Numbers 12

[Rob McNair]

Anyone else notice that only Miriam receives a punishment and not Aaron when they speak against Moses? Man you ladies are just getting the shaft! It's like the guys can do no wrong. One of the great apologetic points to the resurrection is that women are recorded as the first to see the empty tomb. Women had no rights and their testimony had no legal standing, so if ever there was a part of the Bible to change, you'd expect that some scribe would have done that. Anyway, sorry ladies...

[Amber Kalina]

It just probably deals with the times. People were a lot more sexist back then than they are now. Like, you wouldn't have apologized if you were sexist, would you?

[Abby Kalina]

you know i was about to make this conversation myself. but yeah why do you think God only punished mariam? was it because aaron was a priest?

[Rob McNair]

I think you are right Abby, Aaron was a priest and probably got special favor. On the flip side when the angel Gabriel visits Zacharias and tells him Elizabeth will have a child (John the Baptist) and Zacharias questions Gabriel, he is made mute. However, when Gabriel visits Mary and she questions, nothing happens to her. So it does go both ways eventually.

[Steven & Candace Dahl]

Yes, the women in the Bible times really had no rights. Good conversations. I probably would have been one of the whining Israelites. I know God rescued them from Egypt, but that was a long time to be in the wilderness. I think I would have been going to Moses and saying. "How about going here, or trying to settle here." Anything may have seemed better than camping out, getting all those laws to follow and then being told if you don't follow them, you have to suffer the wrath and consequences of an angry God if you don't measure up. Glad to be a child of God who has also heard the Gospel after the Law.

[Tracy Bieger]

It does seem a little like Miriam was sort of the instigator. But I'm sure this indicates how wrong it was in those times for a woman to question the authority of a man.

[Abby Kalina]

do you think it was God's will that women should have equal rights later on or was that just human caused?

[Rob McNair]

I think by the time Jesus rolls around he changes things up. Women play an important role in his life and ministry. He saves the women accused of adultery from being stoned, he talks openly with the Samaritan woman at the well, stories about Mary and Martha, a woman is the first one to witness the empty tomb, etc.

Romans 16:1 states, "I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae..." So even during Paul's time a woman had achieved a position of authority in the church.

[Abby Kalina]

cool. if Jesus changed the way women played roles in stuff, then why did it basicly go bad again. i mean in like midevil times women were like property to their husbands and they didn't really have that many rights.

[Amber Kalina]

Ya know what's sad? You know when Korah, Dathan, and Abiram do the wrong thing and rebel and try to start an uprising? Why did their families have to die, too? The wives, the children, the babies... Why did they have to die becuase of those men's folly? Everyone else was spared, why couldn't the wives and children step away from the men, too, and be spared?

[Abby Kalina]

i don't know. i was thinking the same thing. maybe they knew what there husbands were doing but they still chose to stand beside them... maybe they could have stepped away but chose not to.

[Amber Kalina]

But what about the children?? That still meant that they had no chance in the matter what so ever!