148 Increased Repertoire (Num 31)

Since starting to fish I have learnt so much.
I CAN walk for longer than 20 minutes.
I CAN carry more than 20kg on my back.
I CAN talk to people I have never met and fit in ok.
I CAN tie things on the back of a trailer and they won't fall off.
My knots WILL hold.
I DO have better hand eye co-ordination than I thought.
Camping isn't so bad.
We do live in a beautiful place.
Oh, and I CAN catch fish.
Many fish.

Today I realised the most important lesson I have learned in all of this.
Through the journey of back casts going into trees, flies getting wrapped around the rodand myself, getting hooked up on snags and every dandelion head along the river bank, even that single one all by itself in a field on nothing else sticking up, I discovered an element of skill has appeared in my repertoire.
I suddenly have this ability to untangle my headphone lead when the mornings are so cold I can't feel my fingers.
It's a gift, I try not to talk about it much.
So I won't.

Numbers 31
Israel launches an attack on Midian.
12 000 soldiers PLUS Phinehas the son of Eleazar.
There is a point to him being added especially.
God is represented and at the forefront of battle.
Men being men I guess, they failed to remember old lessons in the face of a pretty girl.
Or thousands of pretty girls even.

v16 "Behold, these (the women), on Balaam's advice, caused the people of Israel to act treacherously against the LORD in the incident of Peor, and so the plague came among the congregation of the LORD."

They didn't get it. They didn't learn.
I'm not sure of the time frame, but it wasn't long.
And instead of wiping out the entire nation, they kept some trophies.
Inappropriate trophies at that.

The cleansing process interests me.
All metals pass through fire.
Anything that can't be burned passed through water.
In either case emerging clean. Pure.
When you don't know what something was used for, it is best to clean it before using it. Eliminate the risk of infection.
Physical or spiritual.
God can put us through stuff that seems hard and sometimes it hurts.
What comes out on the other side though is precious, fine, usable and pleasing in God's eyes.

The questions about the numbers of animals used in sacrificing are sort of answered in this passage.
In all over 800 000 animals are taken as bounty.
800 000.
That's a lot of extra poop to avoid while walking.
My understanding would be that if the people didn't have the means to look after this quantity of livestock, they wouldn't take them.
If the sheer scale of the size of the new herd was unimaginable or impractical, then the animals would have been slaghtered or left alone.
My suspicion is that this number of animals was a drop in the ocean compared to what the Israelites had and were used to looking after.
We're talking about a nation of herdsmen.
They probably didn't even notice the difference.
Except for the piles of poop.
I guess these were a people used to looking where they walked.