Deuteronomy 27-34: A Big Decrescendo before the Climax

So here we are, the Law has been reiterated, Moses is about to die, and the Israelites are about to go into the Promised Land under the direction of Joshua.  Everything builds up, and then there's this major let-down before the ending.

First of all, Moses tells the people that when they get to the Promised Land they are to go up to Mount Ebal and Mount Gerazim (which are conveniently right next to each other) and write down all the blessings of God on Gerazim and the curses of God on Ebal.  Then there's a list of all the curses - e.g. ";Cursed is he who dishonors his father or mother.' And all the people shall say, 'Amen.'"

In chapter 28 we read the blessings that will be written on Mount Gerazim, which are the blessings for obeying God.  It's pretty thorough.  Then to counter that, we read all the curses that will happen if the people do not obey God; it's the reverse of every one of the blessings, plus some more elaboration.

In chapters 29-30, Moses makes a covenant with Israel to obey God, and he tells them again what will happen to the people who disobey God - and then tells them that they are going to disobey God as a nation pretty soon, but that when they turn back to Him, He will restore them from all the curses they're going to bring on themselves.  He beseeches them to "choose life in order that [they] may live."

So here comes the let-down.  In chapter 31, God tells Moses that the people are totally going to turn away from Him and that He is going to be angry with them and bring all those curses He promised on them, and He tells Moses to teach the people a song as a witness to them.  He also has Moses write the words of the Law down at this point.

Chapter 32 is the song of Moses, which basically states the greatness of God and everything He did for His people Israel, and how they turned from Him and as a result, He removed His blessing from them, and how He avenges all of His enemies.  At the end of that, God tells Moses to go up to Mount Nebo to see the Promised Land before he dies, and reminds him that he's not going in because of his own stubbornness and disobedience.  Major bummer to be reminded of that right before you die, right?

So that's the low point.  In spite of all the hype, God totally knows that Israel is not going to remain faithful.  And Moses, being the smart cookie that he is, knows it too.  The good thing is, God promises redemption and restoration; He's not going to turn His back on Israel forever.

In chapter 33, Moses blesses Israel tribe by tribe.  Some of the tribes, like Levi and Joseph, get long blessings, and some of them, like Reuben and Dan, get really short two-liners.  But each blessing is personal to that particular tribe, and it reminds me of when Jacob blessed his sons one at a time before he died.

So then Moses climbs Mount Nebo and God shows him the land he promised to Abraham.  I have to think that this was a really incredible, beautiful sight to Moses.  Imagine pouring more than forty years of your life into a goal, and finally being able to see it, even if you can't touch it.

What's really weird is what happens next.  Moses dies up on the mountain, but it appears that God is the one who buries him - it just says "He buried him," and nobody else is mentioned as having gone up with Moses, and furthermore, it says that nobody knows where Moses' grave is.

A lot of people say that Joshua or somebody wrote this last part of Deuteronomy, but I don't really think so, because it's written as if it's been a long time since Moses died.  Listen to this:  "Since that time no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses."  Doesn't it seem like there would have been a lot of prophets between Moses and the writing of this epilogue?  I don't know, maybe Joshua wrote it when he was really old.

Anyway, remember how I thought Abraham and Aaron got good epigrams?  Moses' is the best.  Check this out:

"So Moses the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the LORD.  And He buried him in the valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor; but no man knows his burial place to this day.  Although Moses was one hundred and twenty years old when he died, his eye was not dim, nor his vigor abated.  So the sons of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days; then the days of weeping and mourning for Moses came to an end. [. . .]

"Since that time no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face, for all the signs and wonders which the LORD sent him to perform in the land of Etypt against Pharaoh, all his servants, and all his land, and for all the mighty power and for all the great terror which Moses performed in the sight of all Israel."

Wow!  That is a lot to be said about somebody, especially by God - since God inspired the Bible, including these words here.  You know, Moses was kind of a screwy person sometimes.  He didn't want the job God called him to do, and he fought and kicked against it; he appears to have had marital problems, and he had a bad temper that led him to disobey God once or twice.  But you know, that stuff can be said about anybody.  Moses was a great man not because he was a man without fault, but because he was a man God used.  Face it, we all screw up.  We all have personal problems and family problems and whatever other kinds of problems, but that doesn't mean that God can't use us.  I guess what I've learned from the story of Moses is that when God decides to do something, He goes all the way.  Just go with it.  If God wants to use you for something, don't fight Him about it.  You may not think you're qualified - and you may be right - but I don't think God particular cares what we're qualified for.  Whatever holes we have in our resume, He is perfectly capable of filling.  If we are on God's side, then even a problematic human like you or me or Moses can do extraordinary things.

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 11-19: You'd Think These Laws Would Be Organized Better

I'm behind in my blogging again, so I'm going to lump several chapters together again.  Deuteronomy turns out to be really interesting.  The majority of the information has already been given in Exodus through Numbers, but there is stuff in here that I don't remember reading before (but then again, I don't even remember reading it from the last time I read Deuteronomy, so it could very well be in one of the other books and I just can't remember that far back).

Here's an overview of what goes on here:

• 11:1-32 Rewards for obedience
  
• 12:1-27 Instructions on where to offer sacrifices
  
• 12:28-32 Don't follow the religion of the other nations
• 13:1-18 Idolatry is punishable by death
  
• 14:1-22 Clean and unclean animals
• 14:23-29 Tithes
• 15:1-19 Slavery and the Sabbatic Year
• 15:20-23 Firstborn animals
• 16:1-17 Holidays
• 16:18-22 Appointing Judges
• 17:1-7 Punishing idolatry again
• 17:8-13 Difficult cases to be judged by Levites
• 17:14-20 Laws for appointing a king
• 18:1-8 Providing for the Levites
• 18:9-14 Sorcery, spiritism, witchcraft, etc forbidden
• 18:15-22 Prophets, true and false
• 19:1-13 Cities of refuge; manslaughter versus murder
• 19:14-21 False Witnesses

 As you can see, those are a lot of different topics, and it really kind of jumps around a lot.  There are a couple of one-sentence laws tucked in there too that I didn't list.  As something of an organization freak, this sort of drives me crazy, and I wonder if there's a reason for ordering it all like this, or if Moses is just speaking as he remembers something, or what.

So here are some things that I find interesting:

1.  Location of offering sacrifices.  Burnt offerings, it appears, could not be offered just anywhere; the people would have to go to a designated location.  Judging by the context, it seems that the purpose of this was to prevent people from using the pagan places of worship (and we'll find out why later on).  They were supposed to completely destroy every pagan altar and votive and object of worship so they wouldn't be tempted to start using those things.

2.  I think tithing, as it is described in the Bible, has been really misunderstood.  In chapter 14 it says that the tithe is a portion of a person's harvest, which that person is supposed to take to the designated place of worship and eat, or if they couldn't carry it all, they could exchange the crops for money or oxen or wine or anything they wanted and take that to the designated place of worship and eat it there.  Then every three years they were to take that tithe and give it to the Levites in their town for them to eat.  That sounds very different to me from the 10% of our income given to the church every month that I've heard about all my life.  I'm not saying it's bad to give money to the church - I think it's very important - I just don't think it's the same thing as a tithe.

3.  Slavery.  Slavery in ancient Israel, at least according to the Law, was really different from modern slavery like what we practiced before the abolition.  Slavery among Hebrews was a temporary state; ever seven years, the slaves were to be set free - and more than that, their owners were supposed to load them with money and livestock so they wouldn't have to start over with nothing.  Every time the Law mentions slaves and the poor and orphans and stuff like that, it says, "remember that you were slaves in Egypt."  I think maybe God let Israel be in slavery so long so that they would learn to have compassion on the poor once they became rich.  I don't know if it worked out that way, but that was the idea.

4.  God knew that Israel was going to want to have a king eventually, so He even made provisions for that.  He said the king wasn't supposed to accumulate wealth or possessions or wives or anything that would turn his heart away from God or make him think he was better than his countrymen.  Yeah, none of those rules were kept.  It also says that the king was supposed to have the Law written on a scroll to be kept next to him so he could read it every day his whole life - now if that rule had been followed, maybe the Hebrew monarchy would have turned out better than it did.

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 26-29: A New Generation

I'm kind of behind in my blogging so I'll try to lump several chapters together.

When we get to chapter 26, the forty years of wandering have now passed (I guess it's assumed that the last few chapters took place during those 40 years).  So it starts out with a census of the new generation.  The population of the Hebrews has grown by just about 1000, which is not very much.  Upon closer inspection of the numbers, we find that some tribes have actually decreased considerably in size, while others have grown considerably.  Check out this before and after:

Tribe------------Before -------------After
Reuben---------46,500-------------43,730
Simeon---------59.300-------------22,200
Gad------------46,650-------------40,500
Judah-----------74,600------------76,500
Issachar--------54,400-------------64,300
Zebulun--------57,400-------------60,500
Ephraim--------40,500-------------32,500
Manasseh------32,200-------------52,700
Benjamin-------35,400-------------45,600
Dan------------62,700-------------64,400
Asher----------41,500-------------53,400
Naphtali--------53,400------------45,400

Now, these numbers represent every male of fighting age - that is, 20 or older - not every person in each tribe.  The Levites didn't fight and didn't have an inheritance in the promised land (a section of land allotted to them), so they weren't numbered in with the rest, but in this passage we find out that there are 23,000 males a month old and older.  So they must be a much smaller tribe all around.

I think it's interesting that so many of the tribes shrunk in number.  I wonder if it's that they just had a lot of old people and not a lot of kids, or that they had more girls than boys, or that a lot of them died in the plagues and things.  This is supposed to be the new generation, though, so most of these people were either kids or not born yet when their parents were dying of plagues and things.  But I guess a lot of people died in plagues who would have still had children, and by that means the number of births dropped.

Anyway, a cool thing happens in chapter 27.  This guy named Zelophehad (hereafter Z) has died, although he wasn't one of Korah's rebels from chapter 16, and he has no sons - only five daughters, all of whom are unmarried at this point.  They ask Moses to give them their father's inheritance (land in the promised land) to keep in his name.  I am going to assume this was unheard of in these days.  Even in modern times, land usually passed to the next direct male rather than the next direct person.  That's the initial conflict in Pride and Prejudice, which takes place around 1810 - the Bennetts' estate Longbourn is entailed by default on heirs male, so their five daughters are going to get nothing when Mr. Bennett dies.  Not every estate was handled this way (Miss Anne de Bourgh, only child of Sir Lewis and Lady Catherine, inherits all of Rosings Park), but it was common.  But God tells Moses, when he asks him, that Z's daughters are right in saying they should have an inheritance, and makes a law that any man who dies with no male heir should give his property to his daughters, and if there are no children it goes to his brother and so forth.  It's still primarily keeping the land to the male heirs, but I think it's really progressive and decent not to take a guy's land away from his family just because he doesn't have a son.

Then we find out that Joshua, Moses' assistant, is going to be the next Moses, and there's a ceremony for the transfer of power - kind of like what they did with Aaron and Eleazar, only in the sight of the whole congregation.  I wonder why they didn't go up on a mountain.  Maybe because Aaron went up the mountain to die and Moses wasn't going to die yet, or maybe because the people needed to see God put His stamp of approval on Joshua so they'd listen to him better than they listened to Moses.  I don't know.

The next two chapters are laws again.  In chapter 28, it sure sounds like there are a lot of sacrifices.  It sounds like they had to sacrifice two male lambs every day as a burnt offering - a continual offering.  Then every Sabbath there was an additional sacrifice of two lambs, and another burnt offering at the first of each month, and then the Passover lamb, and the sacrifices during the Feast of Weeks, and of course each of those had a drink offering and grain offerings to go along with the burnt offering.  Additionally, there was a seven-day holiday during the seventh month, in which there were sacrifices to be offered every day, grain offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings and so forth.  That's a lot of stuff!  I suppose God had to bless them just so they'd have enough sheep to sacrifice every day.  I suppose the reason for all this was, again, to point out the people's constant need for God.  I think the idea behind the continual burnt offerings was to tell people that  they were never in a state of perfect harmony with God - there was always a barrier between them and Him, and they always needed something to go between them and God.  We're not just separated from God by our sinful actions; we're separated from God by our nature, because He is holy and we are not.  God is not one of us, even though we are made in His likeness.  I suppose in order to remove the need for those offerings - in order for man and God to have a direct relationship with nothing in the way, God would have to become one of us.  But now I'm getting ahead of myself.