required one to wash one's hands after leaving a cemetery, attending a funeral, or entering a covered area in which a dead person lay. Numbers chapter 20 Dean Ora Horn Prouser of the Academy for Jewish Religion noted that in before hitting the rock, Moses cried “Listen, you rebels!” using a word for “rebels,” , morim, that appears nowhere else in the Bible in this form, but which in its unvocalized form is identical with the name Miriam, . Horn Prouser suggested that this verbal coincidence may intimate that Moses’ behavior had as much to do with the loss of Miriam reported in as with his frustration with the Israelite people. Horn Prouser suggested that when faced with the task of producing water, Moses recalled his older sister, his co-leader, and the clever caretaker who guarded him at the Nile. Numbers chapter 21 Archeologists Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University and Neil Asher Silberman noted that recounts how the Canaanite king of Arad, “who dwelt in the Negeb,” attacked the Israelites and took some of them captive — enraging them so that they appealed for Divine assistance to destroy all the Canaanite cities. Finkelstein and Silberman reported that almost 20 years of intensive excavations at Tel Arad east of Beersheba have revealed remains of a great Early Bronze Age city, about 25 acres in size, and an Iron Age fort, but no remains whatsoever from the Late Bronze Age, when the place was apparently deserted. Finkelstein and Silberman reported the same holds true for the entire Beersheba valley. Arad did not exist in the Late Bronze Age. Finkelstein and Silberman reported that the same situation is evident eastward across the Jordan, where and report that the wandering Israelites battled at the city of Heshbon, capital of Sihon, king of the Amorites, who tried to block the Israelites from passing through his territory on their way to Canaan. Excavations at Tel Hesban south of Amman, the location of ancient Heshbon, showed that there was no Late Bronze city, not even a small village, there. And Finkelstein and Silberman noted that according to the Bible, when the children of Israel moved along the Transjordanian plateau they met and confronted resistance not only in Moab but also from the full-fledged states of Edom and Ammon. Yet the archeological evidence indicates that the Transjordan plateau was very sparsely inhabited in the Late Bronze Age,