But the LORD said to Moses, “If her father had but spit in her face, should she not be shamed seven days? Let her be shut outside the camp seven days, and after that she may be brought in again.” -Numbers 12:5

I found this odd because I couldn’t find an Old Testament law which discussed spitting.  The only thing that comes close is Deuteronomy 25:9 which says that if a man will not marry his dead brother’s wife to further his brother’s name, his brother’s widow shall spit on his face.  Which means that Ruth spit on ‘no name’s’ face during the story with Boaz.

Rowlandson, Thomas (1756-1827), colored engraving.

But it seems that in Numbers 12, God is appealing to culture, or something deeper than culture.  He is saying, you all know that when a father is disgusted with his daughter he might spit on her.  And as a recognition of the shame she spends a week outside the camp.  God is making the comparison between spit and leprosy.  The father covers his daughter with spit in the same way that God had covered Miriam with leprosy. And since you all know that a daughter who has been shamed simply must go outside the camp for a week, which is a minor thing done by humans.  How much more should a person spit on by God be put outside the camp?  And God in his grace limits the duration of his shame of Miriam to the same as an earthly father.  Though he is well within his rights to extend it as long as he wants.

This doesn’t go over well with us today.  If this scene were depicted in a movie, the part of the father would be played by Darth Vader and the daughter would be an innocent and beautiful disney character with large heart-tugging eyes who just wanted to be herself.  We would obviously side with her.  And her fathers clearly abusive behavior would have justified the following scenes, where she lived like the prodigal son until she found her soul mate.  We have the story all wrong.  And it starts with the little things.  Our culture has not only thrown out the explicit commands of Jesus, Old and New Testaments.  We have thrown out the basic building blocks of humanity, all the way down to sex, male and female.

Paul is even known to appeal to the created order or the order of husbands and wives.  Do you not know that it was the woman who was deceived?(I Timothy 2:14)  Is it not obviously shame if a woman has her head shaved?(I Corinthians. 11)  But we just blow past all of this too, even Christians in the Church.  This is not just random culture, this is the way God made reality.  And even the pre-Christian, pagans as bad off as they were, didn’t have the audacity to mess with these things.  But we sit in a world surrounded by post-Christians burning the very fabric of the created order, and we don’t dare to speak up or try and stop them.  Even worse we join in and claim ‘Christian freedom’ or the ‘love of God which covers all sin’.

And like the petulant child of God, Miriam, who dared to disrespect Moses and assert her own authority, we reject the created order and the gender authority roles which God wove into the fabric of this world.  Why is is surprising that the shrill voice of the feminist murdering her own child, is the same voice which rails against the patriarchy?  Because a house divided can not stand  They know their target, it’s not abusive overbearing men, it’s the mans man, Jesus Lord of the Universe.  They hate his creation and his rules, to the point they even hate and demoralize themselves.  The plight of leprosy was like wearing spit, from God.  These people heap shame on themselves and look just as ridiculous.  God doesn’t have to mock them, they do it well themselves, with their pink hats, shrill voices, childless arms and any number of defacements from tattoos to piercings.   And they try to cover the pain with anti-depressants and herding together in group protests.  The worst part is that we put up with any of it.  We Christians are often too slow to figure out what is going on, we can’t read the cultural statements they are making.  We lament the microaggressions we caused and think we possibly did go to far in suggesting that maybe, possibly, the Scriptures did talk about fathers being the head of the wife.  But that couldn’t apply to us.   As we appoint another effeminate hipster to the pastorate, the caricature opposite of anyone who might possibly resemble a father figure with authority.  We have even twisted the definition of ‘meek’ to include this malakoi pastor(sorry scratch that, discussion facilitator) offering himself up to be sodomized buy any fashionable doctrine. Yet a couple of verses earlier in Numbers 11:3 we find “Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all men that were on the face of the earth.”  Got that? Moses who strangled people with his bare hands, who destroyed Pharoah, led armies, judged Israel for 40 years, broke tablets and struck the stone, was the meekest man on earth.

I find it interesting also that god only struck Miriam, yet her brother Aaron says “do not punish us because of what we have done.”  I think this goes to the glory arguments Paul makesin  I Corinthians 11:7 “woman is the glory of the man.”  God had attacked their glory.   He had humbled them, and they got it.  The repentance structure reestablishes the order which God created.  Miriam submits to Aaron who submits to Moses who submits to God.  Aaron pleads to Moses for Miriam, Moses then pleads to God.  God states his case and she is put outside the camp for 7 days.  And the event had and effect on the entire community, they all had to wait 7 days until she could be brought back into the camp.  Sin is not private and disrespecting those God has placed in authority over you is serious.  It works it’s way through the camp like actual contagious leprosy.  It must be put outside the camp, which is the strong language Paul echoes when he tells the Corinthians to stop taking pride in their harboring of a sexual pervert.  “God will judge those on the outside; but as the Scriptures say, “You must remove the evil person from among you.”  Don’t offer up a place to the feminist pretending to be a Christian, put her outside the camp.  Don’t offer a seat to the effeminate man, put him outside the camp.  For their own good and because God says so.