- Use your own experience to imagine the conversations between the people in general, those closest to the leadership (especially Priests and Levites) when they met in the equivalent of the local once the leadership question was sorted. What would today’s media have made of it?
- Identify a ‘Meribah moment’ in your own experience or that of your friends, family or community. Work out in practical terms what that might call for and how you could play your part in it.
- On a scale of 1-10 where would you place yourself compared to Balaam where 1 is ’nothing like’ and 10 is identical.
- How do Moses’s requirements for leadership compare with the qualities we look for when we appoint leaders? Can you imagine how the way we choose our leaders might appear to someone brought up in a totally different culture?
- When Steinbeck’s Oakies entered California not only did they find it was not quite all they had hoped for but also that they had lost the thrill and purpose of the journey: they had nowhere else to go. Possession of the Land has to be a means not an end. What is needed to keep alive the vision when life becomes more ordinary and routine?
- One scholar has suggested that on entering the promised land the Israelites may may have discovered that ‘a future becoming’ by the continued ‘walking in the ways of God’ is more important than any arrival.Starting from there how different might you see their future?
Further Reading
Bruce M Metzger & Michael D Coogan, The Oxford Companion to the Bible, OUP, Oxford, 1993.
John W Rogerson & Judith M Lieu (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006.
Charles M Barton, John and John Muddiman (eds), Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation, CUP, Cambridge, 1998.
Laymon, (ed), Interpreter’s One-Volume Commentary on the Bible, Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1971.
Matthew Black & H H Rowley, Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, Nelson, London & Edinburgh, 1962.