NOTES for Num 10:1-36
The Book of Numbers describes the people’s movement through the wilderness not as nomads passing from one stopping place to another, nor even as a military campaign, but rather as a solemn procession headed by God Himself. It is no accident that trumpets are mentioned here, the very sacred trumpets that were sounded not only in times of danger, but also on great feast days. This is also the source of the angelic trumpets in prophetic and apocalyptic visions: each such trumpet proclaimed a new revelation, a new age, a new word from God, but above all that very entry of God into the world, into history, and into people’s lives without which there would have been neither sacred history, nor the Bible that describes it, nor the coming of the Messiah.
That is why the people’s movement through the wilderness looks like a solemn religious procession. This is not about some particular feast or a separate event, however important it might be. It is about History with a capital H, which itself became an Event, also with a capital E. This History with a capital H became the content of the Book of Numbers and of the Pentateuch as a whole. The principal actor both in the Book of Numbers and throughout the Pentateuch is God, leading His people to the land promised to them.
Yet the people too are part of the Event, part of History. Without the people there would have been neither the one nor the other; there would have been only God reigning over the world, dwelling somewhere very high above it, so high that there could be no question of His entering this world. We are accustomed to think that the New Testament books, the Gospel, are where the Incarnation is discussed.
In fact, the whole Bible speaks of the Incarnation, only in different ways. The Incarnation is impossible without God’s encounter with an individual person and without His entry into the lives of individuals and then of all humanity. God enters the lives of individuals through particular events and particular encounters, as happened in the days of the patriarchs; this is how God entered the life of each one of them.
God enters the life of humanity through particular historical events connected with a particular people, created by Him expressly so that through this people He might enter the world and history. At the end of time, the Event that completes history takes place within the people: the birth of the Messiah, through whom God enters the world in all fullness, a fullness consciously known because the Messiah is aware of Himself as the Son of God from the very beginning of His earthly existence. Thus History reaches its completion, and the Kingdom begins.