Today, I am reading and commenting on Numbers 8-10.

I have been writing a bit about how Israel was divided into “twelve and one” for the last little bit.  Today’s passage follows the account of how the twelve tribes (counting Joseph’s two sons and not counting the Levites) all gave identical offerings for the dedication of the tabernacle.  It begins with the Levites being given onto God as a wave offering by the rest of Israel.  Once again foreshadowing Jesus being offered for all of humanity.  Another interesting thing in this passage is what happened when the Israelites celebrated the second Passover.  Some of the Israelites could not celebrate the Passover because they were ceremonially unclean as a result of handling a dead body, but did not want to miss out on celebrating the Passover.  They came to Moses to ask what they should do.  The answer which God gave to Moses was that those who for some reason could not celebrate the Passover on its normally scheduled date should do so the following month.  In giving that answer, God reiterated the importance of Israelites celebrating the Passover and included instructions that the same laws should apply to foreigners living among the Israelites: the same laws should  apply to both the foreigner and the native-born.

Towards the end of the passage it refers to “Hobab son of Reuel the Midianite, Moses’ father-in-law.”  Which led me to explore the complications about the fact that the Bible uses two or three different names for Moses’ father-in-law.  It first refers to him as Reuel when Moses first meets him in Exodus 2.  Then later, when Moses encountered the burning bush in Exodus 3, it says that the name of Moses’ father-in-law was Jethro.  Finally in Judges 4:11, it says that Moses’ father-in-law was named Hobab (we usually miss this because most translators follow the explanation I found for this and translate it as “brother-in-law”).  Since I touch on this with my parenthetical explanation, I will address Hobab first.  The phrasing in this passage and the phrasing in judges is slightly ambiguous due to the nature of Hebrew.  First, even in English we could read this passage as saying that Reuel is the grandfather of Moses’ wife, but the translator chose to put a comma in to suggest that Hobab is Moses’ brother-in-law rather than his father-in-law.  Second, the Hebrew word for “father-in-law” and the Hebrew word for “brother-in-law” are written using exactly the same letters (Hebrew does not have letters for vowel sounds), with the difference in pronunciation being noted with marks similar to how English does punctuation and my understanding is that even that is an “innovation” introduced into Hebrew long after both Exodus, Numbers, and Judges were originally written.  Which brings us to Reuel and Jethro.  Well, like most, if not all, names in the Hebrew language, these both have descriptive meaning.  Reuel means either “friend of God” or “shepherd of God”, while Jethro means “excellent”.  Either, or both, of these could have been titles, or maybe even names given by others (similar to nicknames, but with more formality than what we mean by calling something a nickname), for Moses’ father-in-law.  For that matter, his name might have been Hobab, but he started going by these other designations when he gave his son the same name as himself.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.