The Bible Slam: Numbers Chapter 11

This chapter is reminiscent of Exodus Chapter 16, where God is so angry with the Israelites that he sends quail to eat … but we're jumping ahead of ourselves.

The chapter begins with the people complaining, which really ticked God off, so he sends a fire among the Israelites that kills off people in the "uttermost" areas of the camp.  The fire is put out only after Moses prays that it stops.

Then, the people are complaining that they are hungry and haven't had any meat to eat.  In the last few chapters and throughout the book of Leviticus, we've been reading about all kinds of animal sacrifices being made at the elaborate tabernacle, with portions of the meat given to the priests to eat.  Given all of the animals being slaughtered, one would think that they'd have something to eat … but as we've been pointing out so far in the Bible slam, we were told earlier that the people ate manna for 40 years.

In any event, this chapter describes how the people harvested and prepared manna for their meals, complaining the whole while about how tiresome the food was compared with what they had to eat in Egypt.  God is so furious that he sends a huge amount of quail that the Israelites must eat for 30 days until it "comes out of their nostrils" and becomes totally loathsome. When the people eat quail meat, God's so angry with them that he afflicts them with a plague that kills.

During this time, 70 of the elders are rounded up and surround the temple in order to take on some of Moses' emotional burden.  God comes down in a cloud and while his spirit "rests" upon them, they prophesy nonstop.  Two other people in camp start to prophesy, too, even though they weren't at the tabernacle.

Moses, too, is whining to Yahweh. He'd rather die than continue to deal with the burden of the Israelites.

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Discussion Points.

The people are starving and sick and tired of eating manna, yet, the firstborn of all livestock are given to the tabernacle.  The first harvest is given to the tabernacle.  For almost the entire book of Leviticus, several chapters of Exodus, and portions of the book of Numbers so far, the bible talks about sacrifices being made and the priests eating portions of them.  For example, just a few chapters ago, in Numbers 7, we learned:

When Moses set up the tabernacle, each of the twelve tribes kills a bullock, lamb, ram, and a kid, two oxen, and five rams, goats, and lambs for God, for a grand total of 240 animal sacrifices.

There obviously was meat around for the people to eat.  Instead, they are wasting it by burning it up at the tabernacle.

Even Moses apparently questioned this, when he asked Yahweh in Numbers 11:22:

11:22 Shall the flocks and the herds be slain for them, to suffice them? or shall all the fish of the sea be gathered together for them, to suffice them?

Granted, some of the livestock was used for wool, milk or whatever, but if there was livestock, then it would seem there was more to eat than manna.  It would appear from Moses' statement that the people could also have been catching fish.

There are some entertaining oddities, as Skeptics Annotated (King James) points out:

• "… as a nursing father beareth the sucking child" (11:12)
• Calculating the depth and area of quails that dropped out of the sky, each Israelite would have had about 2 million quail to eat each.
  

As to the God's ongoing killings (two events in this chapter:  by fire for complaining; by plague for glutenous eating), Steve at Dwindling in Unbelief has put together a list of killings by God in the Bible.  At the conclusion of Numbers 11, we're at 31,391,106 deaths attributed to the Biblical God.

Viewing the Bible as allegory and certainly not an "inerrant" and "factual" book, the point of the story appears to be about human nature, wanting to go back to the past (which is always better in hindsight) than to move forward.

Sphere: Related Content

Related posts:

1. The Bible Slam: Numbers Chapter 15
2. The Bible Slam: Numbers Chapter 31
3. The Bible Slam: Numbers Chapter 22
4. The Bible Slam: Numbers Chapter 10
5. The Bible Slam: Numbers Chapter 17
6. The Bible Slam: Numbers Chapter 32
7. The Bible Slam: Numbers Chapter 08
8. The Bible Slam: Numbers Chapter 07
9. The Bible Slam: Numbers Chapter 20
10. The Bible Slam: Numbers Chapter 23

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