Numbers 12
About NumbersWritten by AI
Numbers takes its English name from the two counts of the people in chapters 1 and 26, but its Hebrew title, which means in the wilderness, fits it better. It picks up at Mount Sinai and follows Israel nearly forty years through the desert to the edge of the promised land. Tradition credits Moses with the book; many scholars think it was gathered and shaped over a longer time. Christians hold both views.
The big movement is a hard one. A generation that saw God rescue them from Egypt refuses to enter the land when they reach it, and they die in the wilderness. Their children, counted again at the end, stand ready to go in.
Watch how often the people complain and how often Moses prays for them. God is holy and judges sin, yet He keeps His promise. Even the hired prophet Balaam cannot curse them: “God is not a man, that He should lie.”
Before you read Numbers 12Written by AI
Miriam and Aaron criticize Moses because of his Cushite wife and question whether God speaks only through him. The text notes that Moses was very humble. God defends Moses as His faithful servant, and Miriam is struck with a skin disease. Moses prays for her, and she is healed after seven days outside the camp.
The Complaint of Miriam and Aaron
Then Miriam and Aaron criticized Moses because of the Cushite woman he had married, for he had taken a Cushite wife. “Does the LORD speak only through Moses?” they said. “Does He not also speak through us?” And the LORD heard this.
Now Moses was a very humble man, more so than any man on the face of the earth.
And suddenly the LORD said to Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, “You three, come out to the Tent of Meeting.” So the three went out, and the LORD came down in a pillar of cloud, stood at the entrance to the Tent, and summoned Aaron and Miriam. When both of them had stepped forward, He said, “Hear now My words:
If there is a prophet among you,
I, the LORD, will reveal Myself to him in a vision;
I will speak to him in a dream.
But this is not so with My servant Moses;
he is faithful in all My house.
I speak with him face to face,
clearly and not in riddles;
he sees the form of the LORD.
Why then were you unafraid to speak against My servant Moses?” So the anger of the LORD burned against them, and He departed.
As the cloud lifted from above the Tent, suddenly Miriam became leprous, white as snow. Aaron turned toward her, saw that she was leprous, and said to Moses, “My lord, please do not hold against us this sin we have so foolishly committed. Please do not let her be like a stillborn infant whose flesh is half consumed when he comes out of his mother’s womb.”
So Moses cried out to the LORD, “O God, please heal her!”
But the LORD answered Moses, “If her father had but spit in her face, would she not have been in disgrace for seven days? Let her be confined outside the camp for seven days; after that she may be brought back in.”
So Miriam was confined outside the camp for seven days, and the people did not move on until she was brought in again. After that, the people set out from Hazeroth and camped in the Wilderness of Paran.