Today, I am reading and commenting on  Numbers 11-13.

There are a lot of things which I thought about writing about in today’s passage.  It starts with the people complaining about their hardships and God causing fire to break out on the edges of the camp.  Then it mentions how the people were worked up to be upset about the food which God provided, which led Moses to feel overwhelmed and ask God to give him help leading the people.  Then there is the incident where Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because he had taken a Cushite as his wife.  Finally, there is the account of the twelve spies who spied out Canaan; ten of whom spoke against going into the land.  However, I was struck by the fact that it was here that Moses changed the name of Hoshea son of Nun to Joshua.  We don’t often notice this because throughout most of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers it usually refers to him as Joshua.

The first thing I want to write about is why does the author of Numbers even mention that he was once known aa Hoshea.  One possibility is that the list of the twelve spies was copied from another source, and it was only after listing Joshua as Hoshea in his copy of the list that the author realized the discrepancy and needed to explain it.  Another possibility is that Moses changed Hoshea’s name after he returned and the writer chose to tell us that here, while otherwise generally referring to him as Joshua, since that was the name the people he was writing for knew Joshua as.  However, none of that is why I thought this was worth writing about.

What I find noteworthy is the meaning of the two names.  Hoshea means “salvation”, while Joshua means “The Lord is salvation”, or “The Lord saves”.  The writer does not make clear when Moses changed Hoshea’s name to Joshua, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t think it matters.  I suspect that it was sometime after the spies returned, which would explain why he was in the list of spies as Hoshea.  In any case, this name change is important.  The first is because Joshua led the Israelites to establish God’s kingdom in the land of Canaan, and Jesus (the Greek transliteration of Joshua) who established God’s kingdom on the earth for all people.  Second, if Joshua had still been Hoshea when he led the Israelites into Canaan, there would have been those who would have been tempted to worship him in place of God.  Some would have said that the man Hoshea was their salvation, but Joshua’s name gave credit to God.

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