Crystal Writes A Blog

All In The Family

It used to be that naming shows from a specific era was a clear give-away to someone’s age. But now, with the advent of cable and satellite, and stations dedicated to classic television from days gone by, lots of people have the pleasure of enjoying television and movie entertainment from the past. Of course, the older I get, the more I change what I consider to be entertainment, but I do enjoy the stuff from the era when joking about a miniskirt was considered risqué instead of the out and out sexuality that’s pushed out of Hollywood now.

In today’s reading from Numbers 36:1 through Numbers 36:13 (the entire chapter), we complete another weekly portion, and we finish the book of Numbers. And Moses is finishing up his ministry as the leader of Israel by taking care of a few loose ends. In this case, a clan member from the tribe of Joseph has just realized that an earlier ruling requested by the five daughters of Zelophehad could turn out to create an imbalance in the inheritance of the tribes. The ruling was simply that if a man had no sons, his daughters would receive the inheritance from their father as if they were sons.

The problem, as pointed out by the clansman, is that if these girls marry into another tribe, they would take their inheritance with them, taking away part of what rightfully belonged to one tribe and giving it to another. In addition, they would then have a new inheritance with their husband’s family. At the year of Jubilee, when all properties return to their original owners, the tribes these daughters married into would have more than their fair share, and the tribe from which they came would be short some of its inheritance.

Moses decreed a new law that stated these daughters, and any daughters in the same position, would be required to marry within their own tribe to prevent any imbalance in the portions of inheritance. The tribes and the daughters seemed receptive to the law, and in obedience, the girls married from the sons of the brothers of their father. (In other words, they married their cousins.) In doing this, they fulfilled the command that no inheritance would be shared tribe to tribe, and each person would cling to the inheritance that belonged to the tribe of his or her ancestors.

I know there are lots of jokes about intrafamily marriage relationships and inbreeding, but I’m certain God wouldn’t have told them to do something like that if it was actually considered incest and would cause problems like birth defects. I’m happier that we consider that off-limits now, at least in the U.S., but for the purposes of keeping the purity in the tribes, it made sense for their situation. At the same time, I have a feeling that those tribal lines did eventually get blurred, and they may have led to some pretty heated conflicts in the future of Israel. Maybe they still do.

Now, I wonder how God sees the tribes and His family as it is scattered all over the world. Wouldn’t it be funny to find out that by way of ancestral bloodline, your next-door neighbor is actually related to you? Or, what if you found out that you and your cousin had ancestry from Israel but from different tribes? Thankfully, God does have it all sorted out, and He knows who is who right down to the DNA in each strand of hair. And we can be even more thankful that no matter how many families are on the face of the earth now, God has a plan to turn the multiple flocks into one flock under One Shepherd, and we will spend eternity worshiping the One Father we all share equally. Those will be the days.

July 18, 2014 Posted by Crystal A Murray (aka CrystalWriter) | Bible Study, Nonfiction, Torah Commentary | All in the Family, Bible Commentary, Bible study, Complete Jewish Bible, family, inheritance, Israel, Moses, Numbers, Scripture, Torah Portions, tribes | Leave a comment