A short passage near the heart of Behaalotecha, the two verses beginning 'Rise up, O Lord' (Numbers 10:35-36), is marked in the Masoretic text by an unusual scribal device: an inverted Hebrew letter nun placed before and after the passage, setting it visibly apart from the surrounding narrative. The device is rare enough in the Hebrew Bible that the Talmud's tractate Shabbat discusses it directly, recording a view that these bracketed verses function as their own separate book within the Torah, one traditional explanation for the markers being that the two verses interrupt the wilderness journey's chronological sequence and were set here for a different literary reason than strict narrative order.
Source critics likewise treat this brief passage as an older poetic fragment, comparable to other short archaic verse embedded in the Torah's prose narrative, inserted at this point in the text rather than composed as part of the surrounding wilderness account, a judgement that converges with the Talmud's own instinct that something structurally unusual is happening at exactly this spot in the scroll.
The same bracketed verses carry a continuing liturgical role: the first of the two, 'Rise up, O Lord, and let Your enemies be scattered' (Numbers 10:35), is recited in many synagogues at the moment the ark is opened and the Torah scroll is taken out for the public reading on Sabbaths and festivals, so that a fragment the Masoretes marked as textually set apart from its narrative surroundings became, independently, one of the most frequently spoken verses in ordinary synagogue practice.