You must not worship or serve any idol, because I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God. If you hate me, I will punish your children, and even your grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Israel, do not rejoice; don’t shout for joy as the other nations do. You have been like a prostitute against your God. You love the pay of prostitutes on every threshing floor.
Aaron the priest obeyed the Lord and went up Mount Hor. There he died on the first day of the fifth month In the fortieth year after the Israelites left Egypt.
Forty years after the Israelites had left Egypt, on the first day of the eleventh month, Moses told the people of Israel everything the Lord had commanded him to tell them.
It had been thirty-eight years from the time we left Kadesh Barnea until we crossed the Zered Valley. By then, all the fighting men from that time had died, as the Lord had promised would happen.
The Lord your God has blessed everything you have done; he has protected you while you traveled through this great desert. The Lord your God has been with you for the past forty years, and you have had everything you needed.
Remember how the Lord your God has led you in the desert for these forty years, taking away your pride and testing you, because he wanted to know what was in your heart. He wanted to know if you would obey his commands.
“Now then, the Lord has kept his promise. He has kept me alive for forty-five years from the time he said this to Moses during the time we all wandered in the desert. Now here I am, eighty-five years old.
The Israelites had moved about in the desert for forty years. During that time all the fighting men who had left Egypt had died because they had not obeyed the Lord. So the Lord swore they would not see the land he had promised their ancestors to give them, a fertile land.