Numbers: Homeward Bound

Contents Foreword v Preface vii 1

Why read the book of Numbers?

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Reading the Old Testament

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Reading the book of Numbers

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The army camp of God’s people (1–2)

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The Levites: God’s servants in the camp (3–4)

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The tabernacle in the camp: Part 1 (5–6)

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The tabernacle in the camp: Part 2 (7–8)

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Final preparation before moving to the land (9:1–10:10)

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Israel travels to the promised land (10–12)

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10 Israel refuses to enter the promised land (13–14)

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11 Obedience and sacrifice in the land (15)

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12 God vindicates the priesthood (16–18)

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13 Cleansing from the pollution of death (19)

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14 Travelling back to the border of the promised land (20–21)

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15 Israel is blessed by God and will be victorious (22–24) 108 16 The new generation is seduced away from God (25)

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17 Preparing to inherit the promised land (26–30)

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18 Unfinished business east of the Jordan (31–32)

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19 Preparing to inherit the promised land (33–36)

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20 The themes of the book of Numbers

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Reading the Old Testament

Broadly speaking there are two approaches to reading the Old Testament in the Christian world these days. The first approach is widespread in theological colleges, the academic world, and theological commentaries, books and journals. It is an approach to the Bible that I will call ‘critical scholarship’.

The second is the more traditional approach, which views the Bible as the Word of God. Evangelical pastors, teachers and churches take an approach, which holds that the Bible is a true and accurate record of what God has said, and is saying to his people.

CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP It’s important to know how critical scholarship approaches the Old Testament, because almost anything you read these days, including evangelical commentaries, is moving within the world of critical scholarship, even if they disagree with it.

The book of Numbers was believed in the church to be the Word of God, and written mostly by Moses, until around 200 years ago. Under Enlightenment1 philosophy, the Bible was no longer regarded as the Word of God, and was subjected to modern, critical study as a work of man.

The presuppositions of the Enlightenment means that their approach to the Bible is very different to that of Christians.

1. The Enlightment was a movement around the second half of the eighteenth century which placed man at the centre of the universe rather than God. It made reason its chief authority rather than the Church or the Bible.

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Homeward bound Critical scholars in the nineteenth century were trying to work out, not so much what the text of the Pentateuch was saying, but how the Pentateuch came to be. That is, instead of studying the text, they studied the history of the text (how the text was formed). Instead of studying the history according to what the text of Numbers says, they studied the history of how they believed the text of Numbers was put together.

For example, early in the nineteenth century scholars came up with the ‘Fragmentary Hypothesis’, a belief that the Pentateuch was made up of lots of fragments of text, from various origins, which were only put together later in time. The book of Numbers then was seen to be a jumble of fragments, loosely put together – census lists, laws, narrative, poetry, land boundaries, etc. – all thrown together higgledy piggledy. Before dismissing such a view, we might be honest and say that on first reading the book of Numbers certainly may have struck us the same way.

The Fragmentary Hypothesis did seem to make some sort of sense of the book of Numbers, but not in relation to the rest of the Pentateuch, and so the Fragmentary Hypothesis gave way to the Documentary Hypothesis.

The Documentary Hypothesis was made famous by Julius Wellhausen in the 1870s. This hypothesis views the Pentateuch as originating from four sources: ‘J’ (from tenth to ninth century BC Judah); ‘E’ (from eighth century BC Northern Israel); ‘D’ (from King Josiah’s reforms in the late seventh century BC); and ‘P’ (from post-exilic times – sixth to fifth century BC). The book of Numbers under this scheme is believed to have some ‘early’ material from ‘J’ and ‘E’ combined (‘early’ being in the time of David), but most of the material of the book of Numbers is seen to be from ‘P’, that is late, post-exilic writings.

It is widely recognised that there are two broad sections of material in Numbers: narrative, and laws. The narratives are believed largely to be ‘JE’ (that is, ‘early’), and the laws are believed to be largely ‘P’ (that is, ‘late’). Thus the narratives about travel to the land, grumbling in the 4

Reading the Old Testament wilderness, the refusal to enter the land, etc, are seen as coming from an earlier source (early monarchy, and maybe even going back to Moses). However the laws (of which there are many in Numbers) are seen as very late: as originating with the Priests after the exile.

One of the reasons for this late dating of the laws is the nineteenth centur y theor y of evolution. Julius Wellhausen saw anything simple and primitive as ‘early’, and anything legal and complex as ‘late’. On this basis many commentaries on the book of Numbers will assume all of this Documentary Hypothesis to be true. Such commentaries dismiss most of the book of Numbers as unhistorical, and therefore as telling us very little about the time of Moses, but telling us plenty about the time of the post-exilic Priests and what they believed. Thus the book of Numbers is studied as a window onto post-exilic 5th-century BC Judaism. Otherwise it is seen as having little relevance for us today. Such an approach leaves little reason for a Christian to study the book of Numbers, except out of an historical interest in one period of ancient Israel. Numbers is no longer the Word of God for today in this scheme.

By definition this sort of scholarship is speculative: we do know what the Pentateuch says, however we do not know how it came to be put together in its final form (except for what it tells us: for example Moses wrote down Chapter 33 [see verse 2]). The problem however is that these scholars built a picture of Israel’s history based on their speculations.

Their reconstructed history is then used to interpret the text. Thus if they looked at the laws of sacrifice in Chapters 28–29, they would view them as not being from Moses’ time.

It would be assumed that the laws were written after the exile. Thus ‘critical scholarship’ changes the whole way you read the book of Numbers. Such ‘scholarship’ lies behind many books on Numbers written in the twentieth century.

There are inherent problems with the source critical approach. For example there are parallels between many of the laws in Numbers and Ancient Near East texts from 5

Homeward bound the second millennium BC, showing that such laws are indeed as ancient as they themselves claim. There are also differences between the so-called ‘P’ material in Numbers and the true post-exilic material in the Bible. However like the source-critical these arguments are all fairly speculative.

In the latter part of the twentieth century there has been a new approach to the Pentateuch, which has come generally from the field of literary criticism. In this case the emphasis is on studying the final form of the text. Thus instead of looking at how the text came to be, it looks at what the text actually says. The resources of literature analysis in general are used to discover what the text is actually saying. One result of this approach has been to show how the book of Numbers fits together, that it is not a jumble of different bits and pieces. Thus if the ‘final editor’ of the book of Numbers was not an intellectually deficient scholar, who heaped together a jumble of contradictory material, then the text makes sense as it stands. This however would go some way to undermining the entire basis of source criticism, which sees sources as arising from so-called contradictions in the text. Literary criticism is showing these are no longer necessarily contradictions. However proponents of this method of literary criticism do not necessarily believe that what the text says is true, they simply analyse what it says using the tools of literary criticism.

A BIBLICAL THEOLOGICAL APPROACH The book of Numbers repeats over and over that God spoke to Moses. What is recorded here is divine revelation from God, through his prophet Moses. The choice we are left with is not between source criticism and literary criticism. The book of Numbers confronts readers with the choice whether to believe Numbers is the Word of God. Jesus viewed the Pentateuch as the Word of God, from the hand of Moses (see Mark 10:5 and 12:26). Thus Christians accept Numbers as the word of God, because Jesus did.

A further important point for a Christian approach to the book of Numbers is that Jesus viewed the book of 6

Reading the Old Testament Numbers as being about himself. The risen Jesus taught his disciples: ‘… beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself’ (Luke 24:27); ‘He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses …” ’ (Luke 24:44). Thus the book of Numbers is about Jesus, about his person, life, death and resurrection (Luke 24:45–46). Deuteronomy, Psalms, Ezekiel, and the New Testament all quote the book of Numbers.

The Bible has a unity as the Word of God, because its author is God, and it finds its fulfilment in Jesus.

Therefore to read Numbers in isolation, is to misread it.

It must be read in the context of the whole Bible, and as it finds its fulfilment in Jesus. This is a view put forward

by Jesus and the New Testament, yet is unacceptable to much modern scholarship. This is also why most modern commentaries don’t comment on how Numbers is fulfilled in Jesus, or applies to those who are in Christ, but treat the book of Numbers in isolation.

We will look at what Numbers said to its original hearers, so that we can better understand how it finds its fulfilment in Jesus, and then see what it means for us. It is a mistake to leave Numbers back in the second millennium BC and to study it as a history of Israel, instead of hearing it as the Word of God. It is also a mistake to jump straight from Numbers to the twenty-first century, without appreciating that it is primarily about Jesus, not us. This can be illustrated in Figure 1.2

2. For more information on this approach, see the two excellent books by Graeme Goldsworthy, According to Plan: The unfolding revelation of God in the Bible (Leicester: IVP, 1991), and G. Goldsworthy, The Trilogy (Paternoster Press, 2002).

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Homeward bound

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