Numbers 36
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 36Written by AI
The book ends by returning to Zelophehad's daughters. Their tribe worries that if the sisters marry outside it, the land will pass to another tribe. Moses rules that they should marry within their own tribe, and they do. It is a quiet ending that cares about every family keeping its share of the promise.
Zelophehad’s Daughters Marry
Now the family heads of the clan of Gilead son of Machir son of Manasseh, one of the clans of Joseph, approached Moses and the leaders who were the heads of the Israelite families and addressed them, saying, “When the LORD commanded my lord to give the land as an inheritance to the Israelites by lot, He also commanded him to give the inheritance of our brother Zelophehad to his daughters. But if they marry any of the men from the other tribes of Israel, their inheritance will be withdrawn from the portion of our fathers and added to the tribe into which they marry. So our allotted inheritance would be taken away. And when the Jubilee for the Israelites comes, their inheritance will be added to the tribe into which they marry and taken away from the tribe of our fathers.”
So at the word of the LORD, Moses commanded the Israelites: “The tribe of the sons of Joseph speaks correctly. This is what the LORD has commanded concerning the daughters of Zelophehad: They may marry anyone they please, provided they marry within a clan of the tribe of their father. No inheritance in Israel may be transferred from tribe to tribe, because each of the Israelites is to retain the inheritance of the tribe of his fathers. Every daughter who possesses an inheritance from any Israelite tribe must marry within a clan of the tribe of her father, so that every Israelite will possess the inheritance of his fathers. No inheritance may be transferred from one tribe to another, for each tribe of Israel must retain its inheritance.”
So the daughters of Zelophehad did as the LORD had commanded Moses. Mahlah, Tirzah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Noah, the daughters of Zelophehad, were married to cousins on their father’s side. They married within the clans of the descendants of Manasseh son of Joseph, and their inheritance remained within the tribe of their father’s clan.
These are the commandments and ordinances that the LORD gave the Israelites through Moses on the plains of Moab by the Jordan across from Jericho.