Sunday, Nov. 24
Numbers Chapters 34 – 36 Click here to read
The Old Testament was written in a harsher time than our own; we can be grateful that our day allows us the luxury of a less brutal existence and pray that blessing continues.
But time and again we come across passages that have beacons of mercy.
We saw that in the way God dealt with the daughters of Zelophehad, protecting their inheritance when there were no men to carry on the line.
We meet up with them again today. It is interesting that the final chapter of Numbers, with all of the people and events the book has covered, is devoted to making sure these five women are accorded the opportunity to marry and live their lives. As with others, their marriages must be within their tribe, but they are afforded the right to choose their own husbands.
Of all the ways the book could end, the choice to lift up the rights and wellbeing of five sisters who have no great position in the community shows something about God’s care for his people.
We also see the concern for mercy in the laws about the cities of refuge.
The justice of the day was swift and harsh: a life for a life.
But that justice was also tempered with mercy, with protection for those who accidentally caused the death of another person.
First, there is a section devoted to determining if a death was truly accidental. If there was planning, or if a weapon is used, it is assumed to be deliberate.
The law even distinguishes between hitting someone with your fist in anger (deliberate) and shoving them without hostility in a way that causes their death (maybe not deliberate).
For those awaiting judgment, or judged to have killed accidentally, or for whom the death sentence cannot be applied for lack of witnesses, there are cities of refuge scattered through the land: cities where a person can flee and be protected from vengeance when the law doesn’t allow for death as a punishment.
The person must then remain in the city of refuge until the death of the current high priest, essentially being sentenced to a time of banishment rather than death.
No doubt the protection of accused people, and the likelihood that some guilty people were able to avoid punishment, was a frustrating in that day as it is in ours…but here in the earliest days of the Jewish people being a recognizable nation are legal principles that still shape our justice system.