Numbers 6-8 Here we come to the provisions for Nazarites. Nazarites are people, male or female, who are under a particularly rigorous kind of vow to God, either for life or, more commonly, for a particular amount of time. Some famous lifelong-from the womb Nazarites are Samson, Samuel, and John the Baptist.
Chapter 7 is full of descriptions of what representatives of each tribe gave as offerings for the service of the Tent of Meeting and the support of the Levites. I am curious if anybody had done an evaluation of what all those offerings were worth. Each representative gives exactly the same list of items, but each gift is catalogued in its entirety.
Chapter 8 is about the Seven Lamps for the Tabernacle. The figure of 7 lamps becomes important for Christians in the Book of Revelation. These lamps must have been truly works of art: "made, out of hammered work of gold. From its base to its flowers, it was hammered work; according to the pattern that the LORD had shown Moses, so he made the lamp stand." (8:4).
Finally, there are provisions for the consecration of the Levites and their "separation." Note how, in the Torah, consecration for God's purposes virtually always involves separation, splitting off, from a larger part of the community. Note how that is one of the driving themes also of the creation story, until the human beings have been separated out of the rest of the mammals, as servants of the LORD and bearers of the LORD's image.
Psalm 42 A psalm beloved through the millennia. We have many choral versions of this psalm about our souls longing for God "like as the hart longeth for the water brooks" (42:1) This psalm and the one following belong together literarily. The refrain of 42:5 recurs through both psalms. I think this is how the numbering of the Roman Catholic psalms, the Jewish psalms and the Protestant psalms come to differ by one, as some traditions put Psalms 42 and 3 into one psalm.
Romans 3 St. Paul continues to drive home the point that NONE is righteous; that ALL have sinned, and that God is just and good. A major summarizing statement of this chapter occurs in vss. 23ff: "Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith." The barriers between Jew and Gentile, so important in part because of the principle of "separation" and holiness we just noted in our reading of Numbers, are tumbling down in the context of God's grace.
As you read Romans, you will notice that Paul has a tendency to create his own technical terms, often borrowing terms that are familiar in other contexts and giving them special meanings in his own writings. You might find it helpful to keep a list and to remember not to over-generalize, but to let the terms bear the meaning that Paul intends for them.
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