Numbers 21:5: “And the people spoke against God, and against Moses, wherefore have ye brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no bread, neither is there any water; and our soul loatheth this light bread.”
Cassius: Brutus hath rived my heart: A friend should bear a friends infirmities, but Brutus makes mine greater than they are.
Brutus: I do not till you practice them on me.
Cassius: You love me not.
Shakespeare: Julius Caesar Act IV, Scene III
I remember as a young idealistic literature teacher in a Junior High School how I planned and rehearsed my little lecture on this beautifully written passage by Shakespeare on friendship and how easily it is wounded. I no sooner quoted the line by Cassius: “You love me not” with all the flourish of Lawrence Olivier when the whole class broke out laughing. One student in the back slammed his fist on his desk and said: “I knew it, didn’t I tell you all that this Shakespeare fellow was…” The student then waved his hand in such a way as to show his opinion on Shakespeare’s sexual orientation. Let me tell you, teaching Junior High School students is not for the faint of heart. Although the student may have been right in his evaluation of Shakespeare, he was wrong to apply his 20th century understanding of the use of the English word love to the 16th century understanding and use of the word love. A mistake many Christians make with many words they read in the KJV of the Bible.
Nonetheless, Shakespeare was showing that when two friends or two lovers have offended each other, the most hurtful thing, the most heart wrenching thing one can say to the other person is; “You lied to me, you don’t love me.”
Take a look at this passage in Numbers and tell me why God sent fiery snakes to bite the people? The passage says: “The people spoke against God.” Consider what that means to speak against God. To speak against God cut so deep into the heart of God, that He sent fiery serpents to bite them. Let me digress a moment here. The Masoretic text uses vowel pointings which indicate that this word send (shalach) is to be in a piel form. Yet if I were to put a Qibbuts rather than a Qammets under the shin and take the dagesh out of the Lamed (all which were put there by the Masoretes) this would change this to a pual and put it into a passive voice rather than an active voice. The Masoretes put the vowel pointings into the Hebrew seven hundred years after the birth of Jesus. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were written more than 500 years earlier than the Masoretic text, has called into question some of the works of the Masoretes. Many rabbis will question the positioning of some of the vowel pointings that they used. I personally would call into question the vowel pointings of the word shalach as it is used here. I believe this should have been pointed up as a pual and not a piel. The difference is this. As a piel you would read the passage as God sending the poisonous serpents to bite the people. As a pual God did not send the serpents to bite the people, the snakes were there to begin with and ready and able to bite the people, and did not because of God was keeping His protective hand over His people. But once the people sinned, God was unable to cover them with his protection and thus His protection was removed and the snakes started to bite the people. As a pual God did not send the serpents to bite the people but sent a message to the people through the snake bites.
Now let’s look at this phrase speak against God. The word for speak is davar not amar, this is not some slip of the tongue, these were words spoken from the heart of the people. The word is also used as a participle, it was something they were continually doing. In front of the word for God (Elohim) we find the preposition Beth which means in. Literally this is rendered, they were speaking the words of God in God, in other words they were speaking with their hearts to the heart of God and were calling God a liar. They were telling God He did not care for them, He did not love them. God got the message. They were saying that their Egyptian god, Apophasis, (a god pictured as a snake) loved them move and would care for them better. So God proceeded to show them a little about their beloved snake god.
What more hurtful thing could a husband say to his wife or a wife to a husband than to say: “You don’t care for me or love me, I am going to someone who really does.” Can we say anything that is more hurtful to God than: “God, I have no job, my world is falling apart and you stand there and do nothing. You have not kept your promises, thou lovest me not.”
God has shared with you intimately and shown his love over and over to you and then, because things are not going the way you want them to, you literally accuse God of not loving you by complaining about your circumstances. Like the children of Israel, when we complain of our circumstances we are literally saying to God: “You love me not” and that cuts very deeply into the heart of God, we wound His heart. Worse yet, like an unfaithful wife, who leaves the protection of her husband, to be with someone else, we leave the protection of God and when we do He cannot protect us from the bit of the poisonous snakes.
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