Numbers17chapter 17

Numbers 17:1-3

Korah had argued at 16:3 that all the congregation are holy, and his premise came straight out of Exodus 19:6. The answer set up here contains no argument at all: twelve rods from the twelve tribal princes, every man's name written on his own, and one night. Aaron's name goes on the rod of Levi rather than on a rod of his own, which Albert Barnes reads as necessary because Aaron descended from Kohath, the second son of Levi, and would not otherwise have headed the tribe.

Numbers 17:4-5

The rods are laid before the testimony and the sign is announced before it happens, so the outcome cannot be read backwards into the promise. God names the same complaint two ways in one verse, as murmuring against Moses and Aaron and as murmuring he will make to cease from me. That is the reading Moses had already given at 16:11, where he asks Korah's company what Aaron is that they should murmur against him.

Numbers 17:6-7

Every prince hands in a rod and Aaron's lies among them, twelve dry sticks with nothing to tell them apart when the door shuts. Calvin holds that the twelve include Levi, since no division of land is in question here and Joseph therefore counts as one tribe; other readers make Aaron's a thirteenth laid beside the twelve. The room is called the tabernacle of the congregation at verse 4 and the tabernacle of witness at verse 7, and the rods are put where the witness is kept.

Numbers 17:8

One night puts buds, open blossom and ripe almonds on the same branch at once, three stages of a season standing together. The almond is the first tree in that land to wake, and its Hebrew name shaqed sits beside shoqed, hastening, in Jeremiah 1:11-12, where a prophet is shown an almond rod and told that God will hasten his word to perform it. Exodus 25:33-34 had already shaped the bowls of the lampstand like almonds, so the tree stood inside the sanctuary before this rod did. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown report Josephus taking the rod for almond wood, and Adam Clarke reads the three stages as a whole work begun, promised and finished.

Numbers 17:9-10

Each prince takes his own rod back and Aaron's returns to the ark, kept for a token against the rebels. Hebrews 9:4 lists the rod that budded inside the ark along with the golden pot of manna and the tables of the covenant, while 1 Kings 8:9 says that when the priests brought the ark into Solomon's temple there was nothing in it save the two tables of stone. Both accounts stand, and Albert Barnes reads the gap as a loss, suggesting the rod went when the Philistines took the ark in 1 Samuel 4. The reason given for keeping it is preventive, that thou shalt quite take away their murmurings from me, that they die not.

Numbers 17:11-13

Moses obeys in half a verse and the camp answers the sign with panic. Korah had said that all the congregation are holy and every one of them; the same people now say that whosoever cometh any thing near unto the tabernacle of the Lord shall die. Adam Clarke marks the swing between those two claims and reads the word behind we perish as breath failing rather than plain death. The next chapter answers the cry by laying the charge of the sanctuary on Aaron and his sons, so that there be no wrath any more upon the children of Israel.