NOTES for Num 12:1-15
The story in this passage about the accusations against Moses may seem a rather typical example of God’s punishment. Indeed: here are groundless accusations, here is God, here is leprosy; everything is present, everything is logical, simple, and clear. In fact, however, things are not quite as we usually picture them. Or perhaps they are not like that at all. The whole question is where one looks from and how one constructs the logic of the picture that unfolds. Seen from the outside, there is only a linear sequence of events: reproach, the Tabernacle, leprosy, repentance.
The pattern seems elementary and simple, the very one commentators usually draw: an unjust reproach, an appeal to God, God’s judgment and punishment, followed by the sinners’ repentance. Yet when viewed from the Tabernacle, from the place of God’s presence, everything becomes entirely different. First of all, the linear sequence of events on which most commentaries on this passage are based disappears. For God has no “before” and “after,” at least not in our sense.
He has relationships with particular people in the full dynamism of their particular moment. Simply put, for God, in His relationship with each person, there is only the “here and now” that exists in the fullness of the times of His Kingdom, while for a human being there is only the “here and now” of a particular moment, that very “instant between the past and the future.” The main question in assessing any situation therefore becomes how the “here and now” of an individual relates to the “here and now” of God’s fullness of time.
It is this dynamic relationship between God’s “here and now” and the human one that determines how events develop in every situation, including the one described in the passage. An accusation, especially an unjust and groundless one, always knocks a person out of the fullness of God’s “here and now”, and then that person’s life ceases to be the fullness of reality which is precisely “only an instant between the past and the future.”
The instant becomes blurred, and with it the fullness of life, which can exist only as an instant, becomes blurred as well. Then anything is possible, including not only illness but even death, all the more so directly in God’s presence. Repentance, if it is genuine, returns life to the present instant and brings it into relation with the fullness of God’s eternal present; then the illness passes and disappears without a trace. God desires no one’s death; He desires the fullness of life for everyone. The rest depends only on the person.