Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast,

The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies, and it's an Orthodox

priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Okay, we're going to go ahead and get started. That voice you hear in the background is Lily Leonard, a parishioner here. And when we start here in just a moment,

we're going to be picking up in Numbers, Chapter 15, verse 1. For those of you in the distant future who are listening to

this on Ancient Faith Radio, only a week has passed since the last episode. But for those of

it's here, it has been some time due to a number of happenings. So we need to do a little bit of

recap, but not as much as you might think,

because the beginning of chapter 15 is another one of those places

where the book of numbers sort of radically shifts gears.

I mentioned it almost popping the clutch a lot of the time.

This is one of those places.

As we mentioned way back when we introduced the Book of Numbers,

the Book of Numbers is not just one genre of text.

It is not sort of narrative the way Genesis or at least the first half of Exodus were, but there are sections

that are narrative. It is not sort of rules and instructions and commandments for priests the way

the book of Leviticus was, but there are sections that give commandments like that. There's also, as we saw at the

beginning, and we'll see again at the end, census data, which is raw excitement. So there are sort

of all these different genres and different things all sort of brought together into the book

of numbers. All of those things together cover, as we mentioned,

about 40 years of Israel's history in the wilderness. And really, when we said that, that 40 years

actually started at the end of chapter 14. There's another segue that we just finished.

...