Blogging Through the Book of Mormon

It seems I was mistaken previously, they didn’t set up the tabernacle every time they stopped, only when the cloud of the Lord rested on it in such a way that indicated that it was time to set it up. But I was correct in assuming that the set up and tear down were crazy long and tedious endeavors. God came to Moses and told him to make “two trumpets.” TB notes that it is inaccurate to call them both trumpets because even though that it the word that has been used in the English translation, these two “trumpets” were not the same as each other. In fact, one was long and skinny with a flared end that emitted the sound and was used to call armies together and for the military commanders to trump out orders of troop movement, battle plans, etc. TB says that “when the horns are blown during battle the Lord will remember and Israel will be delivered.” This kind of phrasing bothers me because of course God is highly aware of every battle that people engage in, especially if it is the battle...

At the point of the beginning of chapter 9, Israel had been out of Egypt for about 13 months, “and the Lord spake unto Moses in thew wilderness of Sinai, in the first month of the second year after they were come out of the land of Egypt, saying, Let the children of Israel also keep the Passover at his appointed season.” I guess I had just assume that Egypt knew that they were going to observe the Passover every year after they left Egypt but maybe they didn’t know that and this was the first time the people were hearing about it. At this point, God told Moses to observe the Passover, the people observed the Passover, and then they did it from then on “on the fourteenth day of the first month.” I don’t know if it was just because of the short notice or if this was going to be a rule from that point on, but there were “certain men, who were defiled by the dead body of a man, that they could not keep the Passover on that day.” I don’t know if it was because they dealt with dead bodies a...

Chapter 8 seems to be when the tabernacle is dedicated and the Levite priests are set apart for service. Verse 17 ties in the transfer over of authority for sacrifices to God from the first born male of every Israelite household that we’ve talked about before and gives that authority to the Levites. There are two groups here for consideration, the Levites and then the sons of Aaron within the Levitical group. All the sons of Aaron were Levites but not all Levites were the sons of Aaron and this distinction is important because in verse 19, even though the verse doesn’t say it explicitly, the IM notes that there is a division between the Levitical priesthood and the Aaronic priesthood. This is similar to a Sunday School lesson we had last month about the differences between the Aaronic and the Melchizedek priesthood. That lesson was pretty inline with the message from the IM here noting that those who were the sons of Aaron were given the Aaronic priesthood, and those Levites who were N...

One thing that TB pointed out that I think is important is that from Exodus 40, all through Leviticus, until Numbers 7, all that happened in just 50 days according to the timeline given in the Torah. He says, “These events all occur in a timeframe beginning on the 1st day of the 1st month of the 2nd year after they left Egypt, and ending on the 20th day of the 2nd month of the 2nd year… only about 50 days… We know that the building of the tabernacle was completed on the 1st day of the 1st month of the 2nd year.” We discussed Exodus 40 on February 9th, and now it’s almost the end of the year, and I feel like I’ve lived 8 lifetimes since then, so even though it feels like it’s been a long time for me, it’s only been 50 days for the people. Additionally, chapter 7 is one of the longest in the Torah, 89 verses, but it’s highly repetitive, so it won’t be that heavy. The tabernacle was being set to be opened for use, and I’m a little fuzzy on the exact details but all 12 tribes brought thi...

Chapter 6 deals with the vow of being a Nazarite, which was a person who could dedicate their lives to the service of God, sometimes for life but usually just for a short period of time like a few years. At first I thought that only the Levite tribe could make this vow, but it seems like anyone from Israel could do it, both men and women. The caveat for the genders is that a father could nullify his daughter’s vow and a husband could nullify his wife’s vow. They made 3 specific vows, 1. No wine, strong drink, grape juice, or even grapes, 2. Can’t cut their hair, must let it grow naturally the whole time they are in service, 3. Can’t go near a dead body, even if it was a loved one. Some notable Nazarites were Samuel the boy prophet, Sampson, and John the Baptist. Now as far as what Nazarites did, TB says, “Nazarites were not some kind of weird hermits… Nazarites had no special food prohibitions apart from not eating grapes or grape products and they still had to eat Kosher, as did all...

Chapter 4 seems to another Lenite census but this time there’s a difference. In the chapter 3 census of Levites, it’s counting the Levite men aged 1 month and up. This was to make sure that there were enough Levite priests to assume all the priesthood responsibilities that were previously done by the first born Israelites of every family. In fact, at the end, there was a 1 to 1 substitution of Levite priests to Israelite first born home priests and there were left over like 200 and something more from one group to another that had to be redeemed. But this census in chapter 4 only counts Levite priests aged 30 to 50. This was because actually carrying the pieces of the tabernacle were very heavy and needed to be done by strong men and men with the maturity to understand that these things were sacred and were to be treated with respect. Additionally, this was to carry out the priestly duties that needed to be treated with respect and reverence, and the men needed to be old enough to guar...

Chapter 2 was an assigning of how each tribe was to be situated around the tabernacle and in which order they were to be deployed as an army. There were 4 sides of the tabernacle so each side had 3 tribes each with Judah and Ephraim being in the places of honor on the east side of the tabernacle. Chapter 3 is a census of the Levite priests, remember that the previous census for men of fighting age for the army didn’t include the tribe of Levi because they had responsibilities for the religious aspect of the community so they weren’t going to fight in the army, they were going to do other stuff. Therefore, the census in the tribe of Levi was separate and listed here in chapter 3, starting with the sons of Aaron. There’s also a reminder that the first two sons of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, were killed by God for messing up in their duties to God. There’s a bunch of break down of which son and which son of sons were situated where and what exact part of the tabernacle that they were supposed...

Numbers chapter 1 is pretty long, 54 verses, but it’s not super content heavy. It is the explanation of the first census which was to count every man age 20 and older. TB said that this census was to start organizing the army, which makes sense, there were millions of people in the desert, they would have had a need to protect themselves against aggressors, plus they knew that in order to secure the promised land for themselves, they were going to have to take it by force and this was them gearing up for that. Each tribe was numbered and had around 35-75,000 men of fighting age, totaling 603,000 men. What’s interesting about this is that with that many military age men, the average estimate of the population of Israel at that time in that place was 2-3 million people. TB notes that the experts say that there was no way that the desert place they were staying in and in which they wandered for 40 years had sufficient resources to sustain that level of population during that time. But T...

The book of Numbers has always been an interesting name to me and I assumed that it had to do with like the Ten Commandments or something, because those are numbers. I was wrong and apparently the title “Numbers” is only the Christian name for this book and it’s called that because in the first 3 chapters of the book they do a census of the people. The Hebrew name for the book is either “Vayedabber” which means “and He spoke” or, more commonly, “Bemidbar” which means “In the wilderness.” These are so named because Hebrews typically name their written works after the first few words of the text. TB Notes that when the book of Numbers is written, Israel has only been out of Egypt for 1 year which doesn’t seem to be that long of a time considering how much has happened. The IM notes that “the book does not have many doctrinal discourses, but it gives the necessary understanding to key historical events in the story of the family of Jacob.” It will be interesting to see how long it will...