XXII. HOBAB AND THE CHILDREN OF THE KENITE

Numbers 10:29. “And Moses said unto Hobab, the son of Raguel the Midianite, Moses’ father-in-law, We are journeying unto the place of which the Lord said, I will give it you: come thou with us, and we will do thee good: for the Lord hath spoken good concerning Israel.

30. “And he said unto him, I will not go; but I will depart to mine own land, and to my kindred.

31. “And he said, Leave us not, I pray thee; forasmuch as thou knowest how we are to encamp in the wilderness, and thou mayest be to us instead of eyes.

32. “And it shall be, if thou go with us, yea, it shall be, that what goodness the Lord shall do unto us, the same will we do unto thee.

33. “And they departed from the mount of the Lord,” &c.;

It does not appear from this passage, whether Hobab accepted or rejected Moses’ invitation. Yet, on turning to Judges 1:16, we find it said quite incidentally, and in the midst of a chapter relating to various adventures of the tribe of Judah after the death of Joshua, “And the children of the Kenite, Moses’ father-in-law, went up out of the city of palm-trees with the children of Judah into the wilderness of Judah, which lieth in the south of Arad; and they went and dwelt among the people.” This casual mention of “the children of the Kenite,” was evidently here suggested by the subject of Judah being that of which the history was treating, and amongst which tribe their lot happened to be cast. Thus we learn, for the first time, that Moses’ invitation to his father-in-law was accepted,—that he joined himself to the Israelites, and shared their fortunes. The fact transpires in the course of the narrative some sixty or seventy years after Moses had made his proposal to Hobab, the issue of which had been hitherto uncertain, and transpires, too, not in the reappearance of Hobab himself, but in the discovery of his posterity, and the place of their settlement.

It is incredible that so very unobtrusive a coincidence as this in the narratives of two authors (for the Books of Numbers and of Judges of course are such) should have presented itself, had the whole been a forgery; or that an incomplete transaction, as occurring in the one, should have had its character fixed by its results, as those results happen to pass before us, in the other.