I'm finally going to finish Numbers here. I've been at this book for what seems like months. After all the huffing and puffing, animal sacrifices and censuses, the Israelites send 12,000 men to battle against the Midianites. The Midianites are obliterated, and every Midianite male is killed.

The Israelites take the Midianites' livestock and goods, and bring the surviving women and children to Moses. Moses is shocked, and says, "Why did you bring back ALL the women alive?!? Kill every male child, and kill every women who has had sex with a man! But all the female children that haven't had sex, keep them for yourselves!"

If you don't believe me, that's Numbers, Chapter 31:17-18.

After this proclamation, the Israelites inventory all the goods they've pillaged. It comes to:

- 675,000 sheep
- Threescore (a "score" is 20, so I'm guessing the total amount here is 72,000) and 12,000 "beeves"
- Threescore and 1,000 donkeys
- 32,000 virgin women.

And I'm not sure where these came from, but they also received an additional:
- 330,500 sheep (of which over 600 were sacrificed)
- 36,000 beeves (sacrificed threescore and 12)
- 30,500 donkeys (sacrificed 61)
- 16,000 persons (It reads as if they may have sacrificed 32 people here.)

This is the main event, but the next few chapters have a few interesting things as well, aside from the constant recordkeeping of where the Israelites move to and set up. It's also good to know that the journey from Egypt to Canaan (where the Israelites eventually wind up), for some reason they were lost for 40 years, when it would've taken a few weeks even back then. Yahweh apparently curses them to wander because the Israelites were discouraged at the sight of the land He had promised them.

In Chapter 33:50, Yahweh tells Moses to kill all the inhabitants of Canaan and make sure to destroy all their religious symbols - melt their statues and take down their 'high places'. High places is probably a reference to the Asherah's, or groves, in which the Canaanite people worshipped Asherah - who in Canaanite and Sumerian mythology is the wife of El. And El, the chief sky god of the Canaanite and Sumerian pantheon, is who Yahweh was originally (in Genesis). Pretty crazy stuff, eh?

"Yahweh" tells the Israelites to kill ALL the Canaanites, or otherwise He will make the Canaanites a thorn in the side of the Israelites. Yahweh my ass. The political leaders of Israel are using Yahweh to justify the killing of the Canaanites. This crap has been going on for thousands of years!

The rest of the chapters are just a bunch of divvying up of the spoils of war, a few begats, and a few extra rules. And that's pretty much it for Numbers - a truly horrific, and horribly written, book of the Bible.

I will close with this interesting rule from Numbers 35:16-28, which I will sum up: "If you kill a person with malice, you shall be put to death. But if it is an accident, you will be safe within the haven of the city. But if you are caught outside the city walls, it is okay for the closest relative of the victim to kill you."

A Phoenician statue of one of the Ba'al's. Looks kind of dorky.

Numbers, Chapter 25: Right off the bat, 24,000 Israelites die of a horrible plague. And all this after we've been talking about talking donkeys and the conquests of other nations! What happened?

Well, if you've been following this blog or are familiar with the Old Testament, we all know how Yahweh is. He's jealous, He's psychotic, and He's kind of anal. He almost reminds me of Kim Jong Il.

In a nutshell, the Israelites started hanging out with the wrong crowd; the Moabs and the Midianites. The Israelites even partook of some of the worship ceremonies of the Moabs, who worshiped a god (or Baal) named Peor. Peor is the name of the mountain where they were, so it's likely that Baal Peor was a local god of that particular mountain. Apparently, the Israelite men were getting busy with the Midianite women as well.

Yahweh witnesses this and just goes off the handle. He says to Moses, "Take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the LORD against the sun, that the fierce anger of the LORD may be turned away from Israel."

As a further affront, an Israelite man brings a "Midianitish" woman before the congregation, and takes her into a tent. The grandson of the recently deceased Aaron sees this, grabs a spear, and pursues the two into the tent, and runs both of them through. In fact, the woman is stabbed through the belly.

Yahweh sees this and is greatly pleased, and prevents the entire population of Israelites from contracting the plague He had sent out. Unfortunately, 24,000 do die before this happens. Yahweh tells Moses that the man who killed the two will be blessed for his zealousness. And then the Sumerian god who nowadays Christians revere as the omnipotent creator of the universe turns to Moses again and says, "Vex the Midianites, and kill them all."

I am happy to report that the next few chapters I can pretty much skip, because they repeat things that have already been said. They go through another census as they prepare to make war on the Midianites (numbers are probably inflated), they go through some more rituals about animal sacrifice, there is another reference to the practice of scapegoating, etc. The only thing to add is that in Chapter 30 we find out that women are not really responsible for anything - it's the men who oversee them that are responsible for them. And if she is responsible for something, it's only because her father or husband allows her too.

Next time, the Midianites gets smited!!!

Above: Heavy metal culture has brought back Ba'al into something completely different.