Then came the children of Israel— From Kadesh, where we left the Israelites, ch. Numbers 13:27 Numbers 14:25. They continued to wander in the desarts of Arabia thirty-seven years, and found there seventeen different encampments, ch. 33: After which, all that generation of murmurers being dead, Moses, always guided by the miraculous cloud, was ordered to return into the desart of Sin, upon the confines of Idumea.
In the first month— That is to say, in the first month of the fortieth year after their departure from Egypt; which happening in the year of the world 2513, this, consequently, was the first month of the year 2552; see Bedford's Scripture Chronology, book 4: chap. 5. It may seem strange, perhaps, that Moses should pass in silence the transactions of these thirty and seven years which the Israelites wandered in the wilderness, and give us only the first and last years of their peregrinations: but M. le Clerc well remarks, that there is nothing strange in this, since Moses writes not so much in quality of an historian as of a legislator, whose purpose it was to deliver down to posterity all those laws which he received from God; and that system of laws being completed in the first two years after the Exodus, and no new law being delivered during the subsequent years, it did not fall in with his design to insert the history of those years in the Pentateuch. It appears, however, that during the long sojourn of the Israelites in the wilderness, they preserved, with an almost inconceivable obstinacy, their unhappy propensity to the idolatry of Egypt: not content, however, with the idols of Egypt, they borrowed those of the new people with whom they had any conversation. Moloch, Chiun, Remphan, and other such-like Divinities, of whom we know little more than the names, partook of their homage with the true and eternal God.
In Kadesh— Not in Kadesh Barnea, the fifteenth station or encampment of the Israelites, upon the confines of the southern part of Canaan; but in another Kadesh, which was upon the confines of Idumea, and not far from the Red-sea.
And Miriam died there— Four months before her brother Aaron, ch. Numbers 33:38 and eleven before Moses. She was the eldest of three, and was near a hundred and thirty years old, as may be collected from Exodus 4:7 where it appears, that she was not a child when Moses was born. Eusebius tells us, that in his time the tomb of Miriam was found at Kadesh, at a little distance from Petra, the capital of Arabia Petraea. Several of the ancients believed that she died a virgin; and that she was the legislatrix and governess of the Israelitish women, as Moses was the legislator of the men.