Dec 31, 2018
The final chapter of the of Numbers is not quite what one might expect. Chapter 36 introduces us to five daughters of a man named Zelophehad. He had a problem. No, it wasn’t that his name was difficult to pronounce. It was that he was dead. And he had died without a male heir. So, according the Mosaic Law, his unmarried daughters would inherit his land. But some of the other Israelites expressed their concern over this plan. They raised the question: What if one of these daughters were to marry a man from another tribe? Then the land would become his and the inheritance of Zelphehad would be lostThey brought their issue to Moses, who then sought the counsel of God. And what we see is God implementing a solution that had an immediate impact and long-term implications. He instituted a plan that kept the inheritance of Zelophehad within his immediate family and that required his daughters to adopt a long-term, corporate mentality that was designed to meet the concerns of the entire community of Israel.