Numbers 20

Speaker 00:00

Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen holds a PhD in Biblical Studies and is an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Stephen De Young· Host0:19

[instrumental music] Okay. We'll go ahead and get started. Why don't we get started here in just a moment. We're gonna be picking up at the beginning of Numbers chapter 20. And so we left off last time at another place where sort of the genre of the text shifted again, as we've talked about now many times. Book of Numbers covers about 40 years of the history of Israel in the wilderness, and so we get all kinds of stuff [laughs] right? All brought together here. Uh, we get narrative episodes, we get, uh, commandments, we get liturgical instructions, we get a census at the beginning and another one at the end, right? [laughs] We get all kinds of material in here. And so, a- and when it shifts, it can shift kind of abruptly. Now, as we saw last time, we had an episode talking about who held the priesthood, and then we had commandments for priests, right? So it's not that it's just totally arbitrary and jumbled and thrown together, right? There is a rhyme and a reason to it as to where