Numbers 5

This offering may be the guilt offering described in Leviticus 5. In older lingo, the guilt offering was called the trespass offering, as in, “Forgive us our trespasses” or sins. In fact, scholars can’t seem to figure out what the difference is between a “sin offering” and a “guilt offering.” One guess is that guilt offerings are more serious and often involve making restitution. Leviticus 5:14-7:7 talks about when a person needs to make a guilt offering. Leviticus 7:1-10 talks about how to make the sacrifice.

Some scholars say the writer is making the point that the meat of sacrifices like this belongs to the officiating priest. It’s not something the priest has to share with other priests. It’s not community property.

Two dry quarts equals 2.2 dry liters. That’s about a two-and-a-half-pound sack of flour (1 kg).

Frankincense was one of the most exotic and expensive fragrances available, along with myrrh. Also used as woody-tasting spices. Both come from sap of small trees and shrubs growing in what are now Saudi Arabia, northern Africa, and India. People would grind up the dried sap and put it in perfumes. They also burned it as a woody fragrance, and a sweet-smelling incense. They burned the incense in religious services. They also burned incense in homes as air fresheners in the days before soap and deodorants. Possible health benefits: reduces inflammation in the gut and irritable bowel syndrome; reduces inflammation of arthritis; helps relieve asthma. Further medical studies are needed, according to medical researchers.

It’s unclear why the woman needed to let her hair down. It’s not generally something a woman did in public. Women who were ritually unclean because they were suffering from serious skin diseases were instructed to put their hair down and muss it up to provide a visual clue to others that they were unclean (Leviticus 13:5). Some scholars suggest women had to put their hair down to make them feel vulnerable or perhaps to shame them.

The Hebrew word is mar. It’s usually translated in this context as “bitter.” But it can also mean: disagreeable, poisonous, angry, cruel, anxious. Anything but refreshing. “Angry” seems a good fit, given the husband’s jealousy, which produced this anxious scene.

There’s a lot of debate over what is happening here because the words are oblique. The passage literally says, may the LORD “make your thigh shrivel and your belly swell.” Babies first appear between a mother’s thighs. So, many scholars say the phrase is a euphemistic way of saying the woman would suffer from infertility or miscarriages.

Literally, “Amen. Amen.” Archaeological discoveries in Israel confirm people used “Amen” to confirm the truth of an oath they took.

This law, sometimes called the Test of the Bitter Water, might seem to favor the husband, as we interpret the law today. A priest whips up a cocktail of dirt and ink. Ink analyzed from the famous Dead Sea Scrolls contained mainly lamp soot. So, we have a nervous wife standing in the worship center in what she was taught was God’s presence. And she is ordered to drink dirty water that not only has a curse on it, but a curse in it: the priest scraped the ink of the words into the water. Who’s not going to get sick after drinking that? Well, Israelites taught that God controlled everything. See the note for Exodus 28:30, about the high priest using what sounds a bit like dice to get answers from God. Israelites taught that if the woman was innocent, this would prove it and it would quench the jealous anger of her husband, hopefully shutting him up on the subject. Still, the law might seem unfair. But without it, the woman had no recourse. She would have to continue suffering from her husband’s jealousy. This way, if she could avoid getting sick and could manage to produce a baby, the husband should be relieved. From today’s perspective, though, we’re left wondering what would happen if the woman’s next baby looked like the man in the next tent. Perhaps that would produce another trip to the priest, with another round of angry water, and some extra dirt.