Zelophehad

So that's what they're waiting for.

A man named Zelophehad, we read, had five daughters.

It names the daughters, but we see in the story that Zelophehad was one of the nation of Israel that died in the wilderness.

So he didn't have a son as an heir.

The land was going to be parceled out to male beneficiaries and that's that's how the system was working and so these five ladies approach Moses and they say hey in this in this format what's going to happen to our family line my dad would have inherited but he's dead What is going to happen to the land that would come to us in the land of Israel? So this is firstly a question of inheritance, but even more so, it's a question of faith.

Now, if you've grown up in church, if you've grown up around the Bible, especially a Bible teaching church, many of the names that we have talked about in this series may be familiar to you.

But even if you've known about Anna and Jethro, even if you've known about Joseph of Arimathea, and even if you have heard of Onesiphorus, the one we covered last week, You probably know nothing about the daughters of Zelophehad.

And those are the ones we look at today, the five daughters of Zelophehad.

For some of you, this is the very first time you've even heard that name before.

But did you know that the daughters of Zelophehad are mentioned five times? times in the bible five times and four out of those five times they are mentioned by name that is not collectively under the moniker daughters of zelophehad but rather they are named by their given names and four out of those five places in scripture now that's striking when you consider that we don't know the name of noah's wife we don't know the name of lot's wife we only know her as lot's wife We don't know the name of Solomon's wife, the Shulamite bride in the Song of Solomon.

We don't know the name of the Canaanite woman who approached Jesus in Matthew 15.

We don't know the name of the woman who had an issue of blood who came to speak to Jesus in Luke chapter 8.

And the woman at the well of Samaria, anybody know her name? Nobody knows her name.

You rebel in righteousness.

Do you understand what I'm saying? The daughters of Zelophehad said that, "How can they say that only men should inherit the inheritance of their fathers?" The daughters of Zelophehad, they said, "Our father has no son.

He has only daughters.

And if our father dies, and since he has no son, we can have no inheritance.

There are some historical precedent, precedences, uh, in the Bible.

I think the, the one that I'm most interested in, that I do wanna talk about at some point, is in Numbers, uh, 27 and 36, the daughters of Zelophehad, which I'm sure all of you, uh, you know, uh, read that, you know, as night reading, especially if you need to be put to sleep.

Uh, you know, what happens to the daughters of Zelophehad, they're, they, they bring seemingly an unprecedented issue to Moses.

Moses, uh, then says, "Just a minute, I'll get back to you.

I'm not gonna talk about the details right now." But in other words, they bring up an issue that hadn't been thought of, or at least needed to be thought of, and Moses gets permission from God to, to amend something, kind of like a, you know, an extra law in our Constitution, like a, you know...

Uh, and then in Numbers 36, uh, later on when the daughters of Zelophehad are, are older, they have to even amend the law again, uh, because there's anoth- a new precedent.

So in other... precedent.

So there's legal precedences.

So that's one is just to ignore them.

I have never heard a sermon on the daughters of Zelophehad.

They're mentioned in five different chapters in the Old Testament.

That's one of my favorite

But I think it's also important to look at the fact that sometimes women are mentioned in contexts where you don't expect them.

And we still skip them.

I mentioned the daughters of Zelophehad is a great example of that.

Another example is when you have, we're going to assume Moses wrote Exodus.