Today's reading: Joshua 21; Acts 9
What about Moses and his sons?
I'm not sure if this is something that other people think about or are bothered by, but I did some looking into it recently so I thought I'd share just in case.
But as we are going through all these allotments, the family of Moses is missing. And while there are plenty of families that don't receive specific inheritances, many of the major players do, so you would kind of think Moses would qualify for getting a specific inheritance allotted to his family like Caleb, Joshua, and Aaron did. And really, this goes beyond just the allotments of land to the roles in Israelite worship as well. Aaron and his sons have a perpetual role as priests, and the rest of the Levites are given specific roles, but why doesn't Moses' lineage have any specific role like Aaron's? What do his sons do?
The short (and maybe obvious) answer to this is that Moses' family would have been wrapped up in the inheritance and role of the Kohathites. Moses and Aaron's mother was a Gershonite and their father was a Kohathite, so they would have been considered part of the Kohathite line. So while Moses clearly had a role distinct from the rest of the Kohathite clan, that doesn't mean his children would have such a distinct role. Aaron and his sons are the only exception as they are pulled out from among the rest of the Kohathites and given a separate role and a separate inheritance.
According to some Jewish rabbinical sources, Moses asked the Lord to make one of his sons his successor as leader of Israel but the Lord told him that they hadn't dedicated themselves to the Torah so Joshua would be his successor instead. While this doesn't appear in Scripture, other rabbinical teaching points to Numbers 3 where the descendants of Moses and Aaron are listed, but then we are only given the names of Aaron's four sons as evidence that, spiritually speaking, Aaron's sons were assigned to Moses as well. So the Jewish tradition is that while Moses was faithful, his sons were not, so they had no special role, privilege, or inheritance in Israel other than what they received as members of the Kohathite clan.
While I can't speak for the accuracy of the Jewish tradition on the matter, it is clear that Moses' sons did not continue to have a role like their father's in Israel, and so would have fallen in with the rest of their clan members in their role and inheritance.
Maybe that was already obvious to everyone else, but for some reason it has bugged me enough that I needed to dig into it, so there's what I found in case anybody else has been curious about the same thing.
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