Moses is Challenged by His Siblings

(Book of Numbers 12:1 - 12:15) 
While they were staying at Hazeroth, Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses on account of his Arabian wife, (for Moses had indeed married a woman from Arabia).  They declared, "Has Jehovah spoken exclusively through Moses?  Hasn't he spoken through us as well?"

Jehovah heard them.  (Moses himself was a singularly humble man, more so than anyone in the world.) Immediately, Jehovah called to Moses, Aaron, and Miriam and told them, "Go out to the Tabernacle, the three of you!"  And so they went to the Tabernacle.  Jehovah descended in a pillar of cloud that settled before the entrance to the Sanctum.  He summoned Aaron and Miriam, who stepped forward. 

He said to them, "Now listen to what I have to say!  When there are prophets among you, I, Jehovah, make myself known to them through visions; I speak to them in dreams.   This is not true of my servant Moses, for he is the one in whom I have entrusted my people.  With him, I speak face to face, clearly, not in allegories.  And he has even glimpsed the true form of Jehovah.  Why then did you dare speak against my servant Moses?"

As he departed, Jehovah was seething with anger.  After his cloud had ascended above the Tabernacle, Miriam was left standing there with her skin diseased, scaly and white as snow.  Aaron turned to Miriam and lo and behold -- she had tzaraath!  He cried out to Moses, "My master, please don't punish us for this offense we have foolishly committed!  Don't let her be like a stillborn child emerging from the womb with her skin half eaten away.”

Moses cried out to Jehovah, "Oh, God, please heal her, I beg you!"

Jehovah answered Moses, "If her father had only spit in her face, wouldn’t she hide in disgrace for a week or so?  Well then, keep her outside of the camp for 7 days and after that you may let her back in."

And so Miriam was quarantined outside of camp for 7 days, and her people waited to set out again until she could return.  Afterwards, the Israelites departed Hazeroth and camped in the desert of Paran.

Notes
1.  His older brother Aaron and older sister Miriam challenge the role that Moses has assumed of being the sole intermediary between Jehovah and the Israelite people.  Aaron is Jehovah's high priest and Miriam seems to have some claim as a prophetess.  It is hard to see, however, that they could view themselves as the equal of their brother in his relationship with Jehovah.  There seems to be some fierce sibling rivalry here.  How often it happens that when one family member becomes famous,  the siblings merely bask in his reflected glory; any modest success they may achieve is usually dependent upon the star of the family.  They resent the family star and delude themselves into believing that they are as good as he is and can do what he does.  In this case, the sibling rivalry is exacerbated by the fact that Moses was raised as an Egyptian and spent much of his adulthood among the Midians.  Moses would not be truly Israelite in their eyes -- or perhaps even a bona fide member of the family.

2.  Although it has nothing to do Moses' position, a bone of contention between Moses and his siblings seems to be his wife.  How often is the foreign wife resented by the family and regarded as an interloper.  That resentment would have been considerable among the Israelites, who were very xenophobic and race conscious, as well as suspicious and unaccepting of all that was alien to their culture.  This passage is quite problematic.  It refers to Moses' wife as a Cushite.  Cush was an ancient kingdom to the south of Egypt, generally synonymous with Nubia, inhabited by black Africans who, at an earlier period, established a civilization that rivaled that of Old Kingdom Egypt.  The term Cushite was also used more generally to refer to sub-Saharan, black Africa, just as the term Ethiopian was similarly used by the Greeks and even by the Europeans right up until the middle of the Nineteenth Century.  (Stephen Foster wrote Ethiopian songs.)  In Hebrew, a Cushi is a black person.  One might naturally conclude then that Moses' wife was a Negro.  However, it becomes more complicated: Cush also referred to Arabia.  (The Hebrews didn’t have the same conception of continents as we do.)  This is the most likely meaning, and that is why I have used the less ambiguous "Arabian" in the translation.  Sephora was a Midianite and, therefore, an Arabian, even though the Midianites were, in fact, Hebrews.  This seems the most likely explanation of this, at first, puzzling passage.  Rendered otherwise, it implies that Moses acquired an additional wife or remarried after Sephora's death, yet this remarriage is nowhere suggested.  It should be mentioned, though, that there is an alternative non-Biblical narrative in which Moses is sent by the Egyptian government to lead Pharaoh’s armies in Ethiopia and returns in triumph with an Ethiopian princess as his bride.  This would have been before his flight from Egypt and his marriage to Sephora.  Would this other wife, if she existed, have still been around by the time of the Exodus?  Even though the biblical account of Moses is, at best, more legendary than historical, this other account, no doubt of much later origin, is likely to be purely fabulous.   In considering the possibility of a second Mrs. Moses, one must ask how there could have been any opportunity for Moses to marry after his flight from Egypt to Midian, which was made alone.  He was a bit too busy dealing with the Pharaoh and the plagues to have done any courting and wooing after his return to Egypt.  And he was a man with a wife and young children.  Why would he contract a foreign marriage, when he was trying to establish his authenticity as a national leader of the Israelites?  And as leader of the Exodus, he had his hands full, while his actions were continually subject to "divine" as well as popular scrutiny.  How probable would it have been that some Cushite woman tagged along with the Israelites on their Exodus and found a way to marry the top man?  Improbable, surely.  And it's unthinkable that Jehovah would have allowed his man Moses to take a new foreign wife.  Therefore, the correct interpretation is probably the simple one: the reference is to his original, one and only wife, Sephora, daughter of Jethro, and that the description of her as Cushite only means Arabian and Midianite and not black African.

3.  The parenthetic reference to Moses’ humility or meekness probably explains why he doesn’t defend himself.  He allows Jehovah to do so.  (Odd, that if Moses were actually the author of the books ascribed to him, he would commend his own character, especially if he was really so humble!)

4.  Jehovah takes Aaron and Miriam to the woodshed (in this case, the Tabernacle) and, like a stern father, gives them a good talking to and puts them in their place.  However, the ever-irate Jehovah is not a father who spares the rod.  If he has an excuse to punish someone, he will take it.  Understanding, kindness, forgiveness, and mercy have, we've seen, little part in his nature.   When the people complain about not having any real food to eat, he doesn't tell them to man up and tough it out.  No, he gives them the food they desire and then arranges for the food to sicken and kill them -- a retributive act of devious cruelty.  Here, instead of letting Moses' brother and sister off with a warning, after he reproves them, he punishes Miriam by inflicting her with the dreaded tzaraath, a disease that makes her skin white and flaky.  When Moses appeals to him to have mercy, to heal her, Jehovah blows him off.  He dismisses the punishment with a casualness and callousness that is appalling.  "Big deal" he pretty much says, "she'll be OK in a week!"

5. Why Jehovah chooses to punish Miriam and not Aaron is unexplained.  Did Aaron, as high priest, have immunity?   Was Miriam more guilty?  At any rate, it seems unnecessarily severe and nasty, if not misogynistic to punish the woman and not the man.  (Gallantry is not a Jehovan virtue!)

6. Tzaraath is often translated as "leprosy."  However, the term is also used to described mold and mildew infestation of houses and clothes.  It is not known whether biblical leprosy is the same as modern leprosy or Hansen's disease, a chronic, infectious bacterial disease affecting the skin -- probably not.  But tzaraath, when applied to humans, does denote a defiling skin disease that rendered one ritually impure and usually required the sufferer to be isolated or quarantined.  Unlike leprosy, tzaraath infections often seemed to be of limited, even short durations.

7. Jehovah, as he is wont, descends to his Sanctum in a cloud.  The cloud is described as a pillar.  One might imagine his physical, human-like form coming down from the sky and being screened by the cloud.  Some translations have Jehovah standing at the entrance to the Sanctum, or perhaps it's the Inner Sanctum, but it seems likely he is still within the veiling cloud.   He insists that no one but Moses is allowed to see him in the flesh, in his real, physical form, yet we know that Moses only saw the back of his head and then only once.  We may therefore assume that although Aaron and Miriam are hearing his voice, they are only looking at his cloud.

8.  It is made clear by Jehovah that only Moses is his vicar, his human emissary, his agent.  Others with whom he communicates through dreams and visions may be prophets, but they do not represent him or act for him as Moses does.  Apparently Jehovah, not anxious to make friends and influence people, relies upon, trusts only Moses, whom he nevertheless uses and abuses, while treating his chosen people with a contempt that is exceeded only by the detestation with which he views the rest of mankind, the race he supposedly created.