6. You must pay them in silver for any food you eat or water you drink.’ ”
7. 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.
8. So we passed by our relatives, the descendants of Esau who lived in Edom. We turned off the Jordan Valley road that comes from the towns of Elath and Ezion Geber and traveled along the desert road to Moab.
9. Then the Lord said to me, “Don’t bother the people of Moab. Don’t go to war against them, because I will not give you any of their land as your own; I have given Ar to the descendants of Lot as their own.”
10. (The Emites, who lived in Ar before, were strong people, and there were many of them. They were very tall, like the Anakites.
11. The Emites were thought to be Rephaites, like the Anakites, but the Moabite people called them Emites.
12. The Horites also lived in Edom before, but the descendants of Esau forced them out and destroyed them, taking their place as Israel did in the land the Lord gave them as their own.)
13. And the Lord said to me, “Now get up and cross the Zered Valley.” So we crossed the valley.
14. 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.
15. The Lord continued to work against them to remove them from the camp until they were all dead.
16. When the last of those fighting men had died,
17. the Lord said to me,
18. “Today you will pass by Ar, on the border of Moab.