The Lord Bless You (1 of 2)

In context

Numbers 5 gathers laws for keeping the camp clean, the camp “in the midst of which I dwell” (Numbers 5:3). Anyone with leprosy, a discharge, or uncleanness from a dead body was to be put outside it, and anyone who wronged another was to confess and pay back what he owed, plus a fifth (Numbers 5:1–8). The chapter also gives the law for a husband who suspected his wife of being unfaithful when there was no witness: she swore an oath before the Lord and drank “the water of bitterness,” and if she was innocent she would be “free” (Numbers 5:11–31).

Chapter 6 is the vow of a Nazirite, which a man or a woman could make, to be set apart to the Lord for a time: no wine or anything from the grapevine, no razor on the head, and no going near a dead body, not even a parent’s (Numbers 6:1–8). Samson was to be “a Nazirite to God from the womb” (Judges 13:5).

The reading ends with the blessing the Lord gave the priests to speak over Israel: “Yahweh bless you, and keep you” (Numbers 6:24–26). In 1979 a form of this blessing was found on two tiny silver scrolls in a tomb in Jerusalem, from around 600 BC, among the oldest pieces of Bible text known.