NOTES for Deu 3:1-29
The people had no special period set aside for learning how to wage war. They had to learn warfare as they went along, advancing on the path along which God led His people and encountering enemies on the way, who became the Hebrews’ teachers in everything related to war. Yet God Himself remained their chief teacher. It was He who taught His people that spiritual integrity without which true courage is impossible and without which one cannot become a warrior, but at best remains merely a bully and a brawler. To become a warrior and acquire courage, they had to learn to follow God without turning back or looking to either side.
The first skill—not turning back, not recalling Egypt and Egyptian life every hour, now that it had come to seem almost paradisal—was acquired only when the generation of the Exodus, the generation of those who had left Egypt, had passed away. Most of that generation was completely unprepared to follow God without looking back. Their children were different: they experienced the first skirmishes with the enemy and the first battles, still local and not nearly on the scale of those that awaited the people in Palestine, but already giving some idea of the enemies they would face later.
As for the ability not to look to either side, it was greatly helped by the habit of moving in step with God, especially through territory where the people found themselves surrounded by tribes that were, if not hostile, at least not especially friendly. It was God who laid out His people’s route; He determined whom to go around and whom to fight. In this case, they had to rely not on their own intuition or military experience, of which they still had almost none, but on God’s instructions. Of course, the people’s life was not limited to war alone.
War was only one part of it, and the place it would occupy in the people’s life depended largely on their spiritual condition. Yet it was during war, in critical and sometimes extreme situations, that the people acquired qualities that would have served them later in peaceful life, had they not lost them: the ability to hear God and do what He commands. These qualities are absolutely necessary for everyone, but unfortunately a fallen person often acquires them only on the boundary between life and death.