Board index ‹ Specific Bible verses, texts, and passages ‹ Numbers

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Numbers 12:3 reads (NIV):

“Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth.”

Traditionally, Moses is considered to be the author of the Book of Numbers, so this is Moses calling himself “the most humble man alive”.
To a reader with 21st century cultural sensibilities, this looks like something a stand up comedian would say. Is that passage actually intended as a joke or at least intended to be ironic, or is there something else going on?

[jimwalton]

There is no doubting, even for homelike like me who considers Moses to be the author of the first five books of the Bible, that they were edited in later centuries. There are various terms and expressions that could not have come from Moses's era. When i take Moses as the author, it's with the explanation that there were other editors and redactors that came behind him.

Number 12.3 would be one of those. Someone added this later to let us know the esteem in which Moses was held.

[Laughing Cat]

None of it is a narrative though, is it? Just saying, no other agenda.

[jimwalton]

Numbers 12? Or are you talking about all of the first books of the Bible? Well, there's tons of narrative in the first 5 books, so that can't be what you're talking about.

Numbers 12 is also narrative. Moses's siblings, Miriam and Aaron, are complaining that Moe had married outside of Israel: He had married a Cushite woman, most likely a reference to an Ethiopian or Nubian, possibly a Sudanese woman (using some of our modern national or ethnic labels). God appears to them and rebukes the siblings for their complaint about something that doesn't matter in this case (that Moe has married a non-Israelite). Miriam was punished with the skin disease (probably some kind of eczema or psoriasis)—indicating she was probably the primary instigator in the complaint and Aaron, as we might expect, was a lemming just following along. So, yeah, it's narrative.

Let's keep talking, though.

[Laughing Cat]

No I meant none of it is 1st person narrative.

It's debatable whether Moses actually wrote the Bible though. A few years ago I googled "Who wrote Genesis?", and the Google answer was the so-called "Table theory". Have you ever heard of it?

[jimwalton]

> No I meant none of it is 1st person narrative.

Right, but that could be just stylistic from the era. When I was in school we were taught that if you ever put yourself in your writing, you should refer to yourself as "this author" or some such rather than "I." And if it were an autobiography, you should write it in the 3rd person. And you should never use "you," but always "one." You know how this goes. It could just be following the writing rules of the era.

> Who wrote Genesis?

The authorship question of the 1st five books of the Bible is a very complex area of study, and scholarly opinion is pretty much all over the map. The "Tablet Theory" has some glaring weaknesses, as does the Wellhausen Theory. It's beyond a doubt, however, that Genesis is literarily organized according to the "toledoth" ("These are the generations of") statements—10 in all. It is also beyond a doubt that there are literary and theological themes that tie all 5 books together. It is ALSO beyond a doubt that the books have been edited through the centuries. We know that Hebrew didn't exist as a language when Moses wrote, so someone later put the text in Hebrew. All these things are well known and beyond doubt.

I find the case to be reasonable that Moses wrote things down that were later translated, edited and assembled. Moses is the "author" of much of it, but obviously not the "author" of the final form. I see Moses as the tradent of the material—the authority behind it and the author of its Torah content etc., but not necessarily the author of some of the narrative sections. Obviously it's not possible that he wrote the record of his own death in Deuteronomy 34, for instance.

Much of Numbers is narrative, only a little of which Moses may have written, but it may still be an authoritative and accurate record. Much of Genesis could have been passed on by him and others and later written. Much of Exodus could have (and I believe was) written specifically by him, as well as much of Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

So that's my take on it. It's a much longer conversation, but we can talk about it more if you want.

Back to your original question, I think the remark in Numbers 12.3 was added later to show how he was regarded by future generations.

[Laughing Cat]

I mean, it seems plausible. It's an interesting question.

[jimwalton]

Yeah, I find it all quite fascinating. The more I study and read, there are just so many interesting things I want to know more about and study more deeply. Unfortunately, I'm going to run out of life before I run out of curiosity and questions to find answers to.