Today, I am reading and commenting on Numbers 30-31.

God tells Moses that his last act as leader of the Israelites will be to take vengeance on the Midianites for what they did at Peor.  This could lead one to think that the writer of this passage mixed things up, because in chapter 25 it says that the men of Israel indulged in sexual immorality with Moabite women.  Although the entire incident ends when Phinehas killed an Israelite man who brought a Midianite woman to his tent.  In addition, in this chapter Moses tells the Israelite commanders that the Midianite women followed Balaam’s advice to entice the Israelites to be unfaithful…and Balaam had been called to the area to curse the Israelites by the king of Moab.  To further complicate matters, Moses’ father-in-law was a priest of Midian and Moses spent 40 years living with him.  However, we get an insight into the situation when we discover that Balaam was killed among the Midianites.  Finally, the passage tells us that the Israelites burned all of the towns where the Midianites had settled as well as their camps.  So, it reads as if some of the Midianites, those that followed the five kings mentioned here, had settled in part of Moab, among the Moabites.

When I started writing this today, I thought writing about this would lead me to some spiritual insight about the passage, but that did not happen.  However, I still feel like I gained something of value from this exercise, even if I did not find a lesson to apply to my life today.

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