Day 51 Numbers 23-25

            Balaam is brought to several hilltops around Jericho and the Jordan river where he could see the Israelite camp so that he could curse them.  Much to the chagrin of Balak and his people, Balaam kept blessing the Israelites every time he opened his mouth to prophecy.  He kept trying to explain that he doesn’t have any power to bless or curse anybody, but only repeat what God says.  After seven different ceremonies, Balaam has blessed Israel three times and systematically cursed every one of the other nations in the area, saying that Israel is going to destroy them.

            I think that at least some of these leaders he’s talking to must be descendants of Ishmael.  I’d like to see a chart or something that lays that out.

            While the Israelites are camped out near the Moabites, some of the men begin fraternizing with Moabite women.  I’m not sure if that’s allowed under the law or not, since the Moabite women aren’t under the dominion of any Israelite men, I’m not sure that there’s any rules against fornicating with them,

            The foreign women convince Israelite men to worship their Moabite Gods though, which infuriates God.  God sends an awful plague until Moses declares that every man who’s been consorting with the Moabites must be put to death.  While everyone’s praying about this around the entrance to the tent of meeting, someone who didn’t get the memo actually brings a Moabite woman into camp.  Eleazer sees them and grabs a spear.  He follows them all the way to the mans tent and then stabs the spear through the both of them.

            God makes a covenant with Eleazer to make his line a holy line of priests because his zeal was most comparable to the Lord’s zeal when it comes to enforcing the law.

Day 50 Numbers 21-22

            The book of Numbers has officially jumped the shark.  In the last section the kind of the Edomites told the Israelites that they could not pass through Edom.  After some arguing they finally just went around.  I just realized though, that the Israelites are supposed to be following God’s cloud of fire and light.  Did they turn away from God or did God decide not to pass through Edom?

            That’s kind of weird, but even stranger is the plague of snakes that God sends into the camp because people were complaining about how they should have stayed back in Egypt.  When Moses prays about it God tells him to hoist a big bronze snake up on a pole and whoever looks at it will be cured of the snakes’ poison.  That sounds a lot like an idol, but whatever.

            Where things really get weird is when the Israelites are parked near Jericho and Moab, leader of the Moabites, had seen the destruction they’d brought upon the Amorites so he summoned Balaam.  Balaam, it sounds like, is a guy who’s really good at cursing people.  He also talks to God.

            God told Balaam not to go at first, but then Moab sent some fancier priests and Balaam asked God again if he could go.  God told him he could go with them but he had to do only what God told him to.  On his way to Moab an angry, invisible, sword-wielding angel appeared three times in front of him and each time his donkey walked off the path or turned or did something to stop Balaam.  The third time he started beating and cursing the donkey, but then God spoke to him through the donkey and allowed him to see the angel ahead who would have killed him.

            Balaam apologizes and offers to return home.  God tells him to continue on, but only to say what He tells him to.  Moab seems a little impatient when they finally arrive, but Balaam shuts him down telling him that he’s here now, but he can only say what God allows him to.

Day 49 Numbers 18-20

            The Levites are responsible for the sins of the people and the priests are responsible for the sins of the Levites.  If a Levite wanders himself into someplace he shouldn’t be and accidently sees God or something then both he and a priest will die for it.

            If anyone is in need of some cleansing, Eleazer the priest has a recipe for some special water for cleansing.  He has to ritualistically burn a heifer to ashes outside of camp, which will make him unclean.  Another guy has to come and collect the ashes and then those are used to make special cleansing water.

            When the Israelites come to a place to camp where there’s no water, a group of them jump immediately to their go-to complaints.  “We should have stayed back in Egypt.”  “Why did you bring us out here to die?”  Moses and Aaron pray and God tells them to strike a rock with a staff and water will come out.  When Moses strikes the rock though, he kind of implies that he’s the one bringing forth the water from the ground.  It doesn’t sound like he’s trying to be disrespectful of God, but he’s very frustrated with the people and maybe spoke out of that frustration without really thinking.  God tells him that for failing to glorify Him in carrying out His miracle, God will not allow Moses to lead the people into the promised land.  It sounds like God’s getting a little frustrated these days too.  Moses is basically God’s favorite person to date.  The fact that such a seemingly small omission brought such incredible consequences really seems to demonstrate that God is not screwing around when it comes to receiving credit for what He has done.

Day 48 Numbers 16-17

            250 Israelites led by Korah, a Levite and a few Reubenites came to Moses saying that he had no right to act as though he were closer to God than any of the rest of them.  After all, God was with the entire assembly, not just Moses.  Long story short: the three main leaders were swallowed up by the Earth and all their followers were burned to death by God the same way that those two sons of Aaron’s were burned to death at the big party towards the end of Exodus.

            To try to develop a little more trust within the camp and hopefully prevent more killings in the near future, God told Moses to collect staves from each of the heads of the tribes, including Aaron’s staff representing the tribe of Levi.  He put them in the tabernacle overnight and the next morning Aaron’s staff had sprouted and started growing almonds.

            God said to put Aaron’s staff in front of the ark of their covenant as a reminder to people to have faith so He wouldn’t have to kill them all.  The people didn’t seem to take it that well though and started wailing and despairing in fear that God would kill anybody who came near the tabernacle.

Day 47 Numbers 14-15

            Once again, the Israelites bemoan their fate and say they would be better off back in Egypt.  Once again God hears them and resolves to kill every last one of them for their lack of faith and start the race over with Moses, and once again Moses talks Him down.  This time the people get so far as to start planning to stone Moses and Aaron and choose a new man to lead them back to Egypt.

            Moses says that if God kills all the Israelites, then the Egyptians and other nations will hear about it and say that it’s a sign of God’s weakness, that He couldn’t lead them to the promised land.

            God settles on only killing the men who came back giving a scary report of the new land, everyone who was sent out except for Caleb and Hoshea. Moses called Hoshea Joshua, by the way, which means God, salvation, possibly God is salvation or God’s salvation.  The name Joshua later evolved into the name Jesus.

            The Lord also said that the Israelites had rejected His gift of this land so they could no longer have it.  They were cursed to wander the desert for another forty years until the current generation was dead, then their children could come back and try this again.

            The people then decided that they would very much like to invade Caanan rather than camp in the desert for the rest of their lives so they ran out to try to conquer the first hill they came across.  Moses warned them not to go, and that God was not with them, so they were immediately routed by the Amalakites.

            God lays down some more offerings that must be paid when the Israelites eventually enter their land.  More importantly though, the sacrificial system is clarified so that there is a procedure for absolving accidental sins, but any intentional sins get you cut off from the people.  I guess some people must have started to figure out that they could go fornicate with each other’s wives as long as they made the right sacrifices afterward.  Now anyone who intentionally sins is banished, or worse.  Some guy is caught gathering firewood on the Sabbath and God commands Moses to have him stoned.

            God did warn Moses at the outset that if He traveled with them, their disobedience and wickedness would be unbearable to Him and He would likely destroy them all.

            There are many laws now, so everyone is supposed to wear tassels on their cloths to remind them of all the rules.  They should all have a blue cord running through them, which probably had some kind of cultural significance.  Some jews still wear this.

Day 46 Numbers 11-13

            Once again, the people start to grumble about their hardships.  This whole time they have been eating the mana that falls to the ground with the dew and they’re getting tired of it.  They tried preparing it a few different ways, but it’s getting really old and they remember all the good food they had in Egypt.  They talk about how they were better off back there, so God sets some of them on fire.

            Moses goes to talk to God and begs Him to let some of Moses’s responsibilities rest on some other people.  He feels like a nurse-maid carrying the whole camp while none of them understand anything about what’s going on with God.  The Lord tells him to bring 70 men from all the tribes and He will make them prophets as well.  Since is was the griping about the food that started all this, He will also stuff all the complainers so full of meat that they’ll wish they’d never asked for it to begin with.  These people need to stop saying that they were better off in Egypt.  That really seems to piss God off.

            God says that He’s sending meat because He has heard the wailing of the people.  A huge amount of quail showed up in piles several feet deep all around the camp.  The language seems to imply to me that the quail was already dead when the Israelites went out to gather it, which would make them violate the law about dealing with dead things, but it’s not completely clear.  That would make sense though because in the next scene we hear about a terrible plague wiping out all the people who complained so much about wanting meat.

            Aaron and his wife start questioning Moses’s leadership a little bit.  Now that there are some other prophets around Moses doesn’t seem quite as special.  I’ve been thinking lately that Aaron is really positioned to have a lot of problems with his pride here.  He’s the high-priest of the whole civilization, which is a huge deal since this is supposed to be a nation of priests.  Within the temple hierarchy he is the biggest thing around, yet what are his duties?  Lighting some candles, overseeing the way the tabernacle components are cleaned and transported.  He does a lot of sacrifices for people, but that’s probably actually pretty tedious once the novelty wears off to be honest.  He’s like the head janitor of the camp.  All he does take care of all the day to day operations and whatever else Moses tells him God says to do.

            Anyway, God calls a meeting with all three of them, chews out Aaron and gives his wife leprosy.  Aaron goes to Moses, who then goes to God on her behalf and she is cured seven days later, but in the interim she has to live outside of camp.

            These little administrative matters taken care of, the camp continues on to Canaan, the promised land.  When they start getting close, Moses sends some spies in from all the tribes to scout out the land and the people in it.  They report back that the land is awesome and full of great fruit and stuff, but also populated by giants and assorted badasses living in big fortified cities and who would love nothing more than to eat little Israelite armies for breakfast.

            One of the scouts though, Caleb, insists that it will be fine and they should attack at once.  Caleb is confident that they will be victorious, after all, God told them that land was for them to have, right?

Day 45 Numbers 8-10

            God told Moses to have Aaron set up lamps in the tabernacle.  The Levites were set apart for God in a big ceremony where they sacrificed and purified themselves and prayed.

            With all of the logistics sorted out now the people just followed God.  The big cloud would lift up from the tent of meeting and they would break camp and follow it until it stopped.  Then they would set up their tents and stay there until the cloud lifted again, sometimes for a single day, sometimes for a year.  Eventually though, they set out for the land that God promised them.  Moses’s father in law started back to his home, but Moses convinced him to stay with the camp and share his knowledge of the desert, promising that they would share the great things in Caanan with him.

Day 44 Numbers 7

            This section is only one chapter because it’s almost 90 verses long.  Fortunately there’s only about half a dozen verses worth of content so, hey, easy post.

            The Israelites set up camp and Moses started accepting offerings from the leaders of the 12 tribes on behalf of the Lord.  Each leader donated an ox and they all got together in pairs and went halvsies on six carts as well.  Moses distributed the oxen to the Gershonites and the Merarites to haul tabernacle stuff, but he gave none to the Kohathites because they carried the holiest things and they had to do it by hand.

            Each tribal leader brought an offering in turn.  Each one brought exactly:

One silver plate weighing a hundred and thirty shekels and one silver sprinkling bowl weighing seventy shekels, both according to the sanctuary shekel, each filled with the finest flour mixed with olive oil as a grain offering; ¹⁴ one gold dish weighing ten shekels, filled with incense; ¹⁵ one young bull, one ram and one male lamb a year old for a burnt offering; ¹⁶ one male goat for a sin offering; ¹⁷ and two oxen, five rams, five male goats and five male lambs a year old to be sacrificed as a fellowship offering.

            Every leader brought the same thing.  It doesn’t say that this was predetermined by the Lord or by Moses so I’m not sure how it got so organized.  I mean it’s not a simple matter to get twelve bowls that all weigh the same using the tools one can come up with in a bronze-age desert wilderness.  It sounds to me like some kind of sacrificial price-fixing scheme to prevent any one tribe from having the best or worst offering.  That’s actually a pretty good idea.  I certainly wouldn’t want to be in the tribe that only brought a 70 shekel plate when the tribe next door managed to bring in a 200 shekel plate.

            When Moses finishes dedicating all these offerings he heard the voice of God coming from between the angels on top of the ark of the covenant.  God said to Moses…

            Cliffhanger!  Is God pleased with the offerings?  Is He furious at this dirty communist offering scheme?  Is He going to talk about something completely unrelated to anything that’s happened so far?  Tune in tomorrow morning to find out.  Or read chapter 8 of Numbers I guess, it’s not hard to get a hold of.

            I mean you’re already on the internet after all.

Day 43 Numbers 5-6

            Anyone with a skin disease or who has become unclean through contact with a dead body must be sent away from camp.

            There is a special magic spell given in Numbers chapter 5 for determining whether or not your wife has been faithful.  You have to take her to the priests with some special offerings and they mix a potion for her to drink.  If she’s been fooling around on you then the draught will make her swell and then miscarry, but if she’s been faithful then she will be able to have children still.

            Another way to show dedication to the Lord is to take a vow as a Nazarite.  For a certain amount of time that you determine at the outset you may not drink any fermented beverage or eat or drink anything that has ever had anything to do with grapes.  You may not cut your hair, because your hair during this time is symbolic of your vow and so it’s holy.  You absolutely may not have anything to do with a dead body.  For serious.  If your mother or father dies you may not have anything to do with the burial.  If you’re in a room with someone and they drop dead faster than you are able to run out of the building, then you have to go to the priests, shave your head, offer a bunch of sacrifices and then start your time over again because God has exactly zero tolerance for you being around a dead body.

            At the end of your time as a Nazarite you cut off your hair and offer a bunch of sacrifices.  Nothing really happens, but you get to show your devotion to God, so that’s nice.  There are no time requirements given so I guess you could vow to be a Nazarite for like a day, but it doesn’t really make much sense unless you do it for long enough to allow your hair to grow out noticeably, so that’s at least a month or two.

            I can’t find any information on what this word ‘Nazarite’ actually means.  I always though it had at least some tacit connection to the town of Nazareth, and I’m sure there are plenty of medieval bible ‘scholars’ who were happy to make that jump as well, but it doesn’t sound like there’s really anything out there to back it up.  All the etymology sources I can find keep directing me back to this same chapter, which only says what a Nazarite is, but not why they are so named.  Oh well, I’m open to hearing new information if anyone has any.

            The section ends with a new blessing for the priests to give to the people of Israel, and so that is also how I will end.

The LORD bless you
   and keep you;
²⁵ the LORD make his face shine on you
   and be gracious to you;
²⁶ the LORD turn his face toward you
   and give you peace.

Day 42 Numbers 3-4

            I thought it was odd back in Exodus when God said that every firstborn son was His.  It made sense since he sort of saved all the Israelite firstborn sons from that plague that He sent, but I don’t remember ever hearing anything about that from later in the Bible.  It turns out that’s because God changed that rule shortly after he made it.

            Well, He didn’t change it really, but He said that He would accept the entire tribe of Levi in liue of the firstborn sons from the rest of the camp.  Another part of the census taken involved counting all the men of the tribe of Levi as well as all the newborns from all the other tribes.  It turned out there was almost the same number of both of them.  The Israelites just paid the difference to the Levites for the extra couple hundred infants and God called it square.

            The levites were subdivided into little platoons serving under Aaron and his sons.  You know, the one’s who were left after that incident with the incense back in chapter 10 of Leviticus.  They are divided into the Gershonites, the Kohathites and the Merarites.  Each platoon is led by one of the heads of the Levite families.  I’ll bet you can’t guess what their names were.  Then each of the three groups is given the responsibility to carry and care for a certain collection of the tabernacle structure and  furnishings.  There was a quick reminder to the sons of Aaron to make sure everything is always covered and ready to go before the Kohthites, Gershonites and Merarites start packing it up to make sure none of them accidently see something holy from the sanctuary and die from it.

Day 41 Numbers 1-2

            I take back some of what I said about Leviticus being boring.  Numbers is off to something of a slow start itself.

            God tells Moses to take a census of all the tribes, except the Levites, to determine the strength of the army.  They count all the men able to serve in the army and find there are 603,550 all together, about 50,000 per tribe.  Judah has the most people with 74,600 and the half tribes of Ephram and Menassah, Jacob’s sons, only have around 40 and 32 thousand men, respectively, but they’re both a generation behind the others.  The tribe of Benjamin also has only 35,000, but Benjamin may as well have been a generation behind too, he was so much younger than the others.

            The Levites are exempt from military service because it’s their job to maintain the tabernacle.

            The Lord also lays out how to set up the camp whenever they stop somewhere.  The system they are given is very defensible.  Not everyone sets up their tents at the same time.  The 6 biggest, strongest tribes set up first in two giant divisions near each other.  Once they’re placed, the tabernacle is constructed between them.  Finally the other tribes pitch their tents on the two most open sides of the tabernacle, so if the first two divisions were east and west of the tabernacle, the last two would be north and south, according to God’s plan for setting up the camp.

            So that’s what they did.

Day 40 Leviticus 26-27

            Wow.  God paints an amazing image of what life will be like if these laws are upheld.  All that buildup of rules and rituals and banishing or killing everyone and everything that might sully the camp feels like it just came to a crescendo in this passage.  This is God’s side of the covenant.  It’s only one small section, compared to the previous chapters upon chapters of things the Israelites have to do to uphold their end, but it’s very powerful in it’s simplicity.  In exchange for obedience, God will make the rains come and the crops grow, so that you’ll still be eating last year’s harvest when you have to move it outside to make room for this year’s harvest.  Everyone will have lots of kids to continue their names and everyone will be well-fed.  All of the neighboring nations will be terrified of the Israelites and will run away from them.  Even the mean animals will leave the land.

            On the other hand, if the people don’t follow the rules, God will throw down wasting diseases and famine and deliver them into enemy hands.  God mentions that then the land will have the rest that it did not have when the people lived there.  This seems to assume that the people would rebel against God by breaking the Sabbath.  Is this some kind of foreshadowing or is it just one further reiteration of how important it is to keep the Sabbath?  (it is very important)

            Even if this happens though, and I think that even if I didn’t know how this story ends, it would still seem like God is assuming that this will be the case, God will not forget the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob completely.  He will still watch over them even when they are sick and scared in foreign lands for when they decide to apologize return to the Lord.

            The very last part of the book outlines another form of voluntary sacrifice called dedicating.  I don’t completely understand this one, but it sounds like you just take something like your ox or a patch of land or your daughter over to the temple and give it to the priests, then immediately buy it back from them.  I guess having specific objects or people connected to your offering makes it more personal than just giving the temple money.

Day 39 Leviticus 24-25

            Priests have to maintain the lamps in the tabernacle.

            There’s a rare break in the deluge of laws and festival as we hear about a young man from an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father who swore the lord’s name during a fight as a curse.  The Israelites held him until God told Moses what to do with him, which ended up being to take him outside the camp and stone him to death.  Now anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord, native or alien, must be put to death.  Also, damages done against someone else must be paid back equally, an eye for an eye.  If you kill someone, then the people have the right to kill you back for it.

            God declares that the land itself is to have a rest of its own.  Every seventh year is a Sabbath year and no crops can be harvested.  God promises to provide such a bounty on the sixth year that you will be able to get by through the next one.  Every seventh Sabbath year there’s a Sabbath of Sabbaths, which we call a year of Jubilee.  Every fifty years all property reverts back to the original owner, so when you buy or sell property, the price should be based on how long it is until the next year of Jubilee because you’re not really buying it, but only leasing it for a while.   The same is true for Israelite slaves.  Really you’re supposed to help out your neighbors if they fall on hard times so they don’t ever have to go so far as to sell their land or themselves off for food, but if that does happen, they get the chance to redeem themselves later on.  If they can come up with the money to buy back their house or themselves, then they have to have the option to do so.  If you buy foreign slaves, you can keep them forever, will them to your relatives, do pretty much whatever you want with them, but Israelites were slaves in Egypt so they are not allowed to be harsh or permanent owners to other Israelites.

            This is also enforced for foreign buyers.  Hopefully they let them know before hand, but either way, anyone who buys an Israelite slave has to give them the opportunity to be redeemed or to redeem themselves and even if no one does, they have to release them during the year of Jubilee.

            This one’s kind of tough to get my head around because of the idea of an original owner gets complicated after so many years.  I guess when they first get to the promised land everyone is going to go stake out their family plot, but after even a few generations those family claims are going to be complicated.  When I was in Israel, I was amazed that the whole idea of the original building or original owner were almost meaningless.  The Cardio is a famous road in the old city of Jerusalm, the original site (if you don’t count the city of David).  If you want to find out about the original roads though, youn find out that the cardio was built by the Romans thousands of years after the Israelites had settled there.  The city itself was already thousands of years old when the Isralites got there even.  Most modern Israelis don’t even know what tribe their from, let alone where their family parcel of land is.  And that’s if you don’t consider the confounding factor of the entire population of pre-israel Palistine living there for hundreds of years in the interim.  This system of ownership reverting back every fifty years is an unenforceable mess.

            I guess it was only designed to last for a few hundred more years though.  Once the messiah comes these rules become largely obsolete.

            I dated a Catholic girl in high school and when the year 2000 rolled around she said that the pope had declared a year of jubilee.  According to her there was a list of things you had to do in a year of Jubilee, personal, unquantifiable stuff like perform a merciful act, and if you completed the list then you got a free pass to heaven, or you got all your sins forgiven up through that point for free or something like that.  I wonder if that policy is based on this section of Leviticus.  It’s pretty loose if it is.   I think that sometimes the Catholic Church still likes to just make stuff up though.

Day 38 Leviticus 22-23

            Only the priests and their immediate families are allowed to eat the offerings from the tabernacle.  And the priests’ slaves.

            God only likes animals without defects and deformities for His sacrifices so He will not accept anything that is blind or has some kind of congenital defect.  Likewise if there’s something wrong with its testacles.  Unless it’s a freewill offering, then you can offer a stunted ox or sheep, but it still has to have pristine testacles.

            Every seventh day is a Sabbath day.  No working allowed.  If I didn’t know anything else about the Church and someone asked me what the most important thing in the Bible was based on what I’ve read so far, I would say that it was to keep the Sabbath, no contest.  God has mentioned the Sabbath in just about every conversation he has had with anyone about how they should be living.  Keeping the Sabbath has got to be either the most important commandment God handed down to the Israelites or the one they had the most trouble following because He feels the need to repeat it about once a chapter.

            Additional holy days are the Passover, the feast of first fruits, the feast of weeks, feast of trumpets, day of atonement and the feast of tabernacles.  Each event involves burning sacrifices and resting.  The day of atonement also requires that you fast or else you are to be cut off from your people.

Day 37 Leviticus 19-21

            Chapter 19 of Leviticus is the miscellaneous section for all the laws that don’t fit neatly into one of the other categories.  Most of it is pretty simple and intuitive.  Don’t cheat your neighbors. Don’t steal. Don’t worship idols.  Don’t do things that endanger your neighbor’s life.  There are a couple interesting parts though, that don’t seem to make any sense at the outset.  Don’t wear a shirt made of two different kinds of cloth.  Don’t cut your hair around the temples or trim the edges of your beard.

            I’m wearing a cotton/polyester blend t-shirt right now so where does that leave me?  I’ve heard that these things are forbidden because, at the time, they were practices associated with worshiping other Gods.  That makes sense, but it bothers me a lot that we don’t see that written in the actual text.  My problem is that we’re okay basically ignoring this rule because we feel we understand why it exists and it doesn’t apply the same way anymore.  We need to be really careful doing this kind of thing though because it puts us in a place where we’re telling ourselves “Well, God said that, but he really meant this.”

            Now I feel that it’s really important that we take the context of these passages into account as much as possible.  We sometimes forget that these things were written down at a certain time and place in a certain culture and, even if Moses is quoting God as accurately as he possibly can, you simply can’t completely separate that from his environment all of the time.  We need to try to account for that, but we are still in kind of dangerous territory when we try to tell ourselves that we can completely disregard something from the Bible.

            Of course, there’s some debate about what our relationship even is to the Law in the Old Testament, so I guess we’ll just have to revisit issues like this later in the context of the New Testament.  All I know is that you’re unlikely to get out of a speeding ticket by explaining that you understand why the speed limit is 25, but it doesn’t apply to you at this time.

            God says that when you collect your crops, you should leave some there and not be too thorough.  This is so the poor can come through and pick some grapes to eat.

            Punishments are pre-determined for the laws we’ve been given so far.  Most of them involve death, usually by stoning, but if you marry a woman and her daughter then all three of you are burned to death.  Other infractions get you cut off from your people.  There’s no fine and a night in jail punishments outlined in here though.  The lightest punishment is permanent exile.

            The priests have even stricter rules to live by.  They are not allowed to mourn except for a close family member.  The High priest is not allowed to at all.  None of them can marry a woman who has been a prostitute or divorced.  The high priest has to marry a virgin.  If a priests daughter becomes a prostitute then it is disgraceful to her father.  She has to be burned to death.

Day 36 Leviticus 16-18

            God tells Moses to tell Aaron that he’s not allowed to just come into the sanctuary whenever he pleases.  He has to make some special sacrifices first to account for his own sins and the sins of the whole rest of the camp.  All the sins of the people get loaded onto a goat (the scapegoat) which is then released out into the wilderness.  He needs to do this once a year.

            Eating blood is forbidden because of something to do with life being in the blood.  Anything you kill you have to drain before you eat it and cover its blood with Earth.

            Sex with your close relatives is not allowed.  I assume the definition of a close relative must have been something that was obvious to the Israelites.  It must have been very specific because Abraham married his sister, Isaac married his cousin’s daughter and Jacob married two of his cousins and that all seemed to be okay.  Although Simeon slept with Jacob’s wife and Leviticus also expressly forbids bedding your father’s women, and taking two sisters as your wives is also forbidden and Jacob did that, so maybe these rules just weren’t enforced until after Moses got them.  That seems fair.

            A lot of the rules for who you’re not allowed to sleep with involve not dishonoring friends and family members by sleeping with their wives.  I feel like a lot of care is being taken to specifically include “don’t sleep with your uncle’s wife,” don’t sleep with your son’s wife,” “don’t sleep with your neighbor’s wife.”  Was it okay to sleep with other people’s wives?  I know that neighbor in the old testament is ideally supposed to cover all Israelites right?  But even that’s not a very strong rule because there still doesn’t seem to be any rule against sleeping with your slaves or unwed girls or foreigners.

            You can’t have sex with other men or with animals and you cannot sacrifice your children to Moloch.  I know that this passage about sleeping with other guys gets a lot of air time when my fellow Christians are looking for a reason to dislike the gays.  I think that it’s important to keep perspective here though.  I’m not saying that we should ignore Leviticus when we’re deciding how to run our lives, but we are only about two chapters past the part about how menstruating makes you so unclean that you contaminate everything that you touch for two weeks.  Also, no more shellfish or bacon according to Leviticus and we, as a church, don’t seem to have a problem with that, so I’m hesitant to take someone seriously when they get too bent out of shape about one verse while ignoring everything around it.  I want to keep an eye on this issue though.  I think the Bible can be kind of vague about sexual sins sometimes, especially homosexuality.  And it’s so politically charged that it’s hard to get straight answers from anybody sometimes.  I guess that’s one disadvantage to reading secondary sources.

Day 35 Leviticus 14-15

            There is a process for coming back and being a real human being again after you’ve had an infectious skin disease.  If your symptoms go away then you can meet with the priests again and they can check you over to see if you’re still rashy.  I’ve heard the kosher laws praised for how they anticipate germ theory and modern health and safety customs, like how you’re not supposed to have anything to do with dead things or people with communicable rashes, but I feel, based on what I’m seeing so far, that we might be reaching a little bit there.  Honestly, as a society, it doesn’t take long to figure out that, for whatever reason, people who mess around with dead animals are not usually very healthy, and that poking at someone’s oozing sore is a good way to get one of your own.  Where the rules get more specific regarding actual treatments and practices, they are not that great.  If you fish a dead skink out of your rain barrel, the water it was floating in is unclean and you can’t drink it…until that evening when it becomes okay again.  Similarly, chapter 14 outlines the process by which the priest make someone ritualistically clean who had had a skin disease and it doesn’t sound any different to me than any other ancient magic spells.  The priests had to cut up a bird over some water and then put in the live bird along with some cedar wood, hyssop and red yarn, then sprinkle the potion on the sick man seven times.  There are more steps after that, many, many more steps, but you get the idea.

            We have not by any means mastered the science of medicine in our current era, but none of that stuff seems very helpful for skin conditions.  I don’t know, maybe in another couple thousand years we’ll learn that cedar wood and scared doves are wonder cures for shingles, but I’m going to wait until then to start ascribing that level of practical foresight to the Levitical laws.

            Some similar laws are given about mildew in one’s household for later when everyone eventually makes it to Canaan and gets to live in permanent dwellings.  These are actually pretty practical sounding though.  Go tell the priest about it, then scrape it all out, cut it out of the wall if you have to.  Basically you have to keep tearing out larger and larger chunks of your home until the priests are sure all the mildew is gone.  If you get a really nasty patch you may have to destroy the whole building and move.

            Any kind of discharge makes you unclean as well as pretty much anything that comes in contact with you.  And anyone who comes in contact with anything that’s come in contact with you.  If you’re a woman then you’re super unclean  and no one can touch you while you’re menstruating and then you’re just regular unclean for another week after that.  Then you can go make a sacrifice at the temple to become clean again until your next cycle.  So no matter what, you’re unclean or worse for two weeks out of every month and then it takes a moderately expensive sacrifice (2 doves) to be clean again.  I wonder how common it was for families to just skip it and let the women just be unclean all the time.  I mean that adds up, and it’s not like women in the ancient world got to go out much anyway.

            You’re also unclean for the rest of the day any time you have sex and there is a discharge of semen.  Semen makes things unclean.  I wonder if all the cool kids, when they first got married, would strut around camp all like “sorry guys, I’d like to go to temple with you, but, you know, I’m unclean right now.” *wink*

Day 34 Leviticus 11-13

            Only eat animals that have a split hoof and chew cud or have no split hoof and do not chew cud, but not an animal that only has one or the other.  Only eat sea creature with both scales and fins.  You can eat birds, but there’s a list of forbidden birds.  They’re mostly birds of prey and you can’t eat bats.  Don’t eat flying bugs that walk on all fours (sixes?) but it is okay to eat grasshoppers and some other flying bugs that jump.  Anything that walks on it’s paws is unclean.

            You can’t touch dead things at all without becoming unclean and the way that uncleanness spreads is kind of similar to the was germs work.  If unclean water gets on something then that thing is unclean and if it’s food the it’s not to be eaten.  If an unclean thing gets into a pot of water then everything in the pot is unclean and the pot must be destroyed.  One problem is that a lot of things stop being unclean after a day even if you don’t do anything to make them clean again, which is kind of gross, but better than nothing.  These are mostly rules that will keep a people healthier.

            You can’t eat snakes or centipedes or anything that moves along the ground.

            Childbirth is gross and any woman who engages in such a practice is unclean for at least a week, then still has to stay away from God for another month on top of that.  After that period is over she can take a lamb or some doves to the temple and be made clean again.

            Any skin diseases are to be inspected by the priests.  Aaron and his sons get some instructions for dealing with infectious diseases.  The examine rashes , boils and swelling and decide if someone is made unclean by them.  If someone is unclean they have to live outside of camp, remain unkempt and shout “unclean, unclean” wherever he goes L

            Anything with mildew on it will usually get burned.  If it doesn’t seem to be spreading then they can keep it under observation and maybe try washing it, but if it doesn’t go away they have to destroy it or burn it.  Living in Western Washington I can definitely sympathize with this one.  Mildew is incredibly frustrating.  I keep hearing all these old wive’s tales about using baking soda or vinegar or a lemon in your washing machine, but I think Moses might be onto something with this ritualistic fire thing.  I have a couple towels I’ll have to try that on.

One month check-in

  I've got to start writing shorter posts.  I'm already through most of the advance posts I wrote before I started and I need to stay at least a week a head before I go out of town at the end of February.  I got a gift card for some Google ads in January so I went ahead and made a couple.  They were under review for something like two weeks before anything actually went online, which is really weird.  According to the Google AdWords website it should only take a day or two.  Maybe they're extra careful when they see ads with religious content.
  I certainly would be.
  Since the ads went up though I've seen a huge spike in traffic.  I had basically given up on AdWords, but then a couple days ago I noticed that suddenly as many people had clicked through the blog in one night as had the entire previous lifetime of this project.  I'm certainly not going to keep putting ads up once it ceases to be free, but it looks like I'm getting myself a nice little reader base.  This is good news.  Hopefully I'll continue to see some regular traffic after the ads are gone.  Tell your friends.

  I seem to be getting a surprising amount of traffic from India.  I back-tracked some links to a blog about the aggression of Christian missionaries in India.  It seems to focus on rebroadcasting news items that expose people making a bad name for the Christian Church, of whom there never tends to be a shortage.
  I'm glad there's a connection between our sites though.  Obviously I don't agree with their view that Christianity is a cancer on the face of India, but I think that the best thing for Christians to do when faced with these opinions is not to yell and argue, but to simply do our best to not be assholes.  The mainstream media is great at giving a little slice of air time to every nut job who hates his neighbor and wants to try to legitimize his problems by calling them Christian values.  We can't compete with that.  If we model our lives off of Jesus's ministry then honestly, I don't think we should be trying to compete with it.
  "Love the Lord your God...Love you're neighbor as yourself.  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments" Mathew 22:37-40 Pardon the paraphrasing.

Day 33 Leviticus 8-10

            Apparently being a priest of the Lord is not all it’s cracked up to be.  Aaron and his sons are ordained, which it turns out requires them to live in the tabernacle without leaving for 7 days.  They still don’t have any special relationship with God beyond what the average Israelite has so they basically just oversee the sacrificial system, maintain the Tabernacle and do whatever Moses tells them to.  They are janitors.

            Moses walks them through a big long set of sacrifices and rituals, including waving some meat at the alter as a wave sacrifice and then burning it on top of the burnt offering as an ordination offering.  I’m not sure if this implies that there was more covenant regarding offerings that just wasn’t covered in the first chapters of Leviticus or if these are special one-time-only offerings just for this occasion.  Honestly, the whole process sounds like Moses is just making stuff up as he goes along, but the book says that Moses was only doing what God told him to so I think this may be another obedience thing.

            Speaking of obedience, I talked a little yesterday about how good the ancient Israelites are at following directions, but I guess they kind of have to be.  All of the Israelites who don’t follow directions well are being culled from the tribes at a rapid pace.  The plague of the first born sons from Exodus probably took out a few Israelites who didn’t go through quite the right ritual or who accidently had some leftover lamb sitting around overnight, and anyone who wandered too close to Mt Mariah while God was there was to be instantly killed.  The days of God calling Abraham to Canaan and then patiently staying with him as he wanders through Egypt are long past.  When God tells you to do something now he is not screwing around.

            Two of Aaron’s sons, Nahab and Abhu, get caught up in the awesome party after the ordination week is over.  All the Israelites are super excited, God is there glowing and blessing people and stuff and Nahab and Abihu go to suppliment the stuff on the alter with an offering of incense.  Now back in Exodus 30:9, God said that Aaron and co were supposed to burn incense a couple times a day on the alter, but no one should put any unauthorized offerings of incense on the alter beyond that.  When Aaron’s sons go to burn their incense, God kills them with fire.

            Now the other shoe has dropped.  Moses tells Aaron and the other priests that their families may mourn for people God kills with fire, so that’s nice I guess, but they need to keep their hair tidy and they can’t tear their cloths or God will kill them.  Messing with your cloths and hair was part of the way you mourned back then, so the implication is that no mourning is allowed for priests.  Also, the same thing will happen to them if any of them screw up and break the Law and not only will they be punished (with fire) but God will be angry at the whole camp because of their misdeeds, so there’s some pressure there.  In addition to the regular law, Aaron’s sons are also forbidden from leaving the tabernacle while anointed with the holy oil and they may never drink any fermented beverage.

            After all this exposition Moses gets bent out of shape because the priests burnt some meat and grain that they were supposed to keep for themselves and eat in the tabernacle.  Aaron explained that his sons were making their own sacrifices with what was given to them, which I guess is acceptable under the Law.  So, no reason to kill anyone with fire today right Moses? *nervous chuckle*

Day 32 Leviticus 5-7

            Chapter 5 finishes up some details about the rules for sin offering.  To summarize, not being aware of your sin is not a good enough excuse.  Even if you don’t realize you touched something or did something or thought something that makes you unclean, you’re still unclean and need to deal with it as soon as you find out.  It’s also stipulated that you’re supposed to offer a lamb for this offering, or two doves if you can’t afford a lamb or some nice flour if you can’t afford two doves.  The other sacrifices have similar tiers.  I can’t believe I didn’t notice yesterday, through that whole rant about regressive taxes, that the entire sacrifice system is progressive.  And not only progressive, but it sounds like it’s also self-regulated.  You are the one who decides what you can afford because it’s between you and God.  Although I’m sure, in practice, there was a lot of brow beating done by the priests to keep people honest.  After all, they’ve got a vested interest in how extravagant an offering you make.  They’re the ones who get to eat the left overs.

            The last type of offering is the Guilt offering which is like a Sin offering, but, and again, this is coming mostly from commentaries and websites, the Guilt offering was more appropriate for a Sin for which proper restitution could be made, where the Sin offering was more for things that couldn’t be set right.  If it was a sin against someone else then you had to compensate them for it as well, for the full value times 1.2.

            God gives Moses the rules to hand off to Aaron’s sons regarding how to handle these offerings and what parts they’re allowed to eat, then He says something really interesting.  No Israelites are allowed to eat the fat of cattle, sheep or goats.  Now the Israelites, for all their flaws, are awesome at following the letter of the law.  To this day the practitioners of the Jewish faith have an astounding capacity for allowing themselves to be inconvenienced for the sake of the Law.  I mean this as a compliment.  I was able to visit Israel recently and we were surprised to find that you could not get cheese burgers anywhere.  It turns out, the popular way to interpret the kosher laws these days is so strict that they take that passage from back in Exodus about not boiling a baby goat in it’s mother’s milk to mean that you cannot prepare or serve any meat and dairy together.

            This is the first I’ve ever heard of this thing about not eating any fat though.  If I were trying to avoid eating any fat, I would have to become a vegetarian because there is some amount of fat in everything.  If I were trying to follow that no fat command to the same degree as the no baby goat milk command then I could never eat any meat.  This one is tricky because the sacrificial system designates certain meat that the priests are supposed to eat so obviously that meat doesn’t make one unclean.  Maybe what they meant to say is that you just can’t eat hunks of pure fat, like the chewy white sections of bacon.  Well, maybe that’s a bad example.  But then there’s no such thing really as pure fat right?  I think that even the white, greasy bits have meat in them, and even the purest meat pieces have fat, so where’s the line?  I guess since the sacrificial system is no longer active even within the Jewish community, the safest interpretation is just to never eat meat.  That puts me on the wrong side of like 4000 years of rabbinical tradition though.  They think it’s fine to eat meat.

            I don’t think I like this rule.