Zelophehad’s audacious daughters cast a remarkable shadow as they stride to the Tent of Meeting to plead their case before Moses. Through pages of genealogy, land assignment, and guild-establishing, the book of Numbers has not been a text eager to name a woman’s name.
Yet one would probably be wrong to sense incipient feminism or even gender egalitarianism in this text. It is all about preserving the father’s name, one unfortunate enough not to have left sons and therefore vulnerable to erasure from Israel’s memory. That would be a fate at least as bad as sonlessness and death itself.
Scholars of Israelite law—Michael Fishbane great work, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, leaps easily to the mind—see in circumstances like those of Zelophehad’s daughters a legal pretext for the sort of deliberative declarations that appear in verses 8 through 11, an outpouring of casuistic law that seems odd as the words of YHWH himself but ordinary as the pondered result of a community’s consideration of a test case.
Regardless of its origin, this text creates a manner for the Israelite community to honor the name of its unfortunate deceased along those who died surrounded by sons. It is a procedural way to love one’s brother.
Yet there is a residual impact in the fact that Zelophehad’s daughters force the issue. This feminine cameo figures among the first of many where faithful and forceful women—the adjectives often cohere—break past the boundaries allotted to them and appear to force the hand of divine or human understanding. Though the guardians of tradition present at such an intrusion often resist them, the text usually does not.
There is more incipience here than the refinement of the laws of inheritance.
Not all the marginalized are poor. Not all piety is passive. Not all claims upon YHWH’s attention are spoken in testosteroned voice.
YHWH’s gaze—and that of his people—is only rarely to be circumscribed by convention. Zelophehad’s daughters are also named.
Canter Bridge 
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