Full of the dizzying details of land allotments and legal code, the Pentateuch can land hard atop the Bible reader’s aspirations to ‘read the whole thing’. The legal and inheritance sections of the ‘five books of Moses’ rarely appear in the most thumbed pages of the Bibles on our shelves and bedstands.
One needs a lens for viewing this material, a point of view that emerges from the text and at the same time provides a perspective from which to consider its myriad details. Divine cohabitation with Israel is just such a clarifying motif:
You shall not defile the land in which you live, in which I also dwell; for I the LORD dwell among the Israelites.
So does the final verse of what we read as the 35th chapter of Numbers frame and seal the precepts that come before it. YHWH is establishing the parameters and bolstering the sinews of a nation among whom he has chosen to make his home. No reason is given for this odd selection. A number of them, the common ones, are ruled out: Israel does not invite YHWH’s company by its immensity, by its sanctity, or by a well-developed instinct for obedience. To the contrary, these virtues are notoriously absent.
Yet to establish his home among the sons of Israel is precisely what the Pentateuch claims that YHWH has done. A response is in order. Much of the desired reflex comes in the form of case law, a genre that appears less wearying and more life-giving if we view it as creating a means by which this cohabitation can prove fruitful rather than lethal for its participants.
The divine approach to human beings is almost always like that: uninvited, gracious, ominous, and fiercely demanding.
Canter Bridge 
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