as a victory march. Verse 3 also contributes to such a picture.
The account continues, "Moses wrote down their starting places, stage by stage, by command of the LORD..." (ESV). Our modern English translations lean toward the interpretation that the thing commanded by God was that Moses record the stages of the journey. While that was surely the case, verse 2 probably is saying primarily that the stages of Israel's travels were carried out at God's command, as we read in Numbers 9:18, 20, 23. This implies that each stage was an important part of Israel's training, so that we should think about the 40-year duration of their travels as education more than punishment.
The account consists largely of sentences of the form, "And they set out from X and camped at Y." But there also a few historical and geographical notes, most notably the mention of Aaron's death at age 123 in verses 38-39, which reminds us again that this is a story of two generations of Israelites.
Some of the campsites are familiar from previous accounts in Exodus and Numbers. For example, Kibroth-hattaavah and Hazeroth in verses 16-17 were mentioned together in Numbers 11:35. But the places recorded in verses 19-35 are new.
One question that arises is the following: Where in this account should we place the sending of the spies in Numbers 13, which took place at Kadesh in the wilderness of Paran (Num 13:26)? Different answers have been proposed for this question.
Rashi proposed that Rithmah in verse 19 is another name for the place where the ten scouts gave their false report. He associated Rithmah with rethem, a plant associated with deceptive speech in Psalm 120:3-4.
On the other hand, Abarbanel suggested that the Kadesh from which the scouts were sent was the one in verse 36, making the places in verses 18-35 ones at which the Israelites camped only briefly, so that they didn't rate a mention in Numbers 11-14. In this scenario Israel spent something like 37 years at that location.
A third possibility is that the account doesn't mention the place from which the scouts were sent. As elsewhere in the latter chapters of Numbers, this account may assume previous revelation, with Moses feeling no need to repeat every single detail of Israel's time in the wilderness. In general, this itinerary does not say anything about the nation's sins during the forty years. The implication is that in the big picture, all the grumbling in the wilderness was not so important. Through it all God had guided his people faithfully, and the time in the wilderness was important preparation for capturing the Promised Land.
In the first and third scenarios, the places in verses 18-35 were places that Israel camped during the time between years 2 and 40 in the wilderness, that interval of time about which the Bible tells us so little. The inclusion of this information sends the message that those years were not meaningless. Instead, they were a necessary part of the journey.
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