Numbers12chapter 12

Numbers 12:1-2

The stated grievance is a marriage and the question in verse 2 is authority, hath the Lord indeed spoken only by Moses. Who the woman was is disputed, John Gill setting out the reading that Cush stands for Arabia and the wife is Zipporah the Midianite, while Keil and Delitzsch take her as a Cushite distinct from Zipporah. Miriam is named before Aaron and the Hebrew verb behind spake is singular and feminine, which is why Albert Barnes reads her as the mover and points to verse 10, where the stroke falls on her alone. The closing clause, and the Lord heard it, is the clause that opened the complaining at 11:1.

Numbers 12:3

A book ascribed to Moses carries a sentence in praise of Moses, and the King James translators set it inside brackets. Two positions are held on it, that a later hand added the line, and that Moses wrote down what he was given to write about himself, and the verse settles neither. Adam Clarke goes a third way through the word itself, arguing that anav carries the sense of afflicted or depressed rather than modest, so the line reports what Moses bore rather than what he claimed. What the sentence is doing in the argument is plain enough, since the man who says nothing in his own defence through the whole chapter has his case answered for him at verse 8.

Numbers 12:4-5

Suddenly is the word Adam Clarke fastens on, since no interval is left for the complaint to spread or for the three to prepare an account of it. All three are summoned to the door of the tent and the pillar comes down and stands there, which Matthew Henry compares to a judge taking his seat in the gate of a city where causes were tried. Moses is called out with the other two and is never asked to speak.

Numbers 12:6-7

Vision and dream are named as the ordinary channels, and the words fix what a prophet in Israel is before the exception is stated. Moses is set outside that class in one clause, faithful in all mine house, and the word behind faithful, neeman, is used of a trusted steward or superintendent, as Adam Clarke shows from 1 Samuel 3:20. Hebrews 3:2 and 3:5 quote this verse and then draw a line the Old Testament had not drawn, that Moses was faithful as a servant in the house while Christ is a son over it.

Numbers 12:8-9

Mouth to mouth stands against vision and dream, and Exodus 33:11 says the same thing as face to face, while Exodus 33:20 says no man shall see God and live. Older readers hold those together by taking the similitude of the Lord as a manifestation of glory rather than the divine essence, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown add that the clause reads with the phrase before it, which removes the appearance of a clash with Deuteronomy 4:15. The charge at the end of the verse is about fear rather than rank, wherefore then were ye not afraid to speak against my servant Moses. The anger is kindled and he departed, and that withdrawal comes before any symptom appears.

Numbers 12:10-12

The cloud lifts and the leprosy is there in the same verse, which continues the sequence the book has been setting, complaining answered by fire at 11:1, craving answered by plague at 11:33, and speech against Moses answered here. Miriam alone is struck though Aaron spoke too, and the text gives no reason, so the commentators supply one, Gill and Henry pointing to the priesthood a leprous man could not have served. Aaron is the man Leviticus 13 appoints to look at a plague and pronounce on it, and here he looks at his sister and can only ask Moses to plead. His words in verse 12 describe a stillbirth, flesh half consumed, which is what the disease was taken to be doing to her.

Numbers 12:13-14

The prayer runs to five words in the Hebrew and the man praying it is the man who was spoken against. The answer is a delay rather than a refusal, and its measure is a domestic one, the shame of a daughter whose father has spat in her face, which stands seven days. Leviticus 13:46 had already put the leper outside the camp, so the sentence applies a law that Miriam's own brother administers.

Numbers 12:15-16

A nation of hundreds of thousands stays where it stands for seven days until one woman is brought back in. Deuteronomy 24:9 turns the week into a standing command, remember what the Lord thy God did unto Miriam by the way, and it is given inside the law of leprosy rather than as a story. Micah 6:4 names her with Moses and Aaron among those God sent before Israel, which is the weight she carries in the canon after this chapter. Verse 16 sets the camp in the wilderness of Paran, and chapter 13 sends the spies out from there.