Individual strength through unity: Why it was so important for Israel to have 12 distinct tribes (Numbers 32 & 36)

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As we end the book of Numbers, one of the main themes is that God repeatedly reminds the descendants of Israel is that Moses and Aaron were His chosen servants to the people of Israel. Rather than usurpers of leadership, they were carrying out their calling from HaShem.¹

Korach and his family were in the inner circle of the tribe of Levi. They had access to carry the most holy things but this honor was not enough honor for them and they caused a great rebellion, which God had to crush bluntly.

Keep your promises (Numbers 30)

In the dual Torah reading מטות Matot (“tribes”) and מסעי Massei (“journeys of”) (Numbers 30–36), we are reminded that when the LORD makes a vow or oath, you can count on it.

That is why if we ever make a vow in God’s name, we must be equally careful to follow through completely, without equivocation. We must be careful when calling on the LORD to co-sign our vows or oaths. Although some vows, particularly certain vows of wives and daughters could be contramanded but in general, vow made in God’s name must be followed through to the end.

Numbers 30:13 gives us the context of why certain vows made by certain women could be annulled:

“Every vow and every binding oath to humble herself, her husband may confirm it or her husband may annul it. “But if her husband indeed says nothing to her from day to day, then he confirms all her vows or all her obligations which are on her; he has confirmed them, because he said nothing to her on the day he heard them. But if he indeed annuls them after he has heard them, then he shall bear her guilt.”
Numbers 30:13–15 NASB

Any vow a wife makes that would affect the intimacy of the marital relationship, whether they directly affect the conjugal relationship or the finances of the family, the husband had a veto option, but there were serious consequences if the husband step in with his veto.

Why did You make me this way?

There is a Creator, and there is the creation. The nation of Israel are God’s creation as all the nations of the world are HaShem’s creation.

Then the Lord said, “Because this people draw near with their words And honor Me with their lip service, But they remove their hearts far from Me, And their reverence for Me consists of tradition learned by rote, Therefore behold, I will once again deal marvelously with this people, wondrously marvelous; And the wisdom of their wise men will perish, And the discernment of their discerning men will be concealed. Woe to those who deeply hide their plans from the LORD, And whose deeds are done in a dark place, And they say, ‘Who sees us?’ or ‘Who knows us?’ You turn things around! Shall the potter be considered as equal with the clay, That what is made would say to its maker, ‘He did not make me’; Or what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘He has no understanding’?”
Isaiah 29:13–16 NASB

God made Jews and Gentiles, He made men and women. It goes back to the Maker vs. that which is made. God made our roles for us and we should humbly accept that role.

Do we want to be self-governed or just pursue blood for blood?

The cities of refuge were like our county jails of today. They were holding areas where people could flee to have their case heard before the judges. The cities of refuge were created to slow down the vengeance of the “avenger of blood.”

Today, we have created a dispassionate, impartial, objective venue through our legal system to allow for adjudication of serious offenses such as manslaughter and murder. The avenger of blood had to consider whether he is pursuing his task with a goal of finding the truth and enacting justice or is he just angry and thirsty for vengeance and blood?

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
“John Adams to Massachusetts Militia, 11 October 1798,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed Feb. 28, 2020.

If the nation is completely morally bankrupt, then laws have to abound to keep immoral people in check.

The Apostle Paul takes a deep dive into Isaiah 64-65 in his letter to the Romans, as recorded in Romans 9-11 as to why many in Israel rejected their Messiah and what would come as a consequence of that rejection.

It goes back to the Potter and the clay. If God is our potter, then we have to acknowledge that He has the right to design it how He wants. If you are being fashioned into the handle of a water pitcher, do you have the right to tell God, “No, I don’t want to be the handle”? No. Just as God has the right to decide if we are the foot or the hand of the Body of Messiah, He also has the right to decide if we are Jew or Gentile, male or female.

Why is it so important to have 12 tribes?

Why is it so important that they occupy a particular land? Why is it so important that the daughters of Zelophadad marry only within their tribe to keep their father’s inheritance? Why did God want Israel to be unified?

We have individual parts, and those individuals are important, but they are also important to the whole nation.

It was God who chose to allow a veil over the eyes of the nation of Israel regarding the identity of His Messiah, and that veil was not placed over the Gentiles, but that veil over the nation of Israel will not be there forever.

There are equal dangers in the excesses of extreme individualism but there are also dangers in the excesses of extreme collectivism. Both the individuals and the whole nation are equally important.

East Bank bargain (Numbers 32)

When the children of Gad and Reuben asked to posses the land on the east side of the Jordan, this request frustrated and angered Moses at first. He thought history was repeating itself, with two tribes waffling about the prospect of entering the Promised Land, but the vow made by the tribes of Gad and Reuben eased his concerns.

Gad and Reuben נָגַשׁ nagash (“approach,” H5066) Moshe to address his fears about the two tribes’ not crossing over the Yarden into the Land proper by pledging to go at the lead of the Israel force that would clear out the land (Num. 32:16).²

There are several examples of how the Hebrew word nagash is associated with the idea of going beyond oneself and reaching out for reconciliation, not looking out for loopholes to get out of an obligation, but accepting each other, and building up a relationship with someone else in good faith:

Abraham to the LORD over the Sodom metropolitan area (Gen. 18:23)
Deceptive: Ya’akob to Yitzkhak for the birthright (Gen. 27:21, 25, 27)
Ya’akob to Eysau (Gen. 33:3, 6–7)
Yosef’s brothers to him, and Yosef to them (Gen. 43:19; 44:18; 45:4)
Priests to be consecrated (Ex. 19:22)
Moshe to the LORD on Sinai (Ex. 20:21)
A servant who wants to join his master’s family (Ex. 21:6)
Nagash appears in principle: Raqel (Rachel) to Leah over Ya’akob in the exchange of the mandrakes (Gen. 30:14–16)

Moses presents the situation of Gad and Reuben to the rest of Israel as a contract with conditions and penalties. They addresses Moses’s fears that they were not going to go into the land as the 10 spies of the prior generation did not want to go into the land but the leader of Gad and Reuben reassured them that they were not cowards or unfaithful to the covenant of Abraham.

The 10 spies, and the people who followed them, lost sight of why God created the nation of Israel in the first place and later generations also lost the plot. They forgot that they had a Great Commission to reveal God to the nations around them. They didn’t consider the knowledge of God something to be retained as the Apostle Paul mentioned. For a time, the people of Israel were given over to foolishness. God sent many prophets to warn the people of Israel of their path of folly, but most of the people did not listen.

E pluribus unum: All for one and one for all (Numbers 36)

The Banot (daughters) of Zelophehad petitioned for a change to the laws of inheritance so their father’s line can participate in the legacy of Israel (Num. 27:1-11; 36:1-12). The daughters did gain the inheritance they asked for but they had to give up something in return. They had to choose to marry within their father’s tribe to be granted their father’s inheritance.

There’s another example of a group of people asking for a change in the Law, which was when some Israelites asked to be able to keep the Pesach later, which was granted to them through the Pesach Sheni (Second Passover), This was granted so those who are rendered ineligible to eat the Pesach at its appointed time will still be able to be part of Israel’s remembrance of deliverance (Numbers 9).

We are all traveling along to one goal, which is the Kingdom of Heaven. If we trend towards a streak of individualism, we have to remember we are all a part of something bigger. For those of us who trend towards collectivism, who would want to say that anyone in the collective can be easily replaced, to understand that every people in the community is unique, valuable and hugely important.

For example, Thomas Jefferson wrote a draft of the U.S. Declaration of Independence with language calling slavery inhuman:

he [King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
“Jefferson’s ‘original Rough draught’ of the Declaration of Independence,” Library of Congress, accessed Aug. 3, 2022. Professor Julian Boyd reconstructed the version before it was revised by the other members of the Committee of Five and by Congress. From The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Vol. 1, 1760-1776. Ed. Julian P. Boyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950, pp 243-247) See an image of this page of the draft.

Though an inheritor of slaves, Jefferson couldn’t get his state, Virginia, to change its slavery laws. And he couldn’t get that anti-slavery language into the final version of the Declaration of Independence because a few colonies out of the original 13 would not accept such language.³

So, for the sake of unity against Great Britain, those clauses were deleted, but a poison pill was inserted in the Constitution that would eventually cause the downfall of chattel slavery: the three-fifths clause.

That measure has been misunderstood ever since. As Constitutional Convention delegate Luther Martin, attorney general of Maryland, wrote in a report to his state, the goal of such provisions was to limit the power of the slave states in Congress, thus hastening the end to the practice.⁴

The income inequality between the northern states and southern states was very stark and blatant. The institution of chattel slavery crippled the South’s economy.⁵

The divide between the North’s economic power, which was based on industry versus the South’s agricultural based economy became greater over the decades leading up to the Civil War. The economy of the north was robust and diversified but the economy of the south was stifled and stagnant.

Even 100 years after the end of the Civil War, the economy of the Northern States is far ahead of the economy in the Southern States.

There are some things we inherited that need to be discarded, but we have to be careful not to kick down the pillars that uphold society. When you go to kick out the foundations, then the society and the people they hold up will come crashing down. The people of Israel suffered through a similar identity crisis. If we lose our identity as a people, we lose everything.

Summary: Tammy