A People Taught by Words God Actually Gives

“Offerings made by fire” is ishshei YHWH, the fire-gifts, the portions that went on the altar and those that fell to the priests. Joshua 13:14 quotes this settlement when the land is divided: “the sacrifices of the LORD God of Israel made by fire are their inheritance, as he said unto him.”

Ezekiel’s vision of a restored temple repeats the principle in God’s own voice: “I am their inheritance: and ye shall give them no possession in Israel: I am their possession” (Ezekiel 44:28). “Among their brethren” keeps the Levites inside the family while outside the map.

The shoulder is the foreleg, the cheeks the jaws, and the maw the fourth stomach. Leviticus 7:34 gives the priest the breast and right thigh of peace offerings instead; the rabbis took Deuteronomy’s list as due from ordinary slaughter (Chullin 130a). Eli’s sons simply took what their flesh hook caught (1 Samuel 2:13-16).

The first fleece appears only here in the Torah. The Mishnah gave it a tractate chapter of its own (Chullin 11) and set a minimum flock size before it applied. Numbers 18:12 had already given the priests “the best of the oil, and all the best of the wine, and of the wheat”.

“To stand to minister” describes the priest’s posture; the Talmud notes that no one sat in the temple court save kings of David’s house (Yoma 25a). “Him and his sons for ever” makes the office hereditary, passed with the name.

“Where he sojourned” uses gur, the verb of the resident alien: the Levite lives in his town the way a stranger does. “With all the desire of his mind” is the phrase of 12:15 and 12:20 for craving meat, here turned to wanting to serve.

When Josiah closed the high places he brought their priests to Jerusalem, yet they “came not up to the altar of the LORD in Jerusalem, but they did eat of the unleavened bread among their brethren” (2 Kings 23:9): fed, but not given the altar this verse promises.

“The sale of his patrimony” is obscure, but Levites did hold private property. Jeremiah, of the priests in Anathoth, buys his cousin’s field there (Jeremiah 32:7-9), and Barnabas, a Levite of Cyprus, sells land and brings the money to the apostles (Acts 4:36-37).

“Learn to do” uses lamad once more. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 68a) seized on the wording: you may not learn in order to do, but you may learn in order to understand and to teach, so knowledge of these practices was not itself forbidden.

Divination, qesem, was done by lots and signs; Ezekiel 21:21 has the king of Babylon at a fork in the road, shaking arrows, consulting images and looking in a liver. An enchanter, menachesh, read omens, the word Joseph’s steward uses of the silver cup, “whereby indeed he divineth” (Genesis 44:5).

A charmer is chover chaver, one who binds spells, perhaps with knots. A familiar spirit is an ov, and the woman at Endor was “a woman that hath a familiar spirit” (1 Samuel 28:7), sought by the same Saul who had expelled them (28:3). Isaiah 8:19 mocks seeking “for the living to the dead”.

Manasseh, king of Judah, did nearly the whole list: he made his son pass through the fire, observed times, used enchantments, and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards (2 Kings 21:6). The practices that drove the nations out were brought back in by a son of David.

Tamim, perfect, is the word for a sacrificial animal without blemish, the opposite of 17:1. It describes Noah, “perfect in his generations” (Genesis 6:9), and God’s charge to Abram, “walk before me, and be thou perfect” (17:1). In Hebrew Bibles its first letter here is written large.

“Hath not suffered thee” is literally has not given thee so. Balaam, a diviner hired to curse Israel, said as much from the other side: “Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob, neither is there any divination against Israel” (Numbers 23:23).

The promise was watched for. John’s questioners ask, “Art thou that prophet?” (John 1:21), and the crowd fed by the loaves says, “This is of a truth that prophet” (John 6:14). At Qumran a collection of messianic proof texts, 4QTestimonia, quotes this passage.

The people’s request is quoted in the singular, “Let me not hear”, all Israel speaking as one voice. Hebrews 12:19 recalls the scene: those who heard “intreated that the word should not be spoken to them any more”. Exodus 20:19 gives the plural form: “Speak thou with us, and we will hear.”

Moses told this part of the Horeb scene in 5:28 but stopped at God’s approval and the order to stand by him. Only here does the rest emerge: the office of prophet was God’s answer to the people’s fear, first filled by Moses himself.

Jeremiah’s call repeats the words: “Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth” (Jeremiah 1:9). Like Moses he objected that he could not speak (1:6), and like Moses he was of a priestly family. “All that I shall command him” limits the prophet as much as it empowers him.

“I will require it of him” is edrosh, I will seek it out, the language of blood-guilt, as in Genesis 9:5, “surely your blood of your lives will I require”. Peter quotes the verse in Acts 3:23 as “shall be destroyed from among the people”.

“Presume” is yazid, from the root of boiling over, the word of 17:12. Hananiah is the example: he broke Jeremiah’s wooden yoke and promised release within two years, and Jeremiah told him, “this year thou shalt die”; he died in the seventh month (Jeremiah 28:10-17).

Micaiah staked his own credibility on this test against four hundred prophets: “If thou return at all in peace, the LORD hath not spoken by me” (1 Kings 22:28). The question is quoted from the heart, one of the book’s voiced thoughts.

Jeremiah 28:9 states the test in reverse: “when the word of the prophet shall come to pass, then shall the prophet be known.” Conditional warnings complicate it; Jonah’s Nineveh did not fall because it repented (Jeremiah 18:7-8). “Be afraid” is gur, to shrink in dread.