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.

We're going to go ahead and get started, and when we get started, we're going to be starting

at the beginning of Numbers Chapter 16, and we'll have sort of minimal catch-up here because

so we mentioned last time, this is becoming a refrain, but the book of

numbers has a whole bunch of different kinds of things in it. It's not just numbers.

The, everything from census data to commandments about different things, to narrative stories of

things happening to Israel in the desert.

And it sort of shifts back and forth between these different genres

and different types of literature rapidly.

So chapter 15 that we talked about last time was a chapter that was made up of

mostly commandments. So it was that type.

The previous chapter before that was narrative. It was story. And now chapter 16 that we're

going to read is also story again. So I'm not going to go back through all the commandments

we talked about last time. People listening to this in the recording will

see it. But folks here who may not have been here last time will be okay because you don't

need to know those commandments to understand the story we're about to start. But narratively,

briefly, sort of where we are is Israel has sort of been informed that they're now going to spend the next

40 years in the desert so the rest of the book of numbers really

all of the narrative portions are going to be things that happened during that

40 years and there's nothing close to a continuous narrative of 40 years.

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