New precepts are mixed in here; although the people are now in the desert, the measures described seem to refer to their entry into the land; in reality, they relate to times when the people have fallen multiple times. We must remember that these texts were motivated by the need to reexamine Israel’s past to understand the present and illuminate the future. When the narrator writes this, he sets it in Sinai to demonstrate the commitments the people made to their God and to confront them with the infidelities and contradictions they are experiencing as they reread their history.