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Week 7 Numbers

Chapter thirty-three begins: these are the journeys of the sons of Israel.
Most of the chapter is a long list of unfamiliar place names where the tribes camped. Kibroth-hattavah Hazeroth Rithmah Rimmon-perez. They could be lunar craters for all I know.
After I’d read the chapter I went back and counted the names and found forty-two but I did it quickly so it’s probably not exact. So let’s say about forty place names in forty years. One per year on average.
I looked at the map in my bible. It only has a couple of dozen of the forty place names along the bold red line of the Exodus Route, and half of those have question marks beside them. So there’s a bit of best-guess-ing about actual geographic locations.
The trip eventually landed Israel at the north end of the Dead Sea in Moabite country – just across the river from the Promised Land. That’s maybe 450 kilometres in straight-line distance from Egypt. A long trip. But not forty years long.
Those forty years in the wilderness are usually called wilderness-wanderings. But the trip wasn’t random. I flipped back to Exodus: throughout all their journeys whenever the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle, the sons of Israel would set out. So at the very least it was something like directed-wanderings.
I finished thirty-three, and since the end was in sight read through to the end of Numbers.

Note: quote from Numbers 33:1 & Exodus 40:36 (NASB)

Week 6 Numbers

About a week ago I was reading the first chapter of Numbers.
The tribes were being enumerated in a long and repetitive and not-too-interesting name & number list. That census was taken to assess military strength for the purpose of conquering the Promised Land.
Between chapter one and chapter twenty-six a number of things happened but the key one – as far as the census list goes – is that the tribes were afraid to conquer the Promised Land. I guess natural fear is normal enough. But being afraid wasn’t the real problem.
They also wanted to go back to slavery in Egypt. But that wasn’t the real problem.
They wanted to fire Moses. But that wasn’t the real problem.
Plus they wanted to kill Joshua and Caleb. But that wasn’t the real problem.
According to the Lord the real problem was this: they have seen my glorious presence and the miraculous signs I performed…but again and again they tested me by refusing to listen…None of those who have treated me with contempt will enter (the land). Meaning that 603,550 men enumerated in chapter one – who disregarded the Lord and who treated him with contempt – all died-out in the wilderness. The census was an obituary column.
So even though when I get to Numbers twenty-six and it sounds just like chapter one and is just as labourious and repetitive to read it’s happening forty-years later with a totally new group guys who aren’t-so-contemptuous of the Lord.

Note: quote from Numbers 14:22-23 (NLT)

Week 6 Numbers

The story of the Korah-Dathan-Abiram uprising against Moses seems like one story but I’m wondering if it’s two overlapping stories.
The three men are all introduced in the first verse of sixteen, and they complain to Moses about his unfair religious hierarchy – sounds like a kind of early-middle-eastern populist religious reformation-type uprising. But when Moses replies he speaks only to Korah (who he suspects is angling for leadership).
It’s only after Moses speaks to Korah that he sets up a separate appointment with D&A. They aren’t Levites like Korah. And their complaint isn’t religious. It’s that Moses didn’t bring them into the Promised Land, and that he’s treating them like a bunch of serfs – which sounds more like a social-political French-Revolution-in-the-desert sort of insurgency.
Which sounds like two separate events with separate leaders and separate complaints that happened to overlap each other in time.
But either way – one story or two – the really crucial question I’m left with is that in the end all three men die for their crimes.
I wonder: is marching for justice and equality a crime? A capital crime? I doubt it. I don’t think that in this story justice and inequality have anything to do with it. Something else was seriously bad. Exactly what I’m not sure.
But when it comes to death and dying I never get the sense the bible is frivolous.
When someone is capitally punished it’s pretty safe to assume it was for a capital crime.

Week 6 Numbers

In chapter ten I need to reorient myself geographically and so I flip to the back of my bible.
The map of the Sinai Peninsula looks like a big V.
I lay a straightedge along the Gulf of Suez and it points north-west toward the Nile delta – the left side of the V. The right side of the V follows the Gulf of Aquaba north and east – eventually my ruler passes through the Dead Sea.
When the Hebrews left Egypt they walked south toward the tip of the V but before getting there they headed inland to Mount Sinai. They stayed in the vicinity of Sinai for almost a year. I’ve spent the last fifty-nine chapters reading about what happened there.
But in Numbers ten they left Sinai and went to Taberah & then Kibroth-Hattaavah & then Hazeroth. The cartographer showed that he was guessing locations by putting question marks after the three names. But the guesses are headed a bit east and a bit north and by the end of chapter twelve Israel is up and into the wilderness of Paran – quite a bit closer to the Promised Land.
Between Sinai and Paran – chapters ten-eleven-twelve – there are four not exactly happy incidents.
I think about them briefly but I’m hurrying to read through.
I wonder if it was a waste of time slowing down to look at the map.
But I doubt it.  Taking time isn’t wasting it.

Note: dates are in Exodus 19:1, Numbers 10:11

Week 6 Numbers

In chapter one the Hebrew tribes are still camped by Sinai. Been there since Exodus nineteen.
Their current project is to enumerate tribes and they do that in chapter one, counting up men of military age.
The chapter starts with a list of tribal families: Reuben Simeon Judah Issachar Zebulun Ephraim Manasseh Benjamin Dan Asher Gad Naphtali (Levi isn’t counted, and Ephraim & Manasseh are stand-ins for Joseph).
Then in the second half of chapter one the list is repeated along with the census numbers (the one difference is that Gad comes second instead of eleventh).
I looked back at Genesis twenty-nine to see the birth-order of the twelve brothers: Reuben Simeon Levi Judah Dan Naphtali Gad Asher Issachar Zebulun Joseph Benjamin. I wondered why Numbers didn’t follow that order.
I flipped over to Genesis forty-nine to see the order of Jacob blessing his sons: Reuben Simeon Levi Judah Zebulun Issachar Dan Gad Asher Naphtali Joseph Benjamin. That’s different too.
Back to Numbers – in chapter two there’s a second name list. Same names. Slightly different order but repeating the same census numbers. And chapter two also lumps the twelve into four groups of three:
Judah-Issachar-Zebulun
Reuben-Simeon-Gad
Ephraim-Manasseh-Benjamin
Dan-Asher-Naphtali.
There’s a Leah connection in group two; Rachel in group three. Hmmm.
Starting Numbers I’d hoped that figuring out the name order might help out a bit.
Turns out it didn’t. But it did help focus my thinking.

Week 5 Leviticus

I finished reading Leviticus today.
At some previous point I’d underlined Chapter 26. Meaning I figured it was worthwhile.
And I noticed a couple of things today.
I noticed it’s a cause & effect chapter. It says that input actions will have reliable and predictable output responses. [I have the feeling that twenty-six would be a kind of disappointing read if I preferred doing whatever I wanted to do without any repercussions – a life of output-less inputs. Or disappointing if I wanted to do whatever I wanted to do and get only happy results – good consequences regardless of inputs.]
I noticed a similarity between twenty-six and Genesis two. Of course there’s the numbers difference: one couple vs. about two million Hebrews. But when I forget about that discrepancy the offer is the same: if-you-do-A-then-B-will-result, if-you-do-C-then-D-will-result. It’s your choice.
I noticed that the longest section in the chapter – the negative-inputs = negative-outcomes section – has six Ifs-&-Thens. With the last four Ifs-&-Thens it’s like there’s a bit of a pause to give people a chance to reconsider before ploughing on. Verses eighteen twenty-one twenty-three and twenty-seven reminded me of Pharaoh and the plagues.
And I noticed the last six verses of the chapter swing around, revert to a promise of hope of restoration. The desolate middle-section changes to a guarantee that if you confess your iniquity, become humble, and make amends then the Lord will remember his pledge with you. Your choice.

Week 5 Leviticus

Some big study bibles split up books of the bible into smaller sections. I saw one where Leviticus was divided into twelve subsections.
The minimum division for any book is two.
If I was dividing Leviticus I would split it in half with the split after chapter sixteen (or maybe seventeen – I could go either way).
The reason I would make the break there is because pretty much everything I’ve read before chapter seventeen is material for priests – technical details about sacrifices and how they’re managed.
Chapter seventeen is aimed at both priests and non-priests.
But after that the majority of the content is for ordinary people. I did a quick initial scan through chapters eighteen to twenty-seven. Starting at eighteen I kept seeing this phrase – or one like it: then the Lord said to Moses, say this to your people, the Israelites.
There’s about 350 verses in the last ten chapters of Leviticus. Out of the 350 there’s only two sections written for priests (twenty-one & part of twenty-two – about forty verses total). Which means that 11.43% of the content is for priests, and 88.57% is for everyone.
Meaning section two was not aimed at religious professionals. It was for amateurs like me.

Note: quote from Leviticus 18:1 (NLT). Disclosure: I won’t start reading chapters 18-27 until tomorrow. But I did blitz through them this morning and I’m pretty confident that my numbers are close to accurate for my purposes. And for now close-enough is good-enough.

Week 5 Leviticus

The Tabernacle was built in the second half of Exodus and then Leviticus begins listing the sacrificial offerings that have to be brought there.
If I’m reading through then reading about offerings – burnt-grain-peace-sin-guilt – is content I figure I’ll cover fairly quickly. Except I don’t pick up the pace because chapter one is talking about burnt offerings.
I remembered Jethro from a couple of weeks ago. Jethro was Moses’ father-in-law and the two of them met somewhere in the Sinai Peninsula after the Hebrews escaped Egypt. When he heard about the great escape Jethro: presented a burnt offering and gave sacrifices to the Lord. I wondered how Jethro knew about burnt offerings since burnt offerings weren’t officially described until later.
I remembered Moses telling Pharaoh he wanted to take the Hebrew tribes out so they could sacrifice burnt offerings.
I remembered Abraham was asked to sacrifice his son as a burnt offering.
I remembered Noah offered burnt sacrifices when he left the ark.
People knew about burnt offerings long before Leviticus chapter one.
I wondered for a few minutes how many other things they knew that I haven’t been told they knew.
Hard to say. Quite a few I’d guess.
I’m satisfied I won’t figure it out anytime soon and I push on reading chapters two-three-four-five-six-seven fairly quickly.

Note: quote from Exodus 18:12 (NLT). Other stories in Exodus 10, Genesis 22 & 8.

Week 5 Leviticus

Leviticus.
It’s a bit of a relief that I already made my decision to read through at the beginning of the year. What that means is that today I don’t have to ask myself: should I bother reading Leviticus? To read or not to read isn’t the question.
Still…even though I’ve decided to read everything I do make distinctions when I read. For example I differentiate between what I’d call Gram-Weight Readings and Kilogram-Weight Readings. My informal MHJ Weighting-Scale doesn’t have anything to do with estimating the importance or value of a book – in fact my basic rule is that all sixty-six books are valuable. The MHJ Weighting-Scale is really just a personal and practical way to help me determine the time I’ll devote to different readings – a kind of pace-determiner scale.
Gram-Weight Readings will tend to get less time; Kilogram-Weight Readings get more time. Skimming along versus diving down.
If I re-ordered the five books of Moses according to my Weighting-Scale the bible would look like this: Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Numbers, Leviticus – heaviest to lightest.
Which explains why I spent thirty-one days reading the ninety chapters of the heftier Genesis-Exodus. It was all I could afford. It also explains why it’s unlikely I’ll spend the whole month of February on the ninety-seven chapters that are in Deuteronomy and the much lighter-weight Numbers-Leviticus.

Week 5 Exodus

Exodus 35-40 is a block of text that describes the Tabernacle being built, along with all the bits and pieces that were part of it.
I read the whole section at once. I thought I’d try to mentally piece together a picture of the structure as I read about it. But pretty soon I got balled-up in a clutter of boards and curtains and crossbars and rails and fabrics and loops and clasps and linen veils and measurements and points-of-the-compass directions. I’d need a bit more time to sketch it out.
When I finished I looked online for a picture of the tabernacle with its surrounding fence and the furnishings. There were a lot of pictures by different artists but they all looked about the same.
If I had never seen a picture of the tabernacle I don’t know if I’d have drawn a structure like the ones I saw from the description I read. Definitely not in the time I had.
I did come away from the exercise with a sense of the project’s detail & refinement. Precision. Quality. Beauty.
And the writer says that when it was all finished the presence of the Lord filled the place and rested there.

Progress Note: I did an end-of-the-month check to track my reading progress. There are 1189 chapters in the bible. In January I read 120 chapters (Genesis + Exodus + 30 Psalms). So I’ve read 10.09% of the bible in 8.33% of the year.