Faces of Our Faith: Daughters of Zelophehad | Numbers 27:1-11 | 6.21.26

Near the end of the book of Numbers.

Numbers is unique.

It doesn't get a lot of attention, but it's in between Exodus, when the Hebrew folks are freed from slavery.

And then also in Exodus, Moses receives the law from God at Mount Sinai.

And in Numbers, this is sort of the in-between period while they're in the wilderness.

The people complain and mount rebellions against Moses.

And God offers both judgment and mercy as their actions lead to the consequences of prolonged time in the desert.

They're in the desert for 40 years.

But God remains faithful to God's promise.

To see these people into the promised land.

The generation that left Egypt would not see the promised land, God said, but their children would enter it.

And so right before our reading today, our a new census has been taken of all the Hebrew people.

By the way, numbers gets its name, in case you were curious, from that census.

There's one at the beginning of the book, and then this one right before our reading today.

And these census are called the numbering of the people.

So that's where we get numbers from the census being taken.

And so after this new census is taken, the Lord spoke to Moses about a fair apportionment of the inheritance.

That's the inciting incident here.

The people have been have been faithless and have even begged and mounted rebellions in order to go back to Egypt.

But God is going to bring the next generation into the promised land, and they've taken a census to sort out how to do that fairly.

But before we read what happens next, let's pray and ask God to bless our time in the scriptures this morning.

Can you pray with me?

Guide us, O God, by your word and spirit, that in your light we may see truth.

In your truth we may find wisdom.

And in your will we would discover your peace through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Now let's listen together for God's word to us from the book of Numbers, chapter 27, verses 1 through 11.

Numbers 27:1–11

Then the daughters of Salafad came forward.

Solophat was son of Hepher, son of Gilead, son of Machir, son of Manasseh, of the clans of Manasseh, son of Joseph, and the names of his daughters were Malah, Noah, Hogla, Milka, and Tirtsah.

They stood before Moses, Eliezer the priest, the leaders, and all the congregation, at the entrance of the tent of meeting, saying, Our father died in the wilderness.

And he was not among the congregation of those who rebelled, who gathered themselves together against the Lord in the congregation of Korah, but he died for his own sin, and he had no sons.

Why should the name of our father be taken away from his plan because he had no son?

Give us a possession among our father's brothers.

Moses brought their case for the Lord, and the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, The daughters of Zalophahad are right in what they are saying.

You shall indeed let them possess an inheritance among their father's brothers, and pass the inheritance of their father on to them.

And you shall also speak to the Israelites, saying, If a man dies and has no son, then you shall pass his inheritance on to his daughter.

If he has no daughter, then you shall give his inheritance to his brothers.

And if he has no brothers, you shall give his inheritance to his father's brothers, and if his father has no brothers, then you shall give his inheritance to the nearest kinsman of his clan, and he shall possess it, and it shall be for the Israelites a statute and an ordinance, as the Lord commanded Moses.

This is God's word for God's people.

Thanks be to God.

The teacher's name is lost to us now, which seems right somehow, given what this particular teacher was trying to do, which was to make a six-year-old girl disappear a little bit.

Not unkindly, probably.

He probably believed he was protecting this little girl from something, from a life of struggle, from knowing things that she didn't need to know, from putting her energies towards things that would just never come to fruition in her lifetime.

Why should she suffer that way?

I'm sure he thought that he was saving her some trouble by refusing to teach her long division.

He was only being practical.

What he could not have known, however, standing in that schoolroom with his chalk and his certainties, was that he was handing Daniel Anthony a gift.

A gift he never meant to give, a glimpse of the world as it actually divides itself, between the people who think certain kinds of people should be restricted in their freedoms, and those who believed in the divine belovedness of every sort of person, no matter her age, her gender.

You see, Daniel Anthony was a follower of Jesus, of the Quaker variety, which is to say he believed with the kind of stubbornness that looks like simplicity from the outside, that there is that of God in everyone.

And everyone, in his theology, apparently included his daughter's multiplication tables.

So he did not argue with the teacher.

He did something more dangerous than arguing.

He just walked his daughter out of that door and built her another school.

Right there in their house.

He founded a school with a woman to teach his daughter the long division that the world had decided she didn't need.

It's such a small thing when you put it next to the marches and the arrests and the speeches that would come some 50 and 60 years later.

A man moving a desk, a new tutor arriving with her books, a girl presumably not even fully understanding yet what had just been refused her, and then what had been given back by her father.

But this, I think, is how grace tends to arrive in the world, not as thunder, but as a father who cannot let an insult to his child's identity pass unanswered, and who has, perhaps without knowing it, just taught her the only lesson that mattered more than the long division.

That when the world tells you no, you do not have to believe them.

Susan B.

Anthony grew up under the love of a kind of father whose faith in God led also to a faith in her and in all people.

That there are some sorts of people who don't need long division, or who shouldn't be able to run businesses or have credit, or least of all vote and have a say in their governance.

So when her family's fortunes were up-ended in the panic of 1837, and they lost most of their possessions, Susan began working as a teacher in her teenage years to help support the household.

And it was in those teaching years that she got her first real taste of the arithmetic of inequality, discovering that she earned a fraction of what her male colleagues did for the same work and for the same hours, and the same chalk dust on her hands and the same snotty noses.

That discovery did not stay confined to the classroom.

She told people about it.

It changed something in her.

The Anthony farm had long been a gathering place for abolitionists, her family's Christian conviction making room at their tables for the likes of Frederick Douglass.

And Susan carried that same conviction into the temperance movement, only to be told again that she wasn't allowed to speak at their meetings because she was a woman.

It was a small humiliation that opened up a large truth.

That her cause was not really about whiskey or wages or even slavery alone, but about whether half of the human race would be permitted a voice in the world that they were required to live in.

So she went looking for that voice.

And building on the work of her spiritual ancestor Lucretia Mott and partnering with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she eventually made her way to a ballot box in Rochester, New York in 1872, where she did the one thing the law said a woman could not do.

She voted.

She put a ballot in that box.

And when they came to arrest her for it, she did not flinch.

She didn't apologize.

She did not pay the fine.

She did not pretend it had been some misunderstanding.

She told the court, in words that still ring like struck iron, it was we the people, she said, not we, the white male citizens, who formed this union in the first place.

See, the long division had come full circle.

She had only ever asked to be counted.

And in her asking, eventually, though she would not live to see it, her work and her faith and her witness would serve the cause of liberation for far more people than just Quaker girls from New England.

In the 27th chapter of the Book of Numbers, there's a dispute over land ownership, and the daughters of a man named Zalopahad stood before Moses, Elieazar the priest, the chiefs, and the entire community at the entrance of the tent of meeting, and said, Our father died, and yet he had no sons.

Why should his name be taken away from us because he didn't have a son?

Give us property among his brothers.

I imagine that Zalopahad must have been a father of the same fierce love and encouragement as Daniel Anthony was, a girl dad par excellence.

Because his daughters also knew what the law said.

They knew what was legal and what was illegal.

But they also knew what was right.

And they knew that the law, even the law given to Moses by God, was not more sacrosanct than the human dignity within them.

Mala, Noah, Hogla, Milka, and Tirtsa.

Not a lot of Tirtsah's running around, but we should have a few more.

It's a great name.

You see, according to the Mosaic laws of property ownership, land was passed only to male heirs, and these young unmarried women were about to be homeless, without the ability to make a living.

Outside of a society with no way to grow food.

Their father's possessions and land would be folded into other relatives' families, leaving his daughters with nothing.

So bravely and boldly they came to Moses, the hearer and recorder of the law of God, and they made their case.

This law needed to be reworked.

It may have worked at some point, but it didn't work now for them.

It didn't take them into account.

Scholars highlight that this narrative demonstrates how early biblical law was adaptable.

It showed a community's capacity to adjust its rules when faced with systemic blind spots.

We don't often talk about the law of God in ways like that.

That God is accommodating of people who don't currently fit in the systems and structures.

By the leading of the Lord, the law of Moses is changed, reinterpreted, and lived faithfully under new and different circumstances.

Isn't that what we are called to do?

Malah, Noah, Hogla, Milka, and Tirsa.

They couldn't, they couldn't have had Jesus in particular in mind when they walked to that tent of meeting, but they had a Father's name and a hunger to be counted among the living.

And I believe their courage was already living inside of the story of God's love and grace that has been unfolding in creation.

I believe that they've been living already inside a story that wouldn't be fully enfleshed for another thousand years or so.

A story that says, the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.

And the stone that the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone.

And that the law is made for the people, not the people for the law.

But here's the thing about Jesus: Jesus kept doing what those five sisters did.

He touched the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years and called her daughter.

He stopped a stoning with a sentence, as he wrote in the dirt.

He empowered a Samaritan woman to become the first evangelist in John's gospel, and others to become the first witnesses to the resurrection.

Over and over, Jesus walked up to the edges of the law and asked the same question.

Zalafahad's daughters asked, Does this still serve life?

Does this still serve love?

And over and over again he answered, Love is the fulfillment of the law, not its enemy.

That is the inheritance, as people of faith we have been given.

Not lands, not a namesake to be carried forward, but a pattern.

A pattern of standing at the entrance to the tent and asking for dignity and voice and belonging.

And that resurrection is God's final answer to every system that continues to say, No, not you.

Not you, not yet.

An empty tomb, a stone rolled away, a law rewritten, not on tablets this time, but on the human heart.

So, friends, hear this.

You do not need my or anyone's permission to ask.

You do not need to be loud or important or first in line.

You only need to be brave enough to walk up to whatever tent of meeting stands in front of you, whether they be this church building, whether they be city council chambers, kitchen tables, courtrooms, and say, We are here and we will not disappear quietly.

This is the freedom that Christ died and rose to give us.

Not comfort, but courage, and not certainty, but a calling, a vocation to live out so that we can go and do likewise.

Go and ask boldly.

Go and with the Spirit of God build the world that the resurrection has promised.

Amen.