Well, I'm only just reaching the two-thirds mark of Numbers, and I have to say, it's not so bad. Don't get me wrong, it started off with an almost unbelievable lack of pace, but this has been several sustained chapters of actual story - something I wasn't expecting at all.
It also turns out that I did know some stories from Numbers, I just didn't know they were from Numbers. Huh.
That said, however, there are still some dry bits, but even those tend to not be so bad. 18 starts off with, shades of Leviticus, instructions for priests as far as their duties, roles and dinner portions following sacrifices, but what struck me about this was not any of the particulars, but rather the downright casual approach to the concept of "unclean" demonstrated throughout.
I don't know if it's just me, but I've always had the concept of OT cleanliness built up in my head as a pretty huge deal. Like crazy-gray-haired-old-lady-standing-on-her-porch-screaming-UNCLEAN-while-hurling-cats kind of huge.
But here, it really seems like it's just par for the course in every day life.
Hear me out. From looking at this text, and thinking back on others, there doesn't seem to be a way for the concept of being unclean to be anything other than fairly mundane. Specifically, there doesn't seem to be the moral component to it.
Yeah, that's the ticket. We, or at least I, have long been at least casually thinking about the Old Testament proclamations about "remaining unclean" as being some sort of moral or metaphysical judgment, but there just doesn't seem to be any evidence for that - at least not here.
Here, we have priests being assigned their regular duties. They're being told - by God, mind you - what they're going to do in various sacrificial situations, and at almost every step, someone becomes unclean in the process. They're unclean until evening, they have to avoid contact with others lest they make them unclean, and then it's all over and done with - no fuss, no muss.
This should provide a bit of a different context for the rest of the Pentateuch. Let's see if it holds up.
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Also in this section we've got Moses's first big screw-up in a long while. For most of the time so far he's been pretty up and up, not that you'd expect any less from the most revered prophet in the entire Jewish religion. However, here we have him overstepping bounds, and he pays for it by suffering the same fate as the Israelites who were too chicken to go into the Promised Land, only he's got a lot more class, so he doesn't have to be swallowed up by the ground beneath his feet.
So they're all in the desert, and the Israelites trot out their by now very tired complaint that Moses/God brought them into the wilderness to die and why couldn't they stay in Egypt, etc, so God tells Moses that there'll be a miracle, and it'll get water for everybody.
Great!
Except that Moses, for reasons that are entirely unexplained, fails to follow God's instructions. God says, very clearly, that Moses is to raise his staff over a certain rock, talk to it, and water will come out.
What he does, though, is he takes his staff and he strikes the rock. Water still comes out, but this clearly wasn't in the original plan. So why do it?
There has to be something more to it than simply to say that that's how he was told to do it last time; Moses has been following horrendously complicated and precise instructions for most of his time as God's prophet, and he's always got it right. So why mess it up now?
Well there's nothing explicit in the text that gives any hint, really, but it wouldn't be hard to imagine Moses being pretty pissed off at the hoard of insufferable ingrates with whom he is doomed to spend his days wandering through the desert. Let's face it, the people of Israel would make anyone want to smash sticks against rocks, even if they couldn't punctuate it by yelling, "FINE! HERE'S YOUR DAMN WATER!" afterwards.
I find this to be a more compelling potential rationale than another that I've heard which postulates that Moses was trying to take command himself and pull something off on his own. I'm not sure I buy that. Not because it's impossible, obviously, but it just doesn't seem to be in character. If anything, he's always had to be pushed by God into the role of leader of the people. It hardly seems like he'd overstep his bounds out of sheer ambition.
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I'm not going to get too deep into the Balaam story here, because Numbers 22 ends before it's totally wrapped up, so I'll come back for the rest of it, but a talking donkey is really hard to resist.
I don't care what anyone says, this is what Balaam's donkey looked like.
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