Numbers11chapter 11

Numbers 11:1-2

In Exodus a complaint of this kind was answered with water at Marah, bread in the wilderness of Sin, and water out of the rock at Rephidim. Here the people complain, the LORD hears it, and fire burns in the uttermost parts of the camp, which is the change that governs the rest of the book. The text records no grievance and no demand, only that they complained and that he heard. Moses prays, the fire sinks, and 1 Corinthians 10:10 names murmuring among the things written for the warning of later readers.

Numbers 11:3

The ground is named for what happened on it, Taberah, which is burning. Barnes points out that Taberah is missing from the list of stations in Numbers 33, so it marks a spot rather than a camp, and he reads the stop as the one chapter 33 records under the name given later at verse 34. Deuteronomy 9:22 puts Taberah at the head of a short list Moses reads back to Israel, Taberah and Massah and Kibroth-hattaavah.

Numbers 11:4-6

The craving starts with the mixed multitude, the crowd that came up out of Egypt with Israel at Exodus 12:38, and the children of Israel weep after them. What they remember is the food of a slave country, the fish and the cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the onions and the garlick, and they say they ate the fish freely, which is to say at no price, while they were owned. Matthew Henry marks what the list leaves out, the brick kilns and the taskmasters and the smart of the whip. Verse 6 states the grievance itself, that there is nothing before their eyes but the manna.

Numbers 11:7-9

The narrative stops for three verses to describe the manna, and the description answers the complaint of verse 6 without one word of argument. It is like coriander seed and like bdellium, ground in mills or beaten in a mortar, baked in pans, and tasting of fresh oil, where Exodus 16:31 had given the taste as wafers made with honey. Gill takes the likeness to coriander seed as size and figure rather than colour, since coriander is dark and the manna white. Verse 9 adds that it fell with the dew in the night, so it was on the ground before anybody in the camp was awake.

Numbers 11:10-11

The weeping is not a crowd at the tent of meeting but every family at its own tent door, which is how a complaint spreads through a camp. Two angers stand in one verse, the LORD's kindled greatly and, in a milder word, Moses displeased. His prayer opens with a question about himself, wherefore hast thou afflicted thy servant, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown say his situation can be felt while the language of his remonstrance cannot be defended.

Numbers 11:12-13

Moses answers the weight laid on him with two images out of childbirth and nursing, asking whether he conceived this people or begot them, that he should carry them in his bosom as a nursing father bears a sucking child. The same figure is used of God at Deuteronomy 1:31, where the LORD bare Israel as a man bears his son, and again at Isaiah 46:3-4. Verse 13 puts the practical question, whence should I have flesh to give unto all this people, and Matthew Henry reads it as limiting the Holy One of Israel rather than as asking for instructions.

Numbers 11:14-15

What Moses asks for is death, out of hand, rather than relief. Elijah prays the same at 1 Kings 19:4 and Jonah at Jonah 4:3, and each of the three has just watched God act in power. Numbers 12:3 calls Moses the meekest man on the face of the earth, and Matthew Henry sets that sentence beside this one and says the best men fail in the grace they are most known for. God answers with seventy men to carry the weight with him.

Numbers 11:16-17

Seventy elders had gone up the mountain with Moses at Exodus 24:1 and 24:9, and Jethro had already told him at Exodus 18:17-23 that the work was too heavy for one man to bear. What is new here is the means, that the LORD takes of the spirit which is upon Moses and puts it upon them. Clarke reports the figure Origen and Theodoret used for that, a lamp from which seventy lamps are lit and the first loses none of its own light. Jewish tradition traces the membership of the later Sanhedrin back to this verse, counting the seventy with Moses over them.

Numbers 11:18-20

The word used for preparing a nation to meet God at Exodus 19:10 is used here for preparing to eat meat, and the meat comes as a sentence rather than as a kindness. The measure climbs by steps, one day, two days, five, ten, twenty, and then a whole month until it comes out at their nostrils and is loathsome to them. Verse 20 names the offence in the plainest terms the chapter uses, that they have despised the LORD which is among them and have asked why they came out of Egypt. Psalm 78:29-31 tells the same episode and says he gave them their own desire.

Numbers 11:21-23

Moses counts first, six hundred thousand footmen against a month of meat, and asks whether the flocks and the herds or all the fish of the sea would suffice them. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read the doubt as a passing feeling, uttered to himself and not publicly as at chapter 20. God answers with a question rather than a plan, is the LORD's hand waxed short, a line Isaiah 50:2 and 59:1 take up again. Spurgeon preached this verse as the glorious right hand of the LORD and made Moses the man who calculates his supplies and cannot see how the promise will be kept.

Numbers 11:24-25

The spirit rests on the seventy and they prophesy, and the last clause of verse 25 is read two ways. The King James gives they prophesied, and did not cease, with the Targum and the older Jewish reading behind it; Keil and Delitzsch and the American Standard Version read the same Hebrew as they did so no more, one day of prophecy marking the men out for the office they were to hold. Clarke takes the prophesying here as the public work of exhorting and praying rather than of foretelling. The office they received stands under either reading, and the text settles neither.

Numbers 11:26-27

Eldad and Medad were of them that were written and stayed in the camp, and the spirit rested on them where they were. Matthew Henry says their principle was their praise and their practice their fault, since the order had been to come out to the tabernacle. Cyril of Jerusalem counted sixty-eight men at the tent and these two absent, and read the day as showing the Spirit distributed by measure rather than divided into parts. A young man runs to Moses with the report, which tells the reader how the camp took it.

Numbers 11:28-29

Joshua asks Moses to forbid them, and Matthew Henry suggests Joshua was one of the seventy himself and jealous for the honour of the order. Moses answers with a wish rather than a ruling, would God that all the LORD's people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit upon them. Joel 2:28 promises that in so many words, and Peter stands up at Acts 2:16-18 and says this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown set the answer beside Mark 9:39, where John forbids a man casting out devils and is told to forbid him not.

Numbers 11:30-32

A wind from the LORD brings the quails off the sea and drops them about the camp, and Psalm 78:26 names an east wind and a south wind. Two cubits high upon the face of the earth is read by some as birds heaped that deep on the ground and by Clarke and others as birds flying at that height, tired by the wind and easily taken by hand. The gathering runs a day, a night and a day, and the man who gathered least gathered ten homers, far past what one household could eat. They spread the birds abroad round about the camp, which is what a man does with food he means to keep.

Numbers 11:33-34

The stroke falls with the meat still in their mouths, in the order verse 20 had announced, given what they asked for and struck for the asking. Psalm 78:30-31 tells it the same way, and 1 Corinthians 10:6 points back to this ground when it says we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted. Clarke says the writer never states what the plague was, only that it fell on the murmurers. The place keeps the name Kibroth-hattaavah, the graves of them that lusted, and Matthew Henry marks the sequel at Psalm 78:32, that for all this they sinned still.

Numbers 11:35

The camp moves on to Hazeroth and stays there, and Numbers 33:17 lists Hazeroth as a station in the itinerary Moses was commanded to write down. Chapter 12 happens on this ground, and Numbers 12:15 shows the camp held there seven days while Miriam was shut out. The chapter opened with complaint from the whole congregation and the next opens with complaint from the brother and sister of Moses, so the trouble moves inward before Kadesh.