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Recounting 2 - Deuteronomy 2 & 3

Chapters 2 and 3 are essentially Moses just rehearsing to the Israelites what they had just done as far as what their journey entailed recently. He talks about that they were supposed to pass by the Edomites and the Moabites because they are kin historically and God wasn’t going to give Israel that land anyway so don’t mess with the people. The problem became when Balak the king of Moab tried to curse Israel and ended up taking Balaam’s advice to infiltrate them and tempt them to commit sexual sin with his people so that God wouldn’t favor them anymore. To be fair, the Hebrew men shouldn’t have been tempted and shouldn’t have committed adultery with those women, but they were punished as well. The irony is that Balak was so worried about the Israelites conquering his people that he messed with the situation enough to get them destroyed even though it was never God’s intention to destroy them. Balak, with all his meddling, got his people destroyed when it wouldn’t have happened if he wo...
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Recounting - Deuteronomy 1

As we begin Deuteronomy there are a few important things to note as an introduction. First is that the name Deuteronomy is only the name of his book in the Christian version of the Bible. It means “the second law” because this is Moses giving the law again to the Hebrews before he dies. TB says that it’s because as they are about to go into the promised land, this is him interpreting the law for them once they get there because at this point they had only been living the law while wandering in the wilderness and things were going to change so they needed to know how to live the law once they settled. There was also a long discussion about how the first four books of the Torah, the 7th letters of the first 49 letters spelled out God’s name which indicated that those books were dictated by God to Moses, where as the book of Deuteronomy doesn’t have that. Instead it has the 7th letter of the first 48 letters spells out Torah. 48 letters instead of 49 indicate that this is from Moses becau...
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What's the Lesson - Numbers 33-36

The rest of Numbers, chapters 33-36, were mostly instructions on how to operated once in the promised land of Canaan and so we will go over them quickly. There are some interesting aspects of it, but for the most part it’s just names of people I don’t know and laws that we’ve already gone over before. The first part is a basic travel log of the journey taken by Israel from Egypt to where they are at that point. The significant part about that is that there are 42 points covered by this log, and TB points out that archeological evidence and other accounts don’t match up to this record and he hypothesizes that it is recorded this way because of the significance of the number 42. A quick google search says that the number 42 is significant because it “represents divine creation, transition, and spiritual journeys.” That makes sense that this record is less about where they physically were and more about the spiritual journey of Israel from disobedient freed slaves to the more subservient,...
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Wrong Side of the River - Numbers 32

Like I mentioned yesterday, the Midianites in general weren’t just one single tribe in one single place, they were spread out covering a lot of territory and when Israel defeated them, they only defeated one part of that territory. After they won their battle, the leaders from the tribes of Rueben and Gad noticed “hey this is some really great grazing land here and we have a lot of grazing livestock so maybe we should just stay here instead of going in to the land of Canaan and getting a land inheritance there. The group of “princes” approach Moses and Eleazar with this idea and TB makes sure to note that they aren’t demanding this or refusing to move forward like the previous people were, they just wanted to explain their position and see what Moses has to say about it. Their request at first took Moses back because he was like “you guys want to have your lands here and just not go into Canaan and fight for your brethren to obtain their lands of inheritance?” Basically, he didn’t wa...
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Midianite Battle - Numbers 31

Chapter 31 has a lot to do with the previous chapters concerning the event with Balaam and Balak where the king Balak hired the “priest” Balaam to curse Israel with evil so that Balak could defeat them in battle. At the end of their encounter, there was an uplifting account of Balaam refusing to curse Israel because it was so obvious to him that God had already blessed them and Balaam refused to go against God. Everyone went home and if that was the end of the story then that would have been just fine. The problem became that Balaam went back to Balak and told him that Israel was only protected by God if they were righteous to Him and encouraged Balak to send in his women to corrupt the Israelite men, and the Israelite men were happy to be corrupted. This resulted in God sending a plague upon the people, killing 24,000 of them and only ended because Phineas, a prominent priest and Eleazar’s son, speared an Israelite man while having sex with a Midianite women, killing them both. Becaus...
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Moses to Joshua - Numbers 27, 28, 29 & 30

There are two main concepts in chapter 27, the first being a interestingly progressive inheritance policy. Some women came to Moses because their father had died and had no sons to inherit his land. They still aren’t in the land of Canaan so I don’t think that there’s any actual land to inherit at this point but there is the promise of land when they settle and the daughters want to make sure that they have a place when the time comes. They also specify that their father wasn’t involved in the rebellion of Korah, which must have been because of their heritage. I assume that this issue is brought to Moses because the policy at the time was that only male heirs could inherit the land and there were no male heirs of this man so the women asked why couldn’t the land go to them. Moses takes the issue to God who agrees with the women that they should be able to inherit the land owed to a man if he dies without any sons. I think that this is a pretty progressive policy at the time so it’s ano...
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Rebellion Again - Numbers 25 & 26

Even though the last 3 chapters have been about the adventures of Balak and Balaam blessing and trying to curse Israel, the people of Israel were just living in the land minding their own business. They would have had no idea what was going on and that made me think about all the times that God works on our behalf that we don’t know about. And just to be clear, some of those times the work he’s doing isn’t what we would have chosen, we could even see it as a negative, like what happened with my family recently. Looking back I can see all the ways that the Lord intervened to arrange the circumstances that allowed for that to happen and even though I know that this was what He had planned, I still hate it and it’s all just what I see in hindsight, I had no idea that it was leading up to this at the time. It’s like he threaded a hundred needles to ensure this outcome and I’m so mad about it and my heart is broken but I take comfort in the fact that if this is His plan, then he’s already w...
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