In the book of Numbers (xxi. 14, 15) there is a quotation from ‘the Book of the Wars of the Lord,’ one of the old documents on which the history of Israel in the wilderness is based. The introductory words are unintelligible as they stand, thus testifying to the antiquity of the passage; all that can be made out of them is that they relate not only to the struggle between Israel and the Amorites at ‘the brooks of Arnon,’ but also to a previous war carried on by the Israelites ‘in Suphah,’ near the gulf of Aqaba.[227] Here the Israelites would have been on the borders of Edom, if indeed they were not in Edom itself; and it is therefore noticeable that the Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramses III., whose reign coincided with the period of the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert, declares that he had ‘smitten the Shasu (or Bedâwin) tribes of Seir and plundered their tents’ (_ohélu_). Ramses III. was the only Pharaoh of Egypt who had ventured to attack the Edomite Bedâwin in their mountain strongholds; while Canaan and the plateau east of the Jordan had been Egyptian provinces the inhabitants of Mount Seir had retained their independence. The synchronism, therefore, of this Egyptian expedition against, not the Edomites only, but ‘the Bedâwin of Seir’ and the war in which Israel was engaged ‘in Suphah,’ is, at least, worthy of notice. It may be that part of the training undergone by the Israelites in the desert for their future conquest of Canaan was the help they had rendered their kinsfolk of Edom in their contest with the old taskmasters of the Hebrew tribes. However this may be, of the three leaders who had brought Israel out of the house of bondage, Moses alone survived the long sojourn at Kadesh. Miriam had died there; the death of Aaron also, if we may trust Deuteronomy, had taken place before the final departure from the great desert sanctuary. In any case, it had happened in sight of Kadesh, and before the march had commenced which was to lead the Israelitish tribes to the Promised Land. The time had now arrived when Israel felt strong enough once more to attempt its conquest; not, this time, by the road through the mountains of the south along which Chedor-laomer had marched to Kadesh, but from the plateau eastward of the Jordan where the kindred nations of Moab and Ammon had already established themselves. Here, too, the Israelites made their first permanent settlements in the land which they had marked out for their own.