Read the Introduction
Volume I of Numbers closed with the host ordered at Sinai, and this one opens on the road. The congregation had been counted by its genealogies, the camp drawn four-square about the tabernacle, the Levites charged with the furniture of the dwelling, the gifts of the princes recorded name by name, and the cloud and the trumpets set over the marches of the host. All of that was the administration at rest, the ledger made ready before the camp moved. The eleventh chapter turns the page, and the same ledger must now be kept where the water fails, the appetite murmurs, and the men who bear the charge are tried against the people they bear.
The chapters before you run from the eleventh of Numbers through the twenty-fourth. The complaining at Taberah opens the account, and the answer of the LORD is the burden distributed upon seventy elders who take of the spirit that was upon Moses, the delegated administration born in the waste. The twelve spies go up into the land, ten bring back an evil report, and the congregation refuses; the sentence measured to that refusal is forty years, a year for a day of the reconnaissance, and the ledger records the men of the first numbering whose carcasses were strewn in the wilderness. The offerings of the land are given before the land is reached. Then Korah and his company challenge the appointed authority, and the rod of Aaron buds and blossoms and yields almonds, kept before the testimony as the answer of the record. After that come the portion of the priests, the red heifer and the water of separation, the rock struck at Meribah, the deaths of Miriam and of Aaron upon mount Hor, the serpent of brass lifted for the look that heals the bite, and the victories over Sihon and Og.
That close is the seam the volume is cut upon. The tenth chapter was the last of the ordering at Sinai, and the twenty-fifth chapter opens the failure at Bethpeor, which belongs to the reckoning of the new generation and the settlement laws rather than to the administration of the sentence. What stands between the two is the wilderness itself, and the wilderness is a term of years, a sentence served by the people who refused the land. Volume I showed the ledger made; this volume shows the ledger tested upon the march.
The doctrine carried through these chapters is the administration of a sentence, and the wilderness is its venue. The forty years are measured to the record of forty days of search, and the march is kept as a journal in which every stage is entered and named. The names are entered as they fall: Miriam shut out of the camp seven days, the men who brought the evil report dying of the plague, Korah and his company swallowed by the ground, Aaron dying upon mount Hor in his hundred and twenty-third year, and the congregation that wept for the flesh of Egypt fed flesh until it was loathsome to them. The clerk keeps the account of the sentence without softening the men he registers, Moses included, whose failure at the rock kept him from the land he had carried the people toward.
Authority in this volume is settled by the record rather than by the claim. Korah's case is the claim of the many against the appointment of the One, and the answer is not an argument but an entry: the rod that budded before the testimony, so that the office belongs to the man whose rod blossoms. The water of separation carries the same logic into the cleansing of the camp, for the defiled are made clean by an ordinance appointed and not by their own judgment. So with the serpent of brass, where the bitten look and live, the healing standing upon the ordinance rather than upon the wound. Even the hireling obeys the rule: Balaam is hired to curse and can do nothing but bless, and his words are the blessing of a people no divination can touch.
What makes this volume worth a book of its own is that the sentence is the precondition of the settlement. A generation that had not served its term could not hold the inheritance, and the ledger that recorded the falling names will register the inheritors. Read the two volumes of Numbers as one argument and the order is exact: the host ordered, the sentence administered, the inheritors counted. Read them as the record gives them, and the hireling's words stand where they stood, spoken over a camp that could not be cursed.
Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob, neither is there any divination against Israel: according to this time it shall be said of Jacob and of Israel, What hath God wrought!
Numbers 23:23
Nothing in this volume asks to be taken on trust. The scripture is quoted whole, the doctrine is named as doctrine wherever it goes beyond the text, and the weighing belongs to whoever holds the book.