“Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married (for he had indeed married a Cushite woman); and they said, “Has the Lord spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us also?” (Numbers 12:1-2). According to the timeline of the Biblical narrative, these three siblings were at this point all in their 80s; yet doesn’t this look like the squabbles of teenage sibling rivalry?

Aaron and Miriam describe Zipporah, the wife of Moses (Exodus 2:21) and the daughter of Jethro (Exodus 3:1), as a Cushite woman. This may seem odd, when we think that Midian was east from Egypt (east of the Gulf of Aqaba; northwest Saudi Arabia today), while Cush (roughly, present-day Sudan along the upper Nile) is south of Egypt. But the people of Cush were black-skinned, African, as opposed to the brown-skinned people of the Middle East. There was probably commerce between the two nations, by land via Egypt or across the Red Sea, that could have led to Jethro having a black-skinned daughter. When someone has a skin color different from ours, that is often one of the very first things we notice. We have to wonder whether Miriam and Aaron felt confident that the people of Israel would side with them in their accusation of Moses, because everyone could see that Zipporah’s skin was too dark.

The Lord descends to the tent of meeting and calls Aaron and Miriam to account (Numbers 12:5), sings Moses’s praises (12:6-8), and angrily asks how they dared speak against Moses (12:8-9). The judgment comes immediately: Miriam is full of leprosy (12:10). Why just Miriam? Aaron is right there, too. Aaron cries out to Moses, “O my lord, do not punish us for a sin that we have so foolishly committed” (12:11). Aaron knows he’s part of this: don’t punish “us;” “we” committed this sin.

But Miriam now has a disease that has turned her skin “white as snow” (12:10). If Zipporah’s skin is too black, what if Miriam’s skin is too white? Moses prays for God to heal her (12:13); the text does not directly say whether God does so. Instead we get a harsh proverb-sounding saying of the Lord: “If her father had but spit in her face, would she not bear her shame for seven days?” (12:14). So Miriam must reside outside the camp for seven days: but the people of Israel would not leave their campsite without her (12:15).

It is indeed a difficult passage, troubled by racial overtones, with blaming and shaming the woman, with God’s perplexing arbitrariness in judging one sinner while ignoring the one standing next to her. Those difficulties cannot be explained away: they are just there. But let us notice that although Miriam gets remembered by Moses as a warning against offending God and getting leprosy (Deuteronomy 24:9), she nevertheless gets remembered by the children of Israel as a prophet and worship leader (Exodus 15:20-21), and as one of the great leaders of the Exodus (Micah 6:4).

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Help us, O Lord: for our hearts are troubled. So often we get angry when someone has more authority than we do. So often we make decisions to include or exclude people on the basis of their skin color. So often we practice blaming and shaming, instead of recognizing that we are all sinners who need your grace.