Today’s Scripture Reading (December 4, 2021): Numbers 10
Many years ago, I visited my wife’s parents when a phone call came into their
house. The person on the other end of the line was asking for a “Gary Hunt.”
The first person to be given the phone was my father-in-law. His proper name
was Lawrence Hunt, but he often went by Laurie Hunt and sometimes even Larry Hunt; Larry was the name his customers
most used to address him. But after speaking to the man on the phone, he decided that the call wasn’t for him. And so, the phone was passed on to me. My name is Garry, and I had married into the Hunt family, but
my name wasn’t Hunt. It only took me a few questions to know that the phone
call wasn’t for me but for my father-in-law. We spent the next few minutes passing
the phone back and forth to each other before we realized that it was quite
simply a wrong number. The person on the other end of the line was really
looking for Gary Hunt, and no one at my in-laws answered to that name.
We have a problem with Hobab. The biblical record
seems to be confused as to who Hobab was. Numbers 10:29 states that Hobab is the father-in-law of Moses. But in Exodus, we are told that Moses’s father-in-law was a man
named Jethro. “Now Moses was tending the flock
of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian (Exodus 3:1). And
scholars have jumped through hoops trying to harmonize the two passages.
The easiest solution to the problem of Hobab is to argue that
the two names refer to the same person. My father-in-law went by three names
during his life; Lawrence, Laurie, and Larry. But they were all my father-in-law.
So maybe Hobab was just another name for Jethro. The idea carries some weight;
after all, Hobab means “beloved,” something that might be a pet name for either
a father or a respected priest.
But others argue that Hobab was actually Moses’s
brother-in-law. The Hebrew word is, at best, imprecise and could refer to a
male relative by marriage, which fits the description of a brother-in-law. But
that would mean that Moses’s father-in-law would be Reuel, and we still have a
problem, just with a different name. Was Moses’s father-in-law Jethro or Reuel?
The reality is that we have too little information to make a
definitive assessment as to what the name of Moses’s Father-in-law might be.
But one thing we do know. Moses was wise enough to know that he needed help. He
needed Hobab on his side if he was to succeed.
The truth is that God often uses men on the outside of our
situation, like Hobab, to accomplish his mission. And we need to be willing to
invite them to walk with us on this journey through life. God used these
outsiders then, and he still does now.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Numbers 11
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