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 presumptuo