Jeremy Rosen
Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Numbers 11:16, Rebellion within the Ranks

Jeremy Rosen | Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Numbers 11:16, Rebellion within the Ranks | 03.13.24

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- So the music that’s on at the moment is a song by the late Israeli singer Ofra Haza. And I heard it as the soundtrack for a French film called La Reine Margot. But it is so beautiful about life, about pain, about hope, that I thought it was appropriate to vary from my usual selection to listen to Ofra Haza. So, ladies and gentlemen, back down to business, and we are dealing with rebellions. We’re on Numbers Chapter 11, verse 16. And last week we ended with this rebellion of the masses against the diet, food. Reminds me when I was headmaster of a school, a boarding school. Everybody always complained about the food. Usually they were justified, but that’s a different matter. So the complaint was about the food. They were fed up with the manna that was coming down. And even though there are all kinds of nice stories about the manna and whether it could taste whatever you wanted it to taste, and that would’ve allowed for each individual to cope with a special diet. But it seems they just wanted traditional meat. I wonder what’s going to happen when all meat is going to be lab grown, whether people will still say, “I just want to kill a cow for it.”

But anyway, so that was where we were last week, and basically Moses turns to God and says, “I can’t bear these people anymore. They’re driving me crazy. I don’t want to carry on. And if you insist I carry on, I’d rather you killed me. This is terrible.” I feel so sorry for poor Moses. And of course, we discussed whether this rebellion could have been just the outsiders or the insiders, and there were various attacks. There was the clearing out of the ringleaders at the beginning, but then there was a plague that affected other people. But anyway, we are now carrying on with God turning to Moses and saying, “Okay, I understand your problem. This is too much for you to bear. It is too much for you to bear. I want you to build up a government, a team of people who are going to help you run the show.” Now the big question, of course, is didn’t we hear about this before? Wasn’t this something that in fact Jethro, the famous father-in-law of Moses had actually raised with him, and told him at the time, “You can’t cope, and therefore you need help”?

So is this something that Moses ignored, and now because of the crisis, he’s coming back, or is this the same thing being described in different stages? But either way, verse 16 says, And God says to Moses, “Gather 70 people. From the elders of Israel. Who you know. To be the elders of the people. And if you like, the officers. Shoter is the modern Hebrew for the policemen, the people who are running things. So in other words, there were already these people there, but maybe they hadn’t yet been given sufficient authority, or maybe these were the people who were potential elders, and potential officers. "And I want you to take them To the central tabernacle.” Or there’s some disagreement as to whether the Ohel Moed is the religious part of the tabernacle, or the secular part of the tabernacle. It functioned in different roles, as a kind of a judiciary as well as a kind of a temple. Anyway, “Take them there and I want you to appoint them.” And verse 27. “And that’s where I will come,” says God, “And communicate with you.” “And I will take, Some of the spirit, Which I’ve given you, And transfer it to them. So I’m going to reduce a little bit of your spiritual authority, and I’m going to transfer it to them.

And they will bear with you, share with you, Massa Am, the burden of the people.” “And you won’t have to carry it all by yourself.” So this is the principle of delegation. You should delegate. And now going back to the people complaining about. “Toman, you should declare. Be ready for tomorrow. Now this term, "Hit Kadshu,” seems to be the same word as, “Kadosh,” “Being holy.” But as I’ve mentioned before, holy can simply mean, “Separate yourself from one state to another state.” So be ready for change. “And tomorrow you’re going to have your meat, you’re going to have your steaks. You’ve been crying out to God, to the ears of God. Again, God doesn’t have ears, but metaphorically. "Who is going to give us meat to eat?” But you will eat meat. Because you’ve cried and you’ve complained, “Who’s going to give us meat? Because we were better off in Egypt, and therefore God’s going to give you meat to eat.” But here’s the twist. You’re not going to eat meat just on one day, and not for two days, and not for five days, and not for 10 days, and not for 20 days. I’m going to give you meat to eat for a whole month until it comes through your nose, until you are basically sick of it. And it will become something you don’t want anymore.

Because You have rejected God, Who is with you, And you’ve been crying saying, “Why did he take us out of Egypt?” So, in a sense, this does sound a little bit like God is vindictive. But again, we mustn’t think of God as a human being here, and we must understand these are humans talking about God. These are humans describing the God experience and saying, “You know, if God were me, this is what I would do. I would teach you a lesson that you should be satisfied with what you’ve got, and not complain about not having more,” or just because you want to have something special, therefore you should make a fuss about it. And therefore it is also the sign of rebellion. And because this is a sign of rebellion, the rebellion has to be put down, otherwise it’ll spread and it’ll get worse. Now, when Moses hears this, verse 21, he says, “Listen, there are 600,000 feet or people here,” And again, we’ve discussed before, what does 600,000 mean? Does 600,000 mean the men? In which case, what about the women? And if up to now we’ve talked about a census only including men between 20 and the old age of 60, what about those older and those younger? And if you jot up those numbers, there’d be double that amount.

But he’s not talking about feeding that. He’s talking about feeding 600,000 alone. So again, the use of the number is very strange. Is it a metaphor for a lot of people? Because I’m not touting everyone at this particular moment. But either way he’s saying there are a lot of people. “If I were to kill all the animals that we have around with us, that we are taking with us to provide for milk and food and clothes and everything like that, and if I could find all the fish in the sea and they were gathered into one place, would that be enough?” So interesting, he’s mentioned fish here. So obviously, some people were fish eaters, if not meat eaters. Not everybody might have been a meat eater. And God turns to Moses again and he says, “Listen.” “ "You think God can’t do it? You think I can’t do it? You’ll see if what I say is going to work or not.” Okay, so we have a little pause, and we return to the earlier issue, verse 24. And Moshe goes out. And he speaks to the people. All the words that God has spoken. And he gathers, 70 men From amongst the people, And he gets them to stand right round the tent.

So now, he’s called these 70 people to him to gather round. 70 is an interesting number. The assumption is that there were representatives of each tribe, but if there are, then there’s an odd number that doesn’t quite fit, the number of 70 if you divide it by 12. Anyway they’re gathered around the tabernacle, and God comes down in a cloud, and some of the spirit of God descends on these 70 men. And when the spirit descended on them, They prophesied, or they were in an ecstatic state, And they didn’t stop. Now here’s this word, “Navi”. “Navi” meaning, “A prophet”. But what is prophecy? We’ve discussed this before and normally the term Navi, to bring, “Lahavi,” “To bring,” is to bring inspiration, or maybe to bring a message. But it looks as though it’s some form of ecstasy. Maybe they have taken some mushrooms, or maybe this is in a spiritual trance. Either way, this is considered to raise the level of the individual spiritually. And so previously, we had this when we talked about one of the fathers, Abraham. Sorry, it was Isaac praying for Abimelech, who was smitten because he took his wife, Sarah. And God says to Abimelech in this dream, “Don’t worry, God, this man will pray for you and you will be cured.” So the prophecy also had some curative element into it. It was somebody remarkable on a different level. Verse 26.

But there were two people who remained in the camp and didn’t come out to the tabernacle. One was called Eldad. And the second one was called Medad. And these guys, Eldad and Medad. They also managed to get the spirit of God resting upon them, even though they didn’t go into the tabernacle. They were amongst the people that were gathered together. Maybe they didn’t make up the number, maybe they were excluded. They didn’t go to the tent where everybody else went. And they were prophesying or they were saying something in the camp. Well, this is very strange. Verse 27. The young man ran, and we assume this is Joshua, ‘cause we’re going to mention him in a minute. He told Moshe, “Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp.” Verse 28. Yeshua ben Nun, the assistant of Moshe, One of his young men said, Now, “Kila Im,” can either mean, “Hold them back, restrain them, stop them.” It could also mean, “Kill them, get rid of them.” So we already have is the young man who ran, as I suggested, he might be Yeshua himself, but then why not mention him the first time? So it looks like there were two guys here. There was the one who ran and then told what’s happening.

And there’s Yeshua who was standing serving Moses. So maybe Yeshua was in the tabernacle with Moses. 'Cause Moses is speaking to him, and he’s the one who says, “Get rid of them.” To which Moshe replied in verse 29, this is a very important verse. “Are you worried about me? Do you think this is a problem, or something that I have to deal with?” “I wish everyone in Israel was a Navi. Everybody has the potential to be great, and I wish more people were great.” “'Cause then if they were great, God would give them this inspiration.” So this is an amazing statement of Moshe. First of all, he says, “I’m not worried about being challenged on religious grounds or having other people thinking they can rise to my level. I don’t have a problem with that. I’m happy if everybody would be at that same level.” So anyway, having said this, Moshe returns back into the camp where everybody was, Him and the elders who been appointed, and Eldad and Medad are left to carry on whatever they wanted to do. The question is: what was Joshua so upset about? The rabbis, of course, come up with their different answers. Answer number one was that actually, they were complaining in their prophecy, and suggesting that Moses and Aaron needed to be removed.

So the prophecy was that there should be a change in government and therefore it was political. The other is that no, they were challenging Moshe’s spiritual authority, and suggesting that anybody can challenge the authority of Moses, if that’s what they want to do. So you have different possibilities. The other was that only Moshe, working with God, passes on this authority. So is it a question of authority, or a question of experience? And the big difference is this, that we would say that nowadays, rabbis constitute the authority, but the individual can have a much more powerful spiritual experience than the rabbi. The rabbi just may be a pen pusher or a bureaucrat, or somebody fulfilling a particular function in society, but not necessarily a great man. And you know, it’s a questionable issue. Are these people who claim they have authority, who claim to be in a position of superiority, have they any right to do this? So the question of, if you like, papal infallibility or papal authority does not apply to rabbis. And yet nowadays many rabbis, whether Ashkenazi or Sephardi, whether they are mystics or whether they are scholars, they claim to have this divine power. It’s called Ruach Hakodesh, the Holy Spirit.

Now the Holy Spirit is a term that has become current nowadays, that’s only used once in one context in the Talmud, certainly not in the way it’s used today. This is really a development that came in the 19th century, primarily as a reaction to reform and enlightenment and the Haskalah movement. And it is that these are the only people who can make decisions. But then as we have seen in Israel, so often, some of these people are shown to be corrupt, and even spend time in jail. And that doesn’t seem to affect the way their followers still think somehow, God speaks through them. But I certainly find this problematic, and this is the only example we have of, so to speak, God speaking through other people, rather than the major leaders of the community that we’ve had so far in the Bible, in the Tanach. So we come to 31. How is God going to solve the problem of food, where the meat comes from? So there is a wind, a strong breeze that comes from the sea. Now, nowadays we know about migration, and migration of large numbers of birds. In America, there were the carrier pigeons who numbered in millions, and they were made extinct by the arrival of the settlers into America.

Of course, there were just as much settlers then as people claim there are now, coming into America and destroying them, as well as almost destroying the bison. They’ve managed to get the bison back again, but they haven’t managed to get the carrier pigeons back again. Or the dodo, for that matter. So anyway, these huge, big flocks of quail. Quail is like a sort of a chicken type of bird, but flying, or it’s got plenty to eat on it, and they are migrating, and there’s a strong wind that blows them off course, and they’re exhausted, coming either down from the north, from the warmth of the north in summer to the south, or going back from the south to the north. Either way, they’re coming through this area and they land exhausted on the camp, easy to pick up, and they are so many of them that there are two cubits thick on the ground, and if you take a cubit as going roughly from your elbow to your fingers, then that’s pretty heavy, all over a massive area. Verse 32. So the people get up that day and night and the following day, and they gather all these animals. And somebody who only gathered a little bit managed to gather 10 homerim. And we don’t know how much a homer is, a pound, a kilo exactly. And they were able to spread them round on the camp, all the way round the camp.

They probably twisted their neck or killed them, or whatever it was, or kept them down under some sort of cover or net, until they wanted to take them out and eat them. Verse 33. Thus the meat was barely between their teeth. They’d barely sunk their teeth into the meat when God’s anger burnt them, and there was trouble. And there was a plague. Don’t know what it was. They got sick, they overate, they ate too much. Their stomachs were not used to this wealth of meat after suffering manna, whatever it was, they were paid back. Doesn’t say who was paid back. They couldn’t all have been killed or anything, because then there’s nobody to go on then. But they were, if you like, smitten with a digestive problem. And in 34 they called the name of that place Kibroth-hattaavah, where those who had a lust for meat were buried. So it seemed it weren’t just sick, but they were sick to the point of having some disease that killed them off. Because there, those people in the camp who desired and caused the rebellion, they were the ones who died.

So clearly, this was again a minority that had caused all this trouble, this difficulty over the diet. And so from Kibroth-hattaavah, from that place, they journeyed on to Hazeroth, and that’s where they stopped, at Hazeroth. Now. Chapter 12 continues the question of a rebellion. So it wasn’t just the Asafsuf, the people who were marginalised that were the cause of the trouble, of the rebellion. It now seems that the rebellion is coming from within Moses’ own family. Verse one. Both Miriam and Aaron together speak against Moses, and what do they speak against Moses? Because of this Cushite woman who he had married. Because he had married a Cushite woman. So hold on, she’s worried about her wife? He’s been married to her for how many years? They’ve got grownup children, they’ve been together now for a year and a half in the desert, and now all of a sudden she’s complaining? And what is she complaining about? The Isha Kushit. And the rabbis have two answers to this question. Remember, Kushit nowadays might be describing a Black woman, but in those days, Kush was not Africa, and she on the contrary was from Midian. And Midianites were not Africans.

And in fact when we looked earlier at the genealogy coming out of Noah and the flood, Kush certainly seemed to be Arabia, and nowhere near Africa, although you might understand that the Houthis are overlooking the Red Sea and pretty near to Egypt and to Africa. But nevertheless, they say the term Kushit is used by the prophets as a term of praise of beauty. And the children of Israel are described by God in the prophet as Haisha, as Kushi Imli. “You are dear and beautiful and precious to me.” So, they’re not actually complaining about the wife, they’re complaining because Moses is not living with the wife. Moses has taken his tent away. He wants to be, shall we say, celibate, in order to be close to God. ‘Cause he never knows when God is going to appear. And the complaint of Miriam is that he is abandoning his wife and setting a very bad example to all the other women in the camp, as implying somehow to be religious, you have to be away from your wife. And then there’s another issue.

In verse two they say, They said. Do you think God only spoke to Moses? “He’s spoken to us too. He’s spoken to me personally. He’s spoken to Aaron personally. We are described as prophets too. Miriam is a prophetess, she also has it. Don’t we have a say?” So, there is a question of whether this is a rebellion about an issue, or whether it is a quiet matter of personal status. There’s a wonderful Midrash, and the wonderful Midrash goes like this. Remember previously, we talked about Eldad and Medad? These two guys who were outside of the camp. Outside of the camp, and they were not part of the 70 elders. And Miriam overheard their wives. Their wives, in a sense, were complaining, and they were complaining and saying, “Our two men were left out, and that’s not fair.” To which Miriam, overhearing this conversation, said, “You have no idea how lucky you are.” Now, some people say it wasn’t Miriam, it was Zipporah, Moshe’s wife. It was Moshe’s wife who said, “You don’t know how lucky you are, because my husband has abandoned me. He no longer is in the same tent. And if you get involved with these guys, you are going to be in the same position as Moses. And so I advise you to count your lucky blessings and not go or try to go or to complain.”

And then Miriam takes up the complaint of Zipporah. So in one way, you could see, as I mentioned previously, that Miriam is the champion of the woman. The women. She is, if you like, the first Me Too, so to speak, or the first person who claims that women are being unfairly treated and wants to do something about it. The reaction of Moses in verse three is, Moshe was a very, very modest person. He was so modest, he was more modest than anybody else on earth. It’s a remarkable statement, that despite being the leader, despite being this powerful man, he was very, very humble, and he doesn’t seem to have reacted. He accepted what they were saying, but God intervenes again. So here’s the nasty side of God, if you like. Verse four. And God says something, Suddenly appearing to Moses, Aaron and Miriam, all three of them, and he says, “Come into central tabernacle area.” And all three of them went out together. In verse five, and God appears, comes down on this cloud to the entrance of the tent, and he calls Aaron and Miriam and they come out, leaving Moses inside or outside. And he says, “Listen to me, you two. If there are any prophets other than Moses, whether now or in the future.” God appears to them in a vision. “In a kind of a dream state, I will speak to them.”

So prophets have a relationship with God but it’s at a secondary level, not a primary level. Verse seven. “Not so Adimoshe, Moses. In all my house, He is the one I trust most of all.” And it’s very clear, plainly, and not in, shall we say, riddles like the vestal virgins or other examples of trying to read the signs or look at symbols or the different kinds of magicians that try to predict events from the innards of birds, or from tea leaves. He gets an impression, not a little picture but an impression of God directly that nobody else gets. There can’t be a picture of something, but indirectly. Therefore he is so special, “Why did you not fear? Why do you not have sufficient respect, to speak against Moses?” And God was angry and then disappears. So we have this interesting conversation that’s going on. Another example of imagining what God would say or might say. Verse 10. Heanan, the cloud. Disappears from the tent, and Miriam suddenly is leprous. She is stuck with leprosy, like snow. And Aaron turned and he looked to Miriam. And she was stricken with leprosy.

And then Aaron turns to Moshe and he says, “Please, God. "Don’t hold this sin against us. Even if we’ve done something stupid, even if we’ve been sinned, don’t blame this poor woman. You’ve made her like a dead person. Coming out of the womb of a mother with half the flesh missing. This is not fair.” And Moshe joins Aaron then. “El Adonai,” to God, and issues what is the shortest prayer, and in many respects the most beautiful prayer and wish in the Torah in these five words. He says, “El Na, please God, Rufa, heal, Na, please, La, her.” “Dear God, please heal her.” So God responds to Moshe in verse 14 and he says, “If her father had spat in her face, Would she not be in a state of shame for at least seven days? So she at least will be closed up in isolation as a leper for seven days outside the camp.” The people will wait. “We’re not going anywhere until Miriam is healed.” And after she was healed, then they moved onto the next stage, and they got to the wilderness of Paran.

What always struck me was why God punished Miriam and not Aaron. And again, one explanation may be that Aaron, as always, was the passive one, as he was at the golden calf and he mainly only came along in order to back up Miriam in the claim. Or it may be because he’d already been anointed a priest, he was the high priest given special treatment and because he appeared in the tabernacle, if he would’ve been given leprosy then the whole of the religious system would’ve ground to a halt temporarily, which would not have been a very impressive result. But I think that the issue of complaining about Moses always depends on how you complain. After all, Moses did not punish those people previously, Eldad and Medad, who might have spoken out against him in some way. So it is rather more a case of God intervening in this issue in order to give Moses important status, given the fact we’ve had a series of rebellions. And the fact is that Moses’ status and his position has been challenged. And so this is an obvious way of reinforcing his status and his position.

But unfortunately, I have to say, it also seems to indicate to me the difference in status between the brother and the sister. Now, we now move on to the question of the spies who were sent into the land of Canaan, because at this moment, we are still intending to march, even though there’s been some hint that the golden calf was the beginning of what led to the 40 years in the wilderness. This now is the 40 years in the wilderness going to happen. Now just before I go on to that, I just want to check and see if there are any other questions. Lindy said 17, and not 27. I don’t know what you mean. What did I say? I must have said something about 27, but I don’t know what I said. So perhaps you could let me know later on, or come back with what that mistake was.

So let’s start with chapter 13. Chapter 13 is: God now speaks to the children of Israel and he says, “I want you to send men, To go around and scout out the land of Canaan,” Latou, like a tourist. In Israel today, Tayer. “Go and look around, Which I’m giving to the children of Israel. I want one man from each tribe to send. All of them should be chiefs. Important members. Not the only one, but amongst the important members.” ‘Cause we’ve already mentioned who the chiefs of the tribe were, up to now when we had the census. Now this is a different group. And Moshe sent them, verse three, from the wilderness of Paran with the approval of God. So it’s God’s approval. All of the men, Heads of the children of Israel. And this is their names. So here’s Yeshua, called Yeshua ben Nun. Notice something interesting: that Matte Joseph, they say in verse 11, is Matte Manasseh, and up above, when it says Matte Ephraim, it didn’t say Manatei Joseph.

But maybe that’s because the man from Ephraim was Yeshua ben Nun, the big guy. But nevertheless, it’s a little thing missing that one would notice, because Ephraim and and Manasseh were both the sons of Joseph and should have been together. The other thing you’ll note is how different names there are. There are names of animals. There’s gad, Gaddi, a goat. There’s Gamal, there is a camel. There’s a Kalev, there’s a dog. There are also people. There’s the famous in 10, Mates Zebulun is Gaddiel ben Sodi, is secret, keeping it quiet. And then you also have Igal ben Joseph, the redeemer in the tribe of Issachar. But he’s borrowed a name from another tribe. And then you have Shammua, somebody who listens, somebody who remembers.

These names include occasionally God’s name, like Gaddiel. So there’s a range of names that describe these different characters who are the 12 tourists. They are known as the 12 spies, but it doesn’t say that they are the 12 spies. It says they are 12 men who are sent, Latou, to go on a tour, to wander around. So then the question is: who is initiating this design? Is it Moses or is it God? Here it says very clearly that it is God’s saying to Moses, God specifically telling to Moses, “I want you to send spies,” which is going to create a problem later on in Deuteronomy, when Moses goes back over the history of the time. And when Moses then says, “You people asked me to send spies. It was your initiative.” But here it’s saying very clearly that it’s God’s initiative. And that’s where we will end for today.

And I will turn now to the questions and see what we have. “I said, "You said 27 was just directing to verse 17.” Forget it.“ Anyway, I’m sorry, Lindsay. I’m sorry, I don’t get what it is. I am senile by now anyway.

Q&A and Comments

Q: Israel asked the question: "Given God’s experience with Bene Israel, how could he not have known that they would come back with a negative report? Whether it was the golden calf, the complaining about meat, or the complaining about no water, they were always focused on the negative. What do you think? Was God’s agenda in sending the spies to look around in Eretz Israel?” A: Well this is something obviously we’re going to discuss in greater detail next week. But you raise the wider issue. And the wider issue is this whole book is one in which human beings are struggling to find a relationship with God. And in a sense, God is rather like a parent who just doesn’t understand his kids, doesn’t understand why they’re not doing what they’re expected to do. There is an ambiguity here, and the ambiguity won’t stop until we, if you like, can detach our idea of God from an objective idea of God. And remember that everything that is being said about God in the Torah is being said about us. That we fail to live up to standards, we make mistakes. We are a mess as human beings, but that’s who we are. We are not angels, not designed to be angels, as the tradition goes, “The Torah was not given for angels.” Angels can only do good things. We humans do bad things all the time. And so this description of everything that people are doing is natural, 'cause we do complain all the time, and sometimes we regret the complaints, sometimes we don’t. But that’s who we are. And so the Torah is describing human beings as they are. And then the question of course is, “Well, what about God?” Well, God created us the way we are. That’s the way we are. He knew from the beginning what we were going to be like, or he, she, or it. And therefore, in a sense, God has to stand apart from us. And that’s why we talk about God being hidden from us, and not revealed to us. And we get inspiration from God, whether that inspiration came to Moses, or whether that inspiration came to the 70 elders, or that inspiration came to Aaron and Miriam, they derive some inspiration from God. The inspiration of Moses was far more intense because it was more specific in revealing details of a constitution. But nevertheless, this is all done by, shall we say, something in the background. God is in the background, or as the mystics would say, God in essence is transcendental. Transcendental, rather like electricity. It’s there, running everywhere. We just have to harness it sometimes, or somehow. And sometimes we can misuse it. So this whole theology of God is a problem that keeps on coming back to hit us, and it goes on hitting us for as long as we treat God as a human. We can only treat God as presenting us a situation, a situation in which there is good and bad from the outside world, that is natural or catastrophes; there is good and bad that comes from within us, human catastrophes and human destruction. And this is the challenge of life. And this is why we find life so difficult, and why it’s so hard to cope with all the pressures and all the horrors that keep on being thrown at us endlessly, ceaselessly, throughout the thousands and thousands of years of human history, millions of years of human history. And I guess that’s about as far as I can get to explaining why we answer the question of, do bad things happen? And the straight answer is we don’t have answers. They happen, and we have to do our best. Anthony Tiba.

Q: “Does send for yourself think it necessary to send?” A: Now you raise an excellent question, Anthony. Remember the term, “Lech-lecha,” was applied to Abraham, and it was applied to Abraham twice. First time, “Get you out of the idolatrous community of Harran.” Then it was a second time when it was, “Go and sacrifice your son.” That was also “Lech-lecha.” And the rabbi said, “Lech-lecha always normally means do it for your benefit. There will be an end benefit to this. Eventually, despite the famine in the land of Israel and all the problems go, you’ll be home then and it’ll be a great place to stay.” And similarly, “Go to sacrifice your son. Don’t worry, it will end well. It will be to your benefit, proving your religious commitment.” Here again, Shelech-lecha also implies, “Send for yourself, for your benefit.” And therefore the implication was that sending them to see what the land was like will lead you to be happy about the consequences, and to want to go and inhabit this land, because this land is a good land. As the people are going to come back and say, “We think this is fantastic,” and they’re going to bring fruit and show everything, but at the same time, they realise it’s going to be a fight, it’s not going to be easy. And therefore one way of looking at this was to see how good the land was. The other was to see, “What’s the plan going to be? How should we attack, where should we go?” And so in one sense, you can say, “This is indeed for your benefit, so that you will better be able to accomplish the goal that we’re working towards.” But as we see, it’s not going to turn out that way.

Okay everybody, thank you very much, and I will see you, please God, next week.