Year 7, Day 142: Numbers 27

Theological Commentary: Click Here

For today, I’m going to talk about the daughters of Zelophehad.  Probability tells us that this situation would happen.  Even though families back in those days would have between 10 and 20 children, only about 3-7 would make it to five years old.  Of those, usually only 2 or 3 would make it to adulthood.  Naturally, we would have families whose only offspring would be girls.  In the modern world, this wouldn’t be a problem.  In the ancient world, where inheritance was passed from man to man, this was a large problem.  What do you do with an inheritance if there were no men to receive it?

What I love about this passage is that it shows us that that the typical critique of the Old Testament is completely wrong.  So often we hear that the Old Testament is chauvinistic.  We often hear presentations of the Old Testament that leave out the women and treat them as unimportant.  In this passage, we see that God isn’t this way at all!  God has no trouble with the inheritance of a man being passed into his daughters!  If God truly preferred men to women, he would have overlooked these daughters of Zelophehad and send the inheritance on to the man’s brothers directly.  This is not what God does.  The inheritance goes to the daughters.

Second, this shows us the flexibility of God.  So often we hear about God in terms of rigidity.  God is not rigid at all!  God understands that life and circumstances bring change.  When necessary, we absolutely need to think and make decisions based on the life around us.  We are not designed and created to be automatons.  God did not give us a brain so that we could abdicate critical thinking!  God desires us to always be willing to think as we apply His ways to our life.

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