Understanding Incident of Gathering Sticks on Sabbath

 The unembellished five-verse passage in Numbers 15 outlining what happened prior to God’s pronouncement of capital punishment for a man who had gathered sticks on the sabbath, has prompted believers and scoffers alike to pose provoking questions such as the following:

•      whether the sabbath law should be stringently enforced every seventh day

•      whether God was overly unfair in imposing the most extreme punishment on the man

•      whether this apparently out-of-place narration ought even to have been incorporated into scripture.

 

First of all, the incident described in Numbers 15:32-36 cannot be read out of context.  It is important to recognise at the very outset that this passage has been deliberately placed by the author in Numbers 15 because of the focus on, among other things, the different adjudication processes to be applied when “a person sins unintentionally … before the Lord” (Numbers 15:27-28) as opposed to when “the person does anything presumptuously … that brings reproach on the Lord” (Numbers 15:30).  Since II Timothy 3:16 confirms that “all scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for … instruction in righteousness”, the objective of the author (whom II Peter 1:21 asserts as having been “moved by the Holy Spirit”) must be for Numbers 15:32-36 to serve as an illustrative example of the presumptuous sin explicitly warned by Moses in the immediately preceding verses of Numbers 15:30-31 which declare that “the person who does anything presumptuously … that brings reproach on the Lord shall be cut off from among his people because he has despised the word of the Lord and has broken His commandment ...”

 

Secondly, the following points have to be taken into consideration in order to understand the gathering-sticks-on-sabbath incident in its proper context:

(a)   We are told in Numbers 15:32 that “… they found a man gathering sticks on the sabbath” and this sentence is promptly followed by the phrase “those who found him gathering sticks …” in Numbers 15:33.  That the presence of witnesses is mentioned twice in quick succession suggests that the man’s gathering of sticks is an act out in the open for others to see — despite the observation in Numbers 15:32 that on this occasion “the children of Israel were in the wilderness”.  These two verses offer the first whiff of a hint that there is more than meets the eye here.

(b)  Of importance too in Numbers 15:33 is the fact that the man was “brought to Moses and Aaron, and to all the congregation”.  We have been informed earlier in Exodus 18:25-26 that Moses had already appointed “rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties and rulers of tens so that they judged the people at all times”; after this judicial system had been established, only “the hard cases they brought to Moses but they judged every small case themselves.”  Obviously, what the man did in the open was viewed on the ground as significant enough for his case to bypass the hierarchy of judges and referred directly to Moses himself.

(c)   As a human, Moses would naturally not be able to read the man’s mind and discern whether his overt act of gathering sticks on the sabbath was in open defiance of God.  As a result, Numbers 15:34 merely states that “they put the man under guard …” not as a form of punishment but so as to wait for divine guidance on “… what should be done to him”.  In other words, Moses was not in a position to pass sentence for this case even though he was conversant with God’s decrees (after having, as noted in Deuteronomy 31:24, “completed writing the words of this law in a book”) and would by then have gained much experience in dealing with legal matters (ever since the first record in Exodus 18:13 that “Moses sat to judge the people”); the inference to be drawn is that this is not a straightforward case of violating the sabbath law.

(d)   On the other hand, God has said that “I know the things that come into [a man’s] mind” (Ezekiel 11:5).  Psalm 7:9 adds that “the righteous God tests the hearts and minds” of His created beings and we can thence deduce from the Lord’s capital-punishment decision that this man had indeed acted in open defiance for others to see (and perhaps even to emulate if they happened to be of the same ilk).

(e)   Since others had already witnessed the man’s presumptuous sin, the punishment could not be carried out in private and God instructed in Numbers 15:35 that “all the congregation shall stone him with stones”.  That God furthermore required the man to be brought outside the camp also draws our attention back to Numbers 15:31 which stipulates that such a “… person shall be completely cut off.”

 

Thirdly, it transpires that the man’s sin of presumption is not an isolated incident in the book of Numbers.  This particular passage has to be read in conjunction with the following instances of defiance intentionally included by the author in the chapters before and after Numbers 15:

(1)   in Numbers 11:1, God sent fire to consume “… the people [who] complained and displeased the Lord”

(2)   in Numbers 11:32-33, God supplied quail to the Hebrews who grumbled about having only manna for food “but while the meat was still between their teeth … the wrath of the Lord was aroused against the people and the Lord struck them with a very great plague”

(3)   in Numbers 14:37, the 10 spies (out of the 12 whom Moses despatched to scout out the Promised Land) “who brought the evil report about the land died by the plague before the Lord”

(4)   in Numbers 16:31-33, the earth opened up miraculously in front of the assembly just to swallow up Korah and all those who supported his act of rebellion.

 

The placement of the gathering-sticks-on-sabbath incident among these successive accounts of defiance lends further support to the supposition that the man’s overt act ought not to be viewed as innocuous.  By the way, Paul’s conclusion after his inspired review in I Corinthians 10:5-11 of such recalcitrance episodes in the Pentateuch is that “all these things [that] happened to them … became our examples” for negative what-not-to-follow lessons culled from the period when the Hebrews were learning how to depend on the Lord while being led by Moses to Canaan (after having left Egypt where they did not seem to know much about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob during their period of slavery as chronicled in Exodus 1-2).

 

The remaining question for us to consider is whether the sabbath law is to be strictly complied with at all costs.  To do so, we have to return to basics and ask what is God’s purpose for issuing the fifth commandment.  Having created Adam and Eve, He knows what is best for all mankind.  He is therefore fully cognisant of the necessity for His created beings to rest after specified periods of work even though the Hebrews at the time lacked the medical knowledge (that is nowadays available) to appreciate its physiological significance.  Hence, He chose to introduce the need-for-rest prescription as an imperative for humans to set apart the sabbath as holy and insert this directive among the ten commandments (right at the interface between the commandments directing how the created are to revere their Creator and the commandments governing how humans are to behave among themselves).  The emphasis clearly spelt out in Exodus 20:9-10 is that “six days you shall labour and do all your work but the seventh day … you shall do no work” ―  not only to be applied to the human race but also to be extended to the domesticated cattle.  In particular, Exodus 20:11 reminds us that that the Creator “rested the seventh day” after six days of creation work and so we, having been created in the image of God, likewise have to rest after every six-day period of labour.

 

This is why Jesus took the time and effort during His earthly ministry to explain that the so-called sabbath law was actually instituted for our benefit and not to be rigidly adhered to (without regard for any exceptional circumstances that may on occasion take precedence over the general prescription for rest); simply put, “the sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27).  Jesus’s teaching on the original purpose of the fifth commandment would not really have attracted wide-spread attention had He not additionally performed activities prohibited by the religious authorities on the sabbath like healing men who were handicapped.  As expected, Jesus’s sabbath healings (to expose how the very notion of sabbath had been misinterpreted and misapplied over the intervening centuries) were so shocking that many thereafter heard about not just what He did by way of demonstration but also what He taught by way of correction.  Incidentally, there are no indications in all four gospels of any attempt to arrest Jesus (let alone sentence Him to death) merely on the charge of having violated the sabbath law.  (NB: the chief priests had instead to resort to the trumped-up charge of blasphemy in order to press ahead with their concerted plot to commit the Lamb to death.)