(Numbers 12:1-16)
1. And Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman.
2. And they said, Hath the LORD indeed spoken only by Moses? hath he not spoken also by us? And the LORD heard it.
3.(Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.)
4. And the LORD spake suddenly unto Moses, and unto Aaron, and unto Miriam, Come out ye three unto the tabernacle of the congregation. And they three came out.
5. And the LORD came down in the pillar of the cloud, and stood in the door of the tabernacle, and called Aaron and Miriam: and they both came forth.
6. And he said, Hear now my words: If there be a prophet among you, I the LORD will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream.
7. My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in all mine house.
8 With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches; and the similitude of the LORD shall he behold: wherefore then were ye not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?
9. And the anger of the LORD was kindled against them; and he departed.
10. And the cloud departed from off the tabernacle; and, behold, Miriam became leprous, white as snow: and Aaron looked upon Miriam, and, behold, she was leprous.
11. And Aaron said unto Moses, Alas, my lord, I beseech thee, lay not the sin upon us, wherein we have done foolishly, and wherein we have sinned.
12. Let her not be as one dead, of whom the flesh is half consumed when he cometh out of his mother’s womb.
13. And Moses cried unto the LORD, saying, Heal her now, O God, I beseech thee.
14. And the LORD said unto Moses, If her father had but spit in her face, should she not be ashamed seven days? let her be shut out from the camp seven days, and after that let her be received in again.
15. And Miriam was shut out from the camp seven days: and the people journeyed not till Miriam was brought in again.
16. And afterward the people removed from Hazeroth, and pitched in the wilderness of Paran. (Numbers 12:1-16)
We have in Numbers 12 a sin related to Numbers 11, where ingratitude is the reason for God’s judgment. Here it is envy. Apparently, Zipporah, Moses’s wife, had died; although her father and brother were godly men, Zipporah lacked their faith, or at least their faithfulness, and she gave evidence of pettiness and was a problem to Moses. Moses had remarried an Ethiopian, or, more
accurately, a Cushite woman, of a group apparently related to the Midianites, Zipporah’s people.
Zipporah’s influence on Moses had been of no account. Miriam and Aaron, his sister and brother, were those close to Moses and therefore capable of influencing him. Now there was another woman in the picture, one more agreeable to Moses and more truly a helpmeet. The result was envy. Miriam was clearly the leader in this, and Aaron, who had once before, in the golden calf incident, proven to be a weak man, again proved himself to be a weak follower.
As a result of the marriage, both Miriam and Aaron criticized Moses. They challenged his primacy as God’s chosen man: “Hath the LORD indeed spoken only by Moses? hath he not spoken also by us?” (v. 2). This was partially true. In many instances, God speaks to both Moses and Aaron, but He always speaks primarily to Moses. In Exodus 15:20-23, Miriam is called a prophetess, one who speaks for God, as she leads all the women in their celebration of God’s deliverance. There is a reference to both Aaron and Miriam in Micah 6:4, indicating God’s use of them. The preëminence of Moses is, however, very obvious.
In v. 3, Moses is referred to as the meekest man in all the earth. The sentence is in parentheses, having been added to the Mosaic text by God’s appointed helper. The word translated as “meek”
has an inappropriate connotation at times in English, as does the word “humble.” We think at times of the hypocritical Uriah Heep of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. This is a radical perversion of its meaning, and it warps all of Scripture. Walter Riggans, a Scottish commentator, has called attention to the four inflections of meaning in this word meek:
(a) poor, needy (e.g. Deut. 15:11)
(b) powerless, without influence (e.g. Amos 2:7) (c) oppressed by the powerful (e.g. Ps. 10:17)
(d) therefore, those who rely solely on God in life (e.g. here, Ps.37:11; Zeph. 2:3;
Matt. 5:5).69
This is accurate but can be misleading unless we see this meekness, this poor, powerless, and oppressed condition, as coming from God and leading to a sole trust in Him. In this sense, the word “meek” has been defined as meaning broken to harness, trained and made useful by God for His purposes. In this sense, then, a meek man can be strong and forceful in dealing with the ungodly because he is under God’s discipline, not man’s. What is now identified as meekness means subservience to man, not to God. When our Lord tells us, “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth” (Matt. 5:5), He means that those broken into usefulness to Him rather than to subservience to men are those who shall inherit the earth.
God refers to Moses in v. 7 as “My servant Moses.” This is a title given also to Abraham in Genesis 26:24, and to Caleb in Numbers 14:24. The prophets are also so termed, and Jesus Christ is the great Servant of the Lord (Isa. 53:11).
Moses found himself unready to deal with this envy from the two so close to him, Miriam and Aaron. Miriam, older than himself, had been important to him since childhood. God therefore spoke for Moses, “suddenly,” we are told (v. 4). All three were summoned to the door of the sanctuary where God ordered them to face the truth. God’s anger was very clear (v. 9). Where all prophets and visionaries other than Moses were concerned, God made His word known through
a revelation or a “dream.” The word translated as “dream” has also the meaning of a binding, or a dumbness, whereby the person was silenced so that God might use him or her. All to whom God gave such an experience were on a lower level than Moses, to whom God spoke directly because he “is faithful in all my house,” completely loyal to God and His Kingdom. God said that He spoke to Moses “mouth to mouth,” as friend to friend, plainly and familiarly, not in “dark speeches” (v. 8). How dare they speak against Moses? In doing so, they spoke against God.
When the cloud lifted from the sanctuary, it became at once apparent that Miriam was suddenly far gone with leprosy, eaten up with it. Aaron, however, was not so afflicted. Miriam and Aaron were thus both publicly put to shame, Miriam with her leprosy, and Aaron because he had none.
It made it clear that Miriam was the main offender and that Aaron, as in the golden calf episode, was a weakling. He was in effect of no account and thus shamed as a nonentity in the situation.
Hers was a physical humiliation, his a spiritual one.
At this point, Aaron spoke more like a man. He confessed their guilt, and begged that it be not laid upon them, i.e., spare us from our folly. Entreat the Lord for us, he asked of Moses (vv. 11-12). Aaron thereby confessed also the priority of Moses, against which they had recently spoken.
Aaron’s description of Miriam’s changed appearance compares her to a premature birth or a miscarriage.
Moses immediately prayed to God for Miriam’s healing. God’s response is especially important for the church of our time to understand. In v. 14, God tells Moses, if her father, or, the father of any woman, spat in her face, would she not hide herself for a week out of shame? This refers to a public act of contempt. If a daughter, a wife, or a son shamed his father, such an act would be a public disavowal of any relationship, or, at the very least, his public disgrace and separation until restitution and repentance were made. Miriam had to reside outside the camp, separated from her family and all others, until a week ended, and then she rejoined the camp cleansed.
Some commentators have said that Aaron was not stricken with leprosy because he was the high priest and therefore “necessary.” But it was God who made Aaron high priest, and He could raise up another man to that office. There are no necessary people in God’s sight, and to believe so is madness.
Verse 9 speaks of the anger of the Lord, a burning anger, some have termed it. Because the sin of Aaron and Miriam had been a public offense, God subjected them to a public humiliation and judgment. Some have seen the sin of Miriam and Aaron as an example of racial prejudice. If this had been the case, it would have been shown towards Zipporah much earlier. It was rather a resentment against anyone other than themselves having a closeness to Moses. It is clear also that, whereas Moses was ready to forgive and forget, God was not; hence the seven days of shame, and a mild rebuke to Moses for asking for an immediate restoration. In Otto Scott’s words, “God is no buttercup.” God here shows mercy, but not without a penalty.
We must now, in the light of all this, turn again to v. 3 and the reference to Moses as a meek man. Philip J. Budd refers us to Psalm 25:9 for its meaning: “The meek will he guide in judgment: and the meek will he teach his way.” Psalm 37:11 is similar, and we have it in Matthew 5:5, the blessed meek who shall inherit the earth. Budd notes, “The word is often used
of a trustful attitude.... The point here seems to be that Moses is not self-assertive.”70 He was a forceful man, but he was not an egotist. It was God’s glory, not his own, that concerned Moses.
This is why God asks Miriam and Aaron, “wherefore then were ye not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?” (v. 8). What Moses had not taken as an insult, God saw as an insult to Himself.
What Miriam and Aaron had done was to claim equality with Moses, and God found this offensive. This false claim to equality is another aspect of Numbers no longer preached about.
We have, since the French Revolution, come to regard equality as a great virtue, even as a humanistic inequality was seen as a social necessity prior to that revolution. What God requires of a society is justice; men want that their will, whether equality or inequality, be done. Here, the pretension to equality with Moses was an insult to God, and He took vengeance. To build a society on equality or inequality is injustice: we must build in terms of God’s justice. Envy governs our time as a pretended virtue, as equality. God asks in every instance, why are you not afraid? Such a sin strikes at the foundations of social order and reduces a society to lawlessness and anarchy. Older commentators, like Professor W. Binnie, called the action of Aaron and Miriam “sedition.”71 None condemn it so now that equality and envy have become major political virtues. Again we see why Numbers and the other books of Moses are bypassed in our antinomian era.
God made Miriam unclean because of her envy and her demand for equality, and He shamed Aaron, who now appeared as hardly a man. Watson’s comment of a few generations ago is more appropriate than ever:
Modern society, making much of sanitation and all kinds of improvements and precautions intended to prevent the spread of epidemics and mitigate their effects, has also some thought of moral disease. Persons guilty of certain crimes are confined in prisons or “cut off from the people.” But of the greater number of moral maladies no account is taken. And there is no widespread gloom over the nation, no arrest of affairs, when some hideous case of social immorality or business depravity has come to light. It is but a few who pray for those who have the evil heart, and wait sympathetically for their cleansing. Ought not the reorganization of society to be on a moral rather than economic basis? We should be nearer the general wellbeing if it were reckoned a disaster when any employer oppressed those under him, or workmen were found indifferent to their brothers, or a grave crime disclosed a low state of morality in some class or circle. It is the defeat of armies and navies, the overthrow of measurers and governments, that occupy our attention as a people, and seem often to obscure every moral and religious thought. Or if injustice is the topic, we find the point of it in this: that one class is rich while another is poor; that money, not character, is lost in shameful contention.72
In Watson’s day, politics and economics were seen as the means to the salvation of society. The consequences of that false hope are all around us.
In Psalm 94:20, the psalmist asks,
Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, which frameth mischief by a law?
Men have enacted evil by laws, legalizing equality and inequality, ingratitude, and envy, and then they wonder why evil prospers.
We see again why this chapter is neglected. No doubt, if some feminist learns of it, she may use it to “show” how “sexist” and “antifeminist” the Bible is! The concern of the Bible, however, is with God’s salvation, with sin, His justice, grace, and mercy.