Numbers 31:20 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

Purify all your raiment, and all that is made of skins— La Roque, says the author of the Observations, mentions, as part of the common Arab's furniture, hair sacks, and trunks, and baskets covered with skin, to put up and carry their things in, which are kettles or pots, great wooden bowls, hand-mills, and pitchers; with these they content themselves, and they are all their furniture in common, or nearly so. I mention them distinctly, because this account seems to me to explain, in a clearer manner than commentators have done, (who are, indeed, in a manner silent upon the text,) the passages in Leviticus and Numbers which describe the furniture of the habitations of Israel in the wilderness. Upon whatsoever any of them, when they are dead, doth fall, it shall be unclean; (Leviticus 11:32-33.) whether it be any vessel of wood; their wooden bowls, that is, according to this representation of the utensils of those who live in tents, to which there is reason to believe those of the Israelites were like, who lived so many years like Arabs in the wilderness;—or raiment or skin, any trunks or baskets covered with skins, i.e. or sack, any hair-cloth sack used for the better carrying of goods from place to place. Whatsoever vessel it be, wherein any work is done, it must be put into water, and it shall be unclean until the evening; so it shall be cleansed. And every earthen vessel—the pitchers, used for holding liquids, and drinking out of, wherein any of them falleth, whatsoever is in it; shall be unclean, and ye shall break it. We meet with much the same account of their furniture in the present passage. La Roque's account, therefore, may serve to explain both that and the foregoing, and must be acknowledged a more natural illustration of them than that of the rabbis, who, suppose that the work of goats, (which our translators determine to mean goat's hair) implies instruments made of the horns and hoofs, and bones of goats; few or no instruments being to be found among those who now dwell in tents. See Ainsworth on these passages. There is the like agreeable simplicity in explaining the things made of wood, of their wooden bowls, instead of reckoning up all the particular things which were afterwards made of wood, in the most remote sense of the word, as Maimonides has done, who introduces the mention of vessels of bulrushes, of reed, of the shell of nuts, and the bark of trees; things, which there is reason to think were not in use in these migratory families, and consequently not immediately referred to by Moses; and, if so, not coming under the observation of a commentator, however they may, with propriety enough, have engaged the attention of a Jewish Casuist.