God commands the creation of cities for the Levites to live in. There are to be forty eight towns all together and six of them will be towns of refuge. If you kill someone accidently and are afraid of that person’s family taking revenge on you, you can move to a city of refuge and you’re safe from vengeance as long as you stay there. Once the high priest dies, you’re safe forever and you can leave. It’s important that this is only true if it’s an accidental death though. This section differentiates very strongly between accidently killing someone and intentionally murdering them. This is not the first time in Numbers that the idea of accidental versus intentional sin is discussed. It seems like a bit of a theme in this book. God did not hand down the sacrificial laws so that you could buy your way out of punishments; he created this system as a means of recovering from accidental rule-breaking so that God can still stand to be around you.
God Himself told Moses that He couldn’t travel with the Israelites because they were too wicked, too disobedient for Him to be around, so I wonder how it is that God had such an amicable relationship with Abraham or his sons. I mean, I know they didn’t have this same covenant so Abraham wasn’t actually breaking commandments back then, but God is saying that He can’t stand to be around someone who doesn’t wash their cloths right or who burns incense to Him the wrong way. Did God’s preferences change in the intervening couple hundred years? Is God’s disgust based on the Israelites’ disobedience, so like it’s only abhorrent to God, not because it’s something He doesn’t like per se, but just because He told them not to do it? This book raises as many questions as it does answers sometimes.
I mean the Bible, not the book of Numbers. Numbers is actually pretty straightforward.
Most of the time.
The very last chapter outlines some logistical problems that have come up from those sisters from before inheriting their father’s land in chapter 27. Some guys from the (half)tribe of Manasseh come to Moses and the heads of the Israelite families and point out that if those women, who were from their tribe, went off and married men from other tribes, then their husbands would absorb their holdings. That means that land that was allocated for the tribe of Manasseh could be acquired by someone from Judah or Dan or whatever. This transfer of land, under the law, would persist even through a year of Jubilee when all bought land is returned to the original owner. That’s a real problem because the boundaries of the tribal lands are kind of holy, and this loophole could muddy those borders a lot over a few generations. Moses and the elders patched it up with a ad hoc little piece of legislation decreeing that any women who inherit land in such a way have to marry within their own tribes. Bang, done, next.
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