Behold the Sneaky Ways of God
When parcelling off land to the tribes of Israel, God gave them a directive they forgot.
Toward the very beginning of His relationship with Abraham around 2000 BCE, God spoke of land, promising Abraham and his people Canaan.1 About 90 years later,2 God specified coordinates: “To your descendants I have given this land, From the river of Egypt as far as the great river, the river Euphrates.”3 About the same time, that is to say approximately 1897 BCE, God told Abraham the land was his for keeps. “The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you.”4 God repeated the promise to Abraham’s son Isaac and Isaac’s son Jacob.5
This was all sounding very good.
In 1406 BCE, God mentioned land again when he specified the dimensions and borders of the Promised Land to Joshua: “From the Negev wilderness in the south to the Lebanon mountains in the north, from the Euphrates River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west, including all the land of the Hittites.”6
Then along comes Ezekiel ben-Buzi, who related similar information during the 22-year-long Jewish exile in Babylon between 593 BCE and 571 BCE. Ezekiel’s words were preserved by a host of scribes and scholars in the book of Ezekiel, found in both the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament of the Christian Bible.
Surely wistfulness had crept into Ezekiel’s voice as he recalled God’s words. Certainly the laboring scribes felt remorse as they recorded those words, for the land Ezekiel declared God gave them had been taken from them, or rather they removed from it.
Yet Ezekiel spoke forcefully and with conviction, despite the state of Jewish exile: “Thus saith the Lord GOD; This shall be the border, whereby ye shall inherit the land according to the twelve tribes of Israel.”
And off God went again (through the medium of Ezekiel), reciting salient landmarks those tribes of Israel were sure to know. The northern border: “the way of Hethlon, as men go to Zedad.” The eastern border: measured from Hauran. The southern: “from Tamar even to the waters of strife in Kadesh.” The western: “the great sea from the border till a man come over against Hamath.”
God summed it all up thus, Ezekiel related: “So shall ye divide this land unto you according to the tribes of Israel.” But Ezekiel added God’s disclaimer in the very next verse:7
And it shall come to pass, that ye shall divide it by lot for an inheritance unto you, and to the strangers that sojourn among you, which shall beget children among you: and they shall be unto you as born in the country among the children of Israel; they shall have inheritance with you among the tribes of Israel.
It is to be understood that the Israelites were so focused on getting back to their land, that they forgot the last part.