Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Let me start out by saying this book has been poorly named in English. In Hebrew it was called

in the wilderness. For those of you who don't love actual numbers, just know that even though this book does contain

them, it also contains some highly underrated stories of scripture, some of my favorites.

Most people won't wade through the numbers to get there.

But we're not afraid. We know we'll learn

something even in the days of actual numbers. So let's go. Numbers is the fourth

book in the Torah, also known as the books of the law, the book of Moses, and the Pentatuke. Numbers is the continuation of the story of this family we've been following since day one back in Genesis one.

According to the timeline laid out in scripture, we've been following this family for almost 2,700 years of their lives.

Adam eventually led to Noah, then God wiped out the Earth's population except for eight people in Noah's family, and they started over with a clean slate.

Through Noah's second son, Shim, we eventually get to Abraham and God makes a promise to

Abraham to be the father of many nations. His second son Isaac is the child through which this promise will be

fulfilled and that promise transfers through to Isaac's second son Jacob. Jacob has 12 sons

and 10 of them sold one of them, Joseph, into slavery.

But God loved those 12 brothers and promised to give them the land of Canaan to live in,

where their enemies, the Canaanites lived.

This one brother's enslavement took a turn for the good, but then resulted in all of his

family and their descendants being in slavery in Egypt for 400 years.

Just 13 months ago, God rescued him out of Egyptian slavery through the hand of

Moses and his older brother Aaron. Moses just spent 40 days on Mount Sinai for the second time,

with God passing down laws for him to give to these 12 tribes of people who are the descendants of those 12 brothers we met almost five centuries ago.

The last time we saw Moses he was on Mount Sinai with God, getting instructions about the covenant God was entering into with these 12 tribes. Today, God and Moses are talking again, but this time they're meeting in the Tabernacle, which is in the midst of their encampment in the wilderness of Sinai, not far from the mountain.

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