From fear of this thing. This translation cannot be correct. Had the Hebrew original intended to convey this meaning, we should have had מִדְּאָגַת הַדָּבָר הַזֶּה The literal rendering is, "from anxiety, from a word." The word here translated "anxiety" (LXX. εὐλάβεια) is applied to the sea, and is translated "sorrow" in Jeremiah 49:23. It is translated "heaviness" in Proverbs 12:25. In Ezekiel 4:16; Ezekiel 12:18, Ezekiel 12:19, it is translated "care," "carefulness," and is applied to eating food. It obviously refers to agitation or anxiety of mind, and the proper translation here is, "we did it out of anxiety, for a cause." So Masius and Rosenmuller, who render the word דְאָגָה here by sollicitudo.
What have you to do with the Lord God of Israel? For the Lord hath made Jordan a border. Literally, What to you and to Jehovah the God of Israel, since He hath given a border between us and between you, sons of Reuben and sons of Gad, even the Jordan. Thus the reason for the erection of the altar was the very converse of what it had been supposed to be. So far from considering themselves as shut out from the communion of Israel by the natural boundary formed by Jordan, the two and a half tribes were resolved that no one else should ever think so. If the descendants of the remainder of the Israelites should ever venture to assert anything of the kind, there was the altar, erected in a conspicuous position on the west side of Jordan, left as a perpetual memorial of the great struggle in which Reuben, Gad, and the half tribe of Manasseh had taken part, and which had resulted in the final occupation of the land of Canaan. Keil and Delitzsch remark that there was some reason for this anxiety. The promises made to Abraham and his posterity related only to the land of Canaan. For their own advantage these tribes had chosen to remain in the trans-Jordanic territory conquered by Moses. It was quite possible that in future ages they might be regarded as outside the blessings and privileges of the Mosaic covenant. For the present, at least, they value those blessings and privileges, and desired to have some permanent memorial of the fact that they had a right to share them. From fearing. It may be worth while to notice, as a sign of later, or at least of different authorship, that the Pentateuch employs a different (the feminine) form of the infinitive for the form found here.