The whole chapter begins with the people complaining.....they have just STARTED their trip, so they begin by ticking off the Lord and the Lord shot out fire....seems to me that the people would learn a little lesson from this but NO......they want MEAT. My translation said they were "wailing". All they could think about was meat and they even annoyed Moses. The key difference is that the people wailed to each other, but Moses expressed his frustration to the Lord directly. The Lord provides some help to Moses and gives the Sprit to 70 of their elders....cracks me up that Eldad and Medad got the Spirit, but Joshua says to Moses, "'scuze me, Moses.....those two dudes are doing your job".....Moses was so cool and said, "I wish all the Lord's people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them"........humble, non-jealous Moses. Note here that prophesying here is not "predicting the future".....it is speaking the Word of the Lord. If God directs people to prophesy and predict the future, they will as you can see with Moses, but sometimes, he just wants people to speak about Him in the here and now......
Quail came for the people, but because the people were lusting(putting it before everything else) after the meat, the Lord struck the people with a plague.
Chapter 12
OK, let me clarify something.....I thought Moses only had Zipporah as a wife. After research, scholars feel that he had more than one wife. Zipporah was the Midianite.....she bore Moses the sons we discussed earlier. Apparantly, there is a Cushite wife whose name is never mentioned. Cush is in Ethiopia....Scripture doesn't talk about what Miriam and Aaron had the gripe with specifically, but there are two theories...one is that they couldn't find anything wrong with Moses, so they attacked his wife, and the other is that it was skin color....Ethiopians are black and the Lord struck Miriam with the leprosy that made her skin "white as snow" for a reason, scholars argue. Quite honestly, this is not a saving issue, the point is that there was sibling squabbles that God took care of. Miriam and Aaron repented....Miriam was purified for seven days, they packed up the camp and moved on to the Desert of Paran.
Desert of Paran
Do you think that Traveling in this desert would make you cranky? Would you look only at the desert, or would you think about the fact that you were not a slave in Egypt and that the Lord gave you manna, and that He was leading the camp in a pilar of fire?????
Then here is Kadesh where the Isrealites wait for the Spies report. The desert oasis will be significant, because Miriam dies here eventually, and this is where you will find out that Moses misbehaves and has some dramatic consequences.
Chapter 13....
Moses sent spies to check out the Promised Land. These people were so close to the Promised Land, but the spies got scared and didn't trust in the Lord and spread a bad report about the inhabitants of the Land. Let me point out that I think I am descended from the Anaks who are a race of abnormally large people!!!!! We are otherwise known as Amazons..LOL. Calab said that they should take possession of the Land......the fear spread throughout the camp.....the other races were pagans and people that killed just for the sake of killing.....The Isrealites are SO CLOSE to the Promised Land...
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