Numbers: Forty Years in the Desert

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Tradition says Moses. Like the other books of the Law, it combines priestly material with older stories.

When: It reached its final form in the 500s or 400s BC. Some pieces are much older.

Where it fits: It picks up at Mount Sinai in the second year after Egypt and follows the people through forty years in the desert, to the plains of Moab across the Jordan from Jericho.

Where I quote it: The bronze serpent lifted up (John 3:14; Numbers 21:8–9). I also point to its laws on Sabbath offerings and on keeping vows (Matthew 12:5; Matthew 5:33).

If you only read three chapters: Numbers 6, Numbers 21 and Numbers 27.

Words to Know

Census — a count of the people. The book is named for its two counts.

Nazirite — a man or woman who took a vow to drink no wine, cut no hair and touch no dead body for a set time.

Tassels — fringes on the corners of a garment, with a blue cord, to remind the wearer of the commandments.

Balaam — a foreign prophet hired to curse Israel, who could only bless it.

The Book in Brief

Numbers carries the story from Mount Sinai to the edge of the promised land, mixing stories and laws all the way.

Chapters 1 to 10 are set at Sinai. Moses counts the men able to fight, tribe by tribe, and arranges the camp around the sacred tent. Laws follow, including the Nazirite vow and the priestly blessing. The leaders of the tribes bring gifts for the tent, and the people keep the Passover. Then the cloud over the tent lifts, and they set out.

Chapters 11 to 21 are the hard years. The people complain about the food, and God sends quail, then a plague. Miriam and Aaron challenge Moses, and Miriam is struck with a skin disease for a week. Twelve scouts explore Canaan, and ten report that it cannot be taken. The people refuse to go in, so God condemns that whole generation to die in the desert over forty years, all except Joshua and Caleb. A Levite named Korah leads a revolt against Moses and Aaron, and the earth swallows the rebels. Aaron’s staff sprouts and blossoms as a sign that God has chosen him. Miriam dies. Moses strikes a rock for water when God told him to speak to it, and God tells him he will not lead the people into the land. Aaron dies. When snakes bite the people, Moses lifts up a bronze serpent, and those who look at it live. Israel defeats Sihon and Og, two kings east of the Jordan.

Chapters 22 to 36 are set on the plains of Moab, across the Jordan from Jericho. The king of Moab hires the seer Balaam to curse Israel, but Balaam can only bless. Israelite men join in the worship of the god Baal of Peor, and Phinehas kills an Israelite man and a Midianite woman with a spear. A second census counts the new generation. The daughters of Zelophehad win the right to inherit, and Joshua is chosen to succeed Moses. Then come laws on offerings and vows, a war against Midian, land for two and a half tribes east of the Jordan, a list of every camp on the journey, the borders of the land, and the cities of refuge. The book ends with one more ruling about Zelophehad’s daughters.

Your Bible calls this book Numbers because of its two counts of the people, one at the start (chapter 1) and one near the end (chapter 26). My people called it by the fifth word of its first verse: Bemidbar, which means in the wilderness. That is the better name. This is the book of the forty years in the desert.

The count is huge. It says 603,550 fighting men (Numbers 1:46). As with Exodus, nobody can make numbers like that work in the desert. What the book is really counting is a generation, and how it failed.

Go deeperCould the thousands mean something else?

The Hebrew word for thousand, eleph, can also mean a clan or a fighting unit. When Gideon says my family is the poorest in Manasseh (Judges 6:15), the word for family is that same word. So in 1958 the American scholar George Mendenhall suggested that the census lists in Numbers 1 and 26 first counted units, not thousands. When the book says the tribe of Reuben had 46,500 men (Numbers 1:21), it may once have meant 46 units with 500 men among them. Read that way, the whole army comes to about five or six thousand men. In 1998 the physicist Colin Humphreys proposed a similar reading.¹

It is a clever idea, but the book itself does not read its numbers that way. It adds them up as thousands, to 603,550 (Numbers 1:46). Exodus says each of those men paid half a shekel of silver to the sanctuary, and the total weight of silver only works out if the numbers are real thousands (Exodus 38:25–26). And Numbers counts just 22,273 firstborn sons among the whole people (Numbers 3:43), which would mean that every mother had dozens of sons.

So the numbers were probably never a record. They say something the writers believed: that God’s promise to Abraham, of descendants as many as the stars, had come true (Genesis 15:5).

The oldest verses ever found

In Numbers 6 there is a blessing the priests spoke over the people:

The LORD bless you, and keep you. The LORD make his face to shine on you, and be gracious to you. The LORD lift up his face toward you, and give you peace (Numbers 6:24–26).

In 1979, archaeologists digging in tombs just outside Jerusalem found two tiny silver scrolls, rolled up like charms to be worn around the neck. When they were finally unrolled and read, they held this blessing. They date from around 600 BC. They are the oldest known texts that match a passage of the Bible, centuries older than the Dead Sea Scrolls.²

Someone was buried with the words of this book against his skin, before Jerusalem fell to Babylon.

Go deeperHow the silver scrolls were found and read

The scrolls were found almost by accident. In 1979 the archaeologist Gabriel Barkay was digging a group of burial caves cut into the rock on the slope above the Hinnom Valley, just outside the old walls of Jerusalem. The caves had been robbed long ago. But a young volunteer clearing one of them broke through its floor into a hidden chamber below. It was the place where the bones of earlier burials, and the things buried with them, had been gathered to make room for new ones, and the robbers had never found it. Inside were hundreds of objects: pots, jewelry, arrowheads, and two tiny rolled-up strips of silver.³

The silver was so brittle that unrolling the larger strip took the Israel Museum about three years. When it was flat, it held short lines of Hebrew scratched in the old Hebrew alphabet. The four letters of God’s name were there, and the words of the blessing, close to the form you can read in Numbers. One strip also has words very near a line of Deuteronomy, about the God who keeps covenant and loving kindness with those who love him (Deuteronomy 7:9).²

Not everyone accepted the early date at once. Some scholars thought the letters might be centuries later. In 2004 a team re-examined the scrolls with new photographs and argued that the letters, like the other objects in the chamber, belong to the years around 600 BC.² Most scholars accept that date today.

The vow and the fringes

Numbers 6 also describes the Nazirite, a person under a vow to drink no wine, cut no hair and stay away from the dead.

The angel in Luke says my kinsman John will drink no wine nor strong drink (Luke 1:15). That sounds like a Nazirite, though Luke never uses the word.⁴ I was the opposite. People called me a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners (Matthew 11:19).

Numbers 15 tells every Israelite to wear tassels on the corners of his clothes, with a blue cord, so that you may see it, and remember all the LORD’s commandments (Numbers 15:38–39).

I wore them. The gospels say that the sick reached out to touch the fringe of my cloak (Mark 6:56; Matthew 9:20). And I criticized men who made their fringes long so that people would notice them (Matthew 23:5).⁵ The tassels were meant to remind you of the commandments, not of yourself.

Remembering slavery as free food

This book is full of complaining.

The people are tired of manna. They want meat. And then they say the most human thing in the whole story: We remember the fish, which we ate in Egypt for nothing; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic (Numbers 11:5).

For nothing. They had been slaves. Their baby boys had been drowned. And a little over a year into freedom, they remembered Egypt as free food.

People do this. Freedom is hard and the desert is long, and the old chains start to look like security.

Spies and giants

In Numbers 13 and 14, Moses sends twelve men to scout the land. Ten of them come back terrified. The people there are giants, they say. We were in our own sight as grasshoppers (Numbers 13:33).

The people believe the ten and refuse to go in. So the whole generation that left Egypt dies in the desert, except for the two scouts who trusted God, Joshua and Caleb. It takes forty years.

Joshua, in Hebrew, is Yehoshua. In the form people used in my time, it is Yeshua. That is my name.

The serpent on the pole

In Numbers 21, poisonous snakes come among the people, and many die. God tells Moses to make a bronze serpent and set it on a pole, and anyone who is bitten can look at it and live (Numbers 21:8–9).

John remembers me using this. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life (John 3:14–15). The thing that was killing them, lifted up on a pole, became the thing that healed them.

Now read what happened to that serpent later. The people kept it. They burned incense to it, and it was called Nehushtan. Hundreds of years later, King Hezekiah broke it into pieces (2 Kings 18:4).⁶

That is a warning for anyone who keeps holy objects. Something God once used to heal can become something people worship in God’s place.

The prophet who could not curse

The strangest story in Numbers is about Balaam, a famous seer from the east. The king of Moab pays him to curse Israel. On the way, his donkey sees an angel blocking the road, and Balaam does not. The donkey stops, Balaam beats her, and the donkey speaks (Numbers 22:21–35).

Three times Balaam opens his mouth to curse, and three times only blessing comes out. In his fourth oracle he says, A star will come out of Jacob. A scepter will rise out of Israel (Numbers 24:17).

That verse had a long life. A hundred years after me, a rebel named Simon led a war against Rome, and the great teacher Akiva hailed him with this verse. His followers called him Bar Kokhba, “son of the star.”⁷

And Matthew tells of wise men coming from the east, following a star to my cradle (Matthew 2:1–2). Balaam also came from the east. Early Christian writers saw the connection, and so may you.

Go deeperBalaam outside the Bible

In 1967 a Dutch expedition digging at Deir Alla, a mound in the Jordan valley a few miles east of the river, found pieces of an inscription written in ink on a plastered wall. The wall had collapsed, and the text had to be pieced together from many fragments. It dates from about 800 BC. Its language sits somewhere between Aramaic and the Canaanite languages, and scholars still argue over what to call it.⁸

Its first line calls it the book of Balaam son of Beor, “a seer of the gods.” The gods come to him at night. In the morning he fasts and weeps, and tells the people what he has seen: the gods have met in council and decreed that darkness will cover the earth.⁸

That is the same name and the same father as in Numbers (Numbers 22:5), on a wall not far from the plains of Moab, where Numbers sets the story. It does not prove that the story of the donkey happened. It shows that Balaam was a famous seer in that part of the world, remembered by people who were not Israelites.

The Bible itself remembers him in two ways. In Numbers 22 to 24 he blesses Israel and will say only what God puts in his mouth, and the prophet Micah recalls his answer to the king of Moab among God’s saving acts (Micah 6:5). But a few chapters later Numbers blames Balaam for leading Israel into the sin at Peor (Numbers 31:16), and he is killed in the war against Midian (Numbers 31:8). By the time of my followers, his name stood for a prophet who could be bought (2 Peter 2:15; Jude 11; Revelation 2:14).

The daughters who argued

Here is a story I love.

A man named Zelophehad died with no sons, only five daughters: Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah and Tirzah. Under the law, land passed to sons. So the daughters walked up to Moses, the priests and the whole assembly, and argued. Why should the name of our father be taken away from among his family, because he had no son? (Numbers 27:4).

Moses did not know the answer. He took their case to God. And God said, The daughters of Zelophehad speak right (Numbers 27:7). The law was changed because five women argued with it and won.⁹

The law in this book was not frozen. When it was unfair, people were allowed to say so.

Zeal

In Numbers 25, an Israelite man brings a Midianite woman into his tent in front of everyone. A priest named Phinehas follows them in with a spear and kills them both. God praises his zeal (Numbers 25:6–13).

Phinehas became the model for every man who thought that killing for God was holy. Two centuries before me, the rebel priest who started the Maccabean revolt was praised for burning with zeal as Phinehas did (1 Maccabees 2:26).¹⁰

One of my twelve was called Simon the Zealot (Luke 6:15). I do not know exactly what that name meant before he met me. I know that on the night I was arrested, when one of my friends drew a sword, I told him to put it away (Matthew 26:52).

The man with the sticks

One more story, because it shows how hard the Sabbath could be.

In Numbers 15, a man is found gathering sticks on the Sabbath. The community brings him to Moses, and he is stoned to death (Numbers 15:32–36).

My own arguments about the Sabbath were never about whether to keep it. They were about what it was for. When the Pharisees complained that my friends had picked grain on the Sabbath, I reminded them that the priests in the Temple do more work on the Sabbath than on an ordinary day, because Numbers itself orders extra offerings that day, and nobody calls them guilty (Matthew 12:5; Numbers 28:9–10).

The Sabbath was a gift to people who had been slaves. It was never meant to be another master.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Numbers 27:1–11.

You will find: five sisters who argued that the law was unfair to them, and a ruling from God that they were right.

Then read Numbers 21:4–9 and 2 Kings 18:4. Follow the bronze serpent from healing to idol.

The Short Version

• Numbers is the book of the forty years in the wilderness, and of a generation that could not let go of Egypt.
• Its priestly blessing is written on two silver scrolls from about 600 BC, the oldest known text matching a passage of the Bible.
• I compared my death to the bronze serpent lifted up, which later became an idol and had to be smashed.
• Five daughters argued with the law and won. The law could be changed when it was unjust.
• Phinehas made killing for God look holy. On the night I was arrested, I told my friend to put his sword away.