08-Leviticus 19 – Numbers 6
Feb 14, 2009
This week we will pick up our study in Chapter 19 of the Book of Leviticus. God continued to speak to Moses about his laws. The Lord spoke to Moses about His requirements on the manner in which His people needed to go about their daily lives. He reminded Moses to tell the people in Leviticus 19:2 “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” God does not want His people to turn to idols, or make them for themselves. God also told Moses that the people were not to completely harvest their entire crop from their fields and vineyards after they went in and possessed the Promised Land. The people were to leave some of the crop for the poor to glean from the fields. The people were to be benevolent. God also wanted the Children of Israel to honor Him with their appearance. He did not want His people to trim their sideburns or beards. The Lord would also not allow them the follow the heathen practices of the people living in the Promised Land such as cutting themselves for the dead or marking their bodies with tattoos. Moses was told to tell the people that they must respect the elderly that lived among them. In Chapter 20, God set the penalty for the practice of worship to Molech as death. This worship consisted of the sacrifice of their children to this pagan idol. Anyone performing this act was to be stoned by the congregation. The practices of the occult were also punishable by death by stoning. These practices included anyone who acted as a medium or any other form or practice of spiritualism. The practitioners were killed by stoning, and those who consulted them were to be cut off from the people. God again reminded Moses that the people were holy because He is holy. He also said that He had set apart the people for Himself. These same words are spoken of us in 1 Peter 2:9-10 “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; for you once were not a people, but now you are the people of God; you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” The priests were also to be given standards to live by. God told Moses to tell Aaron and the priests that they were not to become defiled by any dead thing or person, and that they could not participate in any burials. No one was able to enter priestly service if they possessed any defect. In Chapter 22 the priests were told to be very careful with anything that was offered to the Lord. The remains of the selected offerings had to be eaten by them and not by the common ordinary people of the congregation. The last half of the Chapter deals with what could be offered. In Chapter 23 God stopped telling Moses of His laws and began to speak to him about the festivals the Lord’s people were to attend during the year. First the Lord reminded Moses that the people were to keep His Sabbath day, as a day of rest. The reason God told Moses about the feasts at this time was to indicate which days of the feasts were to be regarded as Sabbath days. These days were to be a holy convocation to the Lord. The word convocation means a meeting for holy purposes. The feasts the Lord spoke to Moses about and the time of the year when they occurred in our calendar are: 1. Passover – March/April 2. Unleavened Bread – March/April 3. First Fruits – The Sabbath after Passover 4. Pentecost – May/June 50 days after Passover 5. Trumpets – September/October 6. The Day of Atonement – September/October 7. Tabernacles – September/October 5 days after the Day of Atonement In Chapter 24, God spoke to Moses about His requirement that Aaron was to be supplied with clear beaten olive oil so that he would be able to keep the lamp in the Tent of Meeting burning continuously. The twelve loaves of bread for the Table for the Bread of Presence needed to be replaced every Sabbath. The old loaves had to be eaten by Aaron and the priests in a holy place each week. The Book of Leviticus then goes on to tell a story illustrating what would happen to anyone who blasphemes the Name of the Lord. A man, who was the son of an Egyptian man and an Israelite woman from the tribe of Dan, cursed and blasphemed the Lord. The man in question was placed into custody to await the Lord’s word on his actions. The Lord told Moses to have the entire congregation place their hands on the head of the accused, then take him and stone him to death. The penalty for blaspheming the Lord is death. The standards God applied to the Children of Israel also applied to the other people who chose to live with them. Personal injury inflicted on a person would be dealt with as the Lord says in Leviticus 24:19-20 “If a man injures his neighbor, just as he has done, so it shall be done to him: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; just as he has injured a man, so it shall be inflicted on him.”
In Chapter 25 the Lord speaks to Moses on the sabbatical year and the year of jubilee. For six years the Children of Israel were to sow and reap their fields and vineyards. During the seventh year the fields and vineyards were not to be disturbed. This was a year of rest for the land. The Lord also said that after seven Sabbaths of years, or forty nine years, the fiftieth year was to be a year of jubilee. The year of jubilee was a time to even out the wealth and property ownership of the people. Any property that was sold was to be returned to the original owner or their heirs at this time. If anyone became so poor that they had to sell themselves into service, this was the time they would be set free. This practice assured the equality of God’s people under Him. No one family could gain too much power or wealth.
Chapter 27 deals with God’s instructions on vows and tithing. This ends the Book of Leviticus and the instructions God gave to Moses for His people while they were camped at the foot of Mt. Sinai. We will now begin the Book of Numbers. The Hebrew name for the book is from the first verse “in the wilderness of.” It was called this because the Book of Numbers chronicles the forty years of wandering by the Children of Israel through the wilderness. The English name comes from the Greek Septuagint Bible. That name is “Arithmoi”, or Numbers. Numbers was named because of the amount of times the people were counted in the Book. The Book of Numbers begins with the Lord’s issue of a command to Moses to take a census of the people in the camp according to their family heritage. This census was to be taken of all the men twenty years old and up that could go to war. The Lord had a military reason for numbering the people. The exact number of men in all the Tribes of Israel, except for the Tribe of Levi is listed in the text. The total number of men who could be soldiers in the camp was 603,550 men. The men of The Tribe of Levi were not counted with the others. The Levites were to have assigned to them the care of the Tabernacle. The next thing, in Chapters 2-3, the Lord told Moses was the order for marching for the tribes and their position in relation to the Tabernacle when they had stopped marching and were camped. This order is outlined in the text. The Lord then told Moses to number the Levites by their families and to tell them what their duties in regards to the Tabernacle were. The descendants of Gershon were to be in charge of the Tabernacle, the tent, and its curtains and coverings. They were to camp on the west side of the erected Tabernacle. The descendants of Kohath were to be in charge of the furniture of the Tabernacle, the Ark, the Lampstand, the Table of the Bread of Presence, and the two Altars. They were to camp on the south side of the Tabernacle. The descendants of Merari were in charge of the boards for the Tabernacle along with its pillars and sockets. They were to camp on the north side of the Tabernacle. Aaron and his sons were to camp on the east side of the Tabernacle and perform the duties of the sanctuary. In Chapter 4 the Lord goes into detail on how the Levites were to perform their assigned tasks that Moses was told of in Chapter 3. Each family group had a certain way outlined in the text to perform their duties. We will finish up this week’s study in Chapter 6 where the Lord describes to Moses the Nazirite vow. The Nazirite vow was a vow of dedication to the Lord that could be made by either a man or a woman. The person taking the vow was to separate themselves from the people. They were to abstain from grapes, wine, vinegar, or anything else made from the grape, for the duration of the vow. While performing their vow they were not permitted to cut their hair or shave their heads. For the duration of their vow they could not go near any dead person, even if the deceased was their own family member. The Nazirite vow could be taken for life, or for an agreed upon duration. At the end of the vow the person leaving their time of separation had to shave their heads in the doorway to the Tabernacle, and bring the offerings specified in the text to the Lord. At the end of Chapter the Lord tells Moses to speak to Aaron and his sons to bless the congregation with these words from Numbers 6:24-26 “The Lord bless you, and keep you;
The Lord make His face to shine upon you,
And be gracious to you;
The Lord lift up His countenance on you,
And give you peace.” This passage is one that throughout history has been a favorite of the Jewish people. It speaks to them of a personal promise by the Lord to care for each one of them.
This ends our study for this week. Next week we will continue in the Book of Numbers, and discover why the Children of Israel had to wander for so long through the wilderness.