22
TRIBAL INHERITANCE
This is the thing which the LORD doth command concerning the daughters of Zelophehad, saying, Let them marry to whom they think best; only to the family of the tribe of their father shall they marry. So shall not the inheritance of the children of Israel remove from tribe to tribe: for every one of the children of Israel shall keep himself to the inheritance of the tribe of his fathers. And every daughter, that possesseth an inheritance in any tribe of the children of Israel, shall be wife unto one of the family of the tribe of her father, that the children of Israel may enjoy every man the inheritance of his fathers. Neither shall the inheritance remove from one tribe to another tribe; but every one of the tribes of the children of Israel shall keep himself to his own inheritance (Num. 36:6-9).
The tribe of Manasseh was divided. Half of the tribe lived in Gilead, that section of Israel which lay beyond the Jordan. The chief rulers of this part of the tribe approached Moses with a question: What about the jubilee year?
And they said, The LORD commanded my lord to give the land for an inheritance by lot to the children of Israel: and my lord was commanded by the LORD to give the inheritance of Zelophehad our brother unto his daughters. And if they be married to any of the sons of the other tribes of the children of Israel, then shall their inheritance be taken from the inheritance of our fathers, and shall be put to the inheritance of the tribe whereunto they are received: so shall it be taken from the lot of our inheritance. And when the jubile of the children of Israel shall be, then shall their inheritance be put unto the inheritance of the tribe whereunto they are received: so shall their inheritance be taken away from the inheritance of the tribe of our fathers (vv. 2-4).
The five daughters of Zelophehad had previously come to Moses with a question: What about their inheritance? More to the point, what about the survival of their father's name in Israel? "Our father died in the wilderness, and he was not in the company of them that gathered themselves together against the LORD in the company of Korah; but died in his own sin, and had no sons. Why should the name of our father be done away from among his family, because he hath no son? Give unto us therefore a possession among the brethren of our father" (Num 27:3-4). The law was silent on this matter. The daughters did not want to lose their land, but the Mosaic law weighed heavily on the side of masculine authority. They sought a clear-cut ruling from God: Did God place the preservation of masculine authority above feminine authority to the extent of removing a man's inheritance from his exclusively female progeny? "And Moses brought their cause before the LORD. And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, The daughters of Zelophehad speak right: thou shalt surely give them a possession of an inheritance among their father's brethren; and thou shalt cause the inheritance of their father to pass unto them. And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If a man die, and have no son, then ye shall cause his inheritance to pass unto his daughter" (Num. 27:5-8).
Household authority rather than gender was primary in Israel. Like the widow who became the head of her household, and who thereby gained the right to declare a vow independently of a man (Num. 30), so were the daughters of a man who died without sons. His name was to be preserved in Israel through his offspring. Daughters rather than brothers were the means of preserving his name.
Adoption Through Marriage A problem still remained: What about marriage? When a man married, his wife brought a dowry into the marriage. The dowry was what distinguished a wife from a concubine. The dowry was generally provided by the bridegroom: a bride price. This is why Saul established the terms of his daughter's dowry for David: the foreskins of a hundred Philistines (I Sam. 18:25). Because the bridegroom provided the bride price, a daughter was not an economic burden on her brothers. Her dowry did not cost them part of their inheritance. A sister was not a source of negative economic sanctions in the family.(1) In contrast, a son inherited a portion of his father's land. This capitalized his branch of the family. This is how a man's name was normally preserved in Israel.
Then what about marriage? If the daughter inherited a portion of her father's land, and her husband was outside the tribe, would the tribe's inheritance be reduced? The jubilee law as written indicated that this was the case. The issue was judicial: adoption. The bride was adopted into her husband's family. We know this because of the response of the tribal leaders. If the wife had not become a member of her husband's family, which could take place only through adoption, then the problem the leaders brought before Moses would never have arisen. But the husband was under the authority of another tribe. Through his authority over his wife, based on her adoption into his household, his tribe would gain authority over the legacy of the man who died without sons.
The judicial solution was tribal. If a daughter married a man who was a member of her tribe, she inherited her father's land. If he was outside her tribe, she forfeited her inheritance. This inheritance was part of her tribe's inheritance. It was located within the legal boundaries established by lot (Num. 36:2). The tribe's judicial authority extended to its borders. The enforcement of God's civil law was tribal. Each tribe would apply God's law locally as it saw fit. This judicial decentralization was a major source of liberty in pre-exilic Israel. The central civil government could not impose its will over the tribes apart from an appeals system (Ex. 18).
The creation of geographical zones exempt from local tribal law would have undermined this decentralized system of rule. If one tribe could extend its authority by means of marriage, this would have subsidized a form of inter-tribal imperialism. The power of one tribe could have been extended through a program of seeking out brotherless virgins in another tribe. These women, already vulnerable, would have become pawns in a game of inter-tribal politics. To protect them, and to protect the regional authority of each tribe, God revealed a solution: the forfeiture of landed inheritance by a woman adopted into the family of a rival tribe. Landed inheritance was not strictly individualistic. "If a man have two wives, one beloved, and another hated, and they have born him children, both the beloved and the hated; and if the firstborn son be hers that was hated: Then it shall be, when he maketh his sons to inherit that which he hath, that he may not make the son of the beloved firstborn before the son of the hated, which is indeed the firstborn: But he shall acknowledge the son of the hated for the firstborn, by giving him a double portion of all that he hath: for he is the beginning of his strength; the right of the firstborn is his" (Deut. 21:15-17). It was also not strictly familistic, as the case law of Zelophehad's daughters indicates. It was partially tribal. "Neither shall the inheritance remove from one tribe to another tribe; but every one of the tribes of the children of Israel shall keep himself to his own inheritance" (Num. 36:9). The preservation of a man's name mandated the preservation of his tribe's name. The preservation of a man's inheritance mandated the preservation of his tribe's authority over his land. Only with the defeat of Israel by Assyria and the defeat of Judah by Babylon did this system of tribal authority end. It ended because the hierarchy of civil authority was transferred by God from Israel to a series of pagan empires.
Progressive Revelation and Eschatology Perhaps more than any other incident in Scripture, the story of Zelophehad's daughters reveals the progressive nature of God's revelation in biblical history. The jubilee land law was incomplete. It did not answer the question: What if an Israelite dies without sons? This question was raised by the five daughters in Numbers 27. Moses asked God; God replied: daughters should inherit, not the man's brothers or his uncles. But this answer raised another question: What if a daughter marries a man from outside her tribe? This was a problem because of a judicial issue that is never directly raised in the Mosaic law but which is the most fundamental of all judicial issues: adoption. Ultimately, this is the issue of redemption: the transition from wrath to grace. While the Mosaic law does not discuss it, this issue underlies the entire system: adoption into a tribe through a family or a city (citizenship); adoption into a family through marriage (inheritance); adoption of one family's inter-generational slave into another Israelite family (liberation).
God did not reveal the details of all this at one point in time. He revealed it over time. The jubilee law did not answer all of the problems of inheritance. Neither did God's initial revelation to Moses regarding the daughters of Zelophehad. He waited for the appearance of the moral discipline that used to be called casuistry - the systematic application of God's law to specific cases - to reveal new problems. Then He revealed the answers through Moses.
With the closing of the canon of Scripture, progressive revelation ceased. No new revelation comes to man that has authority equal to that of the Bible. A claim of judicial equality is in fact a claim of judicial superiority, for that which lawfully interprets past judgments is judicially superior to the past. God's revelation in Numbers 36 was superior to what He revealed in Numbers 27. That which He revealed in Numbers 27 was superior to what He had revealed in Leviticus 25.
Casuistry did not cease with the closing of the canon of Scripture. Casuistry is basic to every legal system. In the West, casuistry ceased to be practiced by Protestants around the year 1700.(2) The demise of Protestant casuistry was part of a larger social transformation: the replacement of Puritanism's theocratic ideal by Newtonian rationalism, Enlightenment speculation, and political secularism. The kingdom of God was progressively restricted to heart, hearth, and church. This was a denial of the comprehensive claims of God on man and his institutions.(3) The revelation of the Bible was assumed to be irrelevant to civil affairs. The revealed law of God was assumed to be subordinate to both natural law and common law because natural law was supposedly more universal than biblical law, and common law is second in authority after natural law. The categories of space and time were invoked against biblical law. They still are, although the category of time is generally given precedence: the doctrine of evolution. Cultural relativism has generally replaced natural law theory in academic circles.
This raises the issue of eschatology. If God's law can never extend to the four corners of the earth through mass evangelism and conversion, then the common-ground categories of space and time will continue to supersede the category of biblical law in the thinking of the vast majority of Christians. That is, if progressive sanctification is eschatologically impossible outside the boundaries of heart, hearth, and church, the kingdom of God must remain confined in history to cultural ghettos. The revealed law of God loses its operational authority because it supposedly was circumscribed spatially and temporally. This ignores the existence of God's specially revealed cross-boundary laws.(4) Their existence was manifested in the ministry of Jonah, who prophesied God's corporate negative sanctions against Nineveh. Cross-boundary laws are geographically universal. They are also temporally binding.
Only with a restoration of biblical casuistry can the kingdom of God be consummated in history.(5) But until there is widespread belief in the triumph of the gospel in history, casuistry will remain, at best, the hobby of a handful of Christian academics with a lot of time on their hands.
Conclusion The case law application of the jubilee law which we find in Numbers 36 ends the Book of Numbers. There is no question what the issue was: inheritance. This is the issue of continuity in history. In the context of Mosaic Israel, this issue was the preservation of a man's name. But it also involved his tribe's name. It had to do with the messianic prophecy of Jacob regarding the coming of Shiloh. "The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be" (Gen. 49:10). This was a seed law. It was also a land law: the preservation of the judicial authority of the tribes in a decentralized holy commonwealth. This judicial commonwealth ceased in the realm of civil government with the exile. So did the land laws in their original form.
Footnotes:
1. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 21.
2. Kenneth E. Kirk, Conscience and Its Problems: An Introduction to Casuistry (new ed.; London: Longmans, Green, 1948), pp. 206-207.
3. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).
4. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), pp. 6, 180, 256, 324, 455, 629, 631-32, 643-45.
5. North, Tools of Dominion, ch. 1.
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