Moses gathered 70 elders and the spirit of God descended upon them. This made Moses very happy because now he would not have to handle the whole load of dealing with the people himself. Hurrah for delegation!
Remember how yesterday God promised to send meat until the Israelites get sick of it? Today he does so. However, he loses his temper (again) in the midst of it all.
But while they were gorging themselves on the meat—while it was still in their mouths—the anger of the Lord blazed against the people, and he struck them with a severe plague.Maybe God was mad at them because they were drying some of the quail. We know that he does not like the manna to be saved. Maybe he does not like any miraculous food to be saved.
Miriam and Aaron criticize Moses for marrying a Cushite woman. Are they complaining about Zipporah? But she was a Midianite woman. Are they the same thing? Or was this a second wife? How confusing!
In any case, God gets mad at Aaron and Miriam for criticizing Moses (Moses did not get mad because he is humble). God curses Miriam with leprosy which she has to suffer from for a week. Why did God punish Miriam with leprosy and not Aaron? That seems unfair.
But I think that the criticism against Moses and the punishment for it was not the real point of the story. The real point was to give God a chance to say this,
“If there were prophets among you,This passage seems to attempt to explain why God never talks to anyone directly anymore even though he chatted with Moses nearly constantly. Moses was special!
I, the Lord, would reveal myself in visions.
I would speak to them in dreams.
But not with my servant Moses.
Of all my house, he is the one I trust.
I speak to him face to face,
clearly, and not in riddles!
He sees the Lord as he is.
So why were you not afraid
to criticize my servant Moses?”
A bunch of scouts investigate the land the Israelites are going to and find that it is wonderful and fertile and full of well established and powerful people. The scouts were scared enough of these people that they tried to spread the rumor that
All the people we saw were huge. We even saw giants there, the descendants of Anak. Next to them we felt like grasshoppers, and that’s what they thought, too!
New Testament
Jesus offers bread and wine as his body and blood. He tells the disciples that they will deny him. He prays at Gethsemane. Judas betrays him. Jesus is arrested. The disciples flee. This is all very similar to Matthew's version.
Psalms and Proverbs
The Lord detests the use of dishonest scales,God is particular about measuring things accurately. He's a nerd. =)
but he delights in accurate weights.
I think it's odd that the scouts were gone for 40 days and 40 nights. This is how long Noah's flood lasted (Genesis 7), how long Moses was on the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments (Exodus 24), how long Moses took to carve the second set of commandments (Deuteronomy 9), and how long Jesus fasted in the wilderness (Matthew 4). and the Israelites spend a total of 40 years wandering in the desert (Deuteronomy 8). That seems like quite a coincidence.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the number 40 had some special meaning/symbolism back in the day? 40 in Hebrew is represented by the letter מ ("mem") and the word ארבעים ("arba'im," literally "fours"; apologies if the formatting gets screwed up here, but copy-and-paste might not be working correctly). but that doesn't really give any insight here. Thoughts?
Also, my reading makes it sound like the part about seeing giants was an accurate report of what they saw, and not just an unfounded rumor (see the previous paragraph, where before anyone spreads rumors, the scouts tell Moses they saw giants). The Hebrew translation calls it an "evil report," not a rumor, again implying that the report was true but not encouraging. I haven't been able to translate this passage on my own, so I don't know which translation is more accurate. Saying the scouts tried to spread rumors about giants seems misleading, if they did indeed see giants.
The significance of the number 40 does seem interesting.
ReplyDeleteI read the rumor about giants as an exaggeration. They saw people they called giants, but saying that they were to those people as grasshoppers are to us seemed like an exaggeration meant to spread additional fear.