93 THE BAAL PEOR EPISODE REVISITED The answer must surely be in the negative since the traditions about Moses give no hint that he was exempt from the laws which he was commissioned to promulgate. An alternative attempt at an explanation would locate Moses among the ancestral figures going back to the beginnings of Israel who followed different marriage customs. Abraham fathered children with Hagar, an Egyptian or Arabian surrogate wife, and with Keturah, “mother” of Midian, another Arabian woman (Gen 16,15-16; 25,1-4). After Jacob’s return from his twenty-year exile in Mesopotamia, the marriage alliance between the indigenous Hivvites and Israelites, which would have made them “one people” (Gen 34,16), was tainted by the crime of rape and ended badly for both parties, but the possibility is not explicitly repudiated. Judah married a Canaanite woman (Gen 38,1-2) and Joseph an Egyptian (Gen 41,45). A similar freedom from restraint obtained in respect to consanguinity and kinship affinity. In advising his son, Isaac speaks in favour of cross-cousin marriage (Gen 28,1-2), and both he and Jacob marry their nieces (Gen 25,19- 20; 29,28). Both types of marriage would come to be prohibited by laws of priestly origin (Lev 18,12-14). This is all well and good, but the obvious problem with this explanation is that Moses belongs to a different age from that of the first ancestors. While biblical chronology is not internally consistent, and cannot be reconciled with the genealogies, Moses appears on the scene either about four centuries (Gen 15,13; Exod 12,40) or four generations (Gen 15,15) after the sons of Jacob and, according to the genealogies, in the third generation after Levi son of Jacob (Exod 6,16-20). Moses belongs, in fact, to the first wilderness generation, the tainted generation which came to an end in the plains of Moab. The Midianite connection of Moses, never viewed in a negative light during that time — leaving aside the obscure complaint of Miriam — implies that in this first period Israelites and Midianites still preserved the tradition of close kinship which later came to be repudiated. As with Israel’s relations with Edom, the violence of the repudiation at a later date is correlative with the closeness of the perceived affinity between the two peoples. Since the reason for forbidding Moses entry into the promised land offered in Num 20,9-13 strains credulity, it may have been simply the awareness that Moses, like Aaron and Miriam, belonged to the first wilderness generation which Yahweh swore would never enter into his rest (Ps 95,11). The Baal Peor episode is therefore the point at which the change in attitude towards the Midianites occurred. It is followed by the second census and the command to Moses to go up Mount Abarim, view the land of Canaan, and die (Num 27,12-13), and the obvious inference is that this is to happen there and then, not at some point in the future. If, therefore, this was the place where the death of Moses was originally recorded, as suggested en passant by Martin Noth13, it must have been transferred to 13 NOTH, A History of Pentateuchal Traditions, 33, n. 126.