This is a difficult, laborious chapter. There are lots of hard-to-pronounce names — 40, 42 or 43 depending on the count. Yet the name of each encampment carries important teachings from what happened at each site and the meaning of the names themselves.
Bilam (Balaam) is not a member of God’s covenant and was a foreigner to them, although he was from the land of Aram, the ancestral homeland of Abraham. Yet, God saw fit to give him His words, His visions and to Bilam and use Bilam as God’s instrument among the people.
Skeptics like to poke fun at this story because of the talking donkey. Yet sometimes, our way is so set upon evil that a talking donkey doesn’t even phase us and give us pause to turn away from our direction.
Balaam wasn’t ignorant of the identity of the Creator God. He knew YHWH by name, and Balak, the king of Moab knew of Him too. If he knew that, then he knew that God had the power to make a donkey talk. Balaam didn’t fully understand the error of his way until one of the most powerful angels in God’s hosts, the Angel of the Lord, confronts him with a sword in his hand.
Israel didn’t credit God with the victory over the Amorites and other blessings, namely the coming of manna each morning to feed the people. God sent death amid the people — and the cure in the image of the instrument of that death. There’s an important prophecy about the work of Messiah Yeshua in this account, something Yeshua didn’t want Nicodemus to miss from his studies of the Torah.
We will look at this chapter carefully. The events of this chapter occur near the end 40 year wilderness exile. After nearly 40 years, the people still complain about being removed from Egypt and “dying in the wilderness.”
There is a very special but blunt message in Numbers 18–19, targeted to the High Priest and his family. Moses is not addressed at all. God impresses upon the High Priest family and the Levites the seriousness of their charge. They are given certain rights within in the community of Israel but also gives them very serious responsibilities. God also places serious consequences on the High Priestly family and the Levites if they are derelict in their Temple duties.
This section could be titled, “The Three Stories of Rebellion”: of a man collecting firewood on Shabbat, of Korah, of two families of the tribe of Reuben. God dealt with each rebellion in a different way. All imprinted in the minds of the people over and again God was the one in charge, and it was God’s prerogative to choose Moses and Aaron.