Miriam the Prophet, Aaron the Priest, Moses the Teacher

Miriam the Prophet, Aaron the Priest, Moses the Teacher
NUMBERS 12: 1-15

The movie Live and Become is the story of a boy among the Ethiopian Falasha Jews airlifted to Israel at the time of the Marxist revolution in the 1980s. Except that Schlomo (Solomon) is not a Jew but a Christian. His parents had died, and his adoptive mother thought he would have more future in Israel than in an Ethiopian refugee camp. In Israel, among the people suspicious about his Jewishness are his girlfriend’s racist father, who doesn’t want his “white” daughter involved with a black guy. It is in this connection that Schlomo gets to take part in a debate on the interpretation of the Torah with another teenager, who also turns out to be racist in the way he seeks to demonstrate that Adam was white and that black people were destined by Noah to be the slaves of white people. Schlomo wins the debate in the synagogue by demonstrating that Adam was neither white nor black; if anything, he was red (in Hebrew, the words for Adam, earth, and red are similar)...

Racism is where Numbers 12 starts, though it is only one of a complex set of questions washing around in the story. Moses has married another wife; perhaps Zipporah has died, or perhaps this is a second wife (having more than one wife is a sign of status, so leaders commonly take extra wives). Miriam and Aaron are not protesting that; they are complaining about her being an Ethiopian and therefore black. Viewing people as inferior on the basis of their skin color is a rather modern phenomenon, but there are one or two hints of it in the Old Testament. Then there is Miriam’s being Moses’ sister; does this new wife push Miriam further away from Moses?

One can imagine Moses groaning. The people complained against him in Egypt; they complained against him at the Reed Sea; they complained against him on the way to Sinai, and they have complained against him on the way from Sinai. He has already told God that it is all too much. Now his sister and brother have turned against him. It is plausible to describe him as the most unpopular person in all the world. (Translations have him as the “meekest” man in the entire world, which is not obviously true, and the word nowhere else means “meek”; it means afflicted.)

Explicitly, Miriam and Aaron’s question concerns Moses’ status as someone through whom God speaks. It is a classic example of a story that becomes clearer when we put ourselves in the position of later Israelites reading it. A question running through their story as we read it in later Old Testament books is the relationship between Moses’ teaching and the messages given through prophets, who were often associated with and supported by priests. Many prophets and priests said things in conflict with Moses’ teaching. They encouraged people to worship other gods, assured the community that things were fine between them and God when they were not, and encouraged them to make images of God as aids to worship. Further, the living voice of prophecy with its priestly support could seem more impressive and relevant than mere “Mosaic” traditions passed on from the past.

Numbers 12 affirms that God speaks through prophets, though it suggests that this speaking falls short of what people gain through paying attention to Moses’ teaching. There is something straightforward and direct about that speaking; it is not a matter of dreams and visions whose meaning is often enigmatic. That is a fair characterization. Three thousand years later, individual aspects of the Torah are puzzling to us, but its nature is to be concrete and clear. Prophets are like poets; they speak in metaphors and images. For Israel as God’s household, the clear teaching of Moses needs to have priority over arguable interpretations of prophetic oracles. You can always trust Moses.

So when Miriam tries for equal status, God puts the prophet in her place. God chastises her in particular because it is her position as prophet that is the issue. She comes first at the opening of the story; Aaron has more of a supporting role. Her chastisement is a temporary attack of what translations traditionally called leprosy, but the word does not refer to the disabling disease that we denote by that name but to a skin disease that (as Aaron notes) makes the skin seem to be decomposing and makes a person corpselike. Moses prays an urgent five-word prayer (five words in Hebrew as in English), a model of praying for someone (not least someone who has done wrong to you). As often happens with prayers in the Old Testament, God doesn’t fully say “Yes,” but neither does God say, “No.” What comes about is the necessary compromise between the demands of love and the demands of justice. Scaliness is viewed as having similar implications to contact with actual death, which makes it impossible to come into the sanctuary that belongs to the living God. Miriam therefore withdraws outside the camp until the affliction disappears, and the people wait for her.

At the end of the story, they are getting near the country they are bound for.
Taken from Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone by John Goldingay