1 Samuel 8-15: Saul

I'm doing a bunch of chapters together so I can start to catch up to where I've read again.  But this whole passage is about Israel's first official king, Saul.

We start in chapter 8 with the people demanding a king.  See, Samuel's sons are almost as big of jerks as Eli's sons were - why is it impossible for a godly person to have godly children in this country? - and the people knew they were jerks, so they want a king "like the other nations" instead of another judge.  It really sounds like when kids ask their parents for some ridiculous new toy for no other reason than because "all the other kids have one."  I really wish Samuel had said "If all the other nations jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?"  Of course they'd probably say yes.

Surprisingly, God tells Samuel to listen to the people.  Actually it's not surprising.  Remember back in Deuteronomy when God gave them rules for their kings when they finally demanded one?  God knew this was going to happen, so at least He prepared for it.

So after lecturing the people and warning them about what a king is going to do, to which the people respond that they totally don't care, we transition to the man God has chosen to be king, only we don't know it yet.  His name is Saul, and his father's name is Kish, and he's lost his donkeys so Saul and his servant are traipsing all around the country to look for them - apparently for several days.  The servant says they should go ask Samuel where the donkeys are since he's a prophet - kind of like going to the mall psychic, I guess? so they do.

Then we find out that God has already told Samuel this was going to happen, and that Saul is the person he has chosen to be king.  So Samuel meets Saul, tells him the donkeys have already found their way back home, but invites him to stay and come to this party he's throwing, kind of hinting that he's about to become king.  Saul kind of goes, whoa man, I'm just a regular lowly guy, why are you talking like this?  Then Samuel sends him back home by a certain route, where he meets some prophets and starts prophesying because the Spirit of God comes on him.  After that he goes home.

Then Samuel calls all the people of Israel to Mizpah to publicly announce that Saul has been chosen king - only he can't find him, because he's hiding.  When Samuel finds him and finally gets him to stand up, Saul is a head taller than anybody in the assembly.  Now, something my pastor said once, is that Saul is the only Hebrew in the whole Bible who is described as "tall."  The people of other nations are generally described as tall, but Jews tended to be short (poor Zacchaeus must have been really short).  So when they asked for a king "like other nations," God gives them exactly what they want - he even looks like the other nations' kings.

Anyway, so at first some of the people aren't too keen on Saul being their king, but then Saul leads an army against the Ammonites and defeats them.  Then the people want to kill the guys who didn't want Saul to be king, but I love what Saul says in response - he says, "Not a man shall be put to death this day, for today the LORD has accomplished deliverance in Israel."  This is a far cry from Gideon, who went through two cities and tore them to pieces just because they wouldn't give him any food.

The picture I am getting of Saul so far is that he's kind of bashful, hiding by the dumpster so Samuel won't make him stand up in front of everybody, that he's got a good enough dose of humility to know that he's nothing particularly special to be chosen as king, and that he's not vengeful.  Sounds like a good guy so far.  But if you know anything about the Bible, you know that things are going to go downhill, and that makes me really sad because right now I like Saul.

Next, Samuel addresses Israel and very briefly rehashes their history from Moses through the judges to today, tells them again that they're being really stupid by demanding a king, but here he is anyway, and exhorts them to fear God and serve him, and then things will be okay.  But if they don't obey God, they and their king will be "swept away" - in other words, their king won't be able to save them from God's judgment.

Then Israel goes to war with the Philistines, and we see Saul's first mistake.  He's waiting around for Samuel to show up to offer a sacrifice, and Samuel is running a little late, so rather than waiting even an extra day or something, Saul goes ahead and makes the sacrifice himself, which apparently is a really big no-no.  I don't know what kind of offering it was so I don't know if there are some kinds that only priests can offer, or something like that, but when Samuel shows up he gets really ticked and says that for this mistake alone, his descendants are not going to be kings.  I don't know why that happened after only his first mistake; you'd think God would give him more chances.  But maybe since God didn't want Israel to have a king in the first place, the stakes have been raised.

Then we meet Saul's son Jonathan.  He's a pretty cool guy, eager to go the extra mile and kill a few extra Philistines, but it gets him in trouble because while he and his men are out killing Philistines, his father is commanding the people not to eat anything until they've defeated the Philistines on pain of death, which sounds like a really stupid battle strategy to me.  On the first day of volleyball practice in seventh grade, I passed out because the coach's assistant told me not to eat before practice, so I didn't.  Food is good for you.  So it keeps saying that the people are exhausted, because they haven't eaten, but Jonathan, who hasn't heard about this stupid order, eats some honey and gets a sugar rush.  So anyway, then Saul is asking God (good idea) whether they should go down and attack the Philistines by night, but God doesn't answer him, so he knows that somebody's broken his rule.  He finds out it's Jonathan and, very reluctantly, is about to kill him, but thankfully the people convince him not to.

Then Samuel tells Saul to go to war with the Amalekites and completely destroy them, like the people did to Jericho and some of the other cities when they were taking over the promised land, as judgment.  I wonder why the Amalekites got extra time?  Hmm.  Anyway, so they go out and defeat them, but rather than destroying everything and everyone, Saul takes the king alive and saves the best of the livestock and basically everything that's good, and only destroys the crummy stuff.  Samuel comes and gets really mad at Saul, and Saul tries to excuse himself by saying it's a sacrifice to God, and then by saying the people did it, not him, but finally he confesses that he has sinned and begs forgiveness.

It's at this point that it says God regrets making Saul king, and Samuel knows it, so after this day he doesn't see Saul again, and instead he goes home and mourns over Saul.  I think Samuel really liked Saul in spite of all his lecturing him and everything.  Sometimes people who love us are the worst lecturers, because they're just concerned about us.

I'm really sorry for Saul.  He started out so well, but his inability to follow directions really got him in trouble.  I guess if you're the king, you're taking the place of the judges - you're basically the guy standing between the people and God, except for the priests.  So it must be really important to be totally obedient to God when He specifically tells you to do something - I mean, it's important for everybody, but when you're in a leadership position it's even more important because your example alone can influence so many people for good or for bad.

One thing I don't really understand is where it says God regretted making Saul king.  Does that mean God thought He had made a mistake?  That he wished He had appointed somebody else?  Or just that He was sad?  We say that everything God does is perfect and He never makes mistakes, and the Bible says God never changes, but sometimes - especially here in the Old Testament - there are statements that seem to contradict it.  It reminds me of Genesis when it says God was sorry he had made humans.

So this story, like so many others, ends on a sad note.  Poor Saul, if he had just followed directions he would have seen his son become king, and his grandson, and so on down the line.  But don't worry, he'll cease to be a cause for pity soon enough.

Judges 1-5: Dynamite Dudes and Deadly Dames

Now we're in Judges, which is, in my opinion, one of the Bible's most frustrating books.  The cycle of obedience, disobedience, oppression, repentance, and deliverance, is going to be repeated many times, and by the time we get to the end of the book things are just chaotic.  But there is some really cool stuff in this book too; in fact, a few of my favorite people are in this book.

So Judges begins more or less where Joshua ended, with Joshua having just died and the people of Israel wondering what to do about the Canaanite cities that have not yet been captured.  So they start to go after some of them, and Caleb even offers his daughter as a reward for whoever will capture Kiriath-sepher.  Things seem to be going well, but then we find out that the Benjaminites don't drive out the Jebusites in Jerusalem, and that there are people among Manasseh, Ephraim, Zebulun, Asher, Naphtali, and Dan that are not conquered or not driven out - in fact, the people of Dan get driven into the hills by the Amorites and they essentially lose their land.  So the angel of the LORD comes and rebukes the people for not obeying Him by not driving out all the people, and warns them that those people are going to become a snare to them.

Here's when things really start to go downhill.  We read again about how Joshua died and the people served God while he was alive and while his successors were alive, but then we read a very ominous verse: "All that generation also were gathered to their fathers; and there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD, nor yet the work which He had done for Israel."

Time out.  Wasn't there a big push in the Law for the people to talk about the LORD constantly with their kids?  What happened?  From Abraham all the way till now, we have seen so few examples of good parents that I'm starting to think parenting skills are a genetic deformity with Israel.  So surprise surprise, Israel serves the Baals, which is the collective name for the pagan gods of the Canaanites.  And guess what? those people who didn't get driven out of the land, and a few people outside the land that God had given Israel peace with at the end of Joshua, they now are not so peaceful.

First the king of Mesopotamia oppresses Israel for 8 years.  God sends a dude named Othniel to deliver them, and for forty years things go well.  But once again, Israel is unable to make a good thing last more than one generation, because history repeats itself.  Only this time it's Moab who oppresses Israel, for 18 years this time.

Enter one of my favorite people in the Bible:  Ehud, a leftie.  He stabs the king of Moab, whom the Bible describes as "a very fat man," so deep that his blade gets lost in the king's stomach.  That's just gross, but the story is also really funny.  And after Ehud's display of left-handed cleverness, there are 80 years of peace - I think that's the longest period of rest that the nation is going to have during this whole book, so don't get too comfortable.

Next is a guy named Shagmar.  He only gets one sentence in the Bible, unfortunately.  He killed 600 Philistines using an oxgoad   I didn't know what an oxgoad was so I looked it up.  According to Wikipedia, "The goad is a traditional farming implement, used to spur or guide lifestock, usually oxen, which are pulling a plough or a cart; used also to round up cattle. It is a type of a long stick with a pointed end, also known as the cattle prod. Though many people are unfamiliar with them today, goads have been common throughout the world. Goads in various guises are iconographic device, and may be seen in the hand of Neith and the 'elephant goad' or 'ankusha' (Sanskrit) in the hand of Ganesha, for example."

Now I don't know anything about Shagmar, but he sounds pretty cool just from that.  I wonder why he didn't use a sword though?

After Ehud dies (so apparently Shagmar's oxgoad feat was during Ehud's lifetime), we have a really cool lady named Deborah, a prophetess.  She's not the judge - a guy named Barak is.  But she tells Barak to go fight Canaan, who is the current oppressor of the last 20 years.  Barak says he'll only go if Deborah goes with him.  I'm really not sure why; I guess he thought having a prophetess around would help him with strategy?  So Deborah tells him that Sisera, the army commander, will be given into the hands of a woman.  I thought that meant Deborah was going to get the credit for Canaan's defeat, but that's not at all what she's talking about.  She means, literally, that a woman is going to kill Sisera.  Her name is Jael.

Jael is probably the coolest lady in the Bible.  First, she has a cool name.  But more importantly, when Barak defeats the Canaanites and Sisera runs away, he comes to her tent, and she convinces him that she'll hide him, because apparently her husband's people has a peace treaty with the king of Canaan.  So he hides there and falls asleep, and Jael takes a tent peg and hammers it through his temple.  That's way grosser than what Ehud did.  Jael rocks!

The next chapter is a song that Deborah and Barak sing, and Jael has her own stanza.

So what do we learn about God from this passage?  One, that God is serious when he says there will be bad consequences for sinning.  Two, that God is also serious about forgiveness, and serious about keeping His covenant with Abraham.  I mean technically, God's already fulfilled the covenant; He kept His terms.  But He continues to keep it even after Israel has broken it over and over and over.  Why?  I guess because God has a plan that's bigger than Israel.  And He'll do what it takes to see that plan through, because ultimately it will save us all.

Joshua 7-12: Six Chapters of War

Jericho is the first of many cities in the area of Canaan to be destroyed by Israel, and once it gets flattened, the Hebrews are chomping at the bit to go on to the next city.  But if you're at all familiar with the story, you know that they jumped the gun on this one.  It's a little town with a little name: Ai.

What happens is, in the case of Jericho (and several of the other cities), God told the people that they couldn't take anything from Jericho.  Not just that all the people had to die, or even that all the people and all the animals had to die, but they couldn't even take gold or silver out of the city.  So along comes this guy named Achan, and I'll give you three guesses what he does.  Yeah.  To be specific, he takes a lot of something: a mantle, two hundred shekels of silver, and a bar of gold weight fifty shekels.  A shekel is 9.56 grams, or a little over a third of an ounce.  200 shekels is a little over 4 pounds, and fifty shekels is about one pound.  Now, I don't know what the subjective value of these things would have been to that society, but right now, gold is being traded at over $1000 per ounce and silver at over $16 per ounce.  So if Achan had taken that amount of gold and silver today (I have no idea what a mantle is), it would amount to about $18,783 in gold and $1125 in gold that he stole.  That's if it were today.

So math aside, Achan screwed up, so after being found out and confessing, he is stoned to death - and not just him, but his family too.  Why is that?  I looked up some commentaries and one of them pointed out that Achan is the fifth generation after Judah, making him one of the older Israelites, maybe in his 50s at this time.  Based on that and the fact that God had previously commanded that no child was to be killed for the sin of their father, I think it is a safe inference to make that Achan's children 1) are adults, and 2) along with Achan's wife, knew about his sin and hid it from Joshua.  Being an accomplice to an evil - or just not saying anything - is sometimes as bad as doing the crime yourself.

So after this matter gets cleared up, so to speak, Israel goes on to defeat every tribe that is in the land God has promised them.  Different people try different things to defeat them, including making a sneaky promise, banding together with other tribes, and so forth, but nothing works.  A total of 31 kings, including the ones we've already learned about in Numbers and earlier in this chapter, are defeated by the Hebrews.

One of the kings mentioned, one of five actually who join forces in an attempt to stop Israel in its tracks, is named Adoni-zedek, and can you guess what city he is king of?  Jerusalem.  If you know any Hebrew at all, you probably know that the word "Adonai" means "lord," and you may also know that "zedek" means "righetousness."  Put those words together next to Jerusalem, and does this name sound familiar to you at all?  It sounds frighteningly close to Melchizedek, the guy Abraham met waaaaaaaay a long time ago in Genesis.  But this guy appears to be bad and definitely not in Israel's side.  Descendant?  Unrelated coincidence?  I have no idea but it's really weirding me out.

What do we learn about God in a chapter that basically is one war story after another?  I think we learn first of all that he was faithful to Abraham and the covenant he made with him and Isaac and Jacob.  I think we also learn that God is punishing the sins of the Canaanites.  Depending oon what city they go to, there are different levels of destruction that must be brought to the city; in some, every living thing is killed.  In others, every living thing is killed and none of the spoil can be touched.  In some, only the people are killed, and in the ones outside the promised land, only the men are killed.  I read this and I recall a passage way back in Genesis that I will paste here for you:

Genesis 15:13-16 "God said to Abram, 'Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years.  But I will also judge the nation whom they will serve, and afterward they will come out with many possessions.  As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you will be buried at a good old age.  Then in the fourth generation they will return here, for the iniquty of the Amorite is not yet complete.' "

In other words, God had already given the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants, but he was going to give the pagan people in the land four hundred more years to repent and turn from their ways.  It seems from the context like they were just doing things a lot more immoral than what was going around in the surrounding areas, because God didn't call for any kind of conquest or judgment on any other tribes.  And I really believe that if these nations had  turned to God, he would have forgiven them.

And this in turn brings a passage to mind from 2 Peter.  Read it with the Canaanites in your mind:

"[B]y the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water, through which the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water.  But by His word the present heavens and earth are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.  But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day. The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance" (3:5b-9).

God is patient with us - he is literally waiting for us to repent, and sometimes he withholds judgment in anticipation of that.  But there is evidently a point at which the time is up, when you either have repented or you are not going to.  The Bible says that today is the day of salvation - not tomorrow, not someday when you get around to it.  We don't know what exactly the Canaanites were doing that God disliked so much, but we do know that everybody does things that are wrong, and I even think everybody does things that are in rebellion of what we know is right.  And in the end, all sin separates us from God.  You cannot endure his presence unless you are no less than perfect.  I don't think it's because God is an Adrian Monk germ-freak afraid to get his clothes dirty; I think it's because our God is a consuming fire and everything that is not pure and holy already will be scorched when it comes into contact with him.  That's a problem, and that problem is what the nation of Israel was created to demonstrate.  The only way for us to enter God's presence is for something completely innocent to stand in our way - and friend, you and I will never be that.  No matter how good you become in your life, you can't erase the bad things you've done.  Only one person can do that, and his name is Jesus.  His blood is the only detergent that can wash the stain of our sins completely away.  All you have to do is take your dirty laundry to him and ask him to clean you.  The Canaanites had four hundred years to get things straight with God, and they missed the opportunity.  Don't let it pass you by.

Deuteronomy 20-26: Laws You Probably Didn't Know About

In chapters 20-27, the oddly-organized explanation of laws continues.  Here is the overview:

• 20:1-20 Laws about war
• 21:1-9 What to do if you find a dead person and don't know who killed him
• 21:10-17 Laws about wives
• 21:18-21 What to do with a rebellious son
• 21:22-23 Laws about hangings
• 22:1-4 Laws about your neighbor's animals
• 22:5-12 almost every verse has a different law that doesn't seem related to any of the others
• 22:13-30 Laws about marriage relations and marital abuse
• 23:1-8 Laws about who can't enter the assembly of the Lord
• 23:9-14 Laws about cleanliness whe away at war
• 23:15-125 every two verses is about something different
• 24:1-5 Laws about marriage and divorce
• 24:6-9 more one-liners
• 24:10-22 Laws about treating poor people well
• 25:1-3 Laws about court sentencing
• 25:4-10 Laws about widows remarrying
• 25:12-16 Laws about having fair weights
• 25:17-19 Get rid of the Amalekites
• 26:1-19 Laws about offering firstfruits

Reading these, I came across many very interesting laws that I didn't remember ever reading before.  Here are my favorites:

1.  The only people that the Hebrews were supposed to wipe out completely were the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites (the people living in the promised land, because of their immorality).  Any other nation that they went to war against, they were first to offer them a peace treaty; if they didn't surrender and accept the terms, the people were to kill all the men (that is, the army) but none of the women, children, or animals.

2. When the people were besieging a city for a long time, they were not allowed to chop down trees to make siege weapons unless they knew for certain they weren't fruit trees.  I even love what it says here - "For is the tree of the field a man, that it should be besieged by you?"  Some people forget that God has more respect for nature than people do, being its creator and all.  He wants us to take care of it and treat it with respect.

3.  If somebody found a nest of clean birds (acceptable to eat), they could take the eggs or young birds but not the mother bird.  If I remember right, this is a law that exists today for falconers who are allowed to possess endangered birds.

4.  These aren't laws that surprised me, but I wanted to comment on them anyway.  There are three weird laws about mixing things - don't sow your field with two kinds of seed, don't plow with an ox and a donkey together, don't wear clothes made of two kinds of fabric, etc.  And those three are right together.  I am wondering if the purpose of these laws was to symbolize the separateness of Israel from the other nations, how they weren't supposed to mix in with the others but be holy (cut off or separate).

5.  If a slave runs away and enters a person's house, that person is not allowed to return the slave to his master; instead, the person is supposed to let him pick a house in town to live in and the person is not allowed to mistreat him.  I think this is really interesting.

6. When people entered a neighbor's field or vineyard, they could eat whatever they wanted in it, as long as they didn't try to carry any of the stuff back home with them.  This explains to me what Jesus and his disciples were doing in Matthew 12.

7.  When a person took out a loan from another person, they were to give them their cloak as collateral.  Here it says that if the guy taking the loan is poor, the guy he gets a loan from can't keep the cloak overnight - he has to return it to him so that he has something to keep him warm when he's sleeping.  Also, an employer has to give the day's wages to his poor employees before sunset instead of making him wait till the next day.

8.  This is great.  So if a man died and his wife had no children, the man's brother (or nearest of kin) had to marry the woman, and her firstborn son would take the name of the late husband so that he would have an inheritance.  Well, some brothers wouldn't want to do this.  If the brother refused to marry the widow, she was to go in front of the elders of the city and have them talk to him.  If he still won't do it, then in the sight of all the elders the woman was to take his sandal off and spit in his face, and then the whole country would refer to him as "the house of him whose sandal is removed."  This explains what happened in Ruth 4.  I was always told that giving your sandal to somebody was a symbol of an oath, but sandal-removing is never mentioned where the Law talks about oaths.  Instead, here it seems to be a sort of humiliation.

Deuteronomy 1-10: Let's Review

Hurray, we made it through another book!  Now we are in Deuteronomy, which means "second law."  It's called that not because there is a second law, but because this is the book where Moses gives the Israelites the Law for the second time.  So pretty much everything in this book will be stuff we've already heard before, and hopefully that reinforces it in our minds better.  And actually, this book repeats some parts of Israel's history more than once.

In chapter 1-4 Moses recounts what happened in Numbers - how the people left Mt. Sinai and came close to Canaan but chickened out from going in, and then had to wander around for 40 years.  Then in chapter 5, he backs up and tells them about the commands God gave him on Mt. Sinai, starting with the Ten Commandments, and reviews the incident with the golden calf and Moses' breaking the stone tablets and having to get new ones.

In the middle of that story, in chapters 6-9, he goes into a bunch of warnings and admonitions.  This is where the Shema, the most important commandment, is found: "Hear, O Israel, the LORD your God, the LORD is one.  You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might."  Moses tells the people to keep God's words so close to them that they talk about them all the time, that they write them down and tie them to their door frames and even to their hands and foreheads - and later on they actually will literally do that.  He warns Israel against intermarrying with any of the foreign people because they would lead them away from God.  Now, as a clarification, a foreigner could join the Jews, be circumcised if he was a male, and become a sort of naturalized citizen, and then I think it was okay to intermarry (we'll see that later on).  But no Jew could marry a foreigner while they were still a worshiper of other gods and did not follow the Law.

Moses tells the Israelites not to be afraid of going into Canaan because God has promised to drive the people out before them, and if they just follow Him wholeheartedly, they will have a really good life.  Listen to these promises: "He will love you and bless you and multiply you; He will also bless the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground, your grain and your new wine and your oil, the increase of your herd and the young of your flock . . .You shall be blessed above all peoples; there will be no male or female barren among you or among your cattle.  The LORD will remove from you all sickness; and He will not put on you any of the harmful diseases of Egypt which you have known."  Sounds like a pretty sweet deal.  But in order to get this deal they have to completely remove all temptation.  They have to destroy the altars to pagan gods and not even use the gold and silver the idols are made with.

Moses reminds the people of how God has provided for them over the last 40 years.  I think it's great that he makes a point of saying that for all these years, their clothes and shoes haven't even worn out.  That's something I would have wondered about.

Then Moses turns back to the story of the Ten Commandments, and about the golden calf and all of that.  And Moses' point here seems to be that God didn't choose Israel because they were a great nation or because they were a good nation - in fact, Moses says they've been rebellious for as long as he's known them, and that's certainly the truth.  But God is blessing them anyway, because He loves them and because He made a covenant with Abraham that He will always keep.  God doesn't go back on His word, and He also doesn't bestow favor on us conditionally - that is, based on how good or great we are.

I think one of the main points in recounting Israel's history this way is to impress upon them what God has already done for them, so they will have courage and trust in what He is about to do for them.  The people might still have some fear about going into Canaan - except for Midian, this is the first time that they have been the ones going out on an offensive war, and the people they're going against are giants who live in fortified cities.  Moses wants them to have faith in God and be confident that if God could do everything He did over the last 40 years, taking Canaan will be cake for Him.

Another main reason for saying all this again is that some of the people are actually hearing it for the first time.  Keep in mind that this is the second generation: the person here, other than Moses and Caleb and Joshua, can be no older than 59.  These people were children, teenagers, or not even born yet when God first brought Israel out of Egypt.  A lot of them don't remember what it was like to be slaves, so God makes special rules for treating slaves and foreign visitors well, saying "remember that you were aliens and strangers in Egypt."  They don't remember how God miraculously delivered them from Pharaoh, so Moses is reminding them.  They may have been too young to pay attention to what was happening on Mt. Sinai, so Moses is telling them the whole story.  But some of them do remember, and Moses' goal is to make sure they don't forget like their parents consistently did.

Finally, I think Moses is telling Israel all these things to inspire love and devotion to God, as well as to keep them humble.  He says to remember what God has done so that later on they don't think it was their power or strength that make them rich.  Moses says, "You shall remember the LORD your God, for it is He who is giving you power to make wealth."  Everything we have is a gift of God - even the things we make for ourselves, we can only make because God gives us the ability to do so.  I think it's important to remember that it is only by God's grace that we have whatever it is we have, so that we are always filled with gratitude and so that we appreciate what we have, instead of becoming prideful and greedy.  Well, we'll see how the Israelites do with these lessons later on.

Numbers 33-36: Getting Ready to Go In

We're going to finish Numbers today!  I'm so excited.  And tomorrow I think I'll get caught up to where I am in my reading.  Yay.

So these final chapters are kind of a summary of what's already happened, along with a few final instructions on what to do with Canaan once the people get there.  Chapter 33 is basically a roadmap - it tells where the Israelites traveled, where they camped, and to some extent when they were there.  I would really love to see how many of these locations we know about for sure.  Many Bibles (especially Zondervan Bibles like mine) have maps in the back, one of which shows a possible route from Exodus to Sinai to the conquest of Canaan; the only problem with this map is that we don't know where Mt. Sinai is.  Many locations - I'm talking 30 or so - have been suggested at one point or another, and our current "traditional" location (Jebel Musa), the one that has a monastery on it and everything, we only consider to be Mt. Sinai because somebody claimed on their deathbed that it was, or something like that.  It most likely is not Mt. Sinai because the physical description of the mountain and surrounding area in the Bible don't match up with it.  Anyway, I've only read up on one other theoretical Mt. Sinai, Jebel al Lawz, in a very interesting book called In Search of the Mountain of God.  I don't kno for sure if I think that is the real Mt. Sinai, but it is a very interesting book and the findings in that book, if it's all true, are very promising.

At the end of chapter 33, God gives the people a warning to drive out the Canaanites from the land when they go in, or else later on those people will get them in trouble and pull them away from God, and then God says that what He plans to do to them, He'll do to Israel if they don't obey this command.  In the words of the immortal Strong Bad: "One, two, three, foreshadowing!"

So then we get into the rules for what they have to do when they get into Canaan.  First of all God gives them the boundaries of their country so they know exactly how much land they have, which is probably a really helpful thing.  Then he appoints leaders for each tribe, who will give out land to the people in their tribes once those borders are set.

The next chapter is about cities.  Since the Levites didn't get their own chunk of land, and since they were the priests for the whole nation, they were supposed to get a few cities in each tribe in which to live, and a few of those cities were also to be cities of refuge.  Now, I don't remember if these were described earlier.  Cities of refuge were places where a guy could go if he had killed somebody accidentally - manslaughter - and be safe.  The law was that if you murdered somebody, then you would be killed, and you could be killed by a relative of the person you murdered.  If you killed somebody accidentally, the person's relatives might still want you dead, but if it was manslaughter, you could go to one of the conveniently spread out cities of refuge and as long as you stayed there, you were safe.  If you left the city, the relative of the dead person could still kill you and not be prosecuted, so you had to stay there until the current high priest died, and then your term was up, so to speak, and you could go home and nobody could kill you.  I have always thought this was a really interesting law.  I think it works.

I have to say, I really like how this book ends.  Remember Z's daughters?  They're back.  They know they're going to get a portion of land that would have belonged to their father, but now their problem is that when they get married, if they marry outside their tribe, their land will be absorbed into the other tribe.  So they ask Moses what to do, and he asks God what to do, and he says that people in this situation just have to marry within their tribe, so that's what they do, and that way their inheritance stays within the family.  I like that the book ends with a chapter about women.  I also like that Z's daughters are an example of how the rest of Israel should have behaved when they had a complaint.  Israel has spent the last forty years whining and griping about this and that, and it's gotten them plagues and snakes and the ground eating them up and not getting to go into the Promised Land.  These girls had complaints, but they went to Moses to get his advice and propose their own solution, rather than saying "Woe is us, we are going to lose our father's inheritance! We should have died!"  So the moral of this story is, don't be a drama queen when there is something wrong.  Try to think of a solution, ask somebody else for help, and it will probably turn out that there is a way to fix your problem.  Learn from Z's daughters.

Numbers 30-32: So This Is Weird

I'm putting these three chapters together because they're all a little, well, unusual, especially at first glance.  In fact I had to do some research on chapter 31 to understand what was going on better.

Chapter 30 is about making vows.  Basically, if you say you're going to do something, if you make an oath, you have to keep it.  What's interesting though is that if you're a girl and you make a vow, and your father (if you're unmarried) or husband (if you're married) tells you that's a dumb vow, you don't have to keep it.  If the father or husband either doesn't say anything against the vow or, presumably, doesn't hear it, it's binding, but a woman could be released from a stupid vow by her father or husband.  I wish that men could be released form stupid vows by their wives, but then again I suppose wives are always trying to get their husbands to keep their promises, so it's probably just as well.

Chapter 31 is the really weird one.  God tells the Israelites to go kill the Midianites, so they fight them and kill all the men, but then Moses tells them to kill the women and the boys too, but not the children who are girls.  There's also a mention of Balaam being killed - remember him?  And then the rest of the chapter is about splitting up the spoils of war.  So when I first read this, it really didn't sit well with me.  I did some research and went over some of the text again and found out that there's a key verse in the middle of this chapter, verse 16, which tells us that Balaam - the guy who Balak hired to curse Israel - had incited these women to try to destroy Israel through immorality and idolatry back in chapter 25 - remember Phinehas?  Apparently, when the Moabites and Midianites saw the Israelites coming and realized God was on their side in war, they put their heads together and tried to get God off Israel's side, and that's when Balak the king of Moab hired Balaam. When that didn't work, the Midianite and Moabite women went over to Israel to tempt them sexually and also invite them to start worshipping their gods, and it worked, or at least it came really close to working.

But if you're like me, you're wondering, where does Balaam fit into the story?  At the end of chapter 24, it looks like he's headed home, which is to the northeast near the Euphrates River.  But apparently he stuck around with the Midianites for a while, and that's where he was when Israel attacked.  Now, Balaam confuses me.  Here's a guy who seemed to have some kind of relationship with God - that is, he could hear God's voice and prophecy accurately, at least in Israel's case, although he and God don't seem to be on the best terms.  But now he's going and plotting against them.

I still think it's sad that a lot of people died - I mean, I think dropping the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was really sad - but now I see that it didn't just come out of nowhere.

Also, to clear up another common misunderstanding, the girls who weren't killed were not kept as wives.  It was still illegal for Jews to marry non-Jews, so prisoners of war were kept as slaves.

Another interesting note is that not all the Midianites died here.  We'll meet them again in Judges.

Finally, chapter 32.  The tribes of Reuben and Gad decide they want to stay on the east side of the Jordan River instead of crossing into the Promised Land, because it's good pasture for their livestock.  At first Moses isn't too keen on this, but they promise to help with the conquest and not to return to their new homes until after all the other tribes are settled in.  So those two tribes, as well as some of the Manasseh people, end up building permanent settlements over on the east side of the Jordan but leaving their wives and kids there while conquering the land of Canaan.  I guess they keep their promise to help out, because my map has their land marked as being right where it says they wanted to stay.  So I suppose that's a good example of keeping vows, as written in chapter 30.

Numbers 21-25: Divide and Conquer

There's a lot of stuff in these five chapters so I'm going to try to say as much as I can in as few words as I can.  First, very quick summary.

• Chapter 21: we see the Hebrews conquer their first city, Arad.  The people get sick of walking around Edom (big country I guess) so they complain.  God sends fiery snakes that bite the people, and then as a cure Moses has to make a statue of the snake that the people look at and then they don't die.  Then we have two more military victories against the Amorites and Bashan.
• Chapter 22: the king of Moab gets scared of Israel, so he sends for a prophet named Balaam to come put a curse on Israel so that he can beat them.  On his way there, God puts an angel in Balaam's path that his donkey sees, but he doesn't see it.  The donkey freaks out and Balaam doesn't know so he beats the donkey until suddenly it starts talking to him.  After a heartfelt conversation with said donkey, Balaam decides that he'll tell the king whatever God says rather than whatever the king wants to hear.
• Chapters 23-24: much to the Moabite king's dismay, all Balaam can do is bless Israel - three times.  The king gets mad and fires him, and he goes home.
• Once the Israelites start moving in on the Canaanite territory, they begin to adopt Canaanite religion.  God gets really ticked off and there's a big meeting where Moses tells the people to kill the people who are not worshiping God.  Then some guy crashes the meeting by walking through the tent with a Canaanite girl, on their way to, um, talk . . . and a guy named Phinehas (son of Eleazar, grandson of Aaron) kills them.  Then God says nobody else has to die, and also there was a plague on the people, but it stops now because of Phinehas.

 So here are my thoughts.  First of all, the conquest of Canaan doesn't really start out like much of a conquest.  In fact, with Arad, it's their king who decides to pre-emptively strike on them as they're coming through.  Then with the Amorites, the Israelites send the same message to them that they sent to Edom: please let us pass through, we won't touch anything, we'll stay on the highway, we won't even stop for a drink break.  The king says no way and goes out to war against them.  And even after they were defeated, the king of Bashan decided to go attack the Israelites too.  So far, they haven't even been the ones making the first move, because this part of the land is not the Promised Land.  They're just trying to get through it to the other side.

Secondly, I love the story of Balaam.  I just think it would be so funny to have your donkey all of a sudden start talking to you - well, maybe not funny at the time, but it's funny to read because Balaam talks back to his donkey!  Now, I don't know if the text leaves out some details, like Balaam freaking out at his donkey talking to him, or if maybe this was something that he had experienced before, but it just makes me laugh to read that the donkey says to Balaamm, "What did I do to make you hit me?" and Balaam says right back "You're making me look stupid, that's what!" and she (the donkey is specifically a girl) says "Come on man, don't you trust me?  Have I ever freaked out like this before?" and he says "no," and then God lets him see the angel standing in the way.  And to top it off, God says to him, "why were you hitting the donkey?  Dude, if she hadn't tried to turn the other way when she saw me, I would have killed you and not her."

Anyway, I do find it interesting that Balaam, who is not an Israelite, seems to know the true God.  He even refers to Him as "the LORD [YHWH] my God."  God speaks to Balaam and Balaam prophesies accurately - that is, he says exactly what God tells him to say.  Now the third time he speaks, it almost seems like he's about to speak presumptuously, because it says that Balaam sees that it pleases the LORD to bless Israel, so the third time he doesn't go consult the LORD before speaking, as he did the first two times.  So I am not sure if that was the right thing to do.  But then it says that the Spirit of God came on him when he spoke, so I think his prophesy there was still real.  Go figure.

Next, the Phinehas thing.  So God has made it clear to the Israelites (see Exodus 20) that they are not supposed to worship any other gods, and that is exactly what they're doing for the first time since the golden calf.  This is very serious - again, Israel was not supposed to be a model government, but an example to the world (and to future generations like us) of how to obtain a relationship with the one true God.  Israel can't offer any kind of hope, any kind of message, to other nations if it is just like them.  So anyway, while Moses is discussing this with the people, this couple walks by, and the next thing we see is Phinehas ramming a spear through them.  Now, I always thought this was really harsh until my youth pastor asked this question:  how do you kill two people with one spear at the same time?  Answer: this couple is having sex right at this moment.  They've just walked right past all these guys talking about the severity of Israel's sin against God - everybody sees them - and they apparently have the audacity to go do this in apparently the middle of the day, not even attempting to hide it.  That is outright rebellion, the kind of sin described earlier in chapter 15 where we learned about unintentional sins versus sins of defiance.  And even though I wish these two guys didn't die, it actually kept a bunch more people from dying.

I want to talk about snakes last, so let's back up.  Now, these "snakes" may have been any of the various poisonous reptiles that inhabited these parts (or something supernatural); if so, we haven't heard a word about them until now, which means God was probably protecting the camp from them, and now He has obviously removed that protection.  Once again, this was a punishment for whining.  Now, you may wonder what is so bad about the gripe fest.  I mean, it wasn't Israel's fault that they had to go around Edom; and I'm sure it wasn't pleasant to be always on the move.  That's totally understandable to me.  But what's not so cool is when the people say this: "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?  For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this miserable food."  That tells me that one, they have totally forgotten their distress in Egypt and how desperate they were to get out; two, they are totally ungrateful for all the miraculous ways God has provided for them; three, they are not acknowledging their own responsibility for being in the wilderness right now in the first place - they were the ones who decided they couldn't get into the Promised Land and would rather die in the wilderness than try - if they had just had faith in the first place, they would've been there by now instead of traveling around in a circle; and four, they would rather be slaves, with their sons all being murdered and being forced to work all day, in a land that they can never own, than trust that God was taking them somewhere.  Ouch.

So about the bronze snake that Moses makes.  That seems really weird, almost like he's making an idol - and in fact later on, we see that some of the Israelites start worshiping the snake statue.  But the symbolism and meaning behind this odd method of healing is really profound, and I don't have time to do it justice - I'll direct you to the third paragraph of this commentary for a really good and thorough explanation.  But basically, this serpent was a metaphor for Christ.  Jesus Himself tells us in John 3 that "Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life" (vs. 14-15).  The image Moses made was of a serpent, in the likeness of the thing that was destroying the people, because Jesus came to earth in the likeness of sinful man.  Anybody who looked at the snake would live and not die from the bites, just as anybody who turns to Jesus receives forgiveness of sins and, rather than death, everlasting life.  I think this is really awesome.