In the midst of the wilderness there was nothing to eat, except what God provided: manna from heaven. Yet the people whined that they had no meat: they missed the fish they had eaten in Egypt, along wirh all the cucumbers and melons, the leeks, onions, and garlic that they had had when they were slaves there (Numbers 11:4-6).
Their complaint got to Moses, so he in turn complained to God: “Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me?” (11:11). We can see that our modern phrase of frustration – “just kill me now” – has been around a long time, all the way back to Moses himself (11:15). The text also shows us that Moses apparently missed the irony of how his own whining matched the whining of the people.
It is interesting to see that God responded this situation in three ways. First, God answered Moses’ complaint by providing an additional 70 elders, to help him bear the burden of the people (11:16-17); and second, God answered the people’s complaint by providing an astonishing amount of quails for them to eat meat (11:31-32). So far, so good: but then we see God’s third response, which includes deep resentment (11:20) and severe anger resulting in a plague (11:33).
Stories like this often bother people. It seems like God should be mature enough to deal with such situations – even if they are stories about human sin and rebelliousness – without such tantrum-looking rage and retribution. Surely the Lord of the universe would never pitch a fit! Yet throughout the Bible we encounter passages that show us God experiencing deep and vivid emotions. Are we in a position to declare that humans can feel things this strongly, but God cannot? If we explain all such passages away, we leave ourselves with a residue that is non-threatening but sterile. And if we do that, we will have created our own tame deity, imagining it’s the real thing.
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We don’t like stories about your wrath, O Lord: we don’t want to think that you might respond to our sin with passionate fury. Can’t we just presume that you will always forgive our rebelliousness? Apparently not. Grant us swift repentance, O God: teach us to depend on you.
james-ayers.com 
2 responses to “A Three-Part Response (Numbers 10-11)”
Interesting that this is preceded by Moses asking his brother in law to go with him. When he declines, Moses persuaded him by sawing, “You know all the best places to camp in the wilderness. We need your eyes!”
Was Moses depending on him for camping advice instead of God? Or in tandem with God’s direction? Or did Moses just want company?
What a hugely complex endeavor.
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It is indeed complex. Adding to the confusion is the uncertainty about the name of Moses’s father-in-law, identified here as Reuel, but as Jethro in Exodus, and as Hobab in Judges. Was he known by three different names? If we accept the traditional view that Moses was the author of both Exodus and Numbers, did Moses not remember his father-in-law’s name? If instead we are skeptical of the traditional view, we might suppose that the five books of Moses were produced by priests and scribes in Jerusalem centuries later, who wove together documents and oral histories to form the books as we now have them. But then we ask, was there one oral tradition that identified the father-in-law as Jethro, and another that named him as Reuel, and a third that called him Hobab: and the editors shrugged and simply used both, despite the confusion that might cause? And Hobab, identified as the son of Moses’s father-in-law, and thus the brother of Zipporah, Moses’s wife, and thus Moses’s brother-in-law, is identified in Judges 4:11 as Moses’s father-in-law.
So your question fits in quite well with this confusion. Was Moses choosing, inadvertently or purposefully, to depend on the human experience of a Midianite rather than on the direct leading of God? Was Hobab part of the means by which God would lead the people through the wilderness? Had Moses and Hobab been friends and companions with each other, so Moses just wanted him to come along because they were friends? Any of these is possible: the text does not give us indications to lead us which to choose.
Indeed, the text does not directly state whether Hobab actually went along with the people of Israel. It says “they” departed, and that could indicate Israel and Hobab, or it could indicate Israel without Hobab. In favor of the latter possibility is that Hobab is never mentioned again in the remaining chapters till the death of Moses. The only other mention of the name in the Bible is the text in Judges 4:11, where he is only noted as an ancestor of the Kenites. (Additionally, the Kenites are identified in Judges 1:16 as the tribe of descendants of Moses’s father-in-law, but no name for that ancestor is offered there.) Still, the fact that Hobab is not mentioned does not mean he was not there, on the journey to Canaan.
So. It is often the case that scripture doesn’t tell us everything we’d like to know.
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