A Book of Transitions
Summary of Numbers...
The book of Numbers can be considered part law, part narrative and part ‘accounting’. Numbers is largely concerned with a census that is taken while the Israelites are making their way through the desert, having escaped from the Egyptians. It proceeds to list the key members of Israelite tribes and houses, and outlines some financial offerings the people are required to make. The Levites are emphasised as a unique, special house given policing and administrative duties, and Numbers carefully details these. More law-giving is recorded here, also, providing a further expansion of the information in Exodus and Leviticus.
In Numbers 13, the book resumes the narrative that began in Exodus. The Israelites have finally completed their formative desert voyage, and await entry to Canaan, the 'Promised Land'. According to their family stories (Genesis) God promised this land to the descendants of Abraham, and they see it as their primary social and religious purpose to claim it. However, they discover that the land itself is also the home of a number of other people groups. Moses sends out a number of young men (one for each tribe) to scout ahead. While they discover that the land is, indeed, very promising and full of food (especially compared to the desert they have been crossing), they also note the sizable cities and armies of its occupants.
Only two of the scouts (named Caleb and Joshua) recommend proceeding, while the others suggest turning and running. The people side with those that endorse fleeing, and complain that God will bring them to their end. The incident angers God, who wants to wipe out the complaining Israelites and begin a new nation through Moses. Moses convinces God to allow them to survive for the time being. However, God declares that none of the current Israelites will enter the Promised Land except Caleb and Joshua. The people of Israel were then condemned to wander the desert for forty years, until the complaining generation had died out. This wandering forms the focus of the remainder of Numbers – more discovering of ritual laws, more challenges, more complaints, and more consequences for people who complain.
A significant event happens in Numbers 20 when the Israelites are complaining about the lack of water at a place called Meribah. God asks Moses to command a rock to yield water to the Israelites. This he does, but with anger, striking the rock with his staff. For that display of temper, Moses is told that he too will share in the fate of his generation of Israelites and not make it to the Promised Land. The book concludes with a number of chapters laying out the terms of invasion and settlement of the lands that Israel will conquer.
What Numbers may have meant to its original audience...
The term 'law' (Torah) for the ancient Israelites was an all-encompassing concept that captures ideas of civic, social and religious responsibilities, as well as story, narrative, history and memory. These categories are largely interconnected - story can communicate civil responsibilities (the way people should interact), while civil responsibilities also have religious consequences. These overlapping areas of meaning don't really have a modern western comparison, although would likely better reflect the cultural realities of many traditional indigenous cultures around the world.
Numbers represents this mixture of cultural content quite well. It opens with commands for a census, closes with laws about property boundaries and inheritance laws, and is filled with stories of espionage, religious observance, and processes for dealing with legal disputes.
In Numbers, the ancient Israelites find the religious explanation for many of their cultures and customs, as well as defining the territories for each of the Twelve Tribes. The story also helps to bring closure to the ‘legendry’ past, the age of the ancient patriarchs and heroes of the Jewish people. It transitions the story in preparation for Israelite settlement in the Promised Land, overseeing the death of the whole generation of Israelites from Egypt, and laying the groundwork for the ultimate replacement of Moses by Joshua.
How Jesus might have read Numbers...
In the Gospel of John Chapter 3, Jesus draws an analogy between himself and a story told in the book of Numbers Ch.21. In a strange turn of events, the people complain against God and God sends a plague of poisonous snakes among the Israelites. The Israelites ask for help, and God instructs Moses to build a bronze serpent for them to look at if they were bitten. If they looked upon the statue, they would live.
In John’s account, Jesus draws a parallel between himself and the bronze serpent. John’s understanding of Jesus is that he is in complete control of his life story, and knows from an early stage that he is heading towards his crucifixion. In John 3 Jesus identifies his own destiny, of being ‘lifted up on a cross’, as mirroring the purpose of the bronze statue. As the Israelites looked to the serpent, so Jesus anticipates that people will look to him as the source of life (John 3:14).
The eternal life that Jesus offers (John 3:15-16) is for “whoever believes”, not just limited to the people of Israel as in Numbers 21. This seems consistent with broader teachings of Jesus elsewhere in the gospels, where gentiles (those from outside of the Jewish community) are welcomed into his community. At the same time, this broader inclusiveness deeply contrasts with Numbers, which clearly views foreigners as enemies and sources of ritual impurity (for example Numbers 25). What's more, Jesus' preaching of "love for enemies" seems at odds with the relentless, cold pursuit of justice that often appears in the Pentateuch. These contrast help further confirm Jesus radically different approach to the law as he seeks to reshape the vision of justice in the Kingdom of God.
What Numbers might mean for our faith today...
As with many stories from the ancient near east, Numbers has a definite shadow side to its text. Murder in the name of religious zealotry, arbitrary punishment, collective punishment and ethnic violence are a difficult part of the story that can’t be justified from the perspective presented by Jesus in the New Testament, as seen in the section above.
Placing the (all-too-present) problems of violence to the side, however, we can find some thought-provoking concepts in Numbers. For example, Numbers demonstrates that for the ancient Israelites, God maintained sovereignty over all areas of life. The book then emphasizes that all activities—censuses, religious practice, accounts, inheritance, law—all of these things have an essential connection to the spiritual world. It encourages us to think about things holistically, which is something that we often don’t do in compartmentalized western thinking.
The Enlightenment was an era where we started separating fact from fiction, myth from history, public law from tradition. This kind of separation is a very western, modernized way of engaging with life. Numbers gives us permission, at least, to begin thinking about the way that even the most mundane or boring stories might actually reflect upon and speak to into the broader range of experiences—spiritual or otherwise—that make us human.
Some important questions to ask about Numbers...
+ Moses, the Rock and Punishment
From Numbers 14, the Israelites are sent on a journey wandering the desert. The narrative goes that this journey is taking place as a kind of journey of religious purification, its intent to punish and destroy the generation of Israelites who, having seen God’s miracles in Egypt, still doubted that they would be able to enter the Promised Land. Again, at its core the underlying story carries disturbing assumptions about God, but the curious aspect that we’d like to explore here are the variances between two accounts of one particular incident—at a place called “Meribah”—to take place on that wandering (Exodus 17:1-7, Numbers 20:1-13).
It is possible to confuse these stories as two separate accounts of parallel events at the one location, but the higher likelihood is that a common story has been adapted twice (given that each story gives a reason for the naming of the place, and neither references the idea of the Israelites having been there before).
The stories both detail a moment of tension between the Israelites, Moses, and God. In the Exodus account, set shortly after the escape, Israelites complain over the lack of water. God’s response is simple: Moses should strike a rock and water would miraculously emerge. The Numbers account is more involved. Moses is told to command the rock to ‘yield its water’, but Moses instead strikes the rock. It still provides water, but for his ‘striking’, rather than ‘commanding’ Moses is forbidden from entering the Promised Land. The response seems extreme in Numbers, especially given that in the Exodus story, striking the rock is precisely what is commanded. The story makes God seem arbitrary, random and unpredictable.
In many discussions, these kind of stories seem to polarise people. Atheists will point to such examples as reason to dismiss the idea of God. Apologists may take an approach that says that since God is good, all of his decisions are just and rational, and we are simply the ones without the ability to comprehend.
This article proposes another way. We recognise that this is how the Israelites believe that God acted, without it necessarily reflecting the historical event. For the Israelites, there is an understanding that Moses never reaches the Promised Land (Deuteronomy also has this understanding, although doesn't give a reason other than the fact that God was angry with Moses (Deut 4:21-22). For this to happen to the greatest prophet and leader in their history, there must have been a reason. In the absence of a clearer reason, they look to a story where Moses quarrels with God (Meribah, the name of the spring, means ‘quarelling’), and perhaps adapt or alter the simpler story in Exodus. Of course, there are other possibilities too… make some suggestions in the comments!