Numbers 7 Bible study: Each prince on his day

The chapter opens "On the day that Moses had finished setting up the tabernacle, and had anointed it and sanctified it with all its furniture, and the altar with all its vessels" (7:1). Exodus gives that day's date: "In the first month in the second year, on the first day of the month, the tabernacle was raised up" (Exodus 40:17). Numbers itself opened a month later, "on the first day of the second month" (Numbers 1:1). So Numbers 7 turns back a month, to the day the tabernacle was set up, and Numbers 9 also goes back before Numbers 1: it is dated "in the first month of the second year" (Numbers 9:1). The text doesn't say why these chapters are placed where they are.

Numbers 7:89→leads toHebrews 1:1-2

When Moses went into the Tent of Meeting, "he heard his voice speaking to him from above the mercy seat that was on the ark of the Testimony, from between the two cherubim" (7:89), as the LORD had promised: "There I will meet with you, and I will tell you from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim" (Exodus 25:22). Hebrews names the same place, the "cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy seat" (Hebrews 9:5). And it opens: "God, having in the past spoken to the fathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, has at the end of these days spoken to us by his Son" (Hebrews 1:1-2). Hebrews doesn't mention Numbers 7, so setting its words beside this chapter is a reading: some hear in Hebrews 1:1-2 the God who spoke to Moses from above the mercy seat now speaking by his Son; others read Hebrews 1 on its own, as about the prophets and the Son, without reference to this verse.

חֲנֻכָּהchanukkahsay kha-noo-KAH

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "dedication, consecration". Strong's: "initiation, i.e. consecration", from the verb chanak, which Brown-Driver-Briggs gives as "train up, dedicate" ("Train up a child in the way he should go", Proverbs 22:6). This chapter has its first four uses in the Hebrew Bible, each time in the phrase chanukkat hammizbeach, which the WEB gives as "the dedication of the altar" (7:10, 7:11) and "the dedication offering of the altar" (7:84, 7:88). It comes eight times in all. At Solomon's temple the same two Hebrew words come back: "they kept the dedication of the altar seven days" (2 Chronicles 7:9). Brown-Driver-Briggs adds that later Hebrew uses the word for the "Feast of Dedication". John's Gospel, written in Greek, sets one of Jesus' visits to the temple at "the Feast of the Dedication at Jerusalem" (John 10:22-23); John doesn't say what that feast marked, and nothing in the Bible ties it to the altar of Numbers 7.