Numbers... Where do I start?

Numbers:

As I start my thoughts on the fourth book of the bible, I have spent some time rereading Numbers. I keep reading it and looking for a way to describe these people that feels true or correct. These people see the amazing acts of God over and over again. Some of the acts are for Moses, or Noah, or Abraham alone, like the burning bush, but others, like the cloud/fire over the tabernacle is for all to see. God makes Himself known to everyone visually.

They are given food when they need food (Chapter 11). They witnessed the plagues of Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea. They witnessed the death of all who entered the desert, which means that the people that came out of the desert would have been born in the desert, a miracle in and of itself. They bear witness to godly act after godly act, all being delivered by Moses, Angels or God. Yet, they turn away from God whenever they aren't feeling fulfilled.

I did state in my introduction that I didn't want to dissect issues of faith or miracles, and I still don't. I won't take issue, to a point, with the suggestion that these events were possible. What I want to do is compare the nature of these people to what we see in humans today or even the early Christian faith. When we look at religious people today, anyone from pacifists to extremists, we see faith that their beliefs are correct; but we also see the “miracles” they attribute to their faith.

There is a wide range of examples or topics, and I don't want to spend too much time talking about them, but we see mother Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich, or holy men in the Far East puncturing different parts of their bodies. Shaolin monks believe in their own chi energy, and Islamic extremists believe in their promised afterlife. Speak to anyone who has had a spiritual experience and they will tell you why they believe in God, but not these early Israelites.

I see two distinct options for why these people wander in and out of faith. One, they come from a polytheist belief structure. So, if one god isn't giving you what you want then just pray to a different god. This seems plausible to me, more so than the idea that they simply slipped into sin and God had to save them time and time again. Remember, these people didn't come to God, He came to them. Well, He came to Moses and then Moses told them what to do.

More than that, we need to face a simple fact, it is human nature to build beliefs around unexplainable and amazing acts that we have observed, and considering the limited or nonexistent state of science at the time, it is obvious why supernatural ideas reigned.

The UFO phenomenon is a perfect example of that today. We have constructed an entire subculture around blurry photos and mysterious unexplainable events. As well as the tragic stories of abduction, which are strikingly similar to near death experiences, but, if the events of the Bible happened today, we would have no other option but to believe in some type of higher power. The Israelites dismiss it as if these happenings aren't important spiritually or to their daily lives.

This conflict has leaded me to believe in my second option as more correct then the first. The people, who are written about in the Old Testament, at least to this point, are fictional. They are not amazed by God. They are not people of faith. There is not one among them that believed, without a doubt, that God was there for their well being, not even Moses.

This changed later on in the Old Testament. Further in people believe on faith alone, and people begin to see God as He is seen today, but within the first five books of the Bible, no amount of proof is enough to convince these people to follow God's laws.

It certainly doesn't compare to early Christians and their faith. We have historical evidence that people were not just being killed, but brutally tortured for their faith in Christ and did not renounce it. The followers of Christ in the early church endured incredible tortures for their faith, but the early Israelites are made out as if they didn't care one way or the other, as long as they got what they wanted and weren't punished.

They seem to treat God with a mild form of indifference. This does not fall in line with human nature today and especially not with their ideas of the natural world 3000 years ago. So, either these people are fictional or they are completely different, at a fundamental level, with other people of their time (Greeks, Romans, Near and Far East, Native Americans) and far removed from how we act on or interpret signs today.

So, the first few chapters of Numbers are about the census taken of the Israelites and the Levites are given the duties of the priesthood. Although given may not be the right word. They were taken out of the covenant with God. In fact, the Levites are sacrificed to God, in a way, as a replacement to the first born sacrifice that He claimed in Exodus.

• Numbers 3:12-13 “...Now behold, I Myself have taken the Levites from among the children of Israel instead of the firstborn who opens the womb among the children of Israel. Therefore the Levites shall be Mine, because all the firstborn are Mine...”
  
  

If you remember in Exodus, after the plagues of Egypt, God lays claim to all the firstborn children and livestock of the Israelites. So I have to imagine that the whole time leading up to this point, the Israelites have been sacrificing every families first child to God, and don't forget, in Leviticus, God loves the sweet aroma of burning flesh. Are we to infer that these people were performing human sacrifices with their own children? Exodus 13 gives us an out for coming to that conclusion. The first born male children are reserved for God, and must be bought back by animal sacrifice at the temple. We dodged a bullet there, for the males at least...

However, this conclusion would have to lead to a comparison of humans to donkeys. Exodus 13 says that a donkey has to be ransomed with a sheep. It also says that you must ransom a child with a sheep as well. Leviticus 11 tells us that a donkey is an unclean animal, so it would reason out that a child is unclean as well, at least until you kill a sheep as an offering. Sounds like a foundation for baptism. I start to see a pattern forming. The further in we go, the more we have to construe with. I understand how monks and priests could study this book for decades in solitude.

Interesting side note, we are left with the Levites being both slaves to the community, and holding the powerful position of the priesthood. That makes for an interesting dynamic within the story.

Chapter 5 shows how superstitious these people were. Verses 11-29 instruct us on how to deal with the suspicion of an unfaithful wife because of a jealous husband. It lays out how to determine if a woman has been true or not, and having reread it a couple of times, shows me the extent of ignorance these people had, and reaffirms in my mind why I am studying this book to begin with.

Do people today believe that thousands of years ago you could determine adultery with some water and a pinch of dirt from the floor? Realistically, it is the mental aspect of the ritual and fear of God's punishment that would cause the adulterer to confess to the crime not the bitter water of God's curse. Whoever wrote the Bible knew how to manipulate people psychologically, which implies a level of insight and intellect on par with ancient philosophers, but predating their writings by centuries, but are we to read the Bible literally or figuratively, because I believe that these people understood it literally and that was its intent.

A worthy talking point begins in chapter 11. The people start to complain about their living conditions to Moses. In the same chapter, Moses complains to God about his leadership role.

· Numbers 11:5-6 “...we remember the fish which we ate freely in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our whole being is dried up; there is nothing at all except this manna before our eyes...”

· Numbers 11:11-12 Moses says “...you have laid the burden of all these people on me? Did I conceive all these people...”

When you read through chapter 11, you will realize why this chapter gives me pause. God decides to relieve Moses of some of his burden but punishes the people of Israel for the same act of complaint. I find it troubling that God would offer separate judgments for similar actions. While it does follow the established line of an angry and jealous God, it does not lead me to the loving and compassionate God I was hoping to find.

How am I supposed to know if praying to God will lead me to His grace or toward His wrath? How can anyone tell me to talk to God about my troubles? How can you convince me that I won't feel His anger? It would appear to me that suffering quietly would be what He wanted. Praying would only give you a fifty-fifty chance between a better life and punishment.

• · “...Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed...” - Henry Miller

The fact is the people had a better life in Egypt. They had a bountiful harvest while they lived there, and we already know that they only had to give twenty percent of it to the Pharaoh of Egypt. I have realized that the people of Israel didn't have a choice to leave Egypt. Moses went to the pharaoh and told him to let them go, then the plagues happened, after which the pharaoh told them to leave. These people were forced to leave their own lands because of Moses.

Chapter 13 talks about scouting the Promised Land. They report back that they found a land full of milk and honey, but giants lived there. The giants are known as the Anakim and later in Duet: 2:11 they are also identified as the Emim. We can trace these giants back to Genesis 6:4, before the flood. The fault in the story line resides here. Genesis 6:17 states that God will destroy everything on earth, but it would stand to reason that the giants of the Promised Land survived the flood that was supposed to kill everything. This is the problem with combining different books, written over hundreds of years, into a canonized revealed religious doctrine. Contradictions seem to be around every corner and a reasonable explanation doesn't cooperate with the long held traditional view.

I'm going to bounce around a bit for chapter 23. There is a verse that puzzles me, again, because of the traditional Christian view of the Trinity.

· Numbers 23:19 - “...God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should repent...”

There are a few verses in the Bible that reference the trinity of God, Christ or messiah, and the Holy Spirit. Almost all of them are in the New Testament, but a few are in the Old Testament. I have not found any that reference all three at the same time. Instead, they reference any two and we infer the trinity.

A moment of review is needed because of the verse I have referenced says that God is not a son of man. Remember back to Genesis, the sons of God are Angels, the son of man is mankind, and their offspring are the giants of Genesis, who survived in the land of Canaan apparently. In the New Testament it is important to realize that Jesus never refers to himself as the Son of God, only the son of man. It is outside of the gospels that Jesus is referred to as the Son of God, everyone else calls him that. Also in the New Testament, Matthew-12:31-32 places Jesus below the Holy Spirit in importance.

So, God is not and cannot be man, according to God's words in Numbers. Jesus is a man according to his own words in the New Testament, and the Holy Spirit is somewhere in between or equal to God according to Jesus and this can't be ignored. If the Trinity is real then they are not equals. If God doesn't take the form of man, then Jesus isn't God. He may be a lesser deity but not God. Given the age this all happened in, demigods were common, so maybe Jesus is meant to be similar to Heracles, the offspring of a god and a mortal and given trials to overcome. At the very least, God is not a man, or a son of man, so God doesn't become like us, and the traditional idea of the Trinity doesn't live up to the hype of the church.

However, I've gotten ahead of myself and moved into topics that will be better examined after we get to the New Testament. Let us return to Numbers subsequent chapters, where I would like to finish with the offerings and what Moses' left his family as his inheritances. Well, that is to say, if he was the true author of this religion, the reason for its creation becomes evident by the end of Numbers.

Reading through chapter 28 would make a PETA sympathizer tremble in a fury of disgust. God requires a daily offering of two yearling lambs that are completely burnt, one in the morning and one at dusk. Also, two quarts of fine grain flour mixed with a quarter of a gallon of oil at each time, as well as pouring out a quarter gallon of brandy twice a day for His drink offering (one for the hommies ya know). These are offered to Him as a soothing smell, to please Him. In addition to the normal daily offering, on the sabbath, you are to offer him two more male yearling lambs, with four extra quarts of fine grain flour mixed with oil and its drink offering of brandy. That totals sixteen lambs a week as a minimum offering to God, to be burnt completely within the morning or evening ceremony. This is what a modern culture believes in?

Gods monthly offering is a bit bigger. It consists of two bulls, one ram, and seven yearling lambs to begin with, too include grain, oil and drink offerings for each animal, which would be an enormous burden on the priests of the faith, plus the normal sabbath or daily offerings that were needed. But we don't end there, because there are more sacrifices for each festival and yearly offerings to think of. In the end, the best that I can figure 1256 bulls, rams, and lambs are to be sacrificed every year according to the offerings in just Numbers 28 and 29.

This doesn't include the personal offerings of promises or gifts, and ones own burnt, grain, sin, peace and trespass offerings that individuals were responsible for. Can you try to imagine the raging fires of the temple in a continual offering to God? For instance, if the beginning of the month was also the sabbath, then they would be burning two bulls, one ram, and eleven lambs in one day. I don't know how many fires it would take to completely burn all these animals on a regular basis and that is not what troubles me.

What troubles me is that God set up a covenant with all of His creation in Genesis 9:10. So what did the animals do to deserve sacrifice as their covenant? What was their original sin? Why does God enjoy or covet the burning flesh of His creation? Does he enjoy our burning flesh in hell? With a little bit of research, we can answer some of these questions quite easily.

The simple answer is that everyone was doing animal offerings. All of the cultures the existed before Judaism in the fertile crescent preformed animal sacrifice to their gods. This was not an original tradition but an established means of paying tribute in ancient traditions. In fact, I can't find any information on a major religion that doesn't have some form of animal sacrifice, except Buddhism, but Buddhism has its roots within Hinduism, which does have a history of animal sacrifice.

So, there are sects of major religions that have renounced this ancient practice, but Christianity is not one of them because their act of salvation is a reinterpretation of its original practice of animal sacrifice. The death of Jesus was a sin sacrifice and He became a tribute to God. The act of communion that serves as your redemption means that you have to condone animal sacrifice as a means of payment to God, if not cannibalism as well.

Everything, except woman, was created from dust and that implies we are all created from the same thing and we are not inherently better then anything else. Even though God givings us dominion over the animals of the earth, it isn't a clear position above them as most would interpret it. We have always perceived control over something as a dominant position, but think of the simple things that dominate us. The common cold has no cure, nor can we dictate to ocean life or fungus. If you really look at the world around us, we have little control over anything. We can kill an entire species, but we don't control it or the niche that it inhabited.

Control over any part of creation is outside of our limited ability to observe it. We don't understand existence enough to control anything yet, but that isn't to say that we don't affect it. Again, we don't have enough knowledge or data to know what is going on around us and we are powerless to control anything. So to say that we have dominion over all creation is very arrogant, not to mention, beyond reality.

To end this section we should speak of Moses' legacy. What did Moses leave his decedents? Well, only one percent of a nations wealth. Moses controlled Gods share of all things on earth. Ten percent of all things were given up as an offering to God, and Moses (with the priests) were given a tenth of the offerings. Try to imagine this, Israel is 1/7 the size of Iowa, closer to Massachusetts or Vermont in land area with the population of Boston. Now, Boston has a rough GDP of $300 billion, in modern dollars, that would give Moses $3 billion today and would easily place Moses among the wealthiest people of the planet at the time, and unlike a king or Caesar, there was no way to challenge his rule. After all, this was a man that spoke directly to God... But he wasn't unique in that day, many people claimed to speak the word of god(s).

• You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion   - L. Ron Hubbard, Science Fiction writer, founder of the Church of Scientology

 

 

Some say that the truth is the one that endures and that is why they believe in his word over other religions, but Hinduism has a longer time line then the Jewish religion. But should we be putting faith in the knowledge of a people that lived 3500 years ago. People that feared lightning or disease and turned to the supernatural out of desperation, not knowledge. These people were at a point of discovery that they needed, but didn't understand. 

 

In as much as Newton was an amazing intellectual in his day, he could not grasp gravities pull like Einsteins theory of general relativity. It was simply beyond Newtons mathematical, observational and cognitive abilities in his day. So, Moses may have been ahead of his time in many ways, and a genius but, he could not have been able to grasp the current level of scientific discovery we teach our first graders in schools today.