Today, I am reading and commenting on  Numbers 34-36.

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As you can see if you regularly read my blog, or listen to my video recording of it, I do not necessarily begin with the start of the passage.  I just take whatever part of the passage speaks to me that day (hopefully, and prayerfully, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit).  Today, I am going to start at the beginning with the borders of the land given to the Israelites west of the Jordan River.  First, I want to note that God defines what is within these borders as the land of Canaan, which He is giving to the Israelites.  Now, when I read this, I cannot make out where these borders are because I do not know where many of the placenames listed here actually are (or, more accurately, were).  However, it seems likely to me that up until at least the time of King Solomon, people would have known exactly where these borders were.  Further, I think that modern archeologists could also identify the location of most of these places.  This means that these borders provides evidence for this passage being composed at least close to when it claims to have been composed (I am not saying that this proof of this, just that it is evidence for it).

Next I want to talk about the cities of refuge.  First, by situating three east of the Jordan and three west of the Jordan, everyone was assured to be within a reasonable distance of a city of refuge.  Thus anyone who accidentally killed a man stood a reasonable chance of reaching a city of refuge before those seeking vengeance on them could catch them.  I like the way in which it lays out methods that you might strike someone and kill them that you cannot claim the death was an accident.  It also gives examples of things which one might do that might cause a death, for which accident is an acceptable excuse.  So, if you strike someone with an object which could reasonably be considered deadly, and that someone dies, you are a murderer, even if everyone agrees that you did not mean to kill them.  This shows us that we are to think about the possible consequences of our actions.  These laws also make it clear that intent does not need to be proven.  If you struck someone with what could be considered a deadly weapon (or even, deadly tool), intent does not matter.  Of course, these laws also contain provisions where if intent to harm can be proven, actual method does not matter.  Further, the laws also give consequences to those who take the life of another by accident.  Needing to make a living in a city of refuge away from your property, with no option to return to your property until the death of the high priest, is no small consequence.  God makes it clear here that human life is to be held sacred.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Numbers 32-33.

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Some of these names are very challenging for me to pronounce (especially some of the place names).  Every time I read this I come to the same conclusion: Moses misunderstood the intentions of the tribes of Reuben and Gad when they asked for the land the Israelites had conquered east of the Jordan River as their inheritance.  However, as I read it this time, it seems to me that the tribes were also in the wrong.  There are different ways to read their request, but I will explain how I read it this year (and the lesson we can learn from it).  The tribes of Reuben and Gad looked at the land which the Israelites had conquered east of the Jordan and thought to themselves that they could not imagine land more suited to their lifestyles.  They saw no reason to go to war for land west of the Jordan.    So, they asked Moses if they could just have that land and be done.  Moses interpreted their decision as them being afraid of going across the Jordan, just as the previous generation had been afraid to go into the land.  He thought they were not willing to aid the other tribes in gaining the land west of the Jordan.  When the tribes of Reuben and Gad realized that their request could be taken that way, they changed it.  So, even though they had indeed originally been requesting to be allowed to not join the fight across the Jordan, that was not what they wanted.  They wanted the land east of the Jordan, and had thought they had no reason to fight west of the Jordan.  Moses’ accusation made them realize that the other tribes had taken part in conquering this land which they desired and had a legitimate claim to their assistance in conquering land for the other tribes to live in.  The lesson we take away from this is that when misunderstand our intentions, we should not get angry and defensive.  Rather, we should seek to resolve the conflict with our brothers.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Numbers 30-31.

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There are two ways to read the instructions concerning vows taken by women in today’s passage.  First, one could read it as saying that women are less responsible for their vows than men, that a woman needs a man to make sure that the vows and oaths she enters in to are truly what she means.  The problem with that reading is that it tells us that a widow or a divorced woman is bound by whatever vows she enters into.  The other reading is that a father or husband who disapproves of a vow taken by his daughter or wife must say so immediately, or allow her to be bound by the vow.  If he does not object to the vow as soon as he hears about it, he is responsible for the sin of breaking it if her later forces her to not keep it.  This reading sees this as recognition that a father can prevent his daughter who is living in his household, and a husband can prevent his wife, from keeping any vows she might have made (even more so in the society to which this command was given than today).  So, this command tells those men that if they do no object to the vows taken by the woman in their life as soon as they learn of it, it is as if they themselves had taken the vow.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Numbers 27-29.

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When God told Moses that he would be gathered to his people after viewing the land that God had given to the people of Israel, he asked God to appoint someone to lead the people in Moses’ place.  Before I go into the difference between the authority over the people which God gave Joshua, Moses’ successor, and that which He had given Moses, I want to focus in on that phrase, “the land that I have given to the people of Israel.”  God did not tell Moses he would see, from the mountain, the land which He was going to give to the people of Israel.  God told Moses that He had already given it to them.  The people of Israel were not yet living in the land, but God had already given it to them.  It was just up to them to move into it and occupy it.  In the same way, through Christ, God has given us citizenship in the kingdom of God.  We just need to move into it and begin to live our lives there.

Now, while Moses led the people of Israel, he spoke to God directly and God directed him as to what His will was for the people of Israel.  In Moses, the spiritual and secular leadership was combined into one person.  However, God separated those roles when He replaced Moses with Joshua.  Joshua was in charge of leading the people, but he was to have Eleazar inquire of God for guidance from God.  To me that seems to give us a model for leadership of the organizations we create to carry out the mission which God gives us.  When God gives a vision to someone to create an organization, He will often give that person the gifts to make decisions to lead that organization with full authority over it.  However, when that founder passes leadership on to the next generation, the next generation of leaders should have someone (or more than one someone) who can hold them accountable.  As I understand this passage, Joshua was to decide what he thought the people of Israel should do, whether it was tactics and strategy or where they should camp, then bring it to Eleazar for Eleazar to seek God’s guidance using the Urim as to whether Joshua had decided according to God’s will.  So, Eleazar did not have authority to make decisions, but he had a sort of veto over Joshua’s decision. I will note that I think what I just wrote is an oversimplification of the relationship of the power of Joshua and Eleazar.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Numbers 25-26.

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As I read this I found the wording of verse four in chapter twenty-five disconcerting:
And the Lord said to Moses, “Take all the chiefs of the people and hang them in the sun before the Lord, that the fierce anger of the Lord may turn away from Israel.”
The translators’ notes say that the word hang can be translated as impale, which I think would be a better translation considering the context, and context is really important to understanding what God was telling Moses.  A simple reading of that verse suggests that God was telling Moses to impale the chiefs among the people (I will get to why I use impale when the translators chose to use “hang” in a moment).  However, verse five suggests something a bit different.  In verse five Moses speaks to the judges of Israel and tells them to kill those of the men under them who yoked themselves to Baal of Peor.  Then we have the account of the man of Israel who brought a Midianite woman to his family camp to have sex with her, and did so right past the gathering of the people crying out to God in front of the tent of meeting.  Aaron’s grandson, Phinehas, was so incensed by this behavior that he took a spear, followed them and killed them both.  The passage tells us that Phinehas doing this stopped the plague on the people of Israel.

Now, I am going to start unpacking how this context should influence how we understand this passage.  First, I prefer “impale” to “hang”, because the description of what Phinehas did could easily be interpreted as impaling the perpetrators, but is certainly not hanging them.  I want to point out that writing out a record was significantly more difficult in that time than today, so that those writing this would have avoided using more words than necessary.  So, as I read this in context, I combine what Moses told the judges with the identification of the man Phinehas killed to draw a conclusion about what God’s command meant.  God’s command was to kill all of those who had joined in the worship of Baal of Peor, which apparently involved sexual activity, especially those who were leaders among the people.  The man Phinehas killed was the son of a chief among the Simeonites.  He thought that his position shielded him from consequences for breaking the laws of God.  Phinehas was outraged that anyone would so brazenly break the laws.  The man did this in front of the assembly of the people, so no trial was necessary.  By killing the man, Phinehas illustrated that no one among the Israelites was above the law, and thus gave pause to those who thought they could get away with both sexual immorality and worshiping another god.  Finally for this I want to note that there was some kind of disease which spread through the people of Israel related to the worship of Baal of Peor, probably a sexually transmitted disease.  Which reinforces my thought that the ten spies died from a sexually transmitted disease that they picked up during their spying mission.

Finally, I want to comment about the relative sizes of the tribes of Israel in the census taken here.  First, my perception from the roles they played later in the Book of Judges is that the “large” tribes were Judah, Ephraim, and Zebulun, and that the “small” tribes were Dan, Simeon, and Benjamin, with the rest of the tribes being somewhere in between.   It turns out that my perception was only correct about the tribes of Judah, Zebulun, and Simeon.  Ephraim was actually the second smallest tribe, and Dan was the second largest.  I am making note of this because I want to keep an idea of the actual sizes of the tribes in mind as I read through the “historical”** books of the Old Testament.

**The books of the Old Testament are often divided into four categories: the Pentateuch,  Historical Books, Wisdom and Poetic Books, and Prophetic Books.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Numbers 22-24.

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When I read this passage, I do not understand why God was angry with Balaam.  That doesn’t mean that I can’t think of reasons why God might have been angry with Balaam, but nothing in the passage makes it clear as to why He was angry that Balaam went.  I suspect that the Hebrew words used in this passage contain connotations (or, at least, did for those who spoke Hebrew when this passage was first recorded) which do not carry over into English.  So, I am going to skip over that and move on to Balaam’s interaction with his donkey.  Three times Balaam’s donkey took action to preserve Balaam’s life from a danger which Balaam did not perceive, and every time Balaam struck the donkey.  Balaam got angrier and angrier at his donkey, until he wanted to kill her.  At that point, God gave the donkey the power of speech.  The donkey points out to Balaam that she had been Balaam’s donkey for a long time and had never behaved in this manner previously.  At that moment, God allowed Balaam to see the danger he had been in, the danger which his donkey kept him safe from.  Balaam was upset because his donkey made him look foolish in front of strangers (the representatives of Balak, whom he was accompanying).  We need to learn not to do the same thing.  We need to learn not to turn on those we have known and trusted for years because they embarrass us before others.  The tendency of humans to abandon those they have known and trusted for a long time to avoid being embarrassed in front of strangers is used by those who seek to draw us away from good behavior and away from God.  Teachers will use this to draw children away from the things which their parents taught them.  Those seeking followers will do the same thing to separate people from their friends and family.

And now I am going to come back to perhaps why God was angry with Balaam.  After Balaam sees the angel of the Lord, he says, “if it is evil in your sight, I will turn back.”  The angel of the Lord (I am not going to expand on this today, but take note of the fact that the passage does not just say “the angel”, as many other passages say, but rather it says “the angel of the Lord”) tells Balaam to go with the men, but repeats that Balaam is to “speak only the word that I tell you.”    This suggests to me that Balaam might have been thinking of how he could distort the word God gave him about the Israelites in order to avoid the embarrassment of blessing those he was hired to curse, perhaps he was not even doing so consciously.  So, we also need to be careful to speak only the word which God tells us.

I was going to write about what we can learn from the rest of the passage, but this took too long to flesh out.  Perhaps I will do a blog entry on this passage again another day.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Numbers 19-21.

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It took me a bit to figure out how to get started on talking about what went on at Meribah.  When the Israelites got there, there was not water for them to drink, or for their flocks and herds to drink.  The people of Israel got angry with Moses and Aaron over this, despite the fact that Moses had resolved this issue for them on the previous time they were here shortly after they left Egypt (described in Exodus 17).  Moses and Aaron prostrated themselves before God, and then Moses took the staff (I am assuming this is the same staff from the previous time) and gathered the assembly of the people before the rock.  Moses struck the rock with his staff twice and water came out of the rock.  However, this time God had told Moses that he was to just tell the rock to yield its water.  The point being that God’s miracles are not the result of magic spells.  We can’t just follow an ritual and get the results we want from God.  We need to do as God commands.  God showed His love for Israel by releasing the water, despite Moses not following His instructions, but as a result of Moses not following instructions God told Moses he would not enter into the Promised Land.  Sometimes God will grant us our requests when we do not follow His commands, but we will suffer consequences.  It is always better to do things as God instructs, even if our way works.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.