Sunday Sermonette: Patriarchy works in mysterious ways

With Chapter 36, we come to the end of the seemingly interminable Book of Numbers. It ends anticlimactically, straightening out a problem -- or a problem at least within the constrained world of patriarchal inheritance -- created in Numbers 27, when the daughters of Zelophehad were allowed to inherit because he had no male heirs. It occurs to some of Zelophehad ' s male relatives that if the heiresses marry outside the tribe, the inheritance will pass to the tribe of their husbands, and we can ' t have that, now can we? So God orders them to marry within the tribe. That ' s it.The allocation of land and property among the tribes has been a major concern of the Book of Numbers. Indeed, that seems to be the main point of the (fictional) censuses that give the book its name, since the land of Israel is to be apportioned according to numbers. So that is a basic rationale for the entire book, to justify the structure of society in Josiah ' s kingdom. But with the Roman conquest and the diaspora all of this ceased to be relevant. As far as I know even among the most fundamentalist orthodox Jews there is no movement to restore the tribal structure of the nationality. I would also just note the haphazard construction of the book. The separation of chapters 27 and 36 is typical. There is a broad underlying chronology, but the structure is otherwise random, with no effort too keep related material together.I will provide an introduction to Deuteronomy, along with the first chapter, on ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs