Numbers 36 Footnotes

36:5-12 Some modern critics contend that the resultant law restricted the rights of women. In actuality it provided a balance between two areas of concern: the integrity of tribal territory and a woman’s right of marriage. Women could marry whom they pleased, and their property rights would be retained, as were the men’s, within the boundaries of the tribe so long as they married within the clans of the tribe. They could marry outside the tribe, but in that case they would forfeit their property rights. The conclusion upholds Zelophehad’s daughters as examples of faithfulness to the Lord’s instruction; when they married they “did what the Lord . . . commanded.”

36:13 The concluding verse of this book summarizes its content, and in particular, the last section in which the geographical setting is the plains of Moab on the east side of the Jordan River, opposite Jericho (26:3; 33:50; 35:1; see 22:1). Moses’s role as God’s appointed prophetic spokesman is reiterated in the use of the phrase “through Moses” (lit “which the LORD commanded by the hand of Moses to the children of Israel”). There, on the threshold of the promised land, the nation was positioned both geographically and spiritually—they had recently done as the Lord commanded—to claim their divine inheritance.