Lost Souls

So the Lord’s anger burned against Israel, and He made them wander in the wilderness for forty years, until the entire generation of those who had done evil in the sight of the Lord came to an end.  Numbers 32:13 NASB

Wander – Shake, rattle, and roll.  Ah, but not a dance.  The Hebrew nûa’ means “to shake, reel, stagger, wander, move.”^[1]  It describes the entire assembly of Israel’s experience during the forty years in the wilderness.  We often imagine the wilderness experience as if it were an extended camping vacation.  Food and water supplied.  Clothing doesn’t wear out.  A celestial guide.  What could be more exhilarating?  Yes, of course, it is punishment, and yes, of course, a lot of people died, but we had tents and good weather and company.  All we really needed was marshmallows and chocolate.

No, I’m afraid not.  nûa’  suggests a continuous state of frustrated misdirection, angst, tedium, and pointlessness.  Back and forth.  Over the same ground.  “Weren’t we here before?”  Day after day, year after year, just waiting it out until YHVH relents and all the while day to day survival.  Counting how many died yesterday.  How many today.  Not a camping picnic.  Much more like an open-air prison.  Lost in the middle of nowhere, going nowhere.

“Primary idea is of a repetitive, to and fro movement. These movements can be on a relatively small scale expressed by ideas such as shaking, reeling, or swaying. Or they can be on a geographic scale calling for meanings such as ‘to wander about.’”^[2]

Focus on “repetitive.”  No real progress.  No sustained direction.  Eventually, no hope.  Put yourself in the place of those who actually survived this generation.  You watched all your parents, grandparents, older relatives grow old and die.  Their clothes still looked good, but the bodies wasted away.  The only real measure of time passed was the number of graves left in the sand.

I wonder if this isn’t a metaphor for us.  Forty years of what?  Can you look back and see direction, progress, purpose?  Or does it seem as if you’ve been wandering?  As if nûa’ is applicable—that sense of going over the same old ground again and again.  Moses Luzzatto wrote that whatever issues we don’t settle here will be waiting for us on the other side.  Heaven isn’t a hard drive erase.  It’s an endless time to deal with what you postponed.  But right now, you and I are in the wilderness, a place where repetition can become the opportunity to re-examine your effort at moving out of the routine.  God will bring about the end of all this wandering—some day.  But right now, when tomorrow looks as if it will be same as today, you can change the outcome.  Israel did get to the Promised Land.  They just had to change the paradigm first.

Topical Index: nûa’, wandering, repetition, Numbers 32:13

^[1] Bowling, A. (1999). 1328 נוַּע. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 564). Moody Press.

^[2] Ibid.