Through a land of desarts and of pits— By the words ושׁוחה ערבה בארצ beerets arabah veshuchah, it was undoubtedly meant to characterize the wilderness by some of its most unfavourable circumstances in point of nature and appearance. But to call it simply, "a land of desarts" seems not to help forward our idea of it. The proper sense of ערבה arabah, seems to be derived from the verb ערב arab, to mix or mingle together; and to be that of an extensive plain or open country, in which no one had an exclusive right of property, but the pasturage and sheepwalks were all promiscuous, and in common. Hence I apprehend the whole country of Arabia to have been denominated, being mostly occupied in that manner. Such also I suppose to be the plains mentioned in Scripture, and called, from their adjacency, the plains of Mamre, of Moab, of Jordan, of Jericho, &c. as being unappropriated, and of course uncultivated lands in the neighbourhood of those places. Accordingly, to such land we usually give the name of the waste. Now the wilderness, through which the Israelites passed in their way out of Egypt, was to a vast extent a land of waste of this kind, totally unoccupied and unfit for the purpose of cultivation, and therefore absolutely incapable of subsisting, without a miracle, such a numerous people as for many years took up their abode in it. To this is added ושׁוחה veshuchah, which our Translators have rendered, "and of pits:" but why they supposed the wilderness to be called a land of pits, I do not well conceive. If, however, שׁוחה shuchah, be the true reading, as all the collated MSS. agree in representing it, it undoubtedly signifies a pit, and may perhaps allude to the inclosure of the wilderness within craggy and high mountains, in respect of which Pharaoh is introduced as saying of the Israelites, "The wilderness hath shut them in," or closed upon them. Exodus 14:3. So that, if we render the words in question "through a land of wide waste and a pit," we may understand by it a country incapable of providing for the people's subsistence from being a wide uncultivated waste; but into which when they were once entered, they were fairly shut up as in a pit, where they and their families must have inevitably perished, if they had not had the assistance of Providence to support them by the way, and finally to extricate them out of it.
And of the shadow of death— This image was undoubtedly borrowed from those dusky caverns and holes among the rocks, which the Jews ordinarily chose for their burying-places: where death seemed to hover continually, casting over them his broad shadow. Sometimes, indeed, I believe nothing more is intended by it, than to denote a dreariness and gloom like that which reigns in those dismal mansions. But in other places it respects the perils and dangers of the situation. Thus, Psalms 23:4. "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." And again, Psalms 44:19. But over and above the foregoing allusions, the land of the shadow of death here seems to mean the grave itself, which the wilderness actually proved to all the individuals of the children of Israel that entered into it, Caleb and Joshua only excepted, whose lives were preserved by a special providence.