Prophecy in Numbers

The LORD bless you and keep you! The LORD let his face shine upon you, and be gracious to you! The LORD look upon you kindly and give you peace! (6:24–26)

Reading

This is liturgy, not prediction: the blessing God gives Aaron and his sons to speak over Israel. It ends with a promise: “So shall they invoke my name upon the Israelites, and I will bless them” (6:27). The Church still prays it, and reads it at Mass on January 1, the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God.

Fulfilled

The prayer that God's face would shine upon his people is answered in Christ. Paul speaks of “the knowledge of the glory of God on the face of [Jesus] Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6), and the risen Lord's first word to his disciples is peace (John 20:19).

Unfolding

The blessing is still given, at the end of Mass and over people and homes. Its last fulfillment is the vision promised in Revelation: “They will look upon his face” (Revelation 22:4).

“But now we are famished; we have nothing to look forward to but this manna.” (11:6)

Reading

The people remember the fish, the cucumbers and the melons of Egypt and despise the bread God gives them each morning. God sends quail, “a wind from the LORD that drove in quail from the sea” (11:31), but the meat they craved becomes a plague. The gift itself had never failed; the people's hearts had.

Fulfilled

Jesus reads the manna as a sign of himself: “it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven” (John 6:32). “Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died”; “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever” (6:49, 51). The Catechism teaches that the “manna in the desert prefigured the Eucharist” (CCC 1094).

Future

“To the victor I shall give some of the hidden manna” (Revelation 2:17).

For now

Numbers is honest that God's people can grow tired of his gifts. Paul warns the Corinthians against the same craving (1 Corinthians 10:6).

“Are you jealous for my sake? If only all the people of the LORD were prophets! If only the LORD would bestow his spirit on them!” (11:29)

Reading

God takes some of the spirit that was on Moses and shares it with seventy elders, and they prophesy. Two men who stayed in the camp, Eldad and Medad, prophesy too, and Joshua wants them stopped. Moses answers with a wish that reaches far beyond his own day.

Fulfilled

The prophet Joel turned Moses' wish into a promise (Joel 3:1–2), and at Pentecost Peter announces it kept: “‘that I will pour out a portion of my spirit upon all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy’” (Acts 2:17). Jesus answers his own disciples much as Moses answered Joshua, when they try to stop a man driving out demons in his name (Mark 9:38–40).

“Then, raising his hand, Moses struck the rock twice with his staff, and water came out in abundance…” (20:11)

Reading

At Meribah the people again have no water. God tells Moses to “command the rock to yield its waters” (20:8), but Moses strikes it twice in anger. Water flows anyway, and Moses and Aaron are told they will not lead the people into the land. A similar story is told in Exodus 17.

Fulfilled

St. Paul says that in the desert Israel “drank from a spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was the Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4). The Catechism: “Water from the rock was the figure of the spiritual gifts of Christ” (CCC 1094). Jesus himself offers the water: “Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink” (John 7:37). From his side on the Cross, opened by a lance, flow blood and water (John 19:34), which the Fathers read as the sacraments of the Church.

See also

Revelation 22:1, “the river of life-giving water.”

“Accordingly Moses made a bronze serpent and mounted it on a pole, and whenever the serpent bit someone, the person looked at the bronze serpent and recovered.” (21:9)

Reading

The people complain, “We are disgusted with this wretched food!” (21:5), and are bitten by “seraph serpents” (21:6). God's remedy is strange: the image of the very thing that is killing them, lifted up for all to see. The Book of Wisdom already understood that it was not the bronze that healed: the one who turned toward it “was saved, not by what was seen, but by you, the savior of all” (Wisdom 16:7). Centuries later King Hezekiah broke the serpent in pieces, because the people had begun to burn incense to it (2 Kings 18:4).

Fulfilled

Jesus himself gives the reading: “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14–15). On the Cross Christ, who knew no sin, is lifted up bearing the image of what destroys us, and whoever looks to him in faith lives. The Catechism names the bronze serpent among the images God permitted in the Old Covenant that pointed toward salvation by the incarnate Word (CCC 2130). The Church reads this passage on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, September 14.

“I see him, though not now; I observe him, though not near: A star shall advance from Jacob, and a scepter shall rise from Israel…” (24:17)

Reading

Balaam, a foreign seer hired by the king of Moab to curse Israel, can only bless it. His fourth oracle looks far ahead to a ruler from Israel. In its first horizon it points to David, who conquered Moab and Edom (2 Samuel 8:2, 14). Jewish tradition before Christ already read it of the Messiah, and the Church has always read it so.

Fulfilled

The magi come from the east asking, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We saw his star at its rising and have come to do him homage” (Matthew 2:2), and the NABRE note on that verse points to Numbers 24:17. Origen connected the magi with Balaam's prophecy (Against Celsus 1.60): the first to follow the star were, like Balaam, seers from the east.

Future

At the end of the Bible the star speaks for himself: “I am the root and offspring of David, the bright morning star” (Revelation 22:16). He promises a share in his light to the faithful: “to him I will give the morning star” (2:28).

“Take Joshua, son of Nun, a man of spirit, and lay your hand upon him.” (27:18)

Reading

Moses, told that he will not enter the land, asks God for a leader “that the LORD's community may not be like sheep without a shepherd” (27:17). God names Joshua, whose name Moses had given him (Hoshea, “salvation,” became Joshua, “the LORD saves”; 13:16). Moses lays hands on him before the priest and the people, and Joshua leads Israel into the promised land.

Fulfilled

In Greek, Joshua and Jesus are the same name, and Hebrews plays on it: “Now if Joshua had given them rest, he would not have spoken afterwards of another day” (Hebrews 4:8). The angel tells Joseph to name the child Jesus, “because he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Seeing the crowds, Jesus' heart “was moved with pity for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd” (Mark 6:34). The Fathers saw in Joshua a figure of Jesus, who leads his people where Moses, the law, could not.

See also

The laying on of hands to hand on a charge is continued in the Church (Acts 6:6; 1 Timothy 4:14).

The one who killed unintentionally “will stay there until the death of the high priest who has been anointed with sacred oil.” (35:25)

Reading

Six cities are set apart as places of asylum, open to Israelites and to “resident or transient aliens” alike (35:15), where someone who has killed by accident can flee from the avenger of blood. The refugee is safe only inside the city, and goes free only when the high priest dies (35:28).

Fulfilled

Many Christian interpreters, from the Fathers on, have read the cities of refuge as a figure of Christ, in whom sinners find shelter, and have seen in the death of the high priest that sets the refugee free a figure of the death of Christ, the high priest. Hebrews may echo the image when it speaks of “we who have taken refuge” holding fast to the hope set before us, “an anchor of the soul, sure and firm” (Hebrews 6:18–19).

Why mystery

No New Testament text names the cities of refuge, and the echo in Hebrews is not certain. The type is a traditional Christian reading, offered here as such.