Oh really! Is this necessary?
I do not have to believe every single word to believe Scripture!
Richad
What part of “harming their base message” leads you to think verbal plenary inspiration? Accurate does not mean inerrant. It means the substance of what is taught is reliable. Not necessarily every word or passage.
Then what on earth are you getting at?
???
Richard
You can’t distinguish a between a work giving a reliable portrait of Jesus that captures the basic substance of his teaching without being inerrant?
I am sorry but that sentence does not make any sense (to me) I suggest you give up now. Suffice it to say I have no problem with Scriptures or getting what I need from them.
They are not inerrant.
They do not need to be inerrant.
They are not authored by God.
They do not need to be authored by God.
Inspiration does not direct what words are used.
The humans who wrote, wrote what they believed to be correct.
What humans saw, and what actually happened do not always agree.
Jesus was misunderstood right up to His crucifixion and beyond. That is an integral part of the message.
and Finally
Jesus said
If you know me then you know the Father
therefore
if you know the Father you know Jesus.
I have spent over 60 year getting to know the Father…
Richard
I think so too, though obviously it gets hairy trying to say what’s what, and it’s hard to avoid just picking and choosing. But I think the basic principle is already there in the OT.
God set up Moses to basically be God for the people and for Pharaoh (Ex. 4:16; 7:1). What the people saw Moses do and say was taken as what God was doing and saying. Given this, what happens when an action has more of Moses in it than God? I think we see that happen the second time he strikes the rock.
The people were grumbling to Moses and Aaron due to their thirst (Num. 20:2–5). God, though, doesn’t seem frustrated. God tells Moses to command the rock to yield its water for them to drink (:6–8). This doesn’t seem to be enough for Moses. He yells at the people: “ ‘Listen, you rebels; shall we bring water for you out of this rock?’ Then Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock twice with his staff; water came out abundantly, and the congregation and their livestock drank” (:9–11). But God punishes Moses and Aaron “Because you did not trust in me, to show my holiness before the eyes of the Israelites” (:12).
I don’t think God is upset that Moses mistreated a rock (though God surely cares about rocks too). By not showing God’s holiness, I think it means portraying God as more fickle, human and temperamental than reality. Hitting the rock was emblematic of how Moses made God out to be unstable, angry and violent.
This wasn’t a one-off event. When the people craved meat, God/Moses provided a windfall of dead quail and forced the people to eat the rotting carcasses for a month. When they somehow got sick, it was taken as a plague from God (Num. 11:10–23, 31–34).
Or, back with the golden calf rebellion, there’s an interesting verse where God says, Now leave me alone so I can get really angry and destroy them (Ex. 32:10). It’s as if God isn’t yet really angry, even after seeing what the people had done, so Moses easily talks God down (:11–14). But when Moses comes onto the scene himself, it doesn’t take him any time at all to fly into a rage (:19). While God’s anger had a long fuse, Moses’ is short. Moses forces the people to grind up the idol and mix it with their drinking water. When many people somehow got sick, it was taken as a plague from God (:20, 35).
One of the worst examples, I believe, is the slaughter of the Midianites. This includes the male children, showing how Moses exceeds Pharoah’s atrocity on Moses’ generation (Num. 31). It’s perhaps the sickest chapter of the Bible. The story is made even worse when we recognize that the Midianites are Moses’ inlaws. This is a family feud, but the Israelites – and our Bibles – see Moses’ anger as God’s.
Anyway, Walter Brueggemann calls passages like this the Bible’s “counter-testimony.” They reveal details that subvert the party line. Usually there are ways to read the passages in line with the dominant testimony and avoid their challenge. But this is where I think a Christocentric reading shines. Rather than simply forcing the OT to say what it never said before, Jesus can give us a standard to sometimes lift up a counter-testimony and allow it to critique the dominant testimony. Maybe God isn’t really as unstable as Moses portrayed. Maybe, as Paul thought, God is more revealed in the generous rock Moses struck than in the angry one striking it (1 Cor. 10:1–4). Jesus gives a basis beyond personal preference to what in the OT we choose to elevate and center.
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Att least they were nice enough to give quarter to all the virgin women. That one is the worst to me.
He does have a pretty big collection of them….
I think this is helpful. Several passages in Ezekiel and Jesus’s treatment of divorce are key for me. But do we get all the way there?
This also gets hairy to me. Jesus basically declares himself the paschal lamb at a Passover meal. He never said otherwise but would he deny God killed all the firstborn of Egypt as the story goes? Certainly just about everyone understanding passover would understand him as being the lamb that saves us just as lamb’s blood did for the Jews back when God killed all the firstborn of Egypt. I think any other interpretation is akin to “forcing the OT to say what it never said before.” It would be very convoluted. Likewise, he mentions Noah’s flood and seemingly does not have an issue with God sending a flood to kill thousands of humans, including women and children. War is terrible but I can’t imagine it never being necessary or justified. I’d like to just dismiss the account entirely but it does start: “The Lord said to Moses, 2 “Take vengeance on the Midianites for the Israelites. After that, you will be gathered to your people.”
If we believe in inspiration I think we have to go deeper as you have done but as you note, scripture views this as a command of the Lord, at least the war part in Numbers 31. The wilderness generation is one not to emulate. Pitre and Bergsma on 1 Cor 10:1-11:
“In this dense but powerful passage, Paul draws out both the typological and moral senses of the book of Numbers, alluding in a few sentences to the condemnation of the first generation to death in the wilderness (Num 14:29-30), the sexual immorality that accompanied the apostasy on the plains of Moab with the Baal of Peor and the devastating plague that resulted (Num 25:1-18), the plague of fiery serpents by which thousands of Israelites were killed for rejecting the manna (Num 21:5-6), and the “murmuring” of the rebellious Israelites who participated in Korah’s rebellion and its aftermath (Num 16:41-49). ”
Per them, Hebrews says the same thing: “Hebrews uses the wilderness generation in the exact same fashion, citing the “fathers” who put God “to the test” for “forty years” as an example of spiritual hard-heartedness, rebellion, rejection of legitimate spiritual authority, and sin (Heb 2:7-18). Indeed, the author of Hebrews uses the fact that the wilderness generation was “unable to enter [the Promised Land] because of unbelief” as a warning to all Christians about failing to enter eternal life because of the same kind of sinfulness (Heb 3:19-4:13).”
Both Paul and Hebrews do not look highly on the wilderness behavior. But one wonders if the failure to kill everyone would have been part of the wilderness failure in their eyes? Because God desires all to be saved, that doesn’t mean everyone necessarily is and though God takes no pleasure in death (Ezek 18), that doesn’t mean some do not suffer and die as a result of divine judgment.
The Christocentric view is certainly not a get out of war free card. Since we believe Jesus is the exact image of the father, He gives us the fullest and best image of God. We still have the mess of “The Lord said” though I note afterwards there is a lot of Moses said and did. Can we understand this as something that happened but see Moses being Moses and screwing up as did the Israelites throughout and going beyond what God would have wanted? Based on Paul’s full critique of their behavior, it seems he took the details seriously as something that happened.
Vinnie
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This is how the** Christian Think Tank justifies Numbers 31:
Summary:
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The judgment scene in Numbers 31 has nothing to do with lewd ‘tests for virginity’
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The judgment scene in Numbers 31 has nothing to do with ‘sex slaves’ or even slavery in the sense of New World Slavery
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The judgment scene in Numbers 31 has nothing to do with a religious war against the Midianites, “because they worshipped a different god than Israel”
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The Midianites were a tribal league of generally nomadic peoples, with a wide variation in orientation, ethics, and practices.
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They were known to engage in kidnapping and international slave trading, as well as raiding and pillage of sedentary peoples/villages.
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The Moabites, who start the chain of events leading to Numbers 31, are under no danger or threat from Israel, but nonetheless begin unprovoked attempts to vanquish the unsuspecting Israelites
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After the Mesopotamian diviner/sorcerer/prophet Balaam fails to curse Israel, he nevertheless advises the Midianite leadership on how to overcome Israel—by a sexual deception of a massive scale.
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Moab transports women into the area en masse, and Midian moves into the territory east of Shittim, to begin this initiative. Some 6,000-12,000 married women aggressively offer sex to the Israelite men (most of whom are married), and after having sex/adultery, convince them to participate in further acts (involving both sex and disloyalty to the Lord).
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Israel ‘falls for it’, and likely makes a ‘covenant’ with a Canaanite fertility god of vegetation (Baal Peor), and are judged by God (at least 24,000 Israelites die of a plague, most of which are males)
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The Moabite and Midianite women retreat out of the area, having successfully used their sex as a weapon (with full knowledge, consent, support, and encouragement from their husbands, fathers, and civic leaders).
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For this atrocity, God orders Israel to attack this specific group of Midianites (not the Moabites) and eliminate them.
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The Israelite force of 12,000 men travel east/southeast to where the Midianite sub-group is camping, and engage in combat. (They are NOT instructed to hunt “all the Midianites in the world down and kill them”—just this group that did the treachery at Baal Peor.) They kill almost all of the males in this battle, but return to the Israelite camp with the herds and property of the Midianites, as well as with the women and (mostly girl) children.
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Moses is shocked to find out that they spared the very women who used the sex-weapon against them, and even brought these women back to the Israelite camp! He orders them to execute the women, who had been involved in the treachery (but only the Midianite women—the Moabite women are spared), and any remaining males among the children.
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The remaining young girls—with an average age of 5 years—were spared and distributed throughout the people, into families. They would eventually be assimilated into Israel families, but from this moment on, they would care for them, feed them, train them, etc. for family life in Palestine.
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The 32,000 young girls could be assimilated into Israel, largely because of the death of the 24,000 adult Israelites.
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The judgment for the atrocity at Baal Peor fell both on Israel and Midian—both would have lost around 24,000 adult members of the population, and the consequences on the Midianite children (especially the boys) would have been a direct result of the choices of their parents and leaders.
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The realities of life in the ANE precluded absorption of the residual boys into the people—in keeping with realities of the time.
Personally, I think the first pushback is on number 17. Why couldn’t they have taken the male children as well? What are these realities of ANE life that precluded it?
Per the Jewish study bible: “Since lineage was determined patriarchally, they do not pose the danger of producing Midianite sons who can avenge their fathers.”
Vinnie