Numbers 11:22, commentary and pictures

The setting is the wilderness after deliverance from Egyptian bondage, where God was proving Israel after promising to be their God and take them as His peculiar treasure. It follows the direction to gather seventy men of dignity, sound judgment and experience to stand with Moses at the tabernacle and share the burden of the people through the Spirit put upon them. It also follows the command for the people to sanctify themselves because God would give them flesh for a whole month.

Moses asks whether killing all the flocks and herds or gathering all the fish of the sea would suffice to supply flesh for the vast camp. He has in view the six hundred thousand footmen among whom he stands, to be supplied for a whole month. His questions reveal distrust of God's power and ability to fulfill His promise and His word. He is at once reproved and reminded that the Lord's hand is not shortened and has not diminished, and that he will now see whether God's word comes to pass. For the One who divided the Red Sea and gave bread from heaven and water from the rock could also provide meat.

On the people's side the verse exposes dissatisfaction with manna from heaven, angels' food that would have been a blessing and preserved their health. God had not prohibited meat but had withheld it in great measure and given the healthy food He designed for them to eat freely, with bread rained from heaven and purest water from the flinty rock and the covenant to put no disease upon them if they obeyed. Yet they murmured against Moses and against God, despised the Lord among them, longed and mourned for flesh meat, and wished themselves back in Egypt by the flesh pots. They would at times prefer slavery and even death rather than be deprived of meat.

God told the people they would have flesh not for one day nor two nor five nor ten nor twenty days but for a whole month until it came out at their nostrils and became loathsome to them for despising Him and weeping that it had been well with them in Egypt. In anger He granted their lustful desire and rained flesh and quails upon that vast multitude in abundance until they were filled. While the meat was still in their mouths and between their teeth, wrath and plague came upon them without a miracle to preserve their life. Great numbers died in the act of eating the meat they lusted for, with thousands destroyed, the fattest slain and the chosen men smitten down. This came because they sinned still and did not believe for His wondrous works, and their craving as transgression reaped its own result.

The same chapter records another judgment in which fire consumed some of the complaining people, with the most guilty struck by lightning from the cloud, and the place was named Taberah, meaning a burning. Appetite and craving for food became the means by which Israel was overcome, so that nearly all who left Egypt died in the wilderness. The verse teaches God's displeasure when appetite controls people and calls for temperance in eating and drinking. It shows Israel's failure to trust the Lord to give the food best for health, and the lesson is that becoming health reformers gives clearer minds to discern what affects the salvation of the soul.