VIRTUALLY THE FIRST THING THE ISRAELITES DO AFTER SETTING OUT ON THE SECOND leg of their journey to the Promised Land is—rebel. This pattern was already seen in the book of Exodus, where, despite the climactic miracle of deliverance at the Sea of Reeds, the Israelites “grumbled against Moshe” at Mara because of lack of drinkable water. Although a strain in later biblical thinking remembered the wilderness period as a kind of honeymoon (cf. Jer. 2:2), the Torah itself chose to remember it as a severe time of testing which the ex-slaves ultimately failed to pass.
The second part of Numbers is a remarkable collection of rebellion narratives that simultaneously display striking similarities and great and colorful differences. The section details six rebellions of the people, and two of the leaders themselves. They are united by a consistent vocabulary: verbs such as “grumble” and “assemble/gather/speak against” depict complaints against Moshe and Aharon and against God. These stories also display the recurring themes of dearth of food and water, and God’s anger at the rebellions, usually expressed in some form of plague (or, additionally, fire).
Rather than unfold in simple chronological order, one following another, these pieces of the text have been intensified by priestly editing, which has interspersed the stories with a number of cultic and legal passages (Chaps. 15, 18, and 19, all of which bear the theme word “law” [Heb. hok or hukka]), and which are somehow related to previous or succeeding narratives. The interruptions also allow each of the memorable rebellion narratives to “breathe,” giving the audience time to digest the images and the drama presented therein. The stories possess both in abundant measure; one thinks, for instance, of the “meat between the teeth” (11:33), of the grape clusters borne on a pole by two men (13:23); and of the great confrontation with Korah in Chapter 16 (not to mention its resolution), as well as Moshe’s dramatic failure in Chapter 20.
As in any great literature, repetition of story type or type scene is here accomplished via variation of the most telling kind. In this case we observe once again an alternating pattern to the rebellions, a pattern which reveals not one theme but several:
The people, over lack of food (chapter 11)
Moshe’s siblings, over prophetic primacy (12)
The people, over the spies’ false report (14)
Levites, over Moshe and Aharon’s prerogatives (16)
The people, over the rebellious Levites’ sinister fate (17)
Moshe himself, over the burden of leading the people (20)
The people, over the lack of food and water (21)
The pattern observable here is broken, in true biblical rhetorical style (where the last in a sequence often serves by its oddness to reinforce the whole), in a final rebellion (Chap. 25), where the people’s actions involve neither the “complaining” vocabulary nor a revolt against human leadership, but rather comprise the greatest biblical crime of them all: worship of other gods. Viewed in this patterned fashion, the rebellion narratives emerge with a kind of crescendo effect.
It is also possible, as I have done in “On the Book of Numbers and Its Structure,” above, to follow the scheme put forth by Mann—a three-part structure to the section, each with its internal logic and conclusions. These are treated below; for the moment, it will suffice to see in the first subsection (Chaps. 11–14) the inevitable result of wilderness rebellions: the divine decree that the slave generation must die out before entering the Promised Land; the second subsection (16–20) deals with the challenges to the leadership of Moshe and Aharon, and results in a similar decree, that they will die outside the land; and the third subsection (20–25) chronicles the encounter of the Israelites with neighboring nations, which initially goes in their favor but ends with the disastrous incident at Baal Pe’or (25).
The primary issue in these stories, to the biblical writer, is lack of trust in God. Each of the three sections mentions or implies that problem; 14:11 and 20:12 use the verb itself, and the narrative of Chapter 25 suggests it. The bottom line is that the Israelites could not keep faith with God—even after both staggering acts of divine intervention (i.e., rescue) and demonstrations of the force of divine wrath—and this lack of faith led ultimately to their dying out in the wilderness outside the Promised Land, in punishment. The stories clearly were meant to be understood as an unfortunate example for later generations, and were taken as such already in the biblical period (see, for example, the treatment in Psalm 78).
Read on another level, the rebellion narratives are largely concerned with the issue of human leadership, its qualifications, manifestations, and limitations (and even failures). Has there ever been a leader as beleaguered as Moshe? From the beginning of his career on the sands of Egypt, where he assumes the mantle of leadership in the matter of retaliating against the sadistic Egyptian taskmaster (Ex. 2:11–12), to its end at the plains of Moab, in stern address to the people he has struggled to lead (this is the setting of the entire next book, Deuteronomy), he must evoke trust in God, lead the people through an uncharted wilderness, and inspire confidence in his own leadership. His success is muted by the passing of the generation he initially leads, before it can enter Canaan; like them, he too must pass on—with merely a look beyond the Jordan, but no more. Later generations of Jewish readers wept on confronting Moshe’s seemingly premature death, and created heroic tales of his pleading before God to be let into the land he had so long sought to reach. In Numbers he fully deserves this stature, alternately interceding with and cajoling God, standing up for and then almost giving up on this people with whom his life has become so enmeshed. Our stories stress his gifts of prophecy and his pathos as a deeply human leader.
A final, troubling issue is the character of God in this part of the book. It is a measure of the Bible’s artistry that the rebellion accounts are so varied in content and style; but the variations in punishment—from undetailed death to skin disease to stoning and the earth opening up, just to mention a few examples—create an impression, not of artistic richness but of unremitting severity. The Bible does not seem to have a problem with this kind of divine behavior, and other ancient cultures would have felt at home here, but already in late antiquity, and continuing down to our own day, Jews and Christians most often have preferred, and prayed to, a more forgiving, nurturing, and compassionate God. Dealing with these texts, in the end, raises the question of whether to understand them as the result of “historical necessity” or “literary conceit” (that is, the old generation simply had to die out) or as they stand in the text: a harsh portrayal of what happened when the covenant people violated the covenant.