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When we read this passage from Numbers 11, I’m quite sure many of us sigh heavily thinking, “Oh great, another story about God’s people acting spoiled and petty and then God quite narcissistically overreacting and angrily smiting and killing them with some sort of plaque.” In Numbers 11 alone we have God sending the dreaded fire on the outskirts of the camp making the people anxious and what amounts to severe food poisoning from eating quail that had spoiled because the amount of quail that God provided was so ridiculously huge, to the point of being offensive huge, that they couldn’t properly store it. Of course, it probably would have helped if their way of eating small fowl back then actually involved cooking it. The ancient historian Herodotus says they ate it raw with lots of salt. Don't everyone gag at once.
Well, let’s not simply dismiss this story and others like it as if the Old Testament were a movie entitled “Legends of a Petty God”. To do so would be to miss the invaluable lesson it contains with respect to us and God. In this passage, there is a hidden message with respect to how we humans tend to go about seeking happiness. Rather than approaching life with gratitude, with being thankful to God in all circumstances, we start looking for gods other than God to give us stuff we think we make us happy and it backfires on us.
Yet we have to admit here that something just isn’t quite right in Numbers 11 in that it is riddled with excessive behaviours that don’t add up. If I were to put myself in the place of the Israelites, I would be missing meat too; carnivore that I am. But I don’t think I would be standing in my doorway weeping loudly and bitterly about it as if someone had died. And then there’s Moses and his “it’s all about me” reaction to seeing and especially hearing this multitude of 600,000+ people wailing for a little “two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, tomatoes on a sesame seed bun”. And the big question, why is the LORD so mad that he would literally bury his people in quail and give them a lethal dose of food poisoning? With all these excesses in behaviour it seems there is more going on here than the Israelites simply complaining about the food. It seems like something got lost in translation.
So, maybe a different translation might be in order. Take note: this will probably be the one and only time I will say the King James Version nailed it. It reads: “And the mixt multitude that was among them fell a lusting: and the children of Israel also wept again, and said, ‘Who shall give us flesh to eat? We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic: But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes’.” Well, let me do a little verse by verse for a moment here and we’ll come to see that the Israelites are actually longing to worship and serve another god than the one who delivered them from slavery in Egypt.
Let’s start with the mixt multitude who fell a lusting. The mixt multitude (or rabble as some translations have it) was a considerable number of non-Israelite people who left Egypt with them after having seen how the God of the Israelites had humiliated all the Egyptian gods by means of the Ten Plagues. They wanted to worship and serve the one true God. Well, it happens that the rabble gets a strong craving. They “fell a lusting” as the KJV puts it because lust had something to do with it. Almost all ancient religious festivals related to celebrating life and fertility and agriculture involved a drunken feast that turned into an orgy. If you remember, this was what was happening at the Golden Calf incident when the Israelites “rose up to play”. I am inclined to think here in Numbers 11 that it was festival time for one of the fertility gods back in Egypt and the rabble’s craving was indeed that they “fell a lusting” because it was time to rise up and play.
Second, the Hebrew text does not say, “Oh that we had meat to eat.” It quite literally reads, “who will cause us to eat meat?” In the ancient world it was next to impossible to eat meat that was not in some way associated with the worship of a god. The Israelites being poor lower-class slaves in Egypt didn’t get to eat much meat. They mostly ate fish and root vegetables. They said “Oh how we remember the fish we ate freely in Egypt, the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic.” Meat and fish would have most likely come to the enslaved Israelites as charitable overflow from one of the Egyptian fertility festivals for which it was the responsibility of the god to provide the food abundantly and free of charge for all the people. So, these folks asking “who shall give us meat to eat” reflects that they are looking for, longing for a god, a god other than their God the God who brought them out of slavery in Egypt, another god who will give them meat to eat. By the other foods listed we can assume that other god to be associated with the Nile River and how it made agriculture possible in Egypt. Those things in mind, I can see Moses and the LORD beginning to be a bit upset here because things are building up to another Golden Calf episode. It wasn’t just a matter of complaining.
And, moreover, they threw the word “remember” in there. Remembering what your god had done for you and being thankful was an official component of worship way back when. In the book of Numbers this incident happened not long after their first celebration of the Passover in the Wilderness. So, they should have been satiated with remembering how the LORD their God brought them out of Egypt, out of slavery and poverty and was taking them to their own land to make them to be a great nation. But no! How soon they are “remembering” the free fish and the slaves' food the so-called gods of Egypt provided them. And now, they've got the nerve to say that their very lives are withering away. Then the clincher, like gods themselves they rather snobbishly proclaim that there has been nothing but "this manna" set before them.
I hope you can feel the gravity of the insult they are offering up to the LORD. They start by asking "who will give us meat to eat?" And then added to it a showy display of bitter weeping. Then they finished with "There's nothing but this manna." No wonder the LORD wants to bury them in quail.
So, what other god is it that they were longing for? Well, there's an ancient Egyptian god who fits the bill and coincidentally for us English speakers, his name was Hapi. He was a fertility god who made the Nile flood every year to make the soil rich in nutrients for growing crops. He was the god responsible for feeding Egypt not only with vegetables but with fish as well. Hapi was very important. He gave (pardon the pun) Hapi-ness to the people, abundant food and festival. But Yahweh, the LORD God of Israel, on the other hand, he was just a great warrior god, who when it came to food all he seemed able to give was manna and manna, miracle provision that it was, just wasn't Hapi enough. They wanted more than the LORD God's gracious provision for them, indeed miraculous provision for them. So the LORD gave them quail, so much so that it ran out their noses. They got sick, and some of them got sick to death.
I have a punny name for that longing the Israelites had – Hapi-ness. It’s the grass is always greener syndrome. Rather than being satisfied and thankful for where we are in life, we seem to believe that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Then when we get on the other side we find the grass is squishy because it’s a septic bed. There are things that our culture says that we need to be happy that always seem to involve the concepts of and cravings for that which is bigger and more than we have at present and it almost always seems to result in debt.
One thing that we so often do is let Hapi-ness distract us from what God is doing in our lives. We tend to think that when we are blessed with health and wealth and comfort then God has indeed blessed us. But, that’s not the lesson that God brought his people into the Wilderness to teach them. The blessing was God’s presence with his people and his miraculous providing just enough in the midst of their not getting the things that they believed would make them Hapi. They just needed to remember and be grateful.
So it is for us, God’s presence with us and God’s providing just enough of what we really need is where we need to be centered. But we have a particular challenge. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that for most to all of us, we have filled our lives with Hapi things, with bigger and more such that God seems so distant, something that we simply believe exists rather than someone we know.
In the next couple of weeks, our congregations in turn will be gathering around the table of the LORD celebrating World Communion Sunday. Part of the spiritual disciple we exercise with that simple ort of a meal is to come remembering how the Triune God of grace has acted savingly in each of our lives, proving himself faithful. We come remembering that Jesus, his very self, is the True Manna come down from heaven from the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit to be himself our abundance of enough. We come remembering how Jesus has come into our lives and changed us, healed us, transformed us and made us know that we are not alone. We come seeing and tasting that giving ourselves in unconditional, wasteful love in the practice of generosity, hospitality, forgiveness, patience, kindness, fidelity, and self-control is where happiness can be found if indeed it can in this broken, hurting world diseased with sin.
We should also come knowing that we too suffer from Hapi-ness. We are indeed inclined to want to find a power greater than ourselves who will give us “meat” to eat rather than manna because it is difficult for us to simply let Jesus, in his presence and his power be our enough. That Supper Jesus gave us is himself. He is enough, abundantly enough. Amen.
