Already behind on the blog but I want to make a few comments at least on some of the events in the book of Numbers. Chapters eleven through seventeen contain a series of complaints and power struggles among the people of Israel and resulting consequences. A lesson can be learned from this about how a community that loses sight of its mission quickly turns on itself. It is no surprise that the peoples’ first complaint was about the food.

At Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, where I studied ages ago, there was single student housing on campus up on the hills of Berkeley and there was married student housing down on the flats in the city. Being in the married student housing I was spared from all the controversy, but up on the hill complaints broke out about the food. Two students on the hill took on the task of cooking for the single student’s dorm. They were wonderful people, brilliant theologians, but not very good cooks. The complaints, however, seemed out of proportion with the problem. The first year of seminary especially can be stressful, and one seminary professor wisely commented that when there is stress in a community the safest thing to complain about is the food.

The people of Israel had plenty of food. They had Manna from heaven (Exodus 16), but now they wanted meat. They were in a vulnerable place on their journey-- the Wilderness. God had freed them from slavery in Egypt, brought them across the Red Sea, given them the Law on Mount Sinai, and now they were in the Wilderness, neither suffering under Pharaoh nor yet arriving at their goal, the Promised Land. They were in the Wilderness, a difficult place on a journey where one is tempted to go back. So they complained about the food and looked back with nostalgia. “If only we had meat to eat? We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.” (Numbers 11:4-6) It is amazing that the people could complain about food from heaven. But we all know well how to complain despite all the good that we are given. It is also amazing how quickly they forgot that they had been slaves in Egypt. It is a vulnerable place to be, in the wilderness between slavery and freedom. It is tempting to go back to what is familiar even when you know it is not a healthy place. It seems the closer one gets to a goal, the more resistance one finds from within and without one’s self.

Moses, in turn, complained to God. “Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in you bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child,’ to the land that you promised on oath to their ancestors?” (Numbers 11:12)

The Lord sent quail into the camp for the people to eat, and then, with a kind of poetic logic to the punishment, the people choked on the quail and died with the quail meat between their teeth.

The pattern of complaints and their corresponding punishments seem legendary in character and may or may not be taken literally. This is a good time to point out the kind of literature we are reading in this wilderness narrative. It is mostly from the Priestly source which came later than the earlier Yawhist and Elohist sources. The stories may be exaggerated over time although legend usually has an historic truth behind it. Think of King Arthur or Paul Bunyan. There’s some history behind those legends.

I also want to ponder a little bit the way that people interpret events of their lives. How even in modern times, people can view personal or natural disasters as punishment for their sins. There were the unfortunate outbursts by certain television evangelists about Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters saying that they were God’s punishment for the sins of the city or our country. We can wave away these comments with mild disgust and move on. But we use similar illogic in our personal lives. Someone gets cancer and asks, “What did I do to deserve this?”

Once, I visited an old man with a broken hip who was near death. He came out of his semi-coma and asked, “What did I do wrong?” You didn’t do anything wrong.” I said. “You just fell and broke your hip, that’s all.” And I assured him that all his sins were forgiven and that God just loved him. He had a look of tremendous relief on his face and he asked, “What do I do now?” “Just rest in God’s love,” I said, “and be at peace.” He rested his head on the pillow. He slipped back into the coma that day and died the next day.

And then there were the power struggles among the people of Israel. These power struggles followed a significant event along the journey. Moses had sent spies into the land of Canaan who came back with some good news and some bad news. It is a land flowing with milk and honey, but there are giants in the land, they said. The people lost their nerve and were afraid to go forward. So, God made them wander in the wilderness for forty years, (forty being a symbolic number for a time of testing) and the people fell into arguing about who was in charge.

I have a couple of thoughts about this. One is an interesting observation I heard some years ago. I’m sorry I don’t know the source. It was about the progression in the scientific community from Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity and particle theory to what evolved as Quantum Theory. Einstein’s theories were a tremendous breakthrough and it must have been quite a stretch for the scientists of the time to grasp. And even Einstein had difficulty accepting some of the further developments that his own theories produced, thus Einstein’s famous quote, “God doesn’t play dice with the world.” But within a generation there emerged a fully developed new science called Quantum Physics. It took one generation for the scientific community to assimilate and then move forward from Einstein’s theories.

Similarly, during the forty years in the desert, the whole Egypt-slave generation had to wander in the wilderness, free but unable to grasp the new reality of their freedom. But the next generation, made strong by their wilderness experience and removed from the slave mind-set, was ready to enter the Promised Land.



Two of the power struggles in particular caught my attention. In Chapter 16, Korah and his company resented the leadership of Moses and Aaron and wanted more power for themselves. The next day, Moses had them stand separate from the congregation and Korah and his gang got swallowed up by an apparent earthquake. This is such classic legendary stuff. It reminds me of those stories like El Dorado or the South Sea Island stories where the priest of some primitive religion calls forth a volcano to show the power of their god. Well, maybe God works that way, or maybe it was an uncannily timed coincidence, or maybe it had to do with the way people interpret natural disasters and other events as I mentioned before. Perhaps there were those tensions within the community and some of the people were swallowed up by and earthquake. But it is a matter of perception whether one sees the event as an “act of God,” or nature.

In one of my previous congregations there were some political struggles. One member of the council wanted to get to the bottom of this trouble. He got pretty excited about the issues and in the middle of his speech he had a heart attack. Fortunately, he survived, but the event was perceived by a few people as some kind of judgment from God upon the congregation. The truth was, the guy was excited and his poor heart gave out. There was nothing more to it than that.

But what do we do, then, with these texts, regardless of how they came to be written, that talk of such a vengeful God? We’ve been talking in our Bible classes at Calvary about how Lutheran’s generally interpret scripture. We tend to look at God’s word in terms of Law and Gospel whether we are reading the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) or the New Testament. It is an inaccurate characterization to say the Hebrew Scriptures are law and the New Testament is Gospel. There is Law and Gospel, God’s challenge and promise, in both the Old and New Testaments.

Lutheran’s also look at how Scripture interprets scripture, not only how one passage might shed light on another, but also how the whole overarching themes of the Bible shed light on individual passages. So, we might look at Luke 13 to see how Jesus interpreted some natural and human disasters of his time. “Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will perish just as they did.” (Luke 13.4) We might look at this and other passages. We see law and gospel, as well as the overarching theme of God’s mercy and loving-kindness that we find throughout the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. That helps us have some perspective when we read some of these awfully harsh sounding passages in Numbers.
(You can read about these characteristic Lutheran methods of interpretation in the book “Opening the Book of Faith” by Jacobson, Powell and Olsen, Augsburg press.)

The other power struggle that I’d like to talk about is between Moses on one hand, and Aaron and Miriam on the other. There is a lot to say about this one because of the way Miriam is unfairly punished. But I’m going to have to save this discussion for another day.