Nomads in numbers by lawrence duff forbes d.litt , d.d. by Moshe Habaita

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Nomads In Numbers by Lawrence Duff-Forbes D.Litt., D.D., FPh.S.

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Contents Page

Forty Years! Why Not Eleven Days?

Doubt’s Doleful Dowry

Revelation and Response

Neither Grapes Nor Garlic

Time’s Tragic Toll

Carcasses in the Wilderness

Caleb and Joshua

Pruning, Pasturing, Persisting

The Silver Trumpets

The Red Heifer

Deaths That Declare

Snakes in the Wilderness

The Son of a Bird and the Swallower of a Nation

The People That Dwell Alone

The Shout of a King

The Goodly Tents of Jacob

The Eloquence of Graves and Stars

Symbolic Scintillations

The Sent One

Cities of Refuge

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Forty Years! Why Not Eleven Days? MY DEAR FRIENDS, what a dismal dame is doubt! Doubt, drab-draped in dowdy dress

and clutching, with fear-forked fingers, her unattractive brood about her skirts. Distrust, Dismay, Despair, Discouragement, Dejection – these are among her many doleful daughters. Suspicion is the nutrition-less food on which she feeds her fainting family, and fruitlessness, futility, and failure mark her devious and retrograde trail through the hesitating hollows of human history. Doubt’s dampening and negatory influence paralyses progress, extinguishes expectancy, handcuffs hope, imposes inertia, and blasts and withers every green thing in life’s lavish landscape. What is this weird fascination that draws our eyes to follow, so attentively, her melancholy movements? Is it because we feel some strange ancestral relationship, some pristine bond, that links us to her lineage? Is doubt the morbid mother of us all? God forbid! It is true, as Heinrich Heine declares, that doubt is deeply fixed in man’s nature; nor can we fairly dispute him when he affirms that doubt to be justified. (Ludwig Marcus, 1844, F. Ewen, Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine, New York, Citadel Press, 1948, p. 668.) But this, fortunately, is not the full picture. Doubt, although the mother of many miserable and downcast daughters is, herself, only a daughter; for Doubt is the daughter of Mystery, and she has a twin sister, and that sister’s name is Faith. How heartily I thank Rabbi Israel Mattuck of England (1883-1954) for the thought that Faith and Doubt are twin offspring of Mystery. (H. Samuel. A Book of Quotations, London, Cresset Press, 1947) Faith, too, has her family; and there is a chronicle supreme where we can follow, with incalculable personal profit, the colorful contrast between Doubt’s cheerless children and Faith’s productive progeny. The Mystery which gave birth to these twin daughters of Doubt and Faith is the mystery of God and Man, particularly as outworked in the Divine Call to Israel, and the chronicle

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of contrast to which I have referred is the Divinely-inspired Record of and eleven-day journey that took forty years to accomplish! Think of it! The name of this wealth-packed chronicle is known to English speaking readers by the unenlightening title Numbers, but to Hebrew readers by the more expressive designation Bmidbar, which means “in the wilderness.” How comes this duel nomenclature for this fourth book of Moses? Well, in this sacred record we read that on two separate occasions (chapters 1-4 and chapter 26) the people of Israel were subjected to a census or numbering. Because of this numbering the seventy Alexandrian Jews who translated the Tenach into Greek in the third century before the Common Era titled the book Arithmoi. This sound will remind you of our English word “arithmetic.” This title Arithmoi passed into Latin as Numeri and thus into English as Numbers. The Hebrew title, Bemidbar, is coined from a Hebrew word actually employed in the Hebrew phrase with which the book itself commences: ... ‫וידבר יהוה אל־משה במדבר סיני‬ “And the Eternal spoke unto Moses in the wilderness . . .” (Numbers 1:1) Bemidbar, in the wilderness! Only those who know the contents of this amazing book can realize the significance of those words – “in the wilderness.” Every syllable of that poignant phrase is taut with tragedy. Tragedy, in that it was a wilderness in which Israel found himself; double tragedy, in that Israel’s long sojourn there was unnecessary – it was a self-inflicted wound! And the dagger that inflicted the wound was in the hand of Doubt! This, then, is the stupendous story of an eleven day’s journey that took forty years to accomplish! Amazing fact! It seems incredible, but it is pathetically true. A journey of some 150 to 200 miles, which, in those days, should have been covered in ELEVEN DAYS (Deuteronomy 1:2) nevertheless took a FORTY YEARS to fulfil.

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Forty years! Why not eleven days? Because Doubt thus distorted and distended time’s brief highway and strewed its lanes with the carcasses of blasted hopes and perished prospects! This tragic record embedded in Bemidbar’s thirty-six chapters will repay our alert scrutiny for, if we discover its grim secret, we shall find and, I trust, possess a living principle of undying value. A principle, therefore, of enormous importance to you, to me, to Israel, and, indeed, to all mankind. Here, indeed, is a Treasure from Tenach. Let us unearth it. Chronologically, there is a break of only one month between the erecting of the ‫משכן‬, the Tabernacle, described in the concluding chapters of the second Book of Moses (Exodus), and the command to number the people of Israel as recorded in the opening chapters of this fourth Mosaic book, Bemidbar. It was the wish of God to bring His people, whom He had just released from Pharaoh’s harsh land. Speedily to the full promised inheritance in the fair promised land. The salvation of the Eternal, blessed be He, is always both FROM and TO. God’s people, redeemed FROM Egypt, were to proceed TO and inherit their priceless patrimony. Israel was to move speedily from peril to a privilege, from a danger to a delight, from a loss to a largess, Mitzraim (Egypt) to the land of “milk and honey.” Eleven days from ignominy to independence. This was the gift of grace held out to Israel by the extended hand of God. It only needed Faith’s firm fingers to possess all that the Divine had given in beneficence. Yet Bemidbar is not the Book of the Eleven days; it is the Book of the Forty years. Forty years of fruitlessness, futility, and frustration! I have a title, however, that I choose for myself to bestow upon this chronicle. If we get into the habit of referring to it as the Book of the Forty years, we might be tempted to turn out thoughts backward into history and regard it as a grave in which events are forever buried. My title for it is the Book of the Revelation of Attitudes and it challenges me to turn my thoughts, not so much backward into history, as inwards into my heart. It is not a grave for the past to enshroud, but a goad for the present to employ.

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Since we shall be exploring together this valuable volume, let me give you a birdâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s-eye view of its contents. Because names conjure memories I have employed the names of three major localities mentioned in Bemidbar to suggest the movements which divide the Record into three sections. The first section I call Sinaitic, for it marks the anticipatory movement from Rameses to Mount Sinai covered by chapter 1 through to chapter 10, verse 10. The second section I call Kadeshic for it signifies the aimless meandering from Kadesh over the long period of 37! years and brings us to the end of chapter 19. The final section I call Neboic, for it describes the ultimate advance from Kadesh to Mt. Nebo extending from chapter 20 to the end of the Book. Anticipation. Aimlessness. Advance. That is the sequence, and Doubt was the cause and cancer of the stalemate. Do please accompany me in succeeding messages as we uncover a precious principle of practical value for this our day, and may we not be forty years in finding it.

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Doubt’s Doleful Dowry MY DEARS FRIENDS, one has only to read the Biblical narrative of events and

experiences in the great Sinai peninsula and, if addition be necessary, follow with gripping interest the attempt to retrace the paths trodden by Moses of old, as recounted in Louis Golding’s magnificent book entitled In the Steps of Moses, to realize that there are better environments than the Wilderness in which to seek the solace of the “green pastures,” or the fruit and verdure of the trees “planted by the streams of water.” Israel had been delivered from the harsh hands of Pharaoh and was being conveyed, under Divine Escort, to the Land of Canaan. Between the six dietary delicacies and pungencies of Egypt (Numbers 11:5) and the seven sun-kissed provisions of the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 8:8) lay the meagreness and rigors of the Wilderness. Yet, in the beneficent willingness of God, for Israel the Wilderness was to be but a brief corridor from burden to bounty. Nevertheless, it was to be a corridor packed with purpose – with Divine purpose! It was to be a test-tube for the trial of Israel’s faith. How well geared for Faith’s triumph was that generation that had just left Egypt! Garrisoned by all the indisputable evidences of Divine Power which their every faculty had experienced when God shook the Land of Pharaoh to its very foundations, and with assurance made doubly sure by the devastating deliverance at Yam Suph (Red Sea) surely doubt could find no fateful foothold in that new nation. Here indeed was a Revelation of the Power of God and now Israel is being led, under Divine Escort, to Mount Sinai for yet another Revelation. This time, as I believe, not so much a Revelation of the Power of God as a Revelation of the Person of God. I am so convinced that Israel errs if he limits the Great Revelation of Mount Sinai merely to the giving of the Torah (Law). The Great Revelation of Sinai par excellence is the Great Revelation of the Holy One, Himself, blessed be He! God’s Power had been the revelation upon Egypt; God’s Light had been the revelation upon Sinai; and God’s love had been the second Sinaitic revelation through the

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Divinely-ordained ordinances of the Tabernacle. Power, Light, and Love. This was the triune base upon which God invited His people to plant their feet in Faith’s firm footing. Yet that generation failed through faithlessness! Is this not the greatest wonder of all? Would not the waters of the Red Sea re-part and stand, abashed, before such unbelief? Would not the plagues of Egypt renounce the title before so paralysing a plague as doubt?

“Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win,” cries Shakespeare. Both the attitude and the outcome of that traitor, Doubt, are graphically illustrated by that fourth book of Moses known in English as Numbers, and in Hebrew by the appropriate title Bemidbar which means “in the wilderness.” If I were asked to depict the three major divisions of the Book of Numbers in diagram form, I think I would draw an oblique stroke, then a circle, then a horizontal line. I would attach to the oblique stroke the word ANTICIPATION, for surely the record up to the tenth chapter would show Israel’s rising anticipation of possessing his promised possessions! In this section of Scripture, the warriors are numbered (chapter 1); the camp organized (chapter 2); the Levites regulated (chapter 3, 4); the people ceremonially purified (chapter 5; 6:1-21); their blessing prescribed (chapter 6:22-27). Then the Altar was dedicated (chapter 7); the Levites consecrated (chapter 8); Pesach Sheni (2nd Passover) celebrated (chapter 9:1-14); and, as a final and colorful anticipation, laws were given regarding the mysterious cloud, the visible evidence of the Divine Escort (chapter 9:15-23); and the memorial silver trumpets, reminder of God Himself and His quick availability in times of peril (chapter 10:1-10). Such were the preparations in anticipation of the departure from Sinai to the land of the seven sun-kissed provisions – “the land of wheat and barley, and vines and fig-trees and pomegranates; a land of olive trees and honey.” (Deuteronomy 8:8) Eleven brief days (Deuteronomy 1:2) and the Divine pledges would be fulfilled; eleven brief days and the Wilderness would be no more!

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But did I not say that this Wilderness was to be a test tube for the Divine trial of that generation’s faith? My friends, sorrowfully, I mush admit that we do not follow the oblique stroke upwards to an eleven day termination in the Promised Land. Alas, on the contrary, we reach the symbolic circle of the long second section. A circle has no end. So far as destination is concerned it is aimless. And that is the designation I am constrained to attach to this symbol of the second section – AIMLESSNESS. Merciful heaven! What a tragedy! Not eleven day in the Wilderness, but FORTY YEARS! Forty years! How did this amazing failure happen? Well, if you’ll read from the eleventh verse of chapter 10 right through chapter 19 I feel sure you will uncover the sorry secret. The sad sequence, I think, could be set out like something like this – Movement; Murmuring; Mistrust; Mutiny; Meandering. True, that generation moved from Sinai towards the Land of Promise (chapter 10: 11-36); but they began to murmur, and to mistrust God, the very God Whose Power, Person and Purpose they had so recently and so intimately known! This unhappy state broke out into active mutiny (chapter 11- chapter 14) and resulted in 37! years of aimless meandering in that same weary Wilderness. Yet this wasteful period was not devoid of events, even if it saw a victory of Israel’s enemies (chapter 14:39-45), for it was harboring a precious seed implanted in the bosom of two men; the precious seed was FAITH and the two men were Caleb and Joshua and that was sufficient to ensure the precious purposes of God! A little doubt can be extremely damaging; a little faith exceedingly powerful. It was Hayyim Hazaz (1897 - ), the Israeli novelist, who wrote:

That’s also a Jewish characteristic, very, very Jewish: to believe with absolute faith, with glowing faith, with all their hearts and souls, and all the same just very slightly not believe, the tiniest little bit, and that tiny little bit is the decisive thing. (“The Sermon,” Abanim Rothot, 1946) I am unable to say whether the doubt that dogged that amazing generation was “the tiniest little bit” or whether it was a considerably large bit. Whatever its magnitude or otherwise it

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certainly was â&#x20AC;&#x153;the decisive thingâ&#x20AC;? for their doubt brought Disqualification and Death! Not one of the doubters of that generation found the Promised Land, but all died in the Wilderness! I find this is a fact realized by far too few. In the Book of Numbers we are dealing with two distinct generations of people. The first generation were those who came out of Egypt and should have reached Canaan in eleven days from Sinai. Their unjustified doubt of God disqualified their entry and doomed them to remain in the wilderness during which period of some forty years the new generation grew up. It was the new generation, not the old, that entered the Promised Land. (Numbers 14) It is such a relief to turn, at chapter 20, to the horizontal line denoting the third section, ADVANCE, yet in these chapters we have many sad reminders of our human frailties. The

sin of Moses and Aaron is one such, for even to Moses and to Aaron God declared: Because ye believed not in Me, to sanctify Me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this assembly into the land which I have given them. (Numbers 20:12) My friends, loss is the legacy of unbelief; let us be careful not to doubt God and the One Whom He sent to redeem us and lead us into the Promised Land.

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Revelation and Response MY DEAR FRIENDS, Shakespeare, in the third act of his play The Merchant of Venice, put

these words in the mouth of Solanio: “Let me say amen betimes, lest the devil cross my prayer . . .” There are many who, like Solanio, say “Amen” betimes; but methinks, again like Solanio, the word is not vehicled in understanding, but rather veiled in obscurity. A very dear friend of mine, in referring to utterances which could justly be placed in a category similar to that of Solanio, employed the most impressive phrase, “psittacine vacuity.” The former word brings to the mind a picture of that bird popularly known as the parrot, whilst the latter word suggests a vacuum, an emptiness. How frequently – unfortunately – that word “amen” is uttered with “psittacine vacuity,” with the frequency of parrot-like repetition, and with about as much understanding as we could reasonably expect from that highly entertaining bird. For a moment, let us look at it. The word I mean, not the bird! Actually, the word “amen” is a Biblical word, the root of which carries with it the general idea of “truth” or “truthfulness,” “faith” or “faithfulness.” The Hebrew word ‫ אמן‬is a word used to stamp the brand of veracity upon any assertion accompanying it, and it is used as the proper response of any person to whom an oath was administered (Nehemiah 5:13; 8:6; I Chronicles 16:36; Jeremiah 11:5). Our father Abraham has been called the father of faith and it is, therefore, sweetly appropriate that, in the Bible, we first meet with the root of this word in association with Abraham. Here is the phrase:

:‫והאמן ביהוה ויחשבה לו צדקה‬ “And Abraham believed in the Eternal and the Eternal counted Abraham’s faith unto Abraham as righteousness.” According to Scripture, faith implies the operation of at least two factors: firstly, a revelation, a word, a message from God; secondly, the response to that revelation, word,

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or message on the part of the one to whom it is disclosed. That is faith. Faith takes God at His word. Revelation and Response become married and the child of the relationship is Reaction. Take the patriarch Noah as an example of this. God’s revelation of the deluge met and married Noah’s response to that revelation and the reaction resulting from that relationship was the Ark that guaranteed the new beginning to humanity. Faith is seen in the attitude – the ‫ ; אמן‬faithfulness is seen in the action following from that attitude – the ‫אמונה‬. Faith reaches the hand of confidence into the God-promised future and pulls into the very present an anticipatory preparation and participation in those God-bestowed promises. There is no better discourse on faith than that embodied in the eleventh chapter of ‫אגרת‬

‫העברים‬, the Epistle to the Hebrews, in the ‫הברית החדשה‬, New Covenant or New Testament and anyone who has not read that chapter has missed an epic. “Now faith is the title-deed of the things we hope for, the proof of the reality of the things which are not being seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) The Hebrew of Isaiah 65:16 uses the very word in association with the Deity. Here is the expression: ‫יתבוך באלהי אמן‬, a literal translation of which would be “the God(s) of Amen” and therefore the New Covenant, New Testament, in applying the title “the Amen” to the Messiah (Revelation 3:14) is simply suggesting, in different, aspect, the oft-implied Tenach (Old Testament) doctrine of the Divine nature of King Messiah. We can now return to the Biblical volume we are currently exploring, the fourth book of Moses known as Bemidbar, or in English as Numbers, and examine there a most interesting use of the root-meaning of this word “amen.” The people whom God had delivered from Egypt were complaining in the wilderness and our great teacher, Moses, burdened down with the weight of his cares and responsibilities, expostulates with God in these most human and expressive terms: “Wherefore hast Thou dealt ill with Thy servant? and wherefore have I not found favour in

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Thy sight, that Thou layest the burden of all this people upon me? Have I conceived all this people? have I brought them forth, that Thou shouldst say unto me: Carry them in Thy bosom, as a nursing-father carrieth the suckling child . . .” (Numbers 11:11, 12) That English expression “nursing-father” sounds in English a trifle awkward, doesn’t it? However, it does express the basic idea of the Hebrew, for here we encounter our word “amen” again, the Hebrew expression translated “nursing-father” being ‫האמן‬. This simple, active, form of the word meaning to “nurse” or to “nourish” conveys the idea of the suckling babe resting in unthinking, carefree, trustfulness upon the loving bosom of the nourisher. Happily it is Moses himself who earns the next use of the word in this book entitled Numbers, for in numbers, chapter twelve, verse 7, the Eternal God declares of Moses:

... ‫ בכל־ביתי נאמן הוא‬. “. . . he is trusted in all My house. . .” Here we have the simple passive form of the word. God declares Moses “is being faithful.” Moses is faithful and he proves the God of Israel to be faithful, too. Faith is a vine that climbs up to God and twines around Him; and trust, patience and hope are the luscious life-packed fruit-clusters that grow upon its sturdy branches. Into this illuminating and helpful framework we can now lift the impelling and eloquent events Divinely-revealed for our instruction in this fourth book of Moses, known as Bemidbar or Numbers. The glorious God of ‫אמן‬, of Revealed Truth, ever-faithful to His gracious promises to mankind in general and to Israel in particular, was still in pursuit of His beneficent purposes and He had already made His great Revelation to Israel. He now awaited the Response from that generation that would meet and marry that Revelation at that time and produce its precious progeny – the Theocratic Kingdom on earth, ‫מלכות שמים‬.

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In a world gripped in the darkness, dread, and despotism of idolatry, Israel was to rise with heavenly light, dispelling the gloom, freeing the fearful, and smashing the shackles of the imprisoned. All that could be envisaged in those glorious words of the prophet were to become a potential possession of humanity: “Arise, shine; for thy light is come, And the glory of the Eternal is risen upon thee. For, behold, darkness shall cover the earth, And gross darkness the peoples; But the Eternal will rise upon thee, And His glory shall be seen upon thee. And nations shall come to thy light, And kings to the brightness of thy rising.” (Isaiah 60:1-3) These radiant words are apt setting for such pearls of prospect as were Divinely displayed for Israel’s appropriation. Whilst these Divine purposes shall yet surely find ultimate fulfilment, it remains for us to note the failure of that Egyptian generation of Israel to respond to God’s revelation and to draw from that failure lessons vital to our own spiritual welfare in these very days. As we have seen from messages immediately preceding, Doubt was the deformed thief which robbed Israel of his imminent heritage. Doubting God! Doubting the Amen! This was the attitude of doubt and its issues were immense. Let us look at the loss that ensued: Topographically, it meant a postponement of the enjoyment of the Promised Land and its precious fruit. The hopeful horizons of the land of milk and honey receded into the distance and scepticism snatched away the fruit of promise. Unbelief resulted in waste of fruit. Chronologically, it meant the imposition of a long, dreary forty years in the wilderness,

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an extravagant and unnecessary expenditure of time spent aimlessly in adverse circumstances. Utterly aimless so far as the immediate accomplishment and enjoyment of God’s precious promises were concerned. Unbelief resulted in waste of time. Genealogically, it meant the physical death of an entire generation because, apart from Moses who died on Nebo, all but two of the adults that came from Egypt perished physically in the wilderness. I am personally persuaded that God has given His Greatest Revelation to men in the Person of the One depicted in that same Epistle to the Hebrews. May our heartfelt Response meet and mate with that great Revelation, and the Reaction will surely be Life Eternal when we can say “Amen” to the sure promises of God in that Redemptive Act of King Messiah. Amen.

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Neither Grapes Nor Garlic MY DEAR FRIENDS, I want to depict, for the capture of your receptive imaginations, a

scene and circumstance of great contrast leading up to a crisis of great consequence. You will find the details in the first fourteen chapters of Bemidbar, the fourth book of Moses, popularly known in the English Bible as Numbers. The scene is a howling wilderness, the circumstance is the Divine call to Israel, and the contrast is the outcome of the transition from rabble to a regiment. In a haste compounded of threat and terror, the unassorted multitudes of Hebrew slaves had fled from Egypt. Ill-attired, unprepared, half-hopeful, half-despairing, oftquestioning, the only decisive factors in their flight were the general direction it was taking and the impelling magic of the name of the man called Moses who had swung the miscellaneous mass towards their unknown goal. True, there was also that singular phenomenon visible in motion before them by day and by night. (Exodus 13:21-22) Neither its presence nor its movement seems capricious. During the dread-drenched hours of their daylight flight it moved upright before them like a pillar of cloud extending from heaven to earth (Abraham ibn Ezra); then, as the evening dropped her purpling mantle, threatening to enshroud them in a darkening veil of tense terror through which, at any moment, destruction might burst, the encroaching darkness was rebuked into retreat by the awesome appearance of a mysterious column of fire which sped its coruscating light in vivid illumination around them. It seemed like a changing of the guard! Alongside the protective power of heaven, arrayed in cool-hued service uniform by day, there stood, in the vanguard of the approaching night, the red-coated custodian of the dark-draped hours! But here was heard no clicking of heels, no changing of arms, no rhythmic step, just the silent transition from cloud to fire in a demonstration pregnant with the suggestion of death to the pursuing Egyptians but defense to the pursued Hebrews. Yet was this assuring manifestation a replacement or a metamorphosis? Was the ‫עמוד ענז‬ – the pillar of cloud – replaced by the ‫ – עמוד אש‬the pillar of fire? Or did the former by day become the latter by night?

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To the harassed Hebrews there was little time or inclination for such speculation. Sufficient that the reassuring word had sped from heart to heart that the manifestation marked the Personal Presence of that same Great Being, the God of the Universe, Whose delivering power had been so immediately witnessed over Egypt and its proud Pharaoh. Onwards, the man and the Manifestation led the multitudes. Out into the wilderness, their ears still echoing with the unearthly sound of the rushing waters of the Red Sea as it submerged both the cries and the carcasses of Israel’s enemies. Onwards, to the Mount of Awe, Mount Sinai, where the rabble became a regiment! Over half a million males were selected as warriors and organized for war; the people were mobilized into an orderly formation according to their various tribes. The two great families which sprang from Joseph’s loins were now counted as two separate tribes known respectively as Ephraim and Manasseh to achieve the dual objective of separating the tribe of Levi for special service in association with the ‫משכן‬, the Tabernacle (Numbers 1:49, 50; 3:12, 13), whilst still maintaining the total number at twelve. This whole rabble was now regimented into an orderly and impressive encampment quite twelve miles square. Divine laws were bestowed upon them; religious rites and rituals provided; a memorial Passover celebrated to remind them of the unchallengeable Power of their Glorious Omnipotent God; and then “in the second year, in the second month, on the twentieth day of the month” came the silent signal to advance – the pillar of cloud was lifting! Immediately the silver trumpets blared their summons, and the whole camp set out for an eleven days’ journey to the Promised Land! Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun led; then the Gershonites and Merarites, two Levite groups bearing portions of the sacred Tabernacle. Reuben, Simeon, and Gad came next, followed by another Levite group, the Koathites, carrying further priceless portions of the Tabernacle including the mysterious and wonderful Ark of the Covenant. Ephraim, Manasseh, Benjamin, Dan, Asher, Naphtali (Numbers 10:14-27) followed in that order and surely it could be well said that here was a sight “every prospect pleases”! Yet, as we follow the procession from Sinai to Kadesh, we could be constrained to finish that quotation by adding “and only man is vile” for, with but three days journeying

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accomplished, the people became ‫ כמתאננים‬, as murmurers” (Numbers 11:1), filling the ears of the Eternal with their complaints. The swift Divine judgement of ‫תבערה‬, Taberah, “burning” (11:1-3), did not prevent the lusting of the “mixed multitude” which accompanied Israel, a lusting which affected Israel and set up a howl for the fish, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic of Egypt. Admittedly potent portions, yet all domiciled on earth’s surface or beneath it and thus in contrast to the promised heavenly fruit of Canaan! The locality was well names

‫ קברות התאוה‬, “graves of lust,” in doleful reminder of the incident.

The disaffection even spread to Moses’ own brother and sister, Miriam and Aaron, and Miriam was Divinely smitten with leprosy from which only Moses’ intercessory prayer brought healing. Murmuring, discontent, jealousy, distrust – these were some of the human vilenesses that constituted the canker that caused the crisis at Kadesh! Now the Promised Land is reached and twelve representative men are sent to reconnoiter it and bring back their report. Israel is in the test tube of faith! Behind, the yet unstilled echoes of the audible and tangible evidences of God’s mighty power. In front, the Promised Land, at the moment shrouded in the sinister silence of the giants and the walled cities. The twelve return with grapes, pomegranates and figs from Canaan’s sunkissed store – evidence of the truth of God’s promises1 however, ten of the spies, by carnal gaze, focus their findings on two features – GRAPES and GIANTS. But the remaining two, Caleb and Joshua, by spiritual gaze, use Faith’s wider horizon, and see three factors – GRAPES, GIANTS and GOD! ‘We be not able!’ cried the ten, ‘For stronger they than we!’ ‘We are well able!’ cried the two, ‘For stronger still is He.’ O Israel! This is a moment of destiny, both immediate and symbolical! Will you see with the eyes of the two or the ten? Let the calm sanity of FAITH push you forward into

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possession and enjoyment of the Divinely-promised inheritance! Will you perceive that the grapes are our portion, the giants God’s portion? Unfortunately, the people that had said “can God prepare a table in the wilderness” (Psalm 78:19) and had “set bounds to the Holy One of Israel” (v. 41) easily succumb to the paralyzing power of Doubt! Oh! the despair, frustration, and fretfulness of Doubt’s bifocal view. Grapes to tantalize and giants to prevent. Oh! the delight, hopefulness and assurance of Faith’s trifocal view. Grapes to guarantee, giants to be overcome – but by the power of a God Whose promises cannot fail! Through doubting God’s promises, that generation had neither grapes nor garlic! Later generations, through doubting God’s Messiah, have suffered similar fruitfulness. But, praise God, His purposes shall be accomplished; man’s failure will not mar God’s success. God’s world-purpose with the Jewish nation, Israel was – and is – world fruit! Cries Isaiah: “In days to come shall Jacob take root, Israel shall blossom and bud; and the face of the world shall be filled with fruitage.” Isaiah 27:6)

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Time’s Tragic Toll MY DEAR FRIENDS, Samuel Uceda, the Palestinian commentator, declares:

No loss like the loss of time. (Midrash Samuel, 1579, to Abot 5:23) If this gentleman is right – and maybe he is – then why is time so valuable? Well, if we refuse our brains any partnership with our mouths, we might lift from Lord Bulwer-Lytton’s verbal wardrobe his threadbare phrase – “Time is money.” But what did Earl Lytton have in mind when he coined and circulated this crisp oral currency? Did he infer that Time was some supernal reservoir continually dripping from its fiduciary faucet, with an undeviating regularity, seconds of sheer gold? Do we cup the hand and catch the cash? Desirable drops! Celestial cistern! May there be no cessation to such chronometric capital! Hold on a minute! Does this mean that gold is the goal? The phrase certainly suggests it and doubtless there are some rare individuals who would subscribe to such a sentiment. However, I am persuaded that Earl Lytton intended to suggest that gold was not so much a goal as a gateway – a gateway into the green pastures of sweet satisfaction of self. There is a toast which runs as follows:

May you always get what you want; May you always want what you get; May you always want it when you get it, And get it when you want it. Is Time, then, to be used as a tool to turn otherwise dolorous seconds into dollars and cents to be spent in self-satiety? Surely, the ancient admonition of Koheleth should deter from such a futile experiment, for

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his experience produced his own assessment in these well-known words:

‫הבל הבלים אמר קהלת‬ ‫הבל הבלים הכל הכל‬ “Vanity of vanities, saith Koheleth; Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” (Ecclesiastes 1:2) Much of this sentiment is embedded in a more modern vehicle of vexation which declares:

We go to work to earn money To buy the bread to get the strength To go to work to earn the money To buy the bread to get the strength. . . And so on ad lib. An onerous and obstinate oscillation filled with futility. And yet, my friends, there is a relationship, if not between time and money, certainly between Time and Treasure. Moreover, there is a valid viewpoint, and a vital vantage void of vanity and vexation, and these are to be found in viewing Time as a Treasury of God. From the Divine Treasury of Time, the God of the Universe hands out to men and nations precious seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years. These units of duration whilst not themselves necessarily of intrinsic value are, nevertheless, potential passports to priceless patrimony if presented at the proper portals. And God Himself, through Divine Revelation, indicates to us the spiritual Promised Land into which we may all enter by means of these precious passports to prosperity of soul. God’s directive, purposive, beneficent will for mankind is that spiritual Promised Land, and Time is the Treasury from whence come these sweet seconds of opportunity – of golden opportunity.

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If Time is a Treasury of God – and I believe it is, and if we can waste or lose such time – and I believe we can, then how great, how humanly irreparable, is that loss. It is with this conviction regarding the quality and potential of Time that we now expend profitably a few minutes of it to continue our explorations in that fourth book of Moses, known as Numbers, and to draw from Israel’s actions and attitudes in the Wilderness more golden Treasures from Tenach for our own spiritual prosperity. Israel, you will recall, had been delivered from the Pharaoh of Egypt and had been brought by God to the fringe of the Promised Land; had even sent spies into that Land to report upon it; but – in my last message – we saw Doubt and Fear, those duel dark devils spawned by Unbelief, had robbed Israel TOPOGRAPHICALLY. Waste of fruit. But fruitlessness is only part of the barren blight of Doubt – its sparse and wizened leafage is futility. Unbelief also robbed Israel CHRONOLOGICALLY and resulted in fruitless waste of time. Consider the ghastly stalemate. Approximately thirty-eight years of sheer futility, spent in a spiritually pathless wilderness, enjoying neither the garlic of Egypt nor the grapes of Canaan. Existence without enjoyment is the lot of the doubter. We shall see also that existence without purpose can be the lot of the doubter, too. Whatever else Israel may or may not be – whether race, religion, or nation (and I have my views on these aspects) – at least Israel, viewed nationally, is two things – a Divine instrument and a Divine Illustration. In the journey out of Egypt to Mount Sinai and from Mount Sinai to Kadesh-Barnea we behold Israel as both Instrument and Illustration. At Kadesh-Barnea, on the fringe of the Promised Land, Israel, as nationally represented by that generation delivered from Egypt, foolishly forfeited the former regal role and retained the latter, but merely as an Illustration of the folly of doubting God’s Person, Power, and Purpose. Here was a nation Divinely chosen to weave the silken skeins of a glorious spiritual pattern, but instead, through unbelief, substituted a tragic suspension, a nugatory hiatus, and this bleak period starkly tragic inasmuch as it was quite unnecessary!

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They had arrived for possession, but they didn’t possess! Unbelief bogged the nation down on the very borders of golden opportunity and, as the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia declares, as I think rightly, Kadesh “would, indeed, appear to have been the Israelite base for most of their ‘forty years’ in the wilderness.” (Vol. 6, p. 276) My beloved friends, will you make an effort to grasp this timeless tragedy coffined in a forty-year time-strip? Look! Behold! The Mishkan, the Divine Tabernacle, the outward, tangible, visible, supernaturally-endowed evidence of the Personal Presence of God leads purposively the recently-liberated people to the very borders of a land and a function filled with all the fullness of a Covenant-Keeping God. But, tragedy of tragedies, instead of entering immediately into that land and that function, through the unbelief of that generation, the very same Tabernacle was obliged to remain, waiting, on that border for the best part of thirty-eight years whilst the people departed from it and roamed the wilderness regions “killing time.” It is Franz Werfel who exclaims, “ ‘To kill time,’ what a profound and terrifying expression!” (Between Heaven and Earth, 13) But note the double tragedy – that whilst they were killing time, Time was also killing them! And so the progress of Israel’s national Divine call was temporarily arrested by Israel’s failure to believe. I am strangely reminded of the well-known parable of the Prodigal Son recorded in the fifteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel. I see the Divine Tabernacle pausing at Kadesh, patiently waiting, like the Divine Father, against the day when the nation of Israel, tired of the “far country,” would cry from the midst of his vapid experience – “I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto Him, ‘Father, I have sinned. . . .’ ” I personally believe a similar failure on a grander scale was repeated much later in Israel’s national history. Regarding it, the One concerned burst into tears as He beheld Jerusalem, and with prophetic vision He sorrowfully declared:

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“If today you yourself had only known the things pertaining to peace! But now they are hidden from you. For a time is coming upon you when your enemies . . . will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation by God.” (Luke 19:42-44) These words of the Great Prophet and Anointed One of Israel were fulfilled literally and from the time of the National Rejection, Israel nationally has been killing time and being killed by time, outside both the literal and the spiritual Promised Land. But I cannot finish on this note, for God’s promises to Israel nationally are sure and may well be epitomized in the words of the prophet Joel:

... ‫ושלמתי לכם את־השנים אשר אכל הארבה‬ “And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten. . .” (Joel 2:25) I believe Israel’s 2000 locust-eaten years are about to be restored to him by his faithful God and Redeemer.

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Carcasses in the Wilderness MY DEAR FRIENDS, have you ever thought of the relationship between words and the

human mind in terms of the relationship between color and canvas? Let me unfold this picturesque idea for you. The human mind can be like an artist’s canvas stretched out untouched before us; words can be like the artist’s pigments; and the dictionary a palette on which repose the artist’s colors all ready for the mixing. Of course not every word possesses color; the word “word,” for instance, is colorless. I could dip my brush into that word “word” and then make a stroke with it on the canvas on your mind, and it would leave no color – possibly only the suggestion of a dead design. On the other hand, some words are vivid and vigorous and splash our mental canvas with instant pictures in brilliant and animated hues, and graphic indeed can be the perspective presented when such colorful words are put to partnership. Sometimes a mere phrase can stab a whole stark panorama into being before our eyes; moreover, not all such depictions are pleasant ones. Will you join me in an interesting experiment? Just spread the untouched canvas of your mind before me and let me dip my brush into an expression found in the fourteenth chapter of the fourth book of Moses known as Numbers. With the pigments provided by just one phrase in the thirty-second verse I would like to splash a strong visual impression on your virgin mental canvas. Listen carefully – here is the expression:

:‫ופגריכם אתם יפלו במדבר הזה‬ “But as for you, your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness.” (Numbers 14:32) In immediate past messages we have seen how this appalling attitude of doubt brings

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waste of fruit and waste of time; we now observe how it also robbed Israel GENEALOGICALLY in waste of life.

And this – this, mind you – to have happened to the very generation who had so confidently exclaimed at Mount Sinai: “All that the Eternal hath spoken we will do”! Yet doubt had wasted their lives! There is a brief but challenging document which every Jewish person should read and absorb for it is intended for us. It is called ‫אגרת העברים‬, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and it is a masterpiece. The writer of ‫ אגרת העברים‬has much to say about Faith and its fair fruits and Doubt and its disasters; moreover, he mentions that very ancient generation of Israel from whom we have been drawing our spiritual Treasures from Tenach. Here are his words in a translation by Dr. Way: “Why, who were they who, though they had heard His command, yet provoked God? Who, but all those sons of Abraham who, led by Moses, had marched out of Egypt? And with whom was God indignant through those forty years? Was it not with the same people, whose unfaith has passed into sin? Those whose dead limbs were left strewn in the wilderness.” (Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 3, verses 16,17) Dead limbs strewn in the wilderness. Carcasses collapsed into chaos. Unfaith, passing into sin, wasted the life of a whole generation! The attitude of doubt brought death in the wilderness instead of life in the land. The individual whose personal attitude to the Self-Revealing God is one of doubt courts certain death in life’s spiritual wilderness; and note that it will be a self-inflicted, wound, for God doesn’t want it that way. And what is true individually is true nationally, for a nation is, after all, but an aggregate of individuals. In what terms, then, can we interpret the long 2000-year national ‫ גלות‬of Israel? A national expulsion and exclusion from the Promised Land which lasted well nigh 2000 years! Two millennia during which, dear God! What heavy toll has been exacted in the wilderness of the dispersion among the Gentile nations!

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The Egyptian generation’s provocation and the Divine decree that touched off the wilderness wastage is recorded in Tenach. Does Scripture also record a national provocation which produced yet another and more grim Divine decree, resulting in this last long trek down the tragic ages of Time’s weary wilderness? I conscientiously believe there exists such a record in what I also conscientiously believe to be an integral part of our Jewish Scriptures. Here is the gist of the decree delivered to those who represented Israel nationally and were thus responsible for making national decisions – to these leaders were addressed these words nearly two thousand years ago: “Did you never read in the Scriptures: ‘That stone which the builders threw away has become the cornerstone. . .’ This I tell you, is why the kingdom will be taken away from you, and given to a people who will pay God fair fruits in season for it.” (Matthew 21:42, 43) Surely the tread of ensuing history punctuates each word with the nod of attestation. But, as we shall see in my next message, though nationally temporarily set aside, God did not sever His covenant national relationship to Israel, either then or now. Neither did He withdraw His mercy to individuals within that nation wherever among then doubt was displaced by faith. May God save us all from the soul-blight of UNBELIEF. How true are the words of Jehuda Halevi when he cries;

When far from Thee, I die while yet in life; But if I cling to Thee, I live, though I should die. (Selected Poems, 87)

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Caleb and Joshua MY DEAR FRIENDS, a most interesting observation is attributed by the Talmud to Rabbi

Simlai. He is recorded to have said:

Moses gave Israel 613 commandments. David reduced them to 11, Isaiah to 2, but Habakkuk to one: ‘the righteous shall live by his faith.’ Whatever may be questionable in Rabbi Simlai’s observation, at least the great declaration of Israel’s Divinely-inspired Prophet Habakkuk is trustworthy. Indeed, Habakkuk’s dictum has been accorded greater recognition than the prophet himself, and it is quoted no less than three times in the New Covenant or Testament (Romans 1:17; Galatians 3:11; Hebrews 10:37, 38) and is regarded, as I think rightly, as a Divine revelation of a most important spiritual principle. Here are the prophet’s words:

:‫ וצדיק באמונתו יחיה‬. “But the righteous shall live by his faith.” (Habakkuk 2:4) The word ‫ אמונה‬signifies “steadfastness” or “faithfulness” and we find it used elsewhere in Tenach of the steadiness of the uplifted hands of Moses (Exodus 17:12) and the faithfulness of Israel’s God. A better understanding of the prophet’s famous words will be obtained if they are read in conjunction with the fifth verse of the first chapter, which reads: “. . . behold, a word shall be wrought in your days which ye will not believe though it be told you.” (Habakkuk 1:5) Thus the basic idea of the principle enunciated by ‫ הבקוק‬suggests that the upright man accepts and believes the revealed word of God and continues steadfastly in active expectation of the things declared by God regardless of all outward appearances. In short, God’s word is sufficient for him.

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Faith thus becomes an active principle not a mere passive acquiescence. But note that the motive for such an active principle is faith flowing from love towards, and trust in, God. Fortunately, our Jewish Scriptures disclose many of Israel’s great men possessed of, and living in, this vigorous principle of faith and it is refreshing to find an outstanding example of it recorded in that fourth book of Moses popularly known as Numbers and from which we are currently excavating many spiritual treasures. I have already mentioned that I call this fourth book of ‫ חמש‬the Book of the Revelation of Attitudes and in immediate past messages we observed how the attitude of doubt, so sadly manifested by that generation of Israel that had been delivered from the Pharaoh of Egypt, resulted in loss of fruit, loss of time, and loss of life. However, with relief and grateful refreshment we behold two of Faith’s giants sanding like twin trees gloriously fruitful in the midst of Doubt’s dismal desert. The first of these men is recorded in (Numbers 13:6) as ‫ כלב בן־יפנה‬or, as the English language pronounces it, Caleb, the son of Jephunneh. The second man was ‫( הושע בן־נון‬Numbers 13:8) whose name Moses changed to

‫יהושע‬, better known in the English tongue as Joshua (Numbers 13:16). Amongst the multitudinous majority of that generation who displayed this paralyzing attitude of doubt, these two, Caleb and Joshua, are twin superb examples of the animated attitude of faith. Joshua, who is also known as Jeshua and Jesus, was the son of Nun of the tribe of Ephraim (I Chronicles 7:27) and we hear of him first when Moses selected him to lead Israel in battle against the Amalekites at Rephidim (Exodus 17:9). He it was who accompanied Moses part of the way towards the great Mount of the Revelation, Mount Sinai, and he also was the first to greet Moses when he descended from that awful eminence. The name ‫( יהושע‬Joshua) means “God’s salvation” and this appellation is a fitting one for this so illustrious individual, this staunch believer, who afterwards became the very successor of Moses himself.

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There is aura of mystery surrounding Caleb that makes him a most alluring figure. Even the intrinsic meaning of his name lurks in the shadows of partial obscurity and refuses positive expression. The Hebrew ‫ כלב‬is thought by some to be onomatopoetic. That means a word originating in the sound made by the object represented. We do this in modern language, you know, when we say that the aeroplane “zoomed” overhead, or that the honeybee “buzzed” around the flowers. If this is the background of the word ‫ כלב‬then it implies the sound of a wild dog or other animal pressing onwards to attack its prey. This is a derivation numbering Gesenius amongst its advocates. On the other hand, Dr. Julius Fuerst rejects this derivation and says the name implies a valiant hero. In other words, it is veiled in obscurity, as I have said. That Caleb well deserves the title of a valiant hero none that know the story will deny; moreover, as part of the mystery attachable to his background, the thought of something wild, outside the domestic economy, foreign to the fold, is not to be easily divorced from him. It will doubtless come as a real surprise to many of my listeners to know that there is a strong probability – though certainty is admittedly lacking – that Caleb was a foreigner by birth, not belonging to Israel except in the character of a proselyte incorporated by his faith, into the tribe of Judah (based on an interpretation of Joshua 15:13 and Joshua 14:14). Whatever may have been Caleb’s birth, whether foreign or Israelitish, his FAITH, seen both as a verbal acquiescence and as a volatile activity, made him an Israelite, indeed, fully equal with Joshua, the Ephraimite, and certainly superior to the vast multitude of that doubting generation who could claim Abraham in no other realm than that of ancestor, for they certainly were the foreigners, utter strangers to the faith of their father Abraham. Caleb and Joshua were two of the spies among the twelve dispatched by Moses to search out and report upon the Promised Land; and they were the only illustrious ones among the twelve.

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The majority, gripped by doubt and unbelief in the revelation of God, discouraged the multitudes from entry into and possession of God’s promised inheritance. The minority, Caleb and Joshua, actuated by faith and strong belief in the revelation of God, encouraged the multitudes to enter and to possess the promised inheritance. For this manifestation of their faith in God they narrowly escaped stoning at the hands of the multitude, maddened and infuriated by the fears, futility’s and frustrations that inevitably accompany the attitude of unbelief. My friends, this is a sad but sorrowfully consistent characteristic of the human family in its totality. It is usually the minority, the few, who hear and believe God’s revelation and, reaching out the hands of faith, possess the good heritage of God. Is that not so? As with the whole human family so with the nation of Israel – only the remnant respond to God’s full revelation and by faith possess the spiritual inheritance and in doing so, be it noted, they usually incur the displeasure of the majority. I cannot conclude without drawing attention to what might well be a beautiful typographical illustration presented to us in these two most refreshing characters, Caleb and Joshua. The Tenach clearly teaches, both in the books of Moses and in the Prophets and the Writings, that the believing ones among the Gentiles were going to be Divinely granted full participation with the believing ones among Israel in God’s great spiritual blessings through Messiah and Messiah’s atoning sacrifice for humanity. Assuming Caleb to have been really a foreigner by birth, how eloquent to behold him one by faith with the Israelite, Joshua, and to see them both entering together into the promised patrimony of the God of Israel Who is also the God of the Universe. My friends, right throughout Israel’s long fruitless, futile, wasteful wanderings in the “wilderness” of the nations, in fickle favors bestowed or in gloomy ghettos incarcerated, there have been the Caleb’s and the Joshua’s who have entered, viewed, and demonstrated to Israel that the fields of faith are fruitful.

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Ever since it began in the Temple at Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago, this ringing testimony of Jewish believers has not ceased even though at times, â&#x20AC;&#x153;all the congregation bade stone them with stonesâ&#x20AC;? (Numbers 14:10). May the congregations of our day be wiser and more willing to believe the minority.

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Pruning, Pasturing, Persisting MY FRIENDS, the Barcelonian translator Abraham Hasdai (Ben HaMelek VeHaNazir, c.

1230, chapter 5) provides us all with a springboard from which to plunge into our current message when he declares:

A pledge unpaid is like thunder without rain. How true this is will be realized by any of us who have experienced the devitalizing effects of a promise without a performance. A broken pledge can tint and taint and torture our entire outlook upon life in general and mankind in particular. It deflates, destroys, yea! embitters. Do men break pledges? Why! In our hearts we know that men’s broken pledges and vitiated vows have, down the ages, erected the huge scaffold from which dangles the mournful corpse of Hope based on human faithfulness. Oh, don’t mistake me1 there is human faithfulness, and thank God for it; but faithfulness is not a quality of humanity at large and he who believes so is headed straight for a front seat view of that unlovely scaffold and the unpleasant sight suspended from it. Whilst I love warmly and genuinely and have a strong feeling with my fellow-man and whilst there are so many that I have that I have proved to be faithful and truthworthy, yet I cannot – I dare not – trust Mankind, generally and at large, is truly untrustworthy. But what of God? There can be but one answer to this question even as there could be but one answer to the other. God is trustworthy. And it is beautifully harmonious that in the very book we are currently exploring – the fourth book of Moses known as Bemidbar and in English as Numbers – we discover a superlative depiction of God’s faithfulness. Indeed, the whole thirty-six chapters are a wholesome and highly encouraging chronicle of God’s pledge Divinely pursued with purpose, patience, and persistence right into a performance of the promise – the very promise itself a further pledge and assurance of

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that prophesied fuller and more perfect performance “in the latter years” of the Messianic era. Therefore, let us observe that God’s promise to Israel had a purpose – a beneficent purpose, Redemptive Messianic purpose. In Bereshit (Genesis 3:15) God had pledged Himself to deal with human sin through One Who was to be essentially, solely, exclusively, the Seed of a woman. The Hebrew text of Genesis 3:15 is revealing and emphatic upon this gem of Divine Revelation. This Divine beneficent purpose is behind God’s pledge to the patriarch Abraham (Genesis 12:1-4). As Professor Abraham A. Neuman, M.A., H.L.D., rightly observes:

In the Abraham Covenant, the promise of the land follows closely upon the choice of Abraham’s descendants as “a blessing to all the families of the earth.’ The possession of the Promised Land was not merely a national goal . . . (Abraham A. Neuman, “Judaism,” The Great Religions of the Modern World, edited by Edward J. Jurji, p. 225) The promised Seed of the Woman becomes the promised Seed of Abraham that He may also become the promised Seed of King David; hence it is true that the Promised Land was not merely a national goal; it was also a Messianic goal toward which God worked in bringing Israel out of Egypt and towards which He pressed with persistence not allowing the failure of man, localized in particular time and circumstance, to thwart His loving kindness towards Mankind in general. Let me now invite your careful attention to what may prove to be new light upon the socalled forty years wilderness wanderings and which may present this whole scene and circumstance in an entirely new perspective to you. As I view it, I see the human actors in this sad drama grouped into three classes – the murmurers, the youth, and the toddlers. Let us observe God’s glorious character of faithfulness as we see Him pruning, pasturing, and persisting.

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As you will recall, the generation of Israel that the Eternal brought out of Egypt, becoming discouraged and dismayed in the wilderness, began to doubt God and to murmur against Him. They cried – “Would that we had died in the land of Egypt! Or, would we had died in this wilderness! And wherefore doth the Eternal bring us into this land, to fall by the sword? Our wives and our little ones will be prey; were it not better for us to return unto Egypt?” (Numbers 14:2b-3) What is God’s reaction to this deplorable attitude? Instead of turning His back upon His faithless nation and abandoning nationally a people whose doubt so definitely disqualified them, He remains faithful to them, faithful to them as a nation, but proceeds to prune out the dead wood within that nation in a constructive and instructive manner. Did these murmurers prefer to die in the wilderness rather than enter the Promised Land? Very well, their expressed wish is granted. God declares: “But as for you, your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness.” (Numbers 14:32) You will readily admit, my friends, that their attitude of doubt in God’s person, God’s Power, and God’s Purpose was too rotten a vehicle to stand the weight of so lofty and so glorious a Divine objective as that disclosed in the Edenic-Abrahamic-Davidic Covenant. This attitude had to be pruned out of Israel. As another has aptly remarked: “It took only forty hours to get Israel out of Egypt; but it took forty years to get Egypt out of Israel.” Now, what of the second group, the Youth. Let me refer you to the Hebrew text of Numbers, chapter fourteen, verse thirty-three:

... ‫ובניכם יהיו רעים במדבר ארבעימ שנה‬ Now I am aware that this has been translated “and your children shall be wanderers in the wilderness forty years . . .” but I suggest a more accurate translation would read – “sons” rather than “children.”

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The word ‫ בניכם‬means “your sons” and is derived from the root ‫ בנה‬meaning “to build” and suggests a group of beings built or developed into a higher sense of understanding than mere “children.” These were capable of that spiritual instruction now rendered so dramatically necessary through the dismal failure of the adult murmurers. Moreover, these ‫בנים‬, “sons,” were not consigned by God to become aimless drifters, as the English word “wanderers” suggests. On the contrary, the Hebrew word is a very arresting and eloquent one. It is ‫רעים‬, the very word employed in the ever-blessed Psalm of the Divine Shepherd (Psalm 23) ‫“ – יהוה רעי‬The Eternal is my Shepherd.” So, in Numbers, the sons are not to be “wanderers,” but ‫רעים‬, “shepherds” in the wilderness, undoubtedly moving from pasture to pasture under the Providence of God and not as desert outcasts. And the third group, the “little ones”? This word comes from the Hebrew root ‫טפף‬ meaning to walk with a mincing, or tripping gait (e.g. Isaiah 3:16). In nounal form the word implies “toddlers.” Little toddlers! But, did not the murmurers make these very “toddlers” – these little toddlers – the excuse behind which to conceal their unbelief? They certainly did! Very well, God declares: “But your little ones, that ye said would be prey, them will I bring in, and they shall know the land which ye have rejected.” (Numbers 14:31) How eloquent! So we see the faithful God in wisdom pruning out thew murmurers, cutting away the dead wood. Again we see the faithful God in loving care and kindness pasturing the youth during the forty years pruning process.

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Finally, we see the faithful God eternally true to His promise, persisting with the nation as such, carefully raising the little “toddlers” with the youth to form the new generation of Israel strong and ready to enter and to possess the Promised Land. This, my friends, is the Eternal God Who invites your confidence and trust, the same Blessed Being, not ‫ יחד‬but ‫ אחד‬and Who, revealed through incarnation in the Person of His Messiah, brought the hope of Redemption to Jew and to Gentile, and Who promises Regeneration through His Holy Spirit to all who will trust in Him and in the Revelation of that Atonement, that Redemption through Messiah May we say ‫אבטח בו‬, “I will trust in Him.”

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The Silver Trumpets MY DEAR FRIENDS, some time ago I came across a little box I had completely

forgotten, tucked away among some articles I seldom used. It was only a small box and its contents had entirely escaped my memory. The box rattled when I shook it and, upon opening it, there lay before me a most inviting and colorful seed. Now, it has been my privilege to journey into many parts of the world and here, before me, in this little box, reposed this little seed which I had brought back with me from . . . well! From where? Who knew? I had forgotten. I knew however, that it was a potential pleaser otherwise I would not have acquired and preserved it. So it immediately assumed a character of allurement and mystery which captured my attention and sent me speculating. I was unable to identify either seed or circumstance. Was it the seed of a tree or plant? Did it hold out a promise of floral fragrance and beauty? Or did it contain within itself some sapid fruit to tantalize the taste buds of the tongue? Obviously, the way to find out was to plant the seed. Roots would strike downwards into the earth and green shoots would sprout upwards into vision and manifestation. And so, my friends, that is exactly what I did and I wasn’t disappointed, I can assure you. Nor will you be disappointed when, right now, I take a seed out of the Hebrew alphabet and plant it in the warm receptive soil of your creative minds. It matters not that you may be unable to identify the seed; it is the fruit that matters, and I can promise you full ability to taste and to delight in it. Of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet we select – to form our seed – the eighth, the eighteenth, and the twentieth, known respectively as ‫ צדי‬, ‫ חית‬and ‫ריש‬. Conjoined, these three Hebrew consonants form a seed of great antiquity, interest, and potential. Already we see its root forming and probing deep into the fascinating land of human meaning and already its green sprouts are unfolding into the clear air of human understanding. We shall call the root ‫ ;חצר‬but what are we to understand by it? Well, from its root in the soil of meaning, our Hebrew seed is forcing skywards no less that three ideological green sprouts all claiming equal place in the air of understanding.

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At first these three notions seem so unrelated that we may be tempted to wonder if they really do sprout from the same seed; but it is this apparent dissimilarity that will allure us to watch the development of these three ideas as they blossom out into flower and into fruit before the eyes of our comprehension. Let me describe, with some care, these three apparently dissimilar concepts. First, from this seed we gain the idea of an enclosure, a courtyard, and area, a community. The second (and be prepared for a surprise) implies being green – yes, indeed, just like the green sprout itself. The third abstraction conveys the impression of being present – present, as at some meeting or convocation. A community; the state of being green; the condition of being present. Since these all come from the one seed, they surely are related. But how? Perhaps we shall need silver trumpets to reveal this relationship to us! Oh, I am quite serious about the silver trumpet. Moreover, we read about them in the very book we are together currently exploring – the fourth book of Moses known as Numbers. In the tenth chapter, the Eternal God commands His servant Moses, saying:

... ‫עשה לך שתי חצוצרת כסף‬ “Make thee two trumpets of silver . . .” (verse 2) Now, that Hebrew word ‫חצוצרת‬, translated “trumpets,” is a very interesting word; indeed, it comes from the very seed we planted, and is what is known as an onomatopoetic word. Yes, that is a long word, I admit, but all it implies is that some words are formed by imitating the sound associated with the thing designated. In short, some words sound like what they signify. For example, the English word “cuckoo” is an onomatopoetic word. So the Hebrew word ‫ חצוצרת‬seeks to imitate, by reduplication of sound the broken sounds of the trumpet. And ‫ חצוצרת‬comes from our root ‫ חצר‬and when we turn to the book of Numbers we begin our interesting process of discovering the relationship between the three ideas already mentioned. The idea of an enclosure or courtyard or community is captured in Numbers 3:26 where

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the court of the ‫( משכן‬Tabernacle) is described. Now the courtyard of the Tabernacle was essentially a place of meeting between God and man on the basis of a Divinely appointed blood-atonement, the details of which we have already examined in past messages. So, from our seed, comes the word ‫חצר‬, meaning court of the Tabernacle where the community of Israel met with the God of the Tabernacle where the community of Israel met with the God of Israel in covenant relationship ratified by blood atonement. The concept of greenness is revealed in the word ‫חציר‬, translated at Numbers 11:5 by the English word “leek,” but which also refers to any green herbage. The thought suggested by anything green is that it possesses life. The third impression, that of being present, is captured from a blend of the two previous topics (the Arabic shows the thought even more clearly) and all three are fused into one compound conception by the blast of the silver trumpets. In that same tenth chapter of Numbers you will find recorded the various occasions upon which, and the methods by which, the silver trumpets were to be sounded. These details are worthy of our observation because they forma partial base for later revelation and tradition, packed full of interest and import to Israel and to all humanity. First, they were to be ‫למקרא העדה‬, “for the calling of the congregation” (10:2) to assemble themselves ‫אל־פתח־אהל מועד‬, “at the door of the tent of meeting”, (10:3) that is, the entrance to the Tabernacle, the ‫משכן‬. It is impossible to appreciate the significance of this assembly without grasping the key to its inner meaning as supplied to us in Exodus, chapter 29, and verses 42-46. It was a meeting of God Himself with His own redeemed people for communion and for fellowship, a happy state made possible by the provided blood of atonement, the fact of which would itself be patent to all the congregation by virtue of the copper altar right at the very entrance of the Tabernacle to which the silver trumpets summoned them. In passing, it is interesting to note that silver is itself employed in the Scriptures as a symbol of atonement. Again, a certain use of the silver trumpet summoned ‫הנשיאים ראשי אלפי ישראל‬, “the princes, the heads of the thousands of Israel.” It is suggested that only one trumpet was used for this summons, whereas both were used for other occasions. (Numbers 10:4)

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Perhaps the most spectacular incident associated with the silver trumpets was for

‫למסע את־המחנות‬, “causing the camps to set forward” (10:2). A very ancient tradition – and, of course, it is only tradition – describes the event in these mystic words:

Whenever God wants Israel to break up camp and move on, He would send on from its place over the Ark the cloud in which beamed the two sacred letters Yod and He in the direction in which Israel was to march, and the four strips of cloud over the standards would follow. As soon as the priests saw these clouds in motion, they blew the trumpets as a signal for starting, and the winds thereupon from all sides breathed myrrh and frankincense. The silver trumpets were also used to sound an alarm, not only ‫ למסעיהם‬, “for their journeys” (10:6), but also when they went to war in their land (10:9) to invoke the salvation of the Eternal. Moreover, the priestly blowing of the silver trumpets was to be ‫לחקת עולם‬, “for a statute for ever” (10:8) The injunctions in Numbers conclude very touchingly with the announcement that the silver trumpets were to be ‫לזכרון לפני אלהיכם‬, “for a memorial before your God [s]” (10:10), and were to be employed in times of gladness, at assemblies, at new moons, and at the sacrifices of the burnt-offerings and the peace-offerings. As we unify our three ideas of community, greenness, and presence, we remind ourselves that the resurrection and the Presence of Messiah, alike in Holy Scripture and in human tradition, are associated with the trumpets. May each ‫הצצרה‬, therefore, call to our minds the final ingathering of the exiles in gladness as a redeemed community, in the greenness of a national resurrection and an individual regeneration with the precious promise of resurrection unto life eternal forever in the Presence of God through the blood-atonement of that same Messiah Whose angels shall make a great sound of a trumpet at His return in power and great glory. (Matthew 24:30, 31)

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The Red Heifer MY DEAR FRIENDS, during one of the many Bible Study Classes it has been my

privilege to conduct, I had occasion to open my Hebrew Bible. My action was very closely observed by one of my very dear English-speaking Gentile friends who happened to be present at the meeting. With eyebrows raised and eyes opened wide in astonishment he exclaimed, “Why, do you read back to front!” I paused, smiled, and surveyed my patient kindly. Oh yes! I said “patient” deliberately. You see, his remark had revealed the presence of an ILLUSION – fortunately, not a dangerous one – and had placed him in the position of a patient upon whom I had immediately to perform the psycho-surgical operation of removing that illusion. Now, my friends, the removal of an illusion can be exceedingly painful, especially if the illusion is a cherished one. Where the surgery is physical there are usually present two helpful factors: the first of which is that the patient himself desires the removal of the element discovered to be discordant to his physical welfare, and the second of which is that the surgeon normally has at his disposal some form of anaesthetic to render his patient insensible to the pain of removal. However, where the surgery is physical these two desirable features are not always present. The patient is frequently reluctant to part with his illusion; indeed, sometimes clings to it most tenaciously, and occasionally even defends it vehemently. Likewise, the surgeon may lack that sweet anaesthetic which – to borrow Shakespeare’s phrase – can best be described as “the milk of human kindness.” Fortunately, upon the occasion to which I refer, there were no adverse features. The “patient” had no desire to harbor an illusion; the “surgeon” possessed the requisite Shakesperian “psycho-lactic” qualities towards his patient; and the illusion itself was not malignant. Very gently, I pointed out that the Hebrew language was related to an Eastern Semitic group stemming back into antiquity and had flowing white whiskers on it when the English language was only toddling about in diapers! Indeed, you may be interested to know, it is recorded that King James IV of Scotland, during the fifteenth century of the Common Era, in an endeavour to discover the parent language of the entire human race, confined two infants to the custody of a dumb woman

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– that is, a woman who could not speak – on the island of Inchkeith in complete isolation from all human utterance so that the pristine, the original, language of mankind might have opportunity to burst spontaneously from the lips of the infants as they grew up. Record has it that the experiment was successful and that these infants spoke pure Hebrew! Even if we take that legend cum grando salis – and I think we should – it is true that in 1642 C.E. one among the top-ranking graduates of Harvard University presented an admirable thesis entitled Hebrea est Linguarum Mater (Hebrew is the Mother of Languages), and very old tradition affirms that Hebrew was the medium of converse between Adam and Eve and God Himself in the Garden of Eden (Genesis Rabba 18,6 and 31,8). Now, to return to my beloved Gentile friend, my patient, he had to learn that if any language was “back to front” it was his own English language and certainly not the language of the Hebrew Scriptures! He laughingly shifted his thinking into reverse gear and went forward! My friends, all this has not been “much to do about nothing” I assure you. I suggest that many of us need to shift some of our thinking into reverse gear in order to go forward into the truth. My Gentile friend was suffering from an illusion regarding the Hebrew language; I am also convinced there are many under an illusion regarding the Hebrew Scriptures to which I had turned when my friend ejaculated the comment calling for “psycho-surgery.” I regard as a major illusion that view of the Hebrew Scriptures more technically known as the “historico-critical” view, the ultimate effect of which is to drain from these Holy Writings their content of Divine inspiration and authority and revelation. A concomitant illusion, I am convinced, is the evolutionary concept of man, married to the uniformitarian concept of creation. It seems that only the Divine Surgeon is qualified fully to remove our human illusions and to liberate us into spiritual health and life. Life – and its associated idea, death – are surely words packed with mystery; and indeed I think the word “mystery” would be a suitable synonym for both life and death.

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Physical death is a grim and grisly fact and it would be a delusion to deny its existence, as I think some try to do; it is therefore, folly to ignore the Scripture revelation that death is a by-product of sin and also a sure symptom associated with that more terrible condition – spiritual death. It is also folly to ignore or deny the revelation of our Jewish Scriptures popularly known as “the Fall of Man,” by which death – tragic evidence of the Fall – attaches to all mankind down the ages. The transmission of physical disease from one person to another is surely a sufficient illustration of the Biblical doctrine of the transmission of the effects of the Fall of Adam HaRishon – the First Adam – upon this posterity. The bias of human nature towards evil and the universal diffusion of death constitute corroborative evidence of the Biblical doctrine of death as a Divine consequence and condemnation of hereditary sinfulness in man. In order to alert us to these dark facts of life and death and, from them, to draw us to the supreme revelation of the Divine redemption, God instituted remarkable symbolical rites associated with both life and death to indicate that all involving the one or the other implied a defilement requiring purification. Where human life was concerned the mother, at childbirth, was regarded as Levitically unclean for forty days in the case of a son, and eighty days in the case of a daughter. Where human death was involved God prescribed the unique institution described in the nineteenth chapter of Numbers, and known as the ‫פרה אדמה‬, the RED HEIFER. Physical death, viewed as the fruit and symbol of spiritual death – the ultimate penalty for sin – was in the highest degree contaminating, and defiled all proximate persons or things; even a bone or a grave would cause defilement; indeed, adding human tradition to Holy Scripture, our rabbis taught that a dead body, however deeply buried, communicated defilement right up to the surface of the earth unless vaulted or enclosed. Our Mishnah declares that “there were courtyards in Jerusalem built over the [solid] rock, and beneath them the rock was hollowed for fear of any grave down in the depths; and they used to bring women while they were pregnant and there they bore their children and reared them.” (Parah 3:2) Having removed, by the Levitical law, the illusion that death was a natural feature of human experience, the Divine Remover of Illusions then pointed to the symbolic

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representation of atonement and purification from sin and its penalty. A faultless, blemishless, red heifer “upon which never came yoke” was slain as a sin offering (‫ )חטאת‬outside the camp; its blood was sprinkled seven times – not on the Levitical altar, mark you, but towards the sanctuary. Then the red heifer was entirely burnt, along with cedarwood, hyssop, and ‫“( שני תולעת‬living” or running water) and the Levitically defiled person was ceremonially purified by being sprinkled with this mixture on the third and seventh day following his defilement. My friends, what are we to understand by this Divine symbolism of the Red Heifer, the

‫?פרה אדמה‬ The fact that it was a ‫פרה‬, a female, all other sin-offerings being males, indicates that the efficacy of the sacrifice symbolized extends to the very womb of life itself (cf. Genesis 3:20), whilst the “scarlet” is emblematic of life as an issue of redemption. Durability and purification are symbolized by the cedarwood and the hyssop. But the feature of paramount symbolic significance is the location of the sacrifice “outside the camp.” This serves to impress us all with the fact that the actual redemption from sin and its penalty and defilement lies outside the Mosaic Law and the Levitical economy. Where, then, are we to look?

Tradition says that from Moses to destruction of the Second Temple, nine red heifers were furnished and that Messiah will furnish the tenth! (Shu‘aib, Hukkat, 88c) I prefer the fuller truth: not that Messiah will furnish the red heifer, but that He Himself was all that the red heifer symbolized. As the writer of ‫אגרת העברים‬, the Epistle to the Hebrews, declares: “If the blood of bulls and goats, and that ashes of an heifer sprinkled the defiled, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Messiah, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself spotless to God, purify your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” (Hebrews 9:13, 14) What humanity forfeited through ‫( אדם הראשון‬the First Adam) can be gloriously regained through the sacrifice of ‫אדם האחרון‬, the Last Adam – the Messiah of Israel and Saviour of the World.

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Deaths That Declare MY DEAR FRIENDS, there is a Yiddish proverb which declares: “The Angel of Death always

finds an excuse.” (I. Bernstein, Judische Sprichworter und Redensarten, Warsaw, 1908) Now, up to the time of preparing this message I have had no personal opportunity of testing either the validity of the proverb or the eloquence of the Angel. With regard to three particular deaths, however, I am persuaded there is much eloquence. Yet the eloquence I discovered in these three deaths is not in or from the Angel but in or from the Death itself. Let me tell you about these three deaths. Our very much neglected Jewish prophet ‫( מיכה‬Micah), who prophesied somewhere about the eighth century before the Common Era, lent his mouth to the Eternal God Who, through that dedicated organ, declared of Israel: “For I brought thee up our of the land of Egypt, and redeemed thee out of the house of bondage, and I sent before thee Moses, Aaron, and Miriam.” (Micah 6:4) Let us look at these three characters whose deaths, in my judgement, are as eloquent as their lives. The fact that God said: ‫ואשלח לפניך את־משה אהרן ומרים‬, “I sent before thee Moses, Aaron, and Miriam,” places these three figures before us in great prominence and importance, not only because of their Divine calling, nor even because of their momentous movements, but also because of their respective functions and the lessons to be drawn from them. I begin with ‫( מרים‬Miriam) not because it is “ladies before gentlemen” but because Miriam was the eldest of that sacred trio. She is mentioned by name at least fourteen times in the Tenach (“Old” Testament), and the first Biblical occasion upon which her actual name appears also fixes, with Divine authority, the office or function that forever attaches to her. Here is the scripture which you will read at Exodus, chapter fifteen, and verse twenty:

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... ‫מרים הנביאה אחות אהרן‬ “And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron. . .” Miriam, the Prophetess! So, in function she belonged to the prophetic office; in family she was the sister of Aaron and Moses. It is in the capacity of the sister of Moses that she is first introduced to us in Scripture. When the evil decree of the Pharaoh of Egypt had gone forth ordering the destruction of all the male Hebrew children, the infant Moses had been placed in a cradle in the Nile in hope of his preservation. Miriam, his sister, probably quite a young girl at the time, watched over his safety from the river bank. When the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe in the river, the child Moses was found and passed into the care and custody of Pharaoh’s daughter to fulfill his divine destiny. It was then that Miriam offered to fetch a Hebrew woman to nurse the child. She called the mother that bore them both and Moses was cradled in the maternal arms of ‫( יוכבד‬Jochebed). The name ‫ יוכבד‬implies “the glory of God” and truly God was to be abundantly glorified by the infant in her arms, and it was Miriam, the prophetess, who had acted as God’s instrument in this most fruitful and fateful preservation. Miriam’s prophetic gift, Divine calling, and leadership is fully acknowledged by our Jewish tradition which bestows upon her its usual extravagances. Her name, however, would appear to be prophetic of a major incident in her life. Derived from the root ‫מרה‬, the implication is that of strength and power misdirected into bitterness and rebellion and the record of Numbers, chapter twelve, discloses just such a manifestation under the leadership of this great prophetess of Israel. We read: “And Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married.” (Numbers 12:1) Miriam’s bitterness against Zipporah was either the excuse or the reason for causing her to press Aaron into partnership with her in rebellion against Moses. The Eternal God acts instantly by summoning Miriam and Aaron before the sacred Tent of Meeting and administering to them a stern rebuke. However, Miriam, as the chief offender, receives the severe punishment of being smitten with leprosy, itself not only a loathsome disease but also a Divine symbol of the living death of sin – a symbol which the Eternal had used upon the hand of His servant Moses in the contest with the Pharaoh of Egypt.

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Moses prays for Miriam’s healing and his prayer is heard, but not before Miriam and the whole camp is arrested in journey seven days. This is the last recorded public event in Miriam’s life. We next read of her death at Kadesh outside the Promised Land. Our Jewish tradition has a quaint legend which says that beside the three Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, only Moses, Aaron and Miriam breathed their last through the kiss of the Shechinah and not through the Angel of Death; moreover these six, together with Benjamin, are the only ones whose corpses are without decay and incorruptible! Remember, I said this was merely legend! Now, what of Aaron? His name, according to Fuerst, means the “enlightened” one. He was three years older than his brother Moses, and in all probability several years younger than his sister Miriam. (Exodus 2:4; 7:7) We receive our first introduction to Aaron in Exodus, chapter four, upon the occasion of Moses reluctance to be the spokesman for God before Pharaoh. We read that: “. . . the anger of the Eternal was kindled against Moses, and He said: ‘Is there not Aaron thy brother the Levite? I know that he can speak well.’” (verse 14) Accordingly, Aaron is appointed by God to be the very “mouth” of Moses (Exodus 4:16) and he becomes the actual instrument by which most of the miracles in and upon Egypt are wrought. Aaron’s prominence in the sad incident of the Golden Calf is too familiar a theme to bear enlargement here. The people cried to him:

... ‫קום עשה־לנו אלהים אשר ילכו לפנינו‬ “Up! Make us gods who shall go before us. . .” (Exodus 32:1) Aaron, collecting the golden articles brought him, fashioned a golden calf, and the people cried:

... ‫אלה אלהים ישראל‬ “These are thy gods, O Israel. . .”

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The ensuing attitude and acts of the returning Moses assume immense proportions as he institutes a process which brings retribution on the offenders and the death of three thousand of them as he intercedes successfully with God for the entire people, and as he also prevails on behalf of Aaron, his offending brother (Exodus 32). The amazing grace of God is indicated by the fact that Aaron’s sad lapse does not debar him from being anointed by Divine command as Israel’s first High Priest (Exodus 19 with Leviticus 8). Henceforth we see Aaron continually in his sacerdotal dignity until the day of his death at the age of one hundred and twenty three years (Numbers 33:39). He died on the top of Mount Hor (Numbers 20) for the Eternal had said: “Aaron shall be gathered unto his people; for he shall not enter into the land which I have given unto the children of Israel, because ye rebelled against My word at the waters of Meribah.” (Numbers 20:24) So Miriam, representative of the prophetic office, and Aaron, representative of the priestly office, were both denied entrance to the Land of Promise. What of Moses, representative of the Law, the Torah? Well, the Babylonian Amora, Hamnuna Zuti (4th Century C.E.), in the Talmud, declares: “Where is the Torah and where the commandment that will shield us from death and judgement!” (Berakot 31a) and the Palestinian Amora, Samuel ben Nahman (3rd Century C.E.), observes: “One man [Moses] saved sixty myriads at the time of the Golden Calf, yet sixty myraids could not save him! (i.e. from death) (Deuteronomy Rabbah 7:10) What, then, do these three deaths declare? That neither the priesthood, the prophetic office nor the Law can prevail to bring us into the spiritual promised land of redemption and reconciliation to God. Our Hebrew Bible is divided into three sections known respectively as the Law, the prophets, and the Writings. If we were to personify these three divisions we may say that the heads of all three are turned expectantly in the one direction – towards the Promised One. The One Whom Moses declares to be a Prophet like unto himself (Deuteronomy 18); the One Whom God has declared to be a priest for ever after the priestly order – not of Aaron and the Levitical order – but of Melchisedek; the One Who came not to destroy but to fulfill the Law. The One Who gathers into His Own Peerless Being the legal

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Office, the Prophetic Office, and the Priestly Office and – adding to these the great function of Redemption – has by His atoning death abolished death for ever! Moses, representative of the Law, alike with Miriam and Aaron, died, ‫– חוץ הארץ‬ outside the Promised Land. But the next Biblical view we have of Moses shows him ‫בארץ‬ – inside the Promised Land (Matthew 17) standing beside the Great Joshua, the MessiahRedeemer, Who is able to lead us all into the spiritual Promised Land of milk and honey. As Joshua ben Levi declares: “In the messianic future there will be no death.” (Genesis Rabba 26:2 on Isaiah 25:8) Truly, now that the Great Atonement has been accomplished, God’s time carries death forward but to kill it eternally!

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Snakes in the Wilderness WHAT UNEXPECTED and amazing regions can be traversed by a train of thought when

once it is set going! Moreover, the strangest things can touch it off. Let me tell you how a piece of pie projected me into the Wilderness of Sinai and filled my mind with snakes and Hasidism! You may not see the link between Hasidism and snakes; nor how a piece of pie could open the throttle of a thought-train and speed it from twenty centuries this side of the Common Era back to nearly twenty centuries the other side of the Great Chronological Divide. Yet the process was simple. That pie was being sampled with much manifest relish by a friend of mine that he exclaimed, “Boy! What a pie! It’s out of this world!” By which remark he intended to convey to my understanding the concept either that the pie possessed properties of such superlative quality as to suggest its origin in another world, or else some supernatural aid in its preparation in this world. I was not prepared seriously to entertain either proposition so far as the pie itself was concerned, but I was struck by the phenomenon that a mere pie could be the parent of a paradox so mystic as the blend of two worlds. That began it! My thought-train rocketed from that pie to Hadidic mysticism, and I recalled that one of the fascinating characteristics of that form of Jewish mysticism known as Hasidism was its emphasis upon living joyously in two worlds at one and the same time. The Lithuanian Hasidic rabbi, Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz (1725-1790) said that whoever speaks of worldly matters and religious matters as though they were distinct is a heretic. (Quoted in Tales of the Hasidim, Martin Buber, Schocken Books, 1947-1948, i, 134) Surely by thus uniting together two worlds in one pie, my friend was manifestly outside the scope of the mystic rabbi’s oracle. Now, I am sure you see the resultant connection between pie and mysticism. And the snakes? Well, they come in through the pie via the rabbi. You see, the rabbi’s name ‫( פינחם‬Pinchas) is derived from the Hebrew root ‫ נחם‬which, among other implications, means to hiss like a snake. In this same family is the Hebrew root ‫ נחש‬from which is derived the very Hebrew word for “snake,” namely ‫נחש‬. Also in the same Hebrew family is the Hebrew root ‫ לחש‬which means to whisper, oftimes in the sense of whispering oracles and magic formulas in order to charm snakes. (Psalm 58:5, 6.

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English tr. 58:4, 5) Now the snakes in the Wilderness of Sinai in the days of our great leader Moses were not ordinary snakes by any means; indeed, they possessed the stamp of the supernatural, and one in particular possessed the stamp of the oracular. We read about them in that fourth book of Moses known in English as Numbers. The people of Israel enroute to the Promised Land under Moses became impatient of the wilderness way (21:4) and, detesting the “bread from heaven” ‫לחם מן־השמים‬, (Exodus 16:4), which the Eternal had miraculously supplied for their sustenance, began to speak against God and against Moses (Numbers 21:5) and also against the Divine supply, which they described as

‫קלקל‬, meaning “insignificant” or “meagre.” The manifestation of such and adverse attitude on the part of a generation entrusted with a Divine mission involving the welfare of the entire human race simply could not pass without Divine correction, and so we read that the Eternal sent among the offenders

‫נחשים שריפם‬, “fiery serpents” (21:6), the incursions of which wrung from the lips of the people the acknowledgement that they had sinned against God and against His Personal Representative, Moses. Jewish non-Biblical legend is not lacking in accurate assessment of the enormity of Israel’s offence, and even tough expressed in the usual extravagance is of sufficient interest to spread before you. A voice, it is recorded, sounded from the heavens and, becoming audible upon earth, made this announcement:

. . . In the beginning of things I cursed the serpent with the words, ‘Dust shalt thou eat,’ yet it complained not of its food. But ye, My people that I have led out of Egypt, for whom I caused manna to rain down from Heaven, . . . ye do murmur against Me on account of manna, . . . Let now the serpents come, that complained not, . . . and let them bite those who murmur. . . (Targum Yerushalmi Num. 21:6)

The serpent, which was the first creature to slander its Maker and was therefore punished, shall now punish this people, which, not profiting by the serpent’s punishment, blasphemes its Creator by declaring that the heavenly food that He sends to them would finally bring them death. (Bmidbar Rabba 19:22 etc.)

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The Book of Numbers records the express request of the now repentant multitude that Moses intercede for them, and so Moses assumes his role of Mediator and Intercessor between God and the people, and in response to the importunity of Moses the Eternal instructs him in these words:

‫ עשה לך שרף ושים אתו על־נם וחיה כל־חנשון‬. ... ‫ ויעש משה נחש נחשית‬:‫וראה אתו וחי‬ “Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole; and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he seeth it, shall live! And Moses made a serpent of copper. . .” (Numbers 21:8, 9a) Our rabbis of blessed memory have not failed to recognize the high symbolic eloquence of the Serpent lifted up for Israel’s gaze at the very scene of his sin! Moreover, they are careful to deny a mere magical cure for snake-bite, for we read in the Mishnah:

But could the serpent [on the pole] slay or the serpent keep alive! – it is rather, to teach thee that such time as the Israelites directed their thoughts on high and kept their hearts in subjection to their Father in heaven, they were healed; otherwise [if they gave no thought to God] they pined away. (Rosh HaShanah 3.8; and see also the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia Vol. 2. P. 508). Moses made the serpent of copper, because in the Hebrew ‫ נחש‬signifies snake and

‫ נחשת‬copper; therefore he, Moses, used a substance in making the serpent that had a name similar in sound to the name of that which he fashioned from it. (See Yerushalmi Rosh HaShana 3,59a) This copper serpent in the wilderness became known as the ‫( נחשתן‬II Kings18:4) a word produced from the thought-link between ‫נחש‬, “serpent,” and ‫נחשת‬, “copper.” The Talmudical writers, in correctly recognizing the serpent as the symbol of sin, justify their conviction in this regard by reference to the awful incident in Eden as recorded in Genesis, chapter three. Copper is symbolically associated with atonement, and it is worthy of the most careful reflection that both the “bread from Heaven” and the “serpent in the wilderness” are linked together in the New Covenant. Listen to these two remarkable quotations:

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“And just as Moses in the wilderness lifted up the serpent on the pole, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that every one who trusts in Him may have eternal life.” (Yochanan – John – chapter 3:14,15) “I solemnly say to you, whosoever believes in me possesses eternal life. I am the bread that gives life. Your forefathers in the wilderness ate the manna, and yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down out of heaven, so that anyone may eat of it and never die. I am this living bread that has come down out of heaven. If anyone eats this bread, he will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my own flesh.” (Yochanan – John – chapter 6:47-51) These two quotations are more arresting when is known that they came from the lips of One Who claimed emphatically to be the God-promised, Righteous Messiah. A puzzled woman once said to Him, “I know that Messiah is coming; when he comes, he will show us all things.” The reply that this woman received is adequate commentary, “I, the very one who is talking to you, am He!” (Yochanan 4:25,26) If His claim is valid – and I do not hesitate to confess that I believe it to be so – then how impressive is Rashi’s declaration: “So too, does the death of the righteous effect atonement!” (Rashi’s commentary on Bemidbar – Numbers) One final observation. Although the Aaronic priesthood and all it implied were of full Divine authority, yet their entire ministration brought no full nor final atonement. But all that is symbolized in Nehushtan Bemidbar (the Serpent in the wilderness) is quite otherwise. It provided a saving healing for Israel which was entirely dissociated from the Mishkan (the Tabernacle) and its Aaronic priestly mediatorial service. The mere look of faith towards the serpent on the pole brought Divine forgiveness, healing and life. Our prophet ‫( ישעיהו‬Isaiah) speaks of the “Righteous One” in the following terms:

‫ויהוה הפגיע בו‬ :‫את עון כלנו‬ “And the Eternal hath made to light on him The iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6) The sheer force of the Hebrew text of Isaiah’s fifty-third chapter is so overwhelming that evasion’s every effort is rendered futile and the following modern Rabbinic confession is compelled:

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It is now frankly acknowledged that he was the victim who bore the dire penalties which the iniquities of others have incurred. May we soften the hardened arteries of pyrrhonism with the life-flow of faith; then shall we see the Manna, the Nehushtan Bemidbar, and Israel’s Righteous One become ‫( אחד‬one) in the Divine Revelation of the eternal remedy for the sin-sick soul of Israel and of all mankind.

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The Son of a Bird and the Swallower of a Nation MY DEAR FRIENDS, I want to call your attention to two strange men bearing strange

names, bent upon strange stratagems, and upon whom came strange experiences. They lived thousands of years ago, yet the issues of their transactions have import and information for our very own days. Indeed, an ancient utterance of one of them was preserved in the memory of millennia and became embodied in the very first message ever to be sped over the modern telegraph. The words were, “What hath God wrought,” taken from Numbers 23:23. The first of these strange men was a king, the second a prophet, both were Gentiles, and each possessed a sinister appellation. The king was named “the Destroyer” and the prophet “the Swallower of a nation” and, as if seeking light on their strange actions by looking into their ancestry, the king was designated “the son of a bird” and the prophet “the son of a blaze” (from ‫) בער‬. What of the king? Our eyes first behold him as he first beholds Israel for, by Divine revelation, our introduction comes to us in these words:

:‫וירא בלק בן־צפור את כל־אשר־עשה ישראל לאמרי‬ “And Balak the son of Zippor saw all that Israel had done to the Amorites.” (Numbers 22:2) Now the appellation of the king, ‫בלק‬, means “Destroyer” and the ancestry of the king,

‫צפור‬, means “a little bird” and, as is so often the case in Scripture, this nomenclature was good commentary upon the historic monarch who possessed it. The eyes of ‫בלק‬, the “Destroyer,” were full of intent to destroy the people of Israel and this “son of a bird” was set upon the method of destruction – the invocation of the supernatural! Supernatural powers are ascribed to birds in ancient Jewish folklore. Yadu‘a (‫ )ידוע‬was the name given to one such magical bird, the tongue of which Balak is supposed – by tradition, of course – to have inserted in an occult bird constructed of gold, with mouth of

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silver and wings of bronze for purposes of divination and supernatural oracular responses. This idolatrous Moabite monarch, impressed by Israel’s victories over Sihon, king of the Amorites, and Og, king of Bashan, was filled with dread when he saw the children of Israel spread our in the plains of Moab opposite Jericho on the east side of the river Jordan (Numbers 22:1-3). Securing as natural allies the nearby Midianites, this “son of a bird,” sought, as supernatural ally, the strange but most interesting figure of “the son of a blaze.” Again, Scripture nomenclature is apt in introducing us to ‫ בלעם בן־בעור‬for Balaam, the son of Beor, means “the swallower of a nation,” “the son of a blaze.” (So Gesenius; cf. Feurst) You will find the Biblical record of these strange transactions well worth your careful examination and I therefore commend to you the pertinent account found in Moses’ fourth book known as Bemidbar or Numbers, chapters twenty-two through twenty-four, and cast within the history of the children of Israel extending from their second arrival at Kadesh to their encampment in Moab’s plains. As I said, Balaam was a Gentile, an Aramean (Numbers 23:7), and seems to have lived at Pethor, a city of Mesopotamia, by the river Euphrates (Deuteronomy 23:4) and through him our minds are alerted to two exceedingly arresting facts. Although a Gentile dwelling among heathen people, Balaam possessed an adequate knowledge of the one true God of the Universe, for he utters the sacred tetragrammaton

‫ יהוה‬which is commonly pronounced in these days “Yehovah,” and expects and receives communication from Him. I confess I am increasingly dissatisfied with the modern evolutionary concept that man began as a speck and evolved into a sage, and my dissatisfaction is the more manifest when such evolutionary extravagances are applied to man’s pristine knowledge of God. However, that is another subject introduced into my mind by this ancient record of Balaam. Yet it is fortified by the second interesting fact that this “son of a blaze” not only possessed knowledge of the God of Moses Whose fire had been seen in the bush that burned without being consumed (Exodus 3), but was actually regarded as being in such

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relationship with powers, celestial or otherwise, that his blessings or his curses were potent and guaranteed performance. He was, therefore, this Balaam, in some sense a prophet, although the usual Biblical name for “prophet,” ‫נביא‬, is not used of him. The Hebrew word ‫ נביא‬is connected with the thought of bubbling-forth as water bubbles up from a concealed fountain. In this way the prophet of God involuntarily bursts forth with spiritual utterances under the compulsion of the Divine Spirit of God. Purely for your interest I may add that our father Abraham is the first person to whom the title “prophet” (‫ )נביא‬is given (Genesis 20:7). The Scriptures do not entitle Balaam to share with Abraham the title ‫נביא‬, but they do describe him as a ‫קוסם‬, a “diviner” (Joshua 13:22), a vocation and practice expressly denounced by Moses in Deuteronomy 18:14 and placed in strong contrast with a particular ‫נביא‬, “prophet,” whom Moses declares will be raised up by the Eternal God and who will be like unto Moses and whom older Jewish interpretation regards as undoubtedly pertaining to the Messiah Himself. (If you will refer to the eighteenth chapter of Deuteronomy you will find the reference. However, Balaam describes himself in terms consonant with an experience of Divine prophecy (Numbers 24:4, ‫)חזה‬, and our Jewish tradition declares that he gradually developed from an interpreter of dreams to sorcerer and had actually attained the greater dignity of prophet in no way inferior to Moses. Moses was the greatest prophet among the Israelites but Balaam was his peer among the heathen and was indeed, the last of the heathen prophets. Thus declares our human Jewish tradition. Now, back to the play and interplay between the “son of a bird” and the “son of a blaze.” Balak, the “destroyer,” sought to enlist the powers of Balaam, the “swallower,” in order to swallow up the people of Israel within the ravenous mouth of a supernatural curse; for, said Balak to Balaam, “I know that he who thou blessest is blessed and he whom thou cursest is cursed” (Numbers 22:6). How arresting it is to observe that, before yielding to Balak’s request, this strange “son of a blaze” had sufficient light burning in his lamp of spiritual intelligence that he made a reply very difficult to reconcile with modern evolutionary ideas. Here are the words of

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this heathen prophet: “Lodge here this night, and I will bring you back word, as the Eternal (‫[ )יהוה‬and this word is again the sacred tetragrammaton, Jehovah today] may speak unto me. . .” (22:8) Here is a pagan non-Israelite from the land of the Euphrates, taking upon his lips the sacred tetragrammaton – yod, hay, vav, hay – the revered Name of the Eternal God of the Universe; moreover, these details are recorded by Moses, a fact acknowledged in our Talmudic writings which declare that “Moses wrote his book and also the chapter of Balaam” (Baba Bathra 14b). How are we to reconcile this phenomenon with the modern evolutionary hypothesis that Yehovah was a mere tribal “god” of the Hebrews? Clearly, this ancient document points not to evolution but to revelation; for, as we shall see in this and in succeeding messages, the God of the Universe speaks to the seer of Mesopotamia as well as to the prophet of Israel. We read:

:‫ויבא אלהים אל־בלעם ויאמר מי האנשים האלה עמך‬ “And God[s] came to Balaam and said ‘Who are these men with thee?’” (Numbers 22:9) When Balaam confesses to the Eternal the malevolent purpose of the Moabite and Midianite elders, the Eternal forbids Balaam either to go with the conspirators or to curse Israel, for declares God[s], ‫אלהים‬, “they [Israel] are blessed.” (22:12) Of what avail the curses of an unworthy human prophet when the very source of Prophecy, God Himself, had already pledged blessing upon and through the very source of Israel, out father and prophet, Abraham! (Genesis 12) This promise of Divine blessing was passed onto Jacob and Jacob’s seed (Genesis 26:4, Israel’s twelve tribes, with assurance of a glorious redemptive climax in the Person of the Great Messiah-Prophet of Whom Moses spoke. See Moses’ reference to Him in the eighteenth chapter of Devarim, that is, Deuteronomy. Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro expressed this redemptive truth when he said:

The kernel which is sown in earth, must fall to pieces so that the ear of grain may sprout from it. (Tales of the Hasidim, i, 123)

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Words which echo the declaration of the Messiah Himself – and here I quote Him: “I most solemnly say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains a single grain. But if it does die, it yields a great harvest.” I quote from Yochanan, chapter 12, in our own Jewish New Covenant Scriptures. How remarkable that Balaam himself was Divinely impelled to prophesy of Messiah when he uttered the amazing prediction of the “star out of Jacob,” which you will find recorded in the twenty-fourth chapter of Bemidbar, Numbers. Truly that Messianic star has blazed forth its light, glory and hope with a greater brilliance than the “son of a blaze” who saw, prophetically, the rising of that star. And may your eyes, O Israel, discern that same Redemptive Messianic light as it shines forth anew from our Divinely-inspired Holy Scriptures.

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The People That Dwell Alone MY DEAR FRIENDS, Abraham ibn Ezra remarks that the number seven, which plays a

prominent part in Biblical institutions, is enveloped in mystery which only a few can understand. Sometimes this interesting pattern of seven is surface-seen, patent and obvious because of specific mention, such as the seven altars, the seven bullocks, and the seven rams figuring in those two remarkable chapters of Scripture dealing with the equally remarkable personage known as Balaam, the son of Beor. Sometimes, however, this same pattern of seven is not so readily discernible, but, on the contrary, lies buried beneath the surface like some hidden treasure intentionally concealed as a special reward for those whose interest and appreciation merit its unstinted bestowal. Such, for instance, is the seven fold repetition of the phrase that introduces the seven

‫ – משלים‬or parables – of that heathen prophet, Balaam, whose full name and title means “the swallower of a nation, the son of a blaze.” Seven times we read of ‫( בלעם‬Balaam) that “he took up his parable and said” (Numbers 23:7, 18; 24:3, 15, 20, 21, 23). What this Mesopotamian diviner and seer said may have had neither interest nor consequence for us were it not for the singular circumstances and prophetic portent of his utterances. However, just as the sevenfold fact of his parables will disclose itself only to search motivated by interest, so, too, the stupendous verities contained in those parables lie buried to human neglect and indifference, and will only yield their reward to those whose hearts are tuned to learn their secret. The human mind facing the manifold enigmas of human history – and how many there are! – will abdicate the throne of enlightenment if it turns from acceptance of the declaration of Divine revelation to chase the ever-elusive will-of-the-wisp of chameleonic human opinion released on its restless flight by a declaration of independence against Divine enlightenment.

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I have a calm conviction, born of a cold intelligence, that in the Holy Scriptures of both the Tenach and the New Covenant or Testament we have a Divine revelation which it is utter folly and dire loss to ignore. Allow these parables of a Gentile Aramean, non-Israelite – indeed, one possibly hostile to Israel – to serve as an illustration. Consider, first, the singular circumstances of the situation. This Balaam was a most unworthy man. Religion became his business, instead of HIS balm. Of him the New Testament says that he fell in love with the profits of wrongdoing and mercenary motives moved him to madness. His madness consisted in his willingness to explore the possibilities of employing whatever powers he possessed to curse the people of Israel. To pursue the course of a curse on Israel is always madness, whether it be manifested by a Gentile prophet of antiquity or a Gentile pervert of our modern days. The madness lies in the folly of facing against the stream of God’s revealed attitude towards, and intent in, Israel’s twelve tribes, known today, correctly, as the Jewish people. Balaam, because of his move towards folly, was made the subject of special Divine attention. As a man puts a bit in the mouth of a beast and makes it go in what direction he desires, so the Eternal pricked Balaam’s mouth (Tanh. Balak 13) and made his tongue the outlet of matter and material of such import that it challenges the attention and respect of all men everywhere at all times. Balaam’s first parable, found in Numbers 23 and verse 7, propounds a question it would be well if every individual and every nation pondered carefully, even in these present days in which we live. Here is the question: How shall I curse, whom God that not cursed? It had been well for the world in general, and for the pertinent individual in particular, if such anti-Semites as Torquemada, Stalin, and Hitler had heeded such a question. Darkness and devilry may move to curse, but light and love will flow with the tide of

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God’s declared and prophesied beneficent intent towards the through “the dust of Jacob, the stock of Israel” (Numbers 23:10). Balaam’s first parable, forced through his unwilling lips by the power of the Spirit of God, reveals the unique status Divinely bestowed upon the Jewish people as a national entity.

:‫הן־עם לבדד ישכן ובגוים לא יתחשב‬ “Lo, it is a people that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.” (23:9) How significant that the prophet’s words not only declare a Divine decree involving the purpose, preservation and perpetuity of the Jewish nation but, in addition, this Gentile prophet was, himself, an animated parable confirming the very words he was forced to utter. The name Balaam can, in the Hebrew have the meaning “the swallower of a nation” and in his heart there surely could be found the intent of willingness to swallow up Israel in a curse. Yet this Gentile is Divinely constrained, compelled, to bless where he would otherwise curse. Years later, General Joshua, Moses’ successor, declares:

... ‫כה־אמר יהוה אלהי ישראל‬ “Thus saith the Eternal, the God[s] of Israel. . .” (Joshua 24:2) And in using these words, he stands before the people as the mouth-piece of the Eternal, and continues: “Then Balak . . . sent and called Balaam the son of Beor to curse you. But I would not hearken unto Balaam; therefore he even blessed you; so I delivered you out of his hand.” (Joshua 24:9,10) I am reminded of what I believe to be a yet unfulfilled prophecy of Zephaniah regarding our same people of Israel whom God views in position and purpose distinct from other peoples.

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Here is Zephaniah’s prophecy: “ for I will make you a name and a praise among all the peoples of the earth . . .” (Zephaniah 3:20) My friends, anti-Semites are always a menace to their own nations and their own peoples and invariably bring loss and disadvantage even upon others who do not share, or are indifferent to, their venomous views. The ancient anti-Semites, Balak and Balaam, were no exception and the Divine decree goes forth: “An Ammonite or a Moabite shall not enter into the assembly of the Eternal; even to the tenth generation shall none of them enter into the assembly of the Eternal for ever; because they met you not with bread and water in the way, when ye came forth out of Egypt; and because they hired against thee Balaam the son of Beor from Pethor (‫ )פתור‬of Aram-naharaim (‫ארם־‬

‫)נהרים‬, to curse thee. Nevertheless, the Eternal thy God[s] (‫ )יהוה אלהיך‬would not hearken to Balaam; but the Eternal thy God[s] turned the curse into a blessing unto thee, because the Eternal thy God[s] loved thee.” (Deuteronomy 23:4-6; English tr. 23:3-5) We are all familiar with the great new Testament declaration that “God love the world so much that He gave His only Son, so that anyone who trusts in Him may never perish but have eternal life” (Yochanan 3:16); yet, my friends, there is a blatant minority whose actions and attitude towards the Jewish people is such as would consign them to “dwell alone” and not to be “reckoned among the nations” sharing in this Divine love. But, let it be remembered that it was Divine love for Israel that reversed the curse of Balaam. The pristine Divine revelation declares – and here I quote from Deuteronomy, chapter 32: “When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the children of men, He set the borders of the peoples according to the number of the children of Israel. For the portion of the Eternal is His people, Jacob the lot of His inheritance.” (Deuteronomy 32:8,9) It is that same undying Divine love for Israel that has set the Jewish people aside and preserved them from a national assimilation among the Gentile nations, in order that, in

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the end of this present current dispensation, this same Jewish nation and people, this people of Israel, will fulfil its prophetic destiny of being a channel of Divine blessing to those very same Gentile nations. No wonder Balaam concludes his first parable with a desire to be like Israel when he cries: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Let me die the death of the righteous, and let mine end be like his!â&#x20AC;? (Numbers 23:10)

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The Shout of a King MY DEAR FRIENDS, we are going to climb a mountain! I assure you it will be worth the

effort, for the view from the summit will be unparalleled and the prospect will be packed with hope. Our way lies through the wonderful Plains of Moab at the northeast end of the Dead Sea on the east side of the River Jordan. Away over to the right, high above us, we see the range of mountains to which we are going, and at 2,643 feet above the Mediterranean Sea there is a ridge called Nebo, and somewhere on the western projection of that ridge is the location once known as ‫פסגה‬ (Pisgah). It was here, under the impulsion of the Spirit of God, that the heathen prophet Balaam proclaimed his second significant parable, the words of which you will find recorded in Numbers, chapter 23, verses 18 through 24, and which reflect that structure known as Hebrew parallelism and include spiritual verities far too precious for us to miss. Let us look at three of these parallelisms: “God is not a man that he should lie; neither the son of man that he should repent.” (23:19) I am aware, of course, that in the interests of polemics these words have been twisted to imply something entirely foreign to their context and their intent but such chicanery will not mislead the honest mind. Anyway, the implication of the words is securely embedded in the text itself which continues: “Hath He said, and shall He not do it? Or hath He spoken, and shall He not make it good?” Obviously, God’s faithfulness to His promises and pledges is the happy theme of this oracle, for He has pledged blessings upon Israel and He will not reverse His warrant. The second parallelism is sufficiently enigmatic to be challenging: “He hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob; neither hath He seen perverseness in Israel. . .” (23:21)

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The Hebrew words for “iniquity” and “perverseness” are ‫ און‬and ‫ עמל‬respectively. And examination of the total usage of the former word in Scripture leads to the conclusion that the basic meaning is not so much a breach of law as an evil course of conduct damaging to the doer in the sense of bringing him and his works to futility and nothingness. The latter word ‫ עמל‬is a very interesting word and is variously rendered into English as “toil,” “labour,” “trouble,” “weariness,” “sorrow,” “travail,” but all as the fruit and consequence of sin, the entrance of which into the world is Scripturally revealed as being responsible for such travail; hence, the same word is also translated in certain places “iniquity,” “perverseness” and “wickedness.” Here, then, lies the enigma. The people of Israel would themselves be instant to admit that they share to the full with all peoples of the world the moral and spiritual failures and shortcomings common to all humanity. Indeed, the Scripture itself repeatedly points to Israel’s “iniquity” and “perverseness.” How, then, could it be said that a scrutiny of this people encamped before the hostile eyes of enemies as well as the all-seeing eye of the Eternal God would disclose no ground for accusation with regard to “iniquity” or “perverseness”? My friends, the answer to this enigma is in the third parallelism. Here it is:

:‫יהוה אלהיו עמי ותרועת מלך בו‬ “YEHOVAH his God[s] is with him and the shout of a King is in him.” (Numbers 23:21) The very nature of Hebrew parallelism obliges us to unite our thoughts of the King with One bearing the Sacred Name of Deity. This Divine Monarch is, then, not only with Israel, but in Israel’s midst. Moreover, the Hebrew word ‫ תרועה‬comes from the root

‫רוע‬, and means “to shout” either for joy or in the strength of victorious battle. The word first appears, if you would like to know it, at Leviticus 23:24 in connection with the memorial blast of horns for Israel’s holy convocation. At first the presence of the Divine King in the midst of Israel only increases the enigma. The ‫און‬, “iniquity,” and the ‫ עמל‬, “perverseness,” of this people is not only absent to scrutiny, but the One in Whose presence no sin can abide is with and in His people. Wherein lies the answer to this spiritual problem – for it is a problem. Sin challenges the

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very Law that upholds the universe and Law demands judgement else it would not be true and righteous Law. But Love sobs for the Law-breaker, yet must fully acquiesce in Law’s demand else it could not be true and righteous Love. However, when it is realized that both Law and Love are sublimely and essentially united in the One Glorious Godhead the problem of sin is seen to be beyond human resource and becomes one solely for Divine elucidation. It is Divine Love, working through – and not against – Divine Law, that seeks a righteous remedy which will fully vindicate Law, yet also justify, pardon, and redeem the repentant Law-breaker. There is but one answer to the problem, and it is as old as Eden’s fateful garden and as new and invigorating as the shout of the King in the ears of the redeemed. The answer lies in the God-appointed, prophesied atonement of Messiah, Himself the King. In the Scripture under review we are dealing with prophecy, and here is a blessed picture of peace and protection for the people of Israel. Redemption brings peace and the presence of God brings protection. I once looked upon a scarlet rose. It was as scarlet as sin, and I though of the words of the prophet Isaiah:

... ‫אם־יהוה חטאיכם כשנים‬ “Though your sins be as scarlet. . .” (Isaiah 1:18) Then I took a piece of glass, also scarlet in color, as scarlet as the rose itself and I interposed that scarlet glass between the scarlet rose and my gaze and, behold, the rose was white as snow. Try the experiment yourself one day. I thought, then, of the remaining words of that same verse in Isaiah’s first chapter: “Though your sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow. . .” Isaiah encourages us by showing us the PRINCIPLE of the Divinely-provided redemption. Let me give you Rashi’s translation of Moses’ words: “. . . for it is the blood with the life that maketh expiation.”

(Leviticus 17:11)

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Isaiah now steps forward once again to enlighten us by showing us the PERSON of the Divinely-provided Redeemer upon Whom was laid ‫עון כלנו‬, “the iniquity of us all.” This Person is the King-Messiah-Redeemer of Whom Moses and the prophets surely spoke and Whose shed blood has made a full atonement for sin. Divine Law looks with the eye of judgement upon the scarlet of our sins; Divine Love provides the blood of atonement through which Law is vindicated; and both Law and Love are ‫אחד‬, one, because the Divine Law-Giver and the Divine Lover are ‫אחד‬, One. Balaam’s Divinely-opened eyes beheld no ‫ עמל‬in Israel because the ‫ עמל‬pertained to the King Messiah Who was prophesied to bear their iniquities, as it is written in Israel’s Divinely-inspired words:

... ‫מעמל נפשו יראה ישבע‬ Let me give you the full eleventh verse of that fifty-third chapter of Isaiah: “On account of the travail of His soul, He sees, and He is satisfied; in the knowledge of Him, He, the Righteous One, My Servant, shall justify the many, and he shall bear their iniquities.” No wonder neither “iniquities” nor “perverseness” can be seen among the redeemed when the precious blood of atonement has been interposed. No wonder the shout of a King is heard in the midst of a people thus Divinely-redeemed. But even this bliss is only the beginning. Our neglected Prophet Zechariah takes up the cry: “And YEHOVAH shall be King over all the earth; in that day shall YEHOVAH be One and His Name One.” (Zechariah 14:9) May that day speedily dawn when King-Messiah shall see the travail of His soul and be fully satisfied.

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The Goodly Tents of Jacob MY DEAR FRIENDS, there is a very apt observation to be found in our Jewish Midrash.

Let me quote it for you:

Do not underestimate the parable, for it leads to the Torah’s true meaning. A penny wick may help to find a lost pearl. (Canticles Rabbah 1.1.8) Let me give you another quotation about parables, this time from the Bible. Here it is: “The legs hang limp from the lame; so is a parable in the mouth of fools.” This last quotation is from the Book of Proverbs, chapter 26, verse 7. Yes, my friends, it is indeed true that there are pearls in parables and, if their costly treasure be really desired, effort as small and as in expensive as a penny wick is all that is needed in the acquisition. Yet it is equally true that we must check the source of the parable, for the Biblical proverb, whilst commending the parable as an efficient medium of imparting underlying truth, nevertheless, warns that wisdom must govern both its employment and its interpretation; for, just as lame limbs will not support the body in the act of walking, so neither will foolishness support a truth in parabolic presentation. The parables of Balaam, that seedy soothsayer, contains real pearls which a mere penny wick may detect, provided, of course, that that illumination proceed from the Holy Spirit of Truth. Moreover, even though folly could be charged at the door of the presumptuous prophet, yet the legs of his parables do not hang limp, because these parables, the ones he uttered, were supported in veracity by the compulsion of the God of Truth. The folly, in other words, resided in the prophet not in the parables. I think we have already discerned this fact, have we not, in our previous examination of the first two of these oracles. We shall find this same feature in the third one, as we now turn to its record in the twenty-fourth chapter of Numbers. This Balaam, this hireling prophet, employed by the king of Moab to curse Israel, soon found that the Eternal God was in no such disposition. Indeed, the evil prophet’s tongue is turned by the power of God to pronounce blessing, not cursing, upon Jacob’s descendants.

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We read that the Eternal put a word in Balaam’s mouth and that: “. . . the spirit of God came upon him. And he took up his parable, and said: ‘The saying of Balaam the son of Beor, And the saying of the man whose eye is opened; The saying of him who heareth the words of God, Who seeth the vision of the Almighty, Fallen down, yet with opened eyes. . .’” (Numbers 24:2-4) Yes, indeed, Balaam’s eyes were opened. Opened to a full realization and conviction that it “pleased the Eternal to bless Israel” hence, “he went not, as at other times, to meet with enchantments, but he set his face toward the wilderness.” (Numbers 24:1) What a sight must have met his gaze, one that was never to be forgotten. Spread out in orderly array before him was the vast encampment of Israel, delivered by the power of God from the Pharaoh of Egypt and now on the way to the Promised Land of Canaan. The tongue that was hinged to a heart that hated was, nevertheless, seized by the power of the Spirit of God and transformed into an instrument that played a melody of words so sweet to the ear, so comforting to the heart, and priceless as the precious pearl:

... ‫מה־טבו אהליך יעקב משבנתיך ישראל‬ “How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, thy dwellings, O Israel!” (Numbers 24:5) Through the Divinely opened eyes of Balaam the tents of Israel appear as refreshing and as beautiful “as valleys stretched out, as gardens by the river-side; as aloes planted of the Eternal, as cedars beside the waters.” Do we inquire what it was that bestowed upon the otherwise plebian assembly such a pleasing aspect? My friends, it was the floodlight of Divine prophetic illumination. You see, the tents of Israel were no ordinary tents. They were tents that teach, that teach vital spiritual values. Pegged fast into a sin-cursed earth, they were tents supported and upheld by Divine intent!

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The first use, in a prophetic sense, of the Hebrew word for tent, ‫אהל‬, is found in the prophecy of the patriarch Noah, which is where he declares:

... ‫יפת אלהים ליפת וישכן באהלי־שם‬ “God enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem . . .” (Genesis 9:27) I am tempted to dwell upon the whole prophecy of Noah and to enlarge upon its wonderful fulfilment down the long vista of ethnic histories, but this is not the place to indulge in an extended digression, however alluring. Nevertheless, rather than disappoint you on this particular Scripture, I suggest that the Hebrew text offers us three interpretations, all of which possess verity. If this ancient prophecy of Noah indicates that Gentile peoples shall increase so much in excess of the Semitic peoples, particularly Israel, that the former shall dispossess the latter, then history provides a pattern into which such an interpretation fits well. If we assume the prophecy to mean that the Gentiles will dwell with the Semitic races, and particularly with Israel, then again history provides a measure of conformation, but later prophecies supply greater hope and encouragement of complete and most blessed fulfilment. If, however, we follow the commentator Rashi, and assume the subject to be God Himself Who shall cause His Divine Presence to dwell with Israel then, again, we are on sure ground. Viewing Israel as a national entity, God has dwelt in the midst of His tents and, even though because of major provocation’s, the Divine Presence has departed from the nation on certain occasions (e.g. Ezekiel 10:18-22), yet the Divine Promise of the Divine Presence is sure and certain indeed. “God has not disowned His people, on whom He set His heart beforehand” (Romans 11:2). I have chosen that deliberately from the New Testament. Israel’s present reemergence as a national entity is sufficient proof of this fact even if the Scriptures did not expressly declare it. And they most certainly do declare it. I believe that the arising of the Third Commonwealth of Israel, Medinat Yisrael, is a prelude to the return of the Divine Presence. Would you like to search out Zechariah 14

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on this point at your leisure. The international sky will be dark indeed, no doubt, but the Light of the World will break through the gloom. The Sun of righteousness will surely rise with healing in His rays (Malachi 3:20, English tr. 4:2). But let us leave the thought-field in which was pitched the tent of Noah (Genesis 9:20-27), and let us visit another significant tent, even the tent of our father Abraham. We are not the first visitors to Abraham’s tent. The Divine Presence has preceded us! In a chapter full of the deepest mystery, we read of the appearing of ‫“ – שלשה אנשים‬three men” – before the tent of Abraham. In speech which is a most amazing admixture of grammatical plurality and singularity, Abraham prepares a “milch und fleish” – milk and flesh – meal which “they” – his celestial visitors – did certainly eat. Rashi and Sforno are among those of our rabbinic commentators who wisely recognize in this eighteenth chapter of Genesis the Divine Presence manifested in One Whom Sforno calls “the Chief Angel” but Who is also described by the great Tetragrammaton, the Divine Name – Ha Shem – ‫יהוה‬, YEHOVAH. Indeed, Sforno does not hesitate to describe Him as “the Eternal, that is to say, the Chief Angel.” Under the mysterious circumstances embedded in that eighteenth chapter of Genesis, the aged Abraham receives the Divine Promise of the birth of a son by the aged and barren Sarah and so another link in the Messianic chain was Divinely forged when Isaac was born in faithful fulfilment of God’s pledge. It is most fascinating to observe that the Hebrew word for “pledge” is ‫משכון‬, a word closely related to the word ‫ משכן‬employed by Balaam in his parable and translated in English by the word “dwelling.” Here, then, is sufficient clue to the hireling prophet’s inability to curse Israel. Like a shield over Israel’s ‫ משכן‬is God’s ‫משכון‬. The promise and protection of God’s pledge stands always between Israel’s dwelling and those who would unwisely curse him.

:‫מה־טבו אהליך יעלב משכנתיך ישראל‬

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The Eloquence of Graves and Stars MY FRIENDS, the modern Israeli short-story writer, Isaac Shenberg, (born 1905)

challenges our contemplative faculties with these very interesting and perhaps a little provocative words:

There was a vast oppressive silence. . . . Only man speaks, said I to myself. Graves and stars are still. For a short while I sat, awake and not awake, then thought to myself again: Only man is silent; graves and stars speak. (Like a Lengthening Shadow. Under the Fig Tree. 94f.) Now I am going to borrow Mr. Shenberg’s interesting words and demonstrate their accuracy; undoubtedly graves and stars are eloquent. Now, please do not misunderstand me here. When I speak of the eloquence of stars, I pay no homage whatever to the pseudo-science of astrology – an artifice strictly forbidden in our Jewish Holy Scriptures. If you wish to, you may refer to Deuteronomy 18 in this regard. On the contrary, rather do I enter into that true spiritual realm suggested by Moses Ephraim Kuh (1731-1790) when he cries:

We trust a star to guide our way Upon the open sea. Why trust we not the Lord of stars On earth our Guide to be? (Hinterlassene Gedichte, 1792) It is, therefore, to the Lord of stars I turn in this message, and to one star in particular. A star, the brilliancy of which was conjured into our consciousness by that well-known peregrinating paradox whose name was Balaam, the son of Beor. You are, of course, aware of the Biblical account. Hired by the malignity of Moab to curse Israel, Balaam finds himself overpowered by the same Lord of stars and, under Divine compulsion, constrained of the Holt Spirit to utter a prophecy widely acknowledged to be Messianic in character. Here are the words which constitute the meaty part of the fourth of Balaam’s seven parables.

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Listen carefully: “I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not nigh; There shall step forth a star out of Jacob, And a sceptre shall rise out of Israel . . . And, out of Jacob shall one have dominion.” You will find the full record of this wonderful prophecy in the twenty-fourth chapter of the fourth book of Moses, known as Bemidbar and in English as Numbers. In Scripture, a star is the symbol of the splendour of power, particularly power pertaining to Deity. The Hebrew prophet, ‫( עמוס‬Amos), in the fifth chapter of the book bearing his name, refers to the One True God of the Universe as “Him that maketh the Pleiades (‫ )כימה‬and Orion (‫( ”)כסיל‬verse 8) and then Amos reproaches the people of Israel for the sin of idolatry and doing homage to:

:‫ כוכב אלהיכם אשר עשיתם לכם‬. “. . . the star of your gods which ye make to yourselves.” (verse 26) Now with these Biblical thoughts as our background we shall be the better equipped to understand the eloquence of the “star out of Jacob.” What, then, of the sceptre? Well, the sceptre is a well-known symbol of rulership and the Hebrew word so translated and employed in Balaam’s parable is ‫שבט‬. Poetically enough, this Hebrew word ‫ שבט‬first appears in the Tenach, that is, the Old Testament, in the famous Messianic prophecy of the patriarch Jacob. Here are the words:

:‫לא־יסור שבט מיהודה ומחקק מבין רגליו עד כי־יבא שילו ולו יקהת עמים‬

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“The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until Shiloh shall come; and unto him shall be the gathering of the peoples.” (Genesis 49:10) Since this same Holy Spirit of God inspired our father Jacob to utter the Shiloh prophecy also constrained that Gentile soothsayer Balaam to voice the prediction of the “star out of Jacob,” we are sure of a connection between the two prophecies, and there is also a very strong probability that Balaam himself was aware of the former when he uttered the latter. We shall do well, then, to view them in some measure of relationship. The most ancient Jewish tradition is almost unanimous in declaring that the Shiloh of Jacob’s prophecy is none other than the Messiah. A Messianic connotation is either inferred or expressly stated in such ancient Jewish documents as the Septuagint Version of the Bible, the Targums, the Talmud, Bereshit Raba, and the Zohar. Indeed, the Zohar sees Deity in the designation, pointing out that the word ‫שילה‬ (Shiloh), being spelt with both the consonants “yod” and “he,” infer the Holy Supernal Name. In these days – you will be interested to know – when we hear so much about “tranquilizers,” it will come as an interesting surprise to many to learn that the name Shiloh has been translated as “The Tranquilizer”! You will also be interested in two ancient Aramaic paraphrases. Here is the first which I quote from the Targum Jerusalem:

Kings shall not fail from the house of Judah, nor skillful teachers of the Law from his children’s children, until the time that the King Messiah come, and whom the nations shall serve. Now the second quotation, this time from the Targum Onkelos:

One having dominion shall not depart from Judah, nor a scribe from his children’s children forever, until the Messiah come, whose is the kingdom; and him the nations shall obey. Our great Jewish commentator Rashi doesn’t hesitate to declare – “Until Shiloh come, that is King Messiah, whose is the kingdom.” Indeed, to those of us who understand the Hebrew language, our ancients have made a play upon the word Shiloh saying of King Messiah that ‫ – שלו‬that is “to him” – belongs the dominion.

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The One Whom Balaam saw and symbolized by the star and the sceptre was undoubtedly Israel’s predicted King Messiah and, again, the ancient Targum Jonathan paraphrases Balaam’s words as follows:

When a valiant King shall rise out of the house of Jacob, and out of Israel, Messiah, and a strong Sceptre shall be anointed. The Targum Onkelos is in the same strain and declares – “When a King shall rise out of Jacob, and out of Israel Messiah shall be anointed.” As further evidence of ancient and assured Jewish acceptance of the Messianic character of Balaam’s prediction of the star out of Jacob – if such evidence is required – it is possible to turn from words to actions. As Shakespeare says, “Strong reasons make strong actions.” Israel’s Third War against Rome was one of those strong actions. It was launched in the year 132 of the Common Era under the leadership of one whose name was ‫בר כוזיבא‬ (Bar Kozeva), but the very “soul of the uprising” was Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph, a Tanna, who has been described as the “founder of rabbinic Judaism” and whose name is mentioned more than 270 times in the Mishnah. This famous rabbi took the strong action of proclaiming Bar Kozeva to be Israel’s promised Messiah, and this individual’s name was changed from Bar Kozeva to ‫בר‬

‫( כוכבא‬Bar Kocheva) which means the “son of a star”; and the strong reason behind this strong action was admittedly the acknowledged Messianic implications of Balaam’s prediction of the “star out of Jacob” (Y, Taan. IV, 68d bot.). Indeed, at the time of the uprising there were coins struck by this pseudo-Messiah depicting the sacred Temple surmounted by a star. The rebellion, as you know, ended tragically in the year 135 C.E. and on the very eminence where once stood that same sacred Temple pagan Rome erected, the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Bar Kocheva, the so-called “son of a star” became known, and known as such very bitterly, as Bar Kzeva, and this expression means “the son of a lie,” a term derived from the Hebrew root ‫כזב‬, to lie, to deceive, to speak falsehood.

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But the emptiness of the false star only serves to emphasize the eloquence of the true star. Permit me to quote Dr. K. Kohler, one time President, Hebrew Union College, from his book Jewish Theology:

Before the real Messiah, the son of David, appears in victory, another Messiah of the tribe of Ephraim is to fall in battle, according to a belief dating from the second century and possibly connected with the Bar Kochba war. In another tradition, probably older, the true Messiah himself is to suffer and die. . . . Moreover, he will redeem the dead from Sheol . . . and the nations will offer the wealth of the whole earth as their tribute to the Messiah. (Jewish Theology, p. 383f; see also IV Ezra VIII, 28) My friends, Isaac Shenberg was right when he speaks of the eloquence of graves and stars. Oh! did I omit to mention a grave? Well! Well! It doesn’t really matter; the actual grave is unimportant because, you see, the grave is empty! The true prophesied Star out of Jacob arose from the dead bodily two thousand years ago, as it was also prophesied of Him in the Psalms in these words: “For Thou wilt not leave my soul in Sheol; neither wilt Thou suffer Thy Holy One to see corruption.” (Psalm 16:10) Truly, there is abounding eloquence in graves and stars.

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Symbolic Scintillations MY FRIENDS, the ancient apocryphal writer, Ben Sira, exclaims:

The beauty and glory of heaven are the stars, gleaming ornaments in the heights of God. (Apocrypha 43:9 f) Also, the Hebrew poet, Micah Joseph Lebansohn (1828-1852) quaintly remarks of the stars:

Are ye God’s meditations, thoughts indeed, engraved upon the annals of the skies? (“To the Stars,” #5) What a striking thought, is it not? The stars as meditations of God. how often has your upward gaze been arrested by the scintillation of some sparkling star as you have beheld the twinkling, tremulous motion of its light? Stars give birth to meditations and none so fruitful as the ancient Star of David, a symbol made up of two equilateral triangles interlaced to form a hexagonal star. The symbol of the interlaced triangles, the Star of David, is held by some to be of such early origin as to be known by the ancient Egyptians, Hindus, Chinese, and Peruvians. According to Rabbi Max Grunwald, of Jerusalem, the symbol appeared on a Hebrew seal which was dated from the 7th century before the Common Era and which was discovered at Sidon. I myself have seen the symbol on the ruins of the ancient synagogue at Capernaum (Tell Hun) in Galilee, ruins which date back at least to the third century of the Common Era. This, by the way, is the synagogue to which it is thought reference is made in the New Testament, in the seventh chapter of Luke, and the sixth chapter of John. The Karaite, Judah ben Elijah Hadasi, in his Eshkol Hakofer, dated about 1148 C.E., calls the symbol the “shield of David,” a title by which it is now more commonly known, even in the two major Hebrew pronunciations – Magen David or Mogan Dovid. The German-Jewish author, Max Brod, writes – and here I quote:

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In Judaism there was always a tendency to recognize the peculiar concatenation and permeation of the two worlds. . . . I visualize in the Shield of David the symbolical presentation of that permeation . . . (Das Diesseitswunder) In proof of the fact that Max Brod is on the right track it is sufficient to mention that in medieval days the interlaced triangles were called the “Shield of David and Abraham.” This designation immediately plants our thoughts firmly in the first verse of the fifteenth chapter of Bereshit – that is, Genesis – where the word “shield” first appears and where God says to our father Abraham:

... ‫אל־תירא אברם אנכי מגן לך‬ “Fear not, Abram, I am thy shield. . .” A protective and saving characteristic of the Eternal to which the great King David, the human ancestor of King Messiah, was able to attest when he exclaims in Psalm 18:

:‫ מגן הוא לכל החוסים בו‬. “. . . He Is a shield unto them all that take refuge in Him.” (Psalm 18:31; English tr. 18:30) The term “Shield of David” really does bring into association the two worlds, the heavenly and the earthly; moreover, its initial employment in Scripture makes the point of contact God and Abraham, and, through the Divine promises to Abraham and to David (e.g. II Samuel 7), pinpoints these promises upon and through the prophesied King Messiah. As to the term “Star of David” we have already seen, in messages immediately preceding, the Messianic implications embedded in Balaam’s parable of the “star out of Jacob.” (Numbers 24:17) As we spend a few moments together in meditation on the suggested symbolism of the star, let me again quote from Max Brod:

. . . two triangles, one pointing upward, the other downward, are interwoven to such an extent that they appear to be a new phenomenon which cannot be split into its parts again. Our God is one. (ibid)

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The three vital sides of the one triangle pointing downwards to the earth, suggest to our minds the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that triune earthly foundation upon which rests the Divine Messianic redemptive promises. (Genesis 12:1-3; 26:1-6; 28:12-18) On other occasions I have called attention to the fact that the Messianic line was the produce of Divine biological supernatural births, for the matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah were humanly incapable of bearing children. The blue color of the interlaced triangles suggests this heavenly feature of miraculous birth associated with the Messianic nation – Israel. (Exodus 19:5,6) The white background upon which the blue symbol appears suggests to the mind twin ideas of the purity of the Divine Revelation granted to Israel and also the fact that Israel was “a people that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.” (Numbers 23:9) This singular character of the nation of Israel – the Jewish people – is due to the fact that this nation is an INSTRUMENT in the Divine redemptive purposes. It will also be observed that the two triangles, interlaced, makes twelve points of contact suggesting the number twelve continually associated with the twelve tribes of Israel. The resultant pattern of the two triangles is a star. As a star is a heavenly luminary for those on earth, so Israel was to give the light of the knowledge of the one true God to the world. This Divine objective has only been partially achieved by Israel as a national entity, owing to his unfortunate defection from revelation into mere human tradition, but it is an objective that will surely be accomplished in the days yet future (e.g. Jeremiah 31:33). Then will Isaiah’s prophecy have complete fulfilment: “Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Eternal is risen upon thee. . . . And nations shall walk to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.” (Isaiah 60:1-3) However, the spiritual outshining of Israel as a nation will not have its glorious accomplishment until Israel, officially and nationally, understands and embraces the truth embedded in the triangle pointing upwards to the heavens.

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Whatever erring human tradition may have done to obscure the light of the knowledge of the Eternal God of the Universe, at least the Tenach itself still blazes forth the beams of that Divine revelation disclosing that the unity of the Eternal is a unity adequately symbolized by the unity of the three sides of the one heavenly-pointing triangle. The tree vital sides of the one triangle pointing upwards to the heavens, suggest to our minds that unity in triunity mysteriously set forth in the Hebrew Bible, and so beautifully enunciated by Moses when he cries:

:‫שמע ישראל יהוה אלהינו יהוה אחד‬ “Hear, O Israel: the Eternal, OUR GODS [for the word is plural], the Eternal, a unity.” (Deuteronomy 6:4) The star, heavenly in position and origin, as a symbol of the Messiah, indicates the heavenly position of the King-Messiah-Redeemer as High Priest forever after the endless rank of Melchizedek. It also indicates the Divine origin of Messiah. The six points of the star, on the other hand, suggest the essential humanity of King Messiah, as if one of the three vital sides of the heaven-pointing triangle of the Deity of the God of Israel became incarnate by miraculous birth, as a man; for six is the number of man in Scriptural gematria. The great Isaac Abravanel, in his commentary on Daniel entitled Wells of Salvation, recognizes the Deity and Humanity of Messiah when, referring to the stars, he writes, “a short time since. . . , and will herald the birth of the Divine Man, the Messiah.” This Human-Divine Messiah-Redeemer is the prophesied Sprout of Jesse who has received the six-fold Messianic anointing announced by the Prophet Isaiah in his eleventh chapter: “And there shall come forth a shoot out of the stock of Jesse, And a ‫ נצר‬shall grow forth out of his roots. And the Spirit of the Eternal shall rest upon Him, The spirit of wisdom and understanding, The spirit of counsel and might, The spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Eternal.” (Isaiah 11:1-2)

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This star of David not only speaks of this Human-Divine Messiah but also suggests the fruit of the atonement He obtained for Israel and all mankind; because it is only when sinsick man, in his triunity of spirit, soul, and body (I Thessalonians 5:23) – suggested by the earth-pointing triangle – becomes interlocked with the Triune God of Israel – suggested by the heaven-pointing triangle – that the perfect picture of the star of redemption appears in the firmament of human hope. Of Isaiah’s six-fold Anointed One, the Sprout, the Branch, the Netzer (‫ )נצר‬from the stock and root of Jesse, it is also written in Scripture: He shall be called a Nazarene. (Matthew 2:23)

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The Sent One MY DEAR FRIENDS, the first benediction of the shemoneh ‘esreh, the Amidah, the most

prominent supplicatory prayer in our Jewish liturgy, concludes with these words:

‫ברוך אתה יי מגן אברהם‬ Blessed art thou, O Eternal, the Shield of Abraham. Our ancients have called attention to the fact that the designation of God as the Shield of Abraham, derived of course from Genesis 15:1, bestows a distinction upon the patriarch enjoyed by no other mortal except King David. Of Abraham, our ancient Jewish legends declare that every altar Abraham raised was a centre for his missionary activities. Without delay, upon reaching a place where he desired to sojourn, he would first stretch a tent for Sarah, then for himself, after which he would proceed at once to make proselytes to bring then under the wings of the Shekinah. In this way his purpose to induce all men to proclaim the Name of God was accomplished. (Midrash Breshith Rabba 39.15, 16; Sanhedrin 44b; Midrash Haggadol 1, 213, etc.) Abraham is to be commended on many points but at least these two – he had the wisdom to change his religion and the courage to become a missionary. Ancient Jewish tradition also asserts that Abraham’s birth was accompanied by a heavenly phenomenon – “one great star came from the east.” It is, therefore, in this interesting blend of Scripture truth and human tradition that the names of Abraham and David are linked with the symbol of a shield and a star. The great King David, in the third Psalm, exclaims ecstatically: “But Thou, O Eternal, art a shield about me. . .” And, today, the well-known Jewish emblem of the interlaced triangles is known equally well by the alternate titles of the Shield of David – Magen David – or the Star of David, the latter title being unquestionably derived from the acknowledged Messianic import of the parables of Balaam (Numbers 23 and 24) which it has been our delight to study

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together recently. In my last message, you will remember, we spent a little time together contemplating the rich symbolism of Israel’s national emblem. This is the place to summarize some of our findings before adding further details for our enjoyment. The earthward-pointing triangle symbolized the three founders of the Jewish nation – Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It also served to remind us that the Scriptures reveal man as a unity of spirit, soul, and body. The heaven-pointing triangle reminds us that the Scriptures reveal God as a Being perfectly unique in His unity. Moses Maimonides expresses a truth when he declares:

I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, blessed be His Name, is a Unity, and that there is no unity in any manner like unto His . . . (“Thirteen Principles”) However, Maimonides expresses this verity in a manner very gravely erroneous inasmuch as he uses a Hebrew word, ‫ יחיד‬a word not sanctioned by the Torah, which never refers to Deity as ‫יחיד‬, but always as ‫ אחד‬. We discern this strange revelation of the unique unity of the Eternal Being throughout the Torah and the entire Tenach. It is quite arresting to observe that the Prophet Isaiah, in one single chapter, encompasses the total concept of this remarkable revelation when he refers to the Creator of the Universe as having been sent on a Divine mission by the Lord God (‫ )אדני יהוה‬and by the Spirit of God. You will find this arresting, valuable, and important revelation of Tenach in Isaiah’s fortyeighth chapter, verses twelve to sixteen. By Divine inspiration the Prophet Isaiah discloses the Eternal Being as a Unity in three co-existent expressions of Conscious Deity. This is consonant with the great declaration of our teacher Moses when he exhorts us in these words:

‫שמע ישראל יהוה אלהינו יהוה אחד‬

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“Hear, O Israel: the Eternal, our Gods [note the plural noun] is the Eternal, a unity.” (Deuteronomy 6:4) Such a concept of Deity as a unity in triunity could only be by revelation – man could hardly have invented it. Indeed, man, hastily forming his own theological conceptions, has already fallen into such errors as tritheism (the idea of three gods) or the equally unfortunate error of unitarianism (one god in the false concept of singularity, ‫ יחיד‬instead of ‫)אחד‬. I take this matter up in greater detail in my book Out of the Clouds. Our ancient Jewish tradition frequently recognizes in the Spirit of God that characteristic which, for want of a better word, I shall refer to as “personality.” To cite but one example of this recognition I refer to the legendary argument between Ishmael and Eliezer when they were allegedly accompanying Abraham and Isaac to Mount Moriah. The argument was interrupted by the Spirit of God of Whom our Jewish tradition records that the Holy Spirit answered: Neither this one nor that one will inherit Abraham. Now, it is obvious that a mere abstraction, a mere emanation, a mere influence, a mere quality, does not possess the capacity for intelligent thought not the ability to express that thought articulately. Indeed, in another of our ancient Jewish traditions relative to the blessings upon Jacob, it is the Holy Spirit Who speaks, saying:

‘He shall call upon me; and I will answer him . . .’ Thus the Biblical revelation of the unique Unity in Triunity of the Eternal God of Israel is not lacking in acknowledgement in our ancient Jewish tradition and it therefore brings added interest, in my judgement to the contemplation of the interlaced triangles, the “star out of Jacob.” We have observed this revelation of the Deity of the Holy Spirit, but we cannot escape the companion revelation of the Deity of the One sent by the Holy Spirit. This Sent One is the Creator of the Universe and the Scriptures abound in Divine intimations that this Sent One would become incarnate as man, being thus Son of God and Son of Man.

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Our rabbis of old time expressed a truth when they wrote in the Talmud:

All the prophets prophesied only unto days of the Messiah. (Berach. 34b) This Sent One is, therefore, none other than Messiah Who, although become Man, is also of the same nature and spirit as the Eternal, a revelation which provides apt commentary upon that otherwise inexplicable Scripture in Tenach where we read: “And one shall say unto him: ‘What are these wounds between thy hands?’ Then shall he answer: ‘Those with which I was wounded in the house of them who love me.’ Awake, O Sword, against My Shepherd, and against the man that is My fellow, saith the Eternal of Hosts; smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered. . .”

(Zechariah 13:6-7)

The shepherd Who was the fellow of God was surely smitten nearly 2000 years ago, as His hands could testify; and equally surely, the sheep were scattered following that event, as Tisha B’av and the long galut can testify. A final point of interest. The tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet is known as yod; although it is the smallest in size of the Hebrew consonants yet it is among the greatest in symbolic significance for it is not only a symbol of the Decalogue, the Law of Moses, but it is also the symbol of the Sacred Name (‫)יהוה‬, the Tetragrammaton, Yehovah and Yah, the very key-signature of Deity. Now it is not generally known that in ancient times this consonant yod was inserted in the centre of the two triangles. Since the Sent One, the Messiah, is symbolized by the Star it is therefore poetic that yod is also the consonant with which His human name, Yeshua, begins. How well Yeshua, the Sent One, fulfilled the Law in spirit and in truth and then submitted His sinless life in atoning death, being wounded for our transgressions, as Isaiah said, in fulfilment of all the prophecies of Moses and the Prophets in Tenach. In deed and in truth the Star of David speaks its Messianic message of atonement and redemption, for it points to Him Who cried: “I am the root and the offspring of David, the bright and morning star.” (Revelation 22:16) May His Light shine into every heart, both Jewish and Gentile.

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Cities of Refuge MY DEAR FRIENDS, the message I am about to bring to you is our twentieth message

based upon that fourth book of Moses known in English as Numbers. In my next message we turn our attention to the fifth book of Torah – Devarim – and known in English as Deuteronomy, and I assure you we have some wonderful treasures to unearth in it; however, before we leave the book of Numbers, let me call your attention to a most interesting piece of Divine legislation found in the thirty-fifth chapter of Numbers. It relates to what is known as the Cities of Refuge. It was Emma Lazarus (1849- 1887), whose sonnet “The New Colossus” is enshrined on the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York, who would be better qualified to write of the bliss of a refuge, an asylum, for the fearful and the needy. Her words, which I now quote to you, are, I think, immortal:

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me. (The New Colossus, 1883) Yet, my friends, if Emma Lazarus had a grand and glowing spark of compassion for the needy, she only possessed it as being derived from the God of Israel Whose compassion is infinitely greater. From the very dawn of human existence, the sacredness of human life has been impressed indelibly upon humanity at large. As one who does not accept the modern evolutionary hypotheses, I believe that murder has been regarded as an offense of the utmost gravity from the very earliest ages. As another has well said:

The principle on which the act of taking life of a human being was regarded by the Almighty as a capital offense is stated on its highest ground as an outrage on the likeness of God in man, to be punished even when caused by an animal. And the one whom I have quoted refers to Genesis, chapter 9.

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In warfare, although legitimate, bloodshed was nevertheless Scripturally held to involve pollution. (Numbers 35:33, 34; Deuteronomy 21:1, 9; I Chronicles 28:3) The wilful murderer, however, could expect no clemency whatever; he was to be executed without privilege of restitution for exoneration, and the nearest relative of the murdered person became the authorized executioner – the avenger of blood. This practice of inheriting the grim prerogative of an executioner is both an ancient and a widespread one; indeed, you may be surprised to learn that it obtains in certain nations to this very day. However, where some of the Arab tribes are concerned, for instance, their Koran permits the payment of blood-money as compensation for murder, provided that, should the blood-money be refused, the law of blood known as Thar becomes operative and the murderer perishes at the hand of the kinsman-redeemer avenger of blood. The person and the act of avenging the blood of the slain is referred to in the Biblical book Numbers by the significant Hebrew word ‫ גאל‬and it is a word that will well repay a little attention right now. In verbal form it means loose, to set free, that which was bound or fettered. As a noun, however, it carries the meaning of a kinsman, a blood-relative as found, for instance, in that book of Ruth with which you are all so very familiar. (Ruth 4:1-8; I Kings 16:11) This word, then, assumes major proportions and the utmost significance when it is realized that it is one which our Jewish Scriptures apply to Deity and, within Deity, to a Being of superlative importance and peculiar relationship. Let me invite your attention to just one passage from the Torah. Jacob, in blessing Joseph, refers to the Divine Source of his blessings in these arresting words. Please listen very carefully as I recite the passage of Scripture very slowly in the Hebrew and afterwards give you a very literal translation.

‫האלהים אשר התהלכו אבתי לפניו אברהם ויצחק האלהים‬ ... ‫הרעה אתי מעודי עד־היום הזה המלאך הגאל אתי מכל־רע‬

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“The God(s) [for the Name of Deity is in the plural form in the Hebrew] before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac did walk, the God(s) [again plural] the Shepherd of me all my life long unto this day, the Angel, the redeemer of me from all evil. . .” Now I have given you a literal translation from Genesis 48:15, 16. My dear friends, from the Scripture quoted, it is clear that out father Jacob understood the Godhead as possessing a characteristic pointing to a plurality within unity and, in addition, as possessing an active capacity of both Shepherd and Redeemer. Let us keep these disclosed attributes of disclosed deity in mind as we return our thoughts to the question of the manslayer. Whatever may have been the custom among other peoples, where the Law of Moses was concerned the wilful murderer could entertain no hope of blood-money; the kinsmenredeemer of avenger of blood was bound to execute the murderer if it was in his power to do so. Retaliation, swift and sure like the flight of an arrow, sped towards the one responsible for taking human life. But – we may ask apprehensively – suppose the killing was accidental? Surely, under the circumstances of sheer accident the one unintentionally killing or causing the death was greatly to be pitied. However, flight from the pursuing ‫גאל‬, redeemer, avenger of blood, was the only and immediate course of action for the manslayer. Was there, therefore, no hope, no asylum, no refuge for the unwitting slayer thus rendered “homeless” and “tempest-tossed”? Ah yes! The One even more compassionate than Emma Lazarus had made a thoughtful and comforting provision for just such a case. Six cities of refuge strategically located were provided, to which the involuntary slayer could immediately flee for asylum. “On the west of the river Jordan were located the cities of Kadesh, Shechem, and Hebron. On the east of the river were Bezer, Ramoth-Gilead, and Golan.” (Joshua 20:7; Deuteronomy 4:43) To any of these – the nearest one – the involuntary homicide could flee and there be safe

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from the avenger until the death of the High Priest of that day, being duly and officially announced, brought liberation to the slayer and released from all his banishment and apprehension. In the very words of the Law of Moses we read the hopeful and gracious Divine declaration – and here I quote it: “. . . but after the death of the high priest the manslayer may return to the land of his possession.” (Numbers 35:28b) Now let me quote a remarkable comment upon this Divine provision, a comment made by none other than our famous commentator Rashi who observes in quoting Makkoth 11a:

The exiled man gains his freedom through the death of the High Priest, because the latter [the High Priest] should have prevented this calamity in Israel by virtue of prayer. It is therefore only his [the High Priest’s] death that expiates the sin of the homicide. My friends, Rashi is pointing us all in the right direction, even if he himself did not see the full significance of his own words. Rashi’s idea of the expiation wrought by the death of the Aaronic High Priest had its true expression in the Biblical teaching of the external expiation and redemption accomplished by the atoning death of the Melchizedekan High Priest, the Messiah of Israel, the Angel-Redeemer, the One Whom the Eternal God refers in the Psalms where we read the declaration of Deity to Messiah – and here I quote Psalm 110:

“The Eternal hath sworn, and will not repent: Thou art a priest for ever After the manner of Melchizedek.” (Psalm 110:4) This God-appointed eternal Priest of Melchizedekan rank is known also in Hebrew as ‫ מלאך פניו‬the Messenger of the Presence of the Godhead (Isaiah 63:9); and He possesses the further significant title of ‫ מלאך פניו‬the Redeeming Angel, by virtue of the fact that he became the kinsman, the blood-relative, of mankind at large by his incarnation as Man into humanity itself.

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Moreover, it is none other than Deity, the very Godhead, Who has provided this everblessed Melchizedekan High priest for us all – both Jew and non-Jew – and again the Scriptures press home upon us their Divine lesson of substitution, for it is the ‫גאל‬, the Redeemer, the Avenger of Blood, Who Himself by His atoning death as sinless Man paid the full penalty for the offense committed by us all and thus became the righteous basis of our exoneration and liberation. No wonder Isaiah, in his sixty-third chapter, declares that he will make mention of God’s mercies (v.7) to Israel states:

:‫ויהי להם למושיע‬ “. . . So he was their Saviour.” (8) and Isaiah continues: “In all their affliction He was afflicted, And the Angel Messenger of His Presence saved them; In His love and in His pity He redeemed them. . .” (Isaiah 63:9) Emma Lazarus’ glowing sentiment could well be paraphrased, I think you will agree, in the very language of that same Kinsman-Redeemer, the Angel Messenger of His Presence, the great High Priest of the rank of Melchizedek, when he cried:

Come to me, all you who are weary and overburdened, and I will relieve you. (Matthew 11:28, tr. Schonfield) How glorious to realize that, when awakened to the peril of our sinful state before the Godhead, we have a refuge into Whom we can flee from the retributive judgement that pursues us, carrying with us, in our flight to Him, the blessed assurance that the atoning death of this great Messianic Melchizedekan High Priest, nearly two thousand years ago, guarantees all who believe – whether Jew of Gentile – a safe return from the exile of sin, back to the spiritual land of restored fellowship with a Holy God and the knowledge of an eternal security in ‫עולם הבא‬, the world to come. Truly we who believe can voice from the depths of our grateful souls the words of the Psalmist, “God is our refuge.” (Psalm 46)

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