But
the complaint is a pretext for their jealousy of him. “The complained, ‘Is it through Moses alone that the Lord speaks? Does he not speak through us also?’” (12:2) The
Lord orders the three of them to come out to the meeting tent where he has this
to say: “Should there be a prophet among you, in visions will I reveal myself
to him, in dreams will I speak to him; Not so with my servant Moses! Throughout
my house he bears my trust: face to face I speak to him, plainly and not in
riddles. The presence of the Lord he
beholds. Why, then, did you not fear to
speak against my servant Moses?” (12:6-8)
The
result of it is that Miriam is afflicted with a skin disease (leprosy?) for
seven days (as a result of Moses’ supplication to God to go easy on her). God compares what he did to a father spitting
in the face of a daughter—that it brings her shame that would last for a week
at least (12:14).
In this
interesting chapter, we see Moses’ brother and sister jealous of Moses’
intimacy with the Lord and wishing to assert their own “right” to be
intermediaries between God and he people.
Schocken editors suggest this might have been inspired by the coming of
the spirit on the elders in the previous chapter. How many times in the history of God’s people have people had this
competitive spirit that makes them say “Is it through Moses alone that the Lord
speaks? Does he not speak through us also?”
So it is that even those who have every reason to know and
appreciate the gifts of those who seem especially called to help us know and
understand God’s will, choose to challenge God’s own call by asserting their
right to be treated as equals. I
guess people have always had trouble with leadership. But God does not totally reject their
assertion. He simply maintains that
Moses sees the Lord and his will more clearly.
The lovely sentence, “Now,
Moses himself was by far the meekest man on the face of the earth” seems to
negate any thought we might entertain that Moses sought some kind of personal
authority to exalt himself. Miriam is
further punished by a week-long episode of a leprosy-like condition, but then
we hear no more of this family strife among the three.
Certainly
it must not have been easy to be the sibling of Moses. From his childhood he seemed to have been
chosen for God’s special favor.
Miriam, who must have been
seven or eight years his senior, stood beside the basket as it drifted along
the shore near the dwelling of the Pharaoh, so she could be there when the
little bundle was discovered. It was
her suggestion that reunited the baby with its mother and permitted the family
to rest assured that Moses would escape the fate assigned to all the other
little Hebrew boys. And later Moses
looked to Aaron to help him speak to the Pharaoh, so shy or hesitant was he in
delivering God’s message to the mighty one.
Certainly they who were most
likely to know the frailties and humanity of God’s prophet were also the most
likely to wonder why he should be given so much authority in the gathering of
God’s people. They understood that
in a human sense there was little distance between them and him. They were therefore most likely to wonder why
God’s wisdom and authority were present in him in such a large measure.
Numbers 13 - Moses sends out scouts from the tribes
to ascertain the strength and character of the inhabitants of the Promised
Land. Hoshea, son of Nun of the tribe of Ephraim, Moses’ own household, is
called Joshua by Moses.
They
reconnoiter the land for 40 days and find the land to be all that God promised,
but the word that the inhabitants are fierce and the towns fortified, is not
received well and some try to exaggerate the Israelites disadvantages so as to
discourage the people and create ill-feeling towards Moses. So
Moses faces rebellion not only from his family but from some of the leaders of
the tribes.
Irenaeus of Lyons
(c.180 AD)
Selections from the Work Against Heresies
Book V – Redemption
and the World to Come
Doctrine of Redemption
in Reply to the Gnostics
1 – “We could in no other
way have learned the things of God unless our Teacher, being the Word, had been
made man. For none could declare to us the things of the Father, except his own
Word. For who else has known the mind of the Lord, or who has become his
counselor? Nor again could we have learned in any other way than by seeing our
Teacher, that we might become imitators of his works and doers of his words,
and so have communion with him, receiving our increase from him who is perfect
and before all creation.”
He
is the “true man” – “redeeming us by his blood in accordance with his reasonable
[Logos-like] nature, he gave himself a ransom
for those who had been led into captivity. Since the apostasy tyrannized over
us unjustly, and when we belonged by nature to God Almighty had unnaturally
alienated us, God’s Word, mighty in all things, [reclaimed us], making us his
own disciples.”
“[H]e
acted justly against the apostasy itself, not redeeming his own from it by
force, although it at the beginning had merely tyrannized over us, greedily
seizing the things that were not its own, but by persuasion, as it is fitting
for God to receive what he wishes by gentleness and not by force.” This is pretty amazing language, language brought to us in
the 20th century by men like Gandhi and M.L. King, Jr.
“So,
then, since the Lord redeemed us by his own blood, and gave his soul for our
souls, and his flesh for our bodies, and
poured out the Spirit of the Father to bring about the union and communion of
God and man—bring God down to men by [the working of] the Spirit, and again
raising man to God by his incarnation—and by his coming firmly and truly giving
us incorruption, by our communion with God, all the teachings of the heretics
are destroyed.”
“These
things did not take place fictitiously but in reality.” “He would not have had
real flesh and blood, by which he paid the price [of our salvation], unless he
had indeed recapitulated in himself the ancient making of Adam.” This puts to
rest some of the assertions of Valentinus.
The
Ebionites, “who do not accept in their souls by faith the union of God and man;
but remain in the old leaven of [merely] human birth—not wishing to understand
that the Holy Spirit came upon Mary, and the power of the Most High
overshadowed her, and so what was born [of her] is holy and the Son of God Most
High, the Father of all who thus brought about his incarnation and displayed
the new birth, so that as we by the former birth were heirs of death, by this
birth we should be heirs of life.”
Ebionites were a Jewish-Christian sect that regarded Jesus as the
Messiah but thought they had to retain the Jewish law and rites, They looked to
a separate Gospel, which is cited by other writers but has disappeared. It was
said to be similar to Matthew’s Gospel but rejected the Virgin Birth.
“”They
do not reflect that as at the beginning of our creation in Adam the breath of
life from God, united with the created substance, animated man and made him a
rational animal, so at the end of the Word of the Father and the Spirit of God,
united with the ancient substance of the creation of Adam, made a living and
perfect man, receiving the perfect Father, so that as in the animal we were all
dead, in the spiritual we are all made alive. For Adam never escaped those
hands of God, to whom the Father said, ‘Let us make man after our image and
likeness.’ “
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