INTRODUCTION
Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the LORD (Jer. 31:31-32).
Harden not your heart, as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness: When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my work. Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said, It is a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known my ways: Unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest (Ps. 95:8-11).
The Psalmist offers as a warning the Israelites' wilderness experience, which is the central focus of the Book of Numbers. The wilderness experience was a curse: a negative sanction. This curse was announced in God's wrathful oath that the exodus generation would not inherit the Promised Land. They would die in the wilderness. Thus, what might have been a temporary transition period in the lives of the exodus generation became their lifetime experience. The Promised Land was associated with rest from their labors. Israel would not gain this rest during their lifetimes. "So I sware in my wrath, They shall not enter into my rest."
This passage offers important information for a correct assessment of the primary theme of the Book of Numbers: oath/ sanctions. This theme is point four of the biblical covenant model.(1) The Book of Numbers is the Pentateuch's book of sanctions. Had the exodus generation been faithful to God, this book would have been the book of conquest: the victory of Israel (positive sanctions) over Canaan (negative sanctions). Instead, it is the book which chronicles Israel's rebellion against God through rebellion against Moses, and of God's negative sanctions imposed in response to their rebellion.
Actually, this is an overstatement. Numbers does not chronicle most of the wilderness period. It chronicles about four years: two at the beginning of the wandering and two at the end.(2) It provides historical information on the reasons for God's imposition of corporate negative sanctions on the exodus generation (1-17); then it provides more historical information regarding the removal of these sanctions from their children, (21-36). Two chapters are devoted to certain priestly laws (18, 19). The central passage is chapter 20, which records the death of Miriam, the sin of Moses in striking the rock, God's judgment against Moses - he shall not enter the land - and Aaron's death. This marks the great transition: from wrath to grace for Israel.
Numbers reveals the covenantal basis of historical progress: positive sanctions for covenant-keeping and negative sanctions for covenant-breaking. This covenantal cause-and-effect relationship serves as the foundation of the theory of economic growth. Profits (positive sanctions for accurate forecasting),(3) wages, and interest-rent(4) can be invested. If these investments are based on accurate forecasts of the future, and if they are implemented on a cost-effective basis, they produce an expansion of capital, which is a tool of dominion. With greater capital, more of the earth can be brought under mankind's dominion. The positive feedback of compound growth, if extended over time, becomes the basis of economic transformation and the conquest of nature, or as economic historian John U. Nef put it, the conquest of the material world.(5)
We conclude that one of the foundations of mankind's fulfillment of the dominion covenant (Gen. 1:26-28) is long-term economic growth. Without the possibility of reinvested earnings and the growth of capital - above all, accurate information and the social means of implementing it - there would be no way for mankind to extend God's kingdom across the face of the earth, transforming nature to reflect the covenantal, hierarchical rule of God in history through His ordained agent, man. The idea of an "unspoiled nature" that has not been influenced by man and reshaped by man in terms of man's desires and needs is an anti-biblical concept. God made it plain to Israel: better the rule of covenant-breaking Canaanites than the rule of nature. "And I will send hornets before thee, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite, from before thee. I will not drive them out from before thee in one year; lest the land become desolate, and the beast of the field multiply against thee. By little and little I will drive them out from before thee, until thou be increased, and inherit the land" (Ex. 23:28-30). In other words, God's negative sanctions against Canaan were to be delayed so that the land would not fall under the negative sanctions of the animals. The reappearance of autonomous nature was regarded by God as being a more fearful negative sanction against the land than continuing dominion by covenant-breaking mankind.
The late twentieth-century environmental movement denies this view of nature by elevating the supposed needs of impersonal, autonomous nature over the goals of man.(6) Such a view of nature is pagan to the core. Increasingly, environmentalism has become pantheistic and even occult: earth as "Gaia" - a living spirit.(7)
The Covenantal Structure of the Exodus-Wilderness Books The Book of Exodus presents the story of God's deliverance of the Israelites. The true king delivered them out of their former bondage to a false king. God intervened in history to demonstrate His power in history. "For I will at this time send all my plagues upon thine heart, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people; that thou mayest know that there is none like me in all the earth. For now I will stretch out my hand, that I may smite thee and thy people with pestilence; and thou shalt be cut off from the earth. And in very deed for this cause have I raised thee up, for to shew in thee my power; and that my name may be declared throughout all the earth" (Ex. 9:14-16). This is point two of the biblical covenant model: hierarchy.(8) The evidence of God's power was His ability to impose negative sanctions on Pharaoh and those whom he represented. The deliverance of Israel began with sanctions that led to a transfer of inheritance. "And the LORD gave the people favour in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent unto them such things as they required. And they spoiled the Egyptians" (Ex. 12:36). This structure of redemption in history was to serve as a model for the exodus generation and all succeeding generations. Inheritance and disinheritance are linked by sanctions: positive for the inheritors, negative for the disinherited.
From Exodus we move to Leviticus: the book of holiness, where the laws of holiness appear. This is point three of the biblical covenant model: ethics.(9) The goal of God's deliverance is the restoration of covenantal obedience on the part of those delivered. This message was to become part of the Passover's ritual, an opportunity to teach respect for God's law to each successive generation. "Then thou shalt say unto thy son, We were Pharaoh's bondmen in Egypt; and the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand: And the LORD shewed signs and wonders, great and sore, upon Egypt, upon Pharaoh, and upon all his household, before our eyes: And he brought us out from thence, that he might bring us in, to give us the land which he sware unto our fathers. And the LORD commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the LORD our God, for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as it is at this day. And it shall be our righteousness, if we observe to do all these commandments before the LORD our God, as he hath commanded us" (Deut. 6:21-25).
The Book of Numbers is clearly concerned with point four of the covenant model: sanctions. The Israelites repeatedly rebelled against Moses in the wilderness. Moses was God's representative. God therefore repeatedly brought corporate negative sanctions against the generation of the exodus. Their rebellion ultimately cost them their inheritance. Godly inheritance - point five(10) - is based on faithfulness to the stipulations of the covenant. The sons of the rebellious generation lawfully claimed the inheritance. The Epistle to the Hebrews extends the theme of the Psalmist by describing this inheritance in terms of rest. "But with whom was he grieved forty years? was it not with them that had sinned, whose carcases fell in the wilderness? And to whom sware he that they should not enter into his rest, but to them that believed not? So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief" (Heb. 3:17-19). The transfer of the right of inheritance was based on sanctions: negative against the generation of the exodus, positive for the generation of the conquest. The actual transfer was also based on sanctions: positive for the Israelites, negative against the Canaanites. The preliminary phase of this transfer began in Numbers 21: the disinheritance of King Arad.
From Point Four to Point Five The Book of Numbers has relatively little to say about the details of economics, at least when compared to the other four books of the Pentateuch. Numbers is concerned with sanctions, but always in terms of the promised inheritance. The main sanctions the book discusses are military and liturgical. The book begins with a numbering of the people, which was in fact a mustering of God's holy army. Excluded from this initial mustering was the tribe of Levi. This tribe was the priestly tribe, i.e., the tribe that was in charge of the sacrificial system. The sacrificial system was a system of sanctions.
The economic issues dealt with in the Book of Numbers mainly have to do with the distribution of the spoils of war. Military spoils were an important topic because Israel was preparing for the conquest of Canaan. The military victory of Israel would constitute the disinheritance of Canaan's nations. That is, the disinheritance of Canaan by Israel was to be the basis of Israel's inheritance. The sanctions were simultaneously positive and negative. This God-mandated disinheritance would be an extension of what Israel had already experienced in Egypt. God's disinheritance of Egypt's firstborn sons had been the historical basis of Israel's initial inheritance: "Speak now in the ears of the people, and let every man borrow of his neighbour, and every woman of her neighbour, jewels of silver, and jewels of gold" (Ex. 11:2). The Egyptians were ready to surrender what would have been the inheritance of the firstborn because of the trauma of the final plague.
The promise of military spoils was designed to motivate the Israelites to greater fervor (Num. 32:17-18; Josh. 17:13-18). The promise of victory(11) was insufficient to motivate the exodus generation. The Book of Numbers provides a grim history of that generation. The book's Hebrew title is bemidbar, "in the wilderness": the fourth word in the first verse.(12) Israel's wilderness experience was the product of Israel's refusal to believe God, obey God, and become the sanctions-bringing agent of God. The long-promised inheritance began only when all the members of the exodus generation except Moses had died (Num. 20). At that point, the conquest generation began the process of disinheritance through conquest on the wilderness side of the Jordan River (Num. 21).
The Promised Land The promise given to Abraham was that in the fourth generation after the descent into Egypt, Israel would conquer the inhabitants of Canaan (Gen. 15:16). This promise was conditional: the Israelites had to remain a people. The visible covenantal mark of this unity was circumcision. The failure of the Israelites of the exodus generation to circumcise their sons required the mass circumcision of Israel at Gilgal after they had crossed the Jordan (Josh. 5:5). Israel had to experience the negative sanction of shed blood before the nation could lawfully shed the blood of the Canaanites who occupied the Promised Land. The negative sanction of circumcision preceded the negative sanction of disinheriting Canaan militarily. Military disinheritance, in turn, had to precede the positive sanction of national inheritance: "But we ourselves will go ready armed before the children of Israel, until we have brought them unto their place: and our little ones shall dwell in the fenced cities because of the inhabitants of the land. We will not return unto our houses, until the children of Israel have inherited every man his inheritance" (Num. 32:17-18).
This should alert us to the two-fold nature of covenantal sanctions: positive and negative. It should also alert us to the two-fold nature of covenantal inheritance: inheritance through disinheritance.
The exodus generation wanted their inheritance without the obligation of disinheriting others. They wanted the benefits of the covenant without the costs: circumcision, obedience, and risk. They died in the wilderness because they refused to accept the risk of negative sanctions. Because they feared death more than they desired the inheritance on God's terms, God gave them death without the inheritance. They sought God's positive sanctions apart from the threat of negative sanctions. This had been Adam's desire, too: to be as God without the threat of death. The result in both cases was death.
Military Sanctions The Book of Numbers has less to say about economics because it is concerned with military sanctions. In war, the winners gain victory at the expense of the losers. The winners gain spoils at the expense of the losers. This is what economists call a zero-sum game. There is no increase in total wealth; the gains of the winners are paid for by the losers.
The free market allows mutual benefits through voluntary exchange. Each party to a transaction seeks to better himself by exchanging one set of circumstances for another. Market exchange is not based on the military principle of "beggar thy neighbor." It is based on the principle of mutual benefit.(13)
Because Canaan was to be placed under God's total ban - hormah - Israel's inheritance had to be based on violence: specifically, military conquest. The mandated process of inheritance could not be a market process. There had to be a forcible disinheritance. Canaanites were not to gain by Israel's presence in the land. They were not to be allowed to enter into a mutually profitable economic relationship with Israel. This is why the Book of Numbers is not much concerned with economics. Its focus is military sanctions: a system of "winner take all."
Israel was not to expand its borders through conquest after the Canaanites had been expropriated. The boundaries of the Promised Land were fixed by the original distribution of land. The sacrificial system prevented any extensive growth in Israel's geography, since the men of Israel who dwelt in the land had to walk to a central location three times a year, minimum, in order to participate in the national feasts and sacrifices. Violence was not to become the basis of wealth creation in Israel. The military conquest of Canaan was to be a one-time event.
A Fool in His Folly Martin Noth, who died as he was completing his commentary on Numbers, was (and remains) one of the most respected academic commentators on the Old Testament. Yet any normal person who picks up his Numbers commentary and reads two pages will think to himself: "This book is utterly incoherent. No one in his right mind would waste his life writing something as useless as this. Noth must have been a German." Indeed, he was. He was a German's German: enormously learned, enormously liberal, and enormously unreadable. His commentary on Numbers does not bother with the mundane task of explaining what any passage means. Instead, it goes on and on about which traditions or late-date authors' interpolations found expression in Numbers, producing a definitively chaotic book. The Book of Numbers is a jumble without any integrating theme, Noth argued, because of these later insertions. Noth wrote:
From the point of view of its contents, the book lacks unity, and it is difficult to see any pattern in its construction.(14)
There can be no question of the unity of the book of Numbers, nor of its originating from the hand of a single author. This is already clear from the confusion and lack of order in its contents.(15)
Numbers participates only marginally in the great themes of the Pentateuchal tradition.(16)
Martin Noth was a liberal higher critic who denied that the Pentateuch is the inspired, authoritative, morally binding word of God. Put more biblically, Martin Noth was a fool. "The wise in heart will receive commandments: but a prating fool shall fall" (Prov. 10:8). "He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool: but whoso walketh wisely, he shall be delivered" (Prov. 28:26). He adopted and applied the hermeneutic of higher criticism, namely, that many people wrote the Pentateuch a millennium after it says it was written. He invoked the evidence offered by higher criticism: the alleged chaos of the Pentateuchal texts. Then he assured his readers that Numbers is incoherent and without unity. But his conclusion had nothing to do with Numbers; it had everything to do with Noth's blindness. Noth and his academic peers are blind.
And in that day shall the deaf hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity, and out of darkness (Isa. 29:18).
His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber (Isa. 56:10).
Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch (Matt. 15:14).
Contrary to Noth, the Book of Numbers is integral to the Pentateuch, and its overriding theme reflects this: sanctions. The book is placed exactly where it should be: book four, which corresponds to point four of the biblical covenant model. Had Noth understood the covenant, respected it, and paid attention to it, he might not have concluded that Numbers possesses no unity and "participates only marginally in the great themes of the Pentateuchal tradition." But Noth was a fool who did not heed Solomon's counsel: "Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding" (Prov. 17:28) He went into print to be hailed around the academic world by less notable fools who have shared his hermeneutic.
What is disheartening is to read a supposedly conservative commentator - a Dutchman who, like so many Dutch theologians, feels compelled to imitate German scholarship - who spouts the same Party Line: ". . . Numbers is not a literary unit but acquired its present form over a period of time."(17) Or Timothy Ashley, who does his best to avoid the most blatant theses of the higher critics, especially the incoherent-text theory, who writes: "Moses may be seen as having a key role in the origin of some of the material in Numbers, though we have no way of knowing how much of it goes back to him."(18) I suggest this percentage of the Book of Numbers that was written by Moses: one hundred. "And Moses wrote their goings out according to their journeys by the commandment of the LORD: and these are their journeys according to their goings out" (Num. 33:2).
Conclusion The Book of Numbers, book four in the Pentateuch, conforms to point four of the biblical covenant model: oath/sanctions. The message of the book is clear: when covenant-keepers rebel against God in history, the blessings - positive sanctions - associated judicially with covenantal faithfulness will be removed; God's negative corporate sanctions will be imposed. This does not mean that the heirs of covenant-keepers are permanently disinherited. On the contrary, their heirs will surely inherit. The negative corporate sanctions are not permanent down through the generations. The promise will be fulfilled. The structure of the covenant cannot be broken. "For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth. For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be: yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be. But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace" (Ps. 37:9-11).
The New Covenant in no way reverses this structure of inheritance. On the contrary, the New Covenant reaffirms it. "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth" (Matt. 5:5). The New Covenant was marked by a transfer of inheritance from Israel to the church. "Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof" (Matt. 21:43). This transfer was visibly imposed by God through Rome's destruction of the temple in A.D. 70.(19)
The Book of Numbers has stood as a warning down through the ages: the basis of covenantal inheritance is corporate covenant-keeping. Numbers calls on men and nations to repent, to turn back to God in search of the standards of righteousness. If God was willing to disinherit the exodus generation because of their constant complaining and their lack of courage, how much more should the spiritual heirs of the Canaanites take heed!
Footnotes:
1. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 4.
2. R. K. Harrison, Numbers: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, 1992), p. 431.
3. Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (New York: Harper Torchbooks, [1921] 1965).
4. Rent is another word for interest. It arises from the same phenomenon: the discount which all men apply always in the present to the value of expected future income. See Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1949), ch. 19.
5. John U. Nef, The Conquest of the Material World: Essays on the Coming of Industrialism (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian, [1964] 1967).
6. A manifesto of such a view of autonomous nature is Bill McKibben's book, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989).
7. Even when cloaked in scientific terminology, any attempt to revive the name of the Greek goddess Gaia in relation to "mother nature" is indicative of an anti-biblical religious impulse. See Gaia: An Atlas of Planet Management, edited by Norman Myers (New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1984); The Gaia Peace Atlas: Survival into the Third Millennium, edited by Frank Barnaby (New York: Doubleday, 1988). For a detailed critique of the politics and religion of environmentalism, see Michael S. Coffman, Saviors of the Earth? (Chicago: Northfield Publishing, 1994).
8. Sutton, That You May Prosper, ch. 2.
9. Ibid., ch. 3.
10. Ibid., ch. 5.
11. "By little and little I will drive them out from before thee, until thou be increased, and inherit the land" (Ex. 23:30).
12. Timothy R. Ashley, The Book of Numbers (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 1.
13. An exception is a futures contract, in which two parties agree with each other either to buy or sell a specified quantity of goods in the future at a fixed price. Whatever profit one party gains is supplied by the other party. The benefit to each party is the freedom of each to affirm his assessment of the economic future by means of an investment tied to that assessment. There are also benefits for the society in general: the best assessments of participants with capital are brought to bear on pricing scarce resources. The presence of the various futures markets brings valuable information into play in the economy. Prices respond faster to the expected conditions of supply and demand. That is, the most accurate information is assimilated faster into the economy by means of the price system. This information transfer costs nothing to the vast majority of the participants in the economy. These costs are born by the participants in the futures markets. What is a zero sum game for the two parties to the contract has positive benefits for the economy as a social system. The futures market, when considered in the context of society's quest for better information at low prices, is not a zero sum game.
14. Martin Noth, Numbers: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968), p. 1.
15. Ibid., p. 4.
16. Ibid., p. 5.
17. A. Noordtzij, Numbers (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1983), p. 13.
18. Ashley, Numbers, p. 7.
19. David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).
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