What Made the Tribe of Levi Special? – Numbers E1

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BibleProject Podcast

Christianity, Old Testament, Torah, Theology, New Testament, God, Demons, Tim Mackie, Bible Study, Angels, Bible, Jesus, Spiritual Beings, Jon Collins, Religion & Spirituality, Spirit, Satan

4.8 • 18.5K Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2022

⏱️ 59 minutes

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Summary

The scroll of Numbers can be difficult to make sense of without context, and there’s a reason for that. The scroll was never meant to be understood on its own. Numbers picks up where Leviticus leaves off and mirrors the scroll on the other side of Leviticus (Exodus). To fully understand all of these scrolls, we need to read them together. Join Tim and Jon as they dive into Numbers, trace the theme of the temple, and discuss the unique role of the tribe of Levi.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Scroll of Numbers.
0:07.3	Or as it's called in Hebrew through the wilderness.
0:10.4	We just got through the book of Leviticus, where Israel is camped at the foot of Mount Sinai for an entire year.
0:16.3	They're ready to pack up and go through the wilderness into the promised land.
0:20.3	Many of the stories and the places and the plots that we're going to find in the book of Numbers mirror the stories we found in the book of Exodus.
0:29.9	And that's because Israel has already gone through the wilderness when they left Egypt on their way to Mount Sinai.
0:37.2	In fact, what we find here is that the Torah is one large chiasm with the book of Leviticus right at the center.
0:46.4	Leviticus is at the heart and then the two scrolls on either side, Exodus numbers match each other.
0:52.1	There's a liberation from slavery in Exodus and then through the wilderness to Mount Sinai.
0:56.8	And then in Numbers we go and reverse. They leave Mount Sinai, go through the wilderness on the way to Moab.
1:03.6	And when they get to Moab, there is a great deliverance from a foreign king who wants to bring curse and death on them, who's like Pharaoh.
1:11.9	At the beginning of Numbers, we get an explanation of how Israel's camp is to be set up with the tribe of Levi standing between Yahweh and the Tabernacle and Israel.
1:23.6	And then God commissions the tribe of Levi to be the priests and assistants of the Tabernacle.
1:30.4	And he says, look, I have chosen the Levites from among Israel to serve as substitutes for all the firstborn sons of the people of Israel.
1:39.5	The selection of one tribe out of the many swapped out for the firstborn.
1:44.7	What that means is that this tribe is now the extra special tribe that's in the slot of the Passover Lamb.
1:51.1	Being the firstborn is about being uniquely responsible, an extra layer of responsibility and representation of the Father.
1:58.2	The Levites as a clan of our put into that place.
2:02.1	And so as we get into all these details of how Israel is organized and the role of the Levites, it's important to remember the entire biblical story.
2:11.2	How God called all humanity to live in proximity with him.
2:15.8	And so this is all mapping back onto the Garden of Eden out of the dust of the land. God forms one unique, priestly representative pair.
2:25.2	They get to be closer to the presence of Yahweh than anybody else.
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