Numbers 12 Footnotes

12:1-16 Aaron and Miriam were apparently challenging Moses’s position as the primary recipient of revelation from God. Critical commentators have assigned this narrative to the Yahwist-Elohist source, as they do most narrative sections of the book of Numbers, and claim it was inserted into its present context by the postexilic (after 538 BC) “Priestly” compilers of the Pentateuch. These sources are simply hypothetical constructs based upon the assumption that the Pentateuch is a late composition, nearly a thousand years after Moses.

12:1 The supposed occasion for the complaint of Miriam was Moses’s marriage to a Cushite woman, though the real reason was his positional authority as God’s primary spokesman. Explanations for the Cushite identity include: (1) the woman was Moses’s second wife, of Cushite origin (Nubian, i.e., modern Ethiopian or Sudanese), whom Moses perhaps had married while Zipporah was in Midian with her father Jethro; (2) Zipporah had died, and Moses had recently remarried; or (3) Zipporah and the Cushite woman are one and the same, Cush being another name for the region she had come from.

12:9-13 Miriam’s disease, described as a condition that turned her skin milky white like a dead baby’s, suggests a variety of skin disorders ranging from skin cancer or psoriasis to Hansen’s disease (the modern designation of leprosy). Any of these would render her unclean according to Levitical law (Lv 13–14). Both Aaron and Moses express their love and concern for their sister in their pleas on her behalf. Aaron, who has followed Miriam in rebellion, appeals rightly to Moses to plead the case of his sister to the Lord, and Moses responds.