Daily Lesson for March 4, 2020

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Numbers chapter 25 verses 1 through 9:

While Israel was staying at Shittim, the people began to have sexual relations with the women of Moab. 2 These invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down to their gods. 3 Thus Israel yoked itself to the Baal of Peor, and the Lord’s anger was kindled against Israel. 4 The Lord said to Moses, “Take all the chiefs of the people, and impale them in the sun before the Lord, in order that the fierce anger of the Lord may turn away from Israel.” 5 And Moses said to the judges of Israel, “Each of you shall kill any of your people who have yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor.”
6 Just then one of the Israelites came and brought a Midianite woman into his family, in the sight of Moses and in the sight of the whole congregation of the Israelites, while they were weeping at the entrance of the tent of meeting. 7 When Phinehas son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he got up and left the congregation. Taking a spear in his hand, 8 he went after the Israelite man into the tent, and pierced the two of them, the Israelite and the woman, through the belly. So the plague was stopped among the people of Israel. 9 Nevertheless those that died by the plague were twenty-four thousand.

When we read the Bible we have to understand that we are witnessing a kind intra-textual debate and even sometimes outright fight between the varying schools and factions who wrote the Bible.

The Lesson today is a disturbing one. It represents the worst in religion and ethnic clannishness. As Christians it is imperative to note that this was exactly the kind of ethno-religion Jesus rejected. How sad then that so many Christians have used this passage or ones like it to justify the evils Jesus abhorred!

But look also at the text. Apparently, Moses had misgivings about this kind of brutishness also. In the text Moses refuses to carry out the order to kill all the chiefs of the people who had consorted with foreign women. This became a point of derision in the power play between the later followers of the Moses school and their rivals in the lineage of the priest Aaron, whose grandson Phinehas carries out the butchery of the Israelite and his foreign wife without even a hint of squeamishness in the story.

See there is a debate going on within the text, a struggle and outright fight. Whoever the Aaronide-School writer of today’s Lesson was clearly had a more narrow and harder-edged version of what Israel should be than he thought the Moses tradition could tolerate. He thought the Moses tradition would lose the nation’s sense of itself through too much toleration. So, he gave the people this story to justify what we might today call ethnic cleansing.

So what is the point?  Again, beware of those who use sacred texts for the purposes of violence. For even the clearest of sacred texts there is often nuance, and disagreement, and a context in writing, and perspective of authorship.

But woe unto those who dare to say and believe that it was the LORD and not human beings who gave the command to kill.

NOTE: We’re reading the whole Bible this year. Tomorrow’s Lesson will be from Numbers 26-27.