Page 100 - Pentateuch - Student Textbook

Yet Moses is human also. The complaining of the people gets to him, and he starts complaining. He too
wonders if God is good since his load is so great (11:10-15). God’s solution is to place his Spirit on 70
other leaders in Israel (11:17). The action is a positive response to Moses, as if to say, “Here is some
help.” The action is also a warning. God transforms normal everyday “leaders and officials” (11:16) by
simply giving them his Spirit. Moses is not indispensable. God’s presence is. The humble Moses needs to
remember this crucial point (12:3). He is not God.

The last instruction in this section (chap. 19) concerns the proper way to handle death. The deaths of so
many people already, anticipating many more in the following years, presented a problem. Touching a
dead body made a person ceremonially unclean (Lev. 21:1-4), seeming to require sacrifices to make
clean (Num. 6:9-12). This gets expensive and time consuming. Since more than one person would be
needed to bury someone, the herds and flocks of Israel would be threatened. Israel needed a better way
to take care of this specific form of uncleanness. The younger generation needed a way to move ahead
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as the older generation died. Death is the final consequence of the older generation’s sin. So God
provided with the ashes of a red heifer (19:1-22).

The provision of the ashes of a red heifer is remarkable. In all other
sacrifices, the sin is committed first, and the sacrifice follows. Here the
sacrifice is made first to provide for later sin. “It is as though the
pollution is transmitted back through time and space to the cow’s
incineration, where the evil is destroyed. As with the disposal of the
purification offering carcasses on the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16:27-
28), incineration of the cow takes place outside the camp. It destroys a
ritual “sponge” that is polluted because part of the same animal is
applied in liquid form (blood/ash/water) to something/someone in
order to remove contamination, and one or more persons who
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participate in the burning are rendered impure.”

The Israelites are learning spiritual lessons. Cleansing moves through
time. Cleansing moves through space. Someone not yet born might Fig. 67: Qalal urn used to store ashes
be cleansed by the previous death of a heifer. A sacrifice outside the
camp could affect cleansing inside the camp. In addition, the nation was learning about the need to
apply the remedy personally. An unclean person had to be sprinkled. The altar was not sprinkled. The
person was.

12.4 Let’s Practice…

1. Give an example of a man named after God and tell what his name means.

2. What tribe was camped closest to the tabernacle?

106 Timothy R. Ashley, The Book of Numbers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 362.
107 Gane, Leviticus, Numbers, 663.

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