To The Reader

After all the drama with Korah, the Lord speaks to both Moses and Aaron and makes some things VERY clear about the Levites- what they’re allowed to do and what not. It’s kinda like school. Israel had basically failed their first semester of How To Honor Yahweh 101. So they have to have some remedial…

The Rebellion of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram is a major event. It will be referred to in future texts. It’s nearly impossible for me to read this chapter and not picture Edward G. Robinson as the smarmy Dathan from the movie – The Ten Commandments. He did such a good job in his bad-guy role…

The Complain-O-Meter: 7️⃣ 8️⃣ 9️⃣… Based on the negative report of the 10 spies, the people give up and start forming a plan to return to Egypt. They really didn’t get it, did they? They’re acting as if settling in Canaan and driving out the giant clans was optional – as if they were looking…

The Mission of the 12 Spies… Just to get a bit better picture of what the spies did, let’s look at some maps; starting with where on earth is the Wilderness of Paran? The Wilderness of Zin or Sin is also in this area (see map 1) but it has nothing to do with “sin”…

Remember the “why-did-we-ever-leave-Egypt” counter back in Exodus 23? We last saw it with a count of 2️⃣ I’ve decided to rebrand it as the… 📣 COMPLAIN-O-METER 🎊 And it’s about to start dinging. 🔔 COMPLAIN-O-METER: 3️⃣🔥🔥🔥 Hardship. I’m sure living in tents is inconvenient. They have just spent 3 days packing up every morning, traveling…

SILVER TRUMPETS I’m guessing that these were more like what we would call a horn or bugle. There are no valves in these trumpets. And I have a theory that each trumpet was tuned to a different pitch, that way, you could hear the harmonic interval if they both sounded together and you’d know that…

This started as a bonus post about the Lampstand that I’ve been promising for a while. But since Numbers 8 begins with God giving instructions to Moses about the lamps, I thought I’d drop it in here. And this is all I’m going to cover in this post. I think we’ve talked sufficiently about the…

Up to this point in Numbers, the LORD has been giving Moses instructions on how to organize the camp. We’ve had the directions on the arrangement of the camp and how to set up and pack up the tabernacle. There are 2 basic views of how the camp may have looked. Both fit the text…

Most of us are familiar with the story of the Bible’s most famous Nazarite – Samson. And because of his story, we might think that a Nazarite vow was a permanent thing. It wasn’t. A quick bit of semantic housekeeping to get out of the way: Nazarite and Nazareth/Nazarene are completely unrelated. They’re as related…

In 1952 Hank Williams warned country music listeners that “your cheatin’ heart will tell on you.” 🎸🎶 In the case of the ancient Israelites, it was a swollen abdomen after drinking conditionally cursed water. We haven’t quite made it to this verse in Numbers yet, but this is basically the OT version of Hank Williams’…

Even if you’re familiar with the Tabernacle, you might not have ever thought about how exactly it got disassembled and packed up. I love that it’s so organized and systematic. There are teams. They know what they’re in charge of. In a way, the disassembly and set up of the Tabernacle reminds me of the…