Numbers 12 Study Notes

12:1 The supposed reason for the complaint of Miriam and Aaron against Moses was his marriage to a Cushite woman, though the real reason was Moses’s authority as God’s primary spokesman. Explanations for the Cushite identity include: (1) she was Moses’s second wife of Cushite origin (Nubian = modern Ethiopian or Sudanese), whom Moses perhaps had married while Zipporah was back in Midian visiting her father Jethro; (2) perhaps Zipporah (a Midianite) had died and Moses had recently remarried; and (3) Zipporah and the Cushite woman are one and the same.

12:2 The terminology and the context suggest that Aaron and Miriam were challenging Moses’s prophetic position as the primary recipient of revelation from God. The ethnic issue was a smokescreen for the real challenge—Moses’s divinely appointed position of leadership. Miriam and Aaron are both spoken of in a prophetic sense in the OT (Ex 4:14-15; 15:20-21; Mc 6:4).

12:3 This parenthetical statement probably came from the narrator rather than from Moses. It suggests that Moses would have let the challenge go unanswered. “It was Yahweh who heard it and took it upon himself to answer it” (T. R. Ashley).

12:4-5 The pillar of cloud descended to provide the personal encounter for divine disclosure.

12:6-7 Being called my servant by the Lord and a faithful prophet placed Moses in the category of Abraham (Gn 26:24) and the “servant” in the Servant Songs of Isaiah (Is 42-53).

12:8 God declared of Moses, I speak with him directly, openly. Some translations have “face to face” (Hb peh ’el peh), but Moses could not look upon God’s face (Ex 33:11,20-23). Only Jesus Christ could truly look upon the face of the Father (Jn 6:44-51). The expression denotes the direct method by which the will of God was communicated through the words of Moses, which could legitimately be translated “mouth to mouth,” since out of the mouth of a person echoes his character (Mt 12:34).

12:9-13 The description of Miriam’s disease as resembling snow like a stillborn baby suggests a variety of ailments ranging from skin cancer to psoriasis, or perhaps even modern leprosy, Hansen’s disease. All of these would render her unclean according to Levitical law (Lv 13-14). Both Aaron and Moses expressed their love and concern for their sister in their desperate pleas on her behalf.

12:14-15 The seven days of separation after healing follows the Levitical law consistently, and the purification process described in Lv 14:1-32 is assumed here.

12:16 The location of Hazeroth in the Wilderness of Paran is viewed in the context of the summary statement in 10:12—that the people journeyed from Sinai to the Paran Wilderness in the first phase of the journey to the promised land. The Paran Wilderness is a broad area of northeastern Sinai, bordered on the northeast by the Zin Wilderness within which Kadesh-barnea is located (cp. 33:15-37).