Tag Archives: Numbers

The Feeding of the 4000

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Mark 8:1-15 has the credibility-defying story of Jesus feeding 4000 people. The story is in fact one of numbers, all of which have symbolic significance. Numbers, bread and fish.

At first reading the account seems to be little more than a retelling of the earlier feeding of the 5000 in Mark 6:30-44. However its numerology is different and Mark has Jesus explicitly compare the two stories in verses 8-21. Both are intentional inclusions in his gospel, not an editorial oversight.

The events almost certainly didn’t happen in reality; significant numbers of people, 5000 and 4000 respectively, following an itinerant preacher around for – magic number alert! – three days would not have escaped the attention of the Romans. Nor would the men (Matthew 13:58 insists 4000 was the number of men) have been able leave their livelihoods for this length of time to follow Jesus around the distant countryside.

Then there’s the repetition of the bread and fish motif. In both stories the entire crowd fails to bring a single thing to eat. On both occasions, the disciples somehow, from nowhere at all, come up with a few loaves and some fish. Symbolic food for symbolic crowds.

Bread, while a staple food of the first century always has spiritual significance in the bible. From manna from heaven in Exodus 16:17 to the Body of Christ in Paul’s teaching. Fish likewise: Mark has it that several of the disciples were fishermen and makes Jesus declare they’re ‘fishers of men’ (Mark 1:17). John will later take bread and fish symbolism to extremes.

The bread in the feeding of 4000 is spiritual manna. Jesus is not feeding a real crowd with real bread. He is ‘feeding’ those who follow him, the early cult, with himself: ‘Jesus took bread… and said this is my body which is for you’ as Paul has him say in 1 Corinthians 11:23-24. So satisfying is this heavenly Bread that there is a great abundance left even after his followers have taken their fill.

There’s more: the numerology signifies that the crowd following Jesus in the story aren’t any old rag tag collection. They are specifically Gentile. Mark alludes to this when he mentions they have come ‘a long distance’ (8:3) and again when he has Jesus explain, in typically obtuse fashion, the meaning of the miracle (8-21):

Jesus asked (the disciples): “Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear? And don’t you remember? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?”

“Twelve,” they replied.

“And when I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?”

They answered, “Seven.”

He said to them, “Do you still not understand?”

Seven loaves with seven baskets left over, seven being the number of the Gentile nations. In the earlier feeding of the 5000 the twelve leftover baskets represent the twelve tribes of Israel.

And still the dumb old Jewish disciples don’t understand. The story is about how the early Jesus cult was open to anyone, Gentiles as well as Jews, who recognised and accepted Jesus as the Bread of Heaven, the Saviour. As Mark was aware, Paul had already expressed this universality:

…when we break the bread, aren’t we sharing in the body of Christ? And though we are many, we all eat from one loaf of bread, showing that we are one body. (1 Corinthians 10:18).

For his next miracle, the healing of a blind man in Mark 8:22-26, Jesus/the cult/Mark go on to hammer home the point still further.

God approves of slavery

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slavery

Over on his blog site, Biblical Musing, Don Camp is trying to justify why God appears to condone slavery. It’s not the first time Don has tried to defend the indefensible; he’s recently been arguing much the same thing on Debunking Christianity.

The fact the Old Testament appears to endorse the keeping of other human beings as slaves is a problem for Christians. It’s a problem compounded by the fact that Jesus in Luke 12.47-48 and the imposter-Paul, in Ephesians 6.5, both support the practice. How can it be that God approves, or at least raises no objection to it? Wouldn’t an omniscient, all-loving God have outlawed slavery, as he outlaws so much else, in one of his innumerable laws and commandments?

Instead, he provides instructions about how to keep and look after slaves; what to do, for example, when you flog one to within an inch of his life so that he later dies (Exodus 21.20-21) or when you deliberately blind your slave – she’s your property after all – or rape her (Exodus 21.26; Numbers 31.17-18).

Don’s answer is that, despite God involving himself in the minutiae of slave treatment, he knew it would be a waste of time telling his people slavery was wrong. Why? Because he took the trouble to tell them lying and stealing were wrong and yet they ignored him. So, hey, why should he bother telling them about slavery? They’d just ignore that too.

But the point is – disregarding the fact that not everyone steals and lies – ‘God’ did issue laws prohibiting stealing and lying (and eating shellfish, and wearing garments of mixed fabric). It seems it was important to him to tell his pet-tribe that these were wrong, even though he must have known many of their number, and many more subsequently, would ignore him.

What can we conclude from this? Only this: that God didn’t feel the same way about slavery as he did about lying and stealing, which is why he didn’t bother making even the same token effort to prohibit slavery.

Or, and much more likely: the tribes who wrote the laws didn’t think slavery was wrong. In fact, they thought it quite useful to have slaves. Given this utility, they were unlikely to have devised laws preventing their ownership. The enslaved themselves no doubt thought differently, but then they didn’t get to write the rules.

We don’t find a commandment prohibiting slavery in the bible because those who wrote it liked having slaves. For this reason too, we find all those inhumane instructions about keeping slaves and what should happen if you maim or kill them.

Of course God didn’t write these laws. People did. And they wrote them according to their understanding of what was moral, fair and legitimate within their own primitive milieu. Thus it was that slavery got a free pass.