Emotion and sentiment are powerful things. They are the tools that are used against us so that we easily deceive ourselves. Humanity has been doing that since the very beginning. As a historian, I understand perhaps more than most how powerful being connected to the past can be. I love the study of our forebears, the people who have done amazing things in our past and made a difference in our world, especially Yeshua!
But, as believers in Messiah, we have to take to heart His own words and admit that deceivers will always be in the world. The hard part is, however, that we have to admit that people we love may have been the ones deceived. That’s what the prophet, Daniel, did in Daniel 9:4-19: he admitted that his own father, and the fathers of all of Israel now trapped in Babylon, had been subjected to and believed lies. It is a hard thing to consider.
Gideon also had to consider it. Gideon was instructed to go to his own father’s house and tear down his Asherah: that was a religious item of worship, equivalent to Ishtar/Easter and part of the pantheon of deities that included Mithras/Ba’al: December 25-type worship: the birth of a son of a trinity. Gideon was called by God to be a defender of Israel, but the first thing he had to do was to go in and knock over his Dad’s tree!
Today, good people are allowing the emotion of connection to cause them not to see truth. The one I had to address most recently was the notion that the ‘early church fathers’ in pre-Constantine days had already started worshipping Jesus on December 25. This is simply not true. Worse, it is a soft form of deceit. It is finding a singular historical fact and weaving a whole narrative around it by writing into the history what is not there.
Most recently, I saw a preacher, one whom I admire, I might add, because he does give some truth to the world, but I saw him all excited, and he presented as truth the notion that Israel’s instructions from God on how to assemble the camp around the Tabernacle caused them to assemble into the shape of a cross.
This falls on its face from simple logic alone, without even thinking about what actually might have been the configuration.
So, let’s walk through it.
First, nothing in the text itself indicates that it must be a cruciform shape. What the text says, in BaMidbar/Numbers 2 is there were four ‘sides’ to the camp, and that in each direction from the Tabernacle, three tribes would assemble and make camp. Each ‘camp’ of three tribes would make a ‘standard’, a flag with an emblem on it to identify that camp, and the Mishkan, the Tabernacle, would be in the center.
There is nothing at all in the text to describe the ‘shape’ that an ariel photo of all four camps would convey. The idea that the camp formed a ‘cross’ is written into the text by pure sentiment, where people think it is necessary, perhaps, to superimpose the Messiah into the text somehow [perhaps because they do not ‘see’ Him there in so many other ways?]
In order to ‘believe’ that notion, one must assume that the Roman-style execution device is a theological ‘key’, and that God pre-encoded that symbol into the text long before Rome existed. That is not entirely impossible for an all-knowing God. But, that is simply not what is in the Bible.
Yeshua was indeed executed with His body in a ‘cruciform’ fashion: He was hung vertically, His arms were extended away from His sides and nailed to a bar behind Him, and His feet were below Him nailed to wood. But, the ‘cross’ of the majority sentiment simply is not in the Bible itself, so why would God ‘encode’ it 2,000 years before Yeshua into the camp of Israel? What Yeshua was nailed to, according to the Greek texts, was a σταυρός (stauros) → an upright post / tree / stake. The word ‘cross’ is not in the original Bible, whether one believes that the Bible was first written in Aramaic/Hebrew or Greek! The Greek word for ‘cross’ is ‘tau‘: it is absent from the New Testament altogether.
Yeshua was attached to a ‘stauros’. Second-Temple era Roman executions in Israel were done on standing ‘posts’, or on trees, where the victim of execution, the ‘criminal’, carried a stauros, a singular beam, to his place of execution. Carrying a cross, as is depicted of Yeshua, would have been impossible, especially for Him, as His back had been torn open, shredded. The victim was laid down, his hands nailed to the stauros he carried, and then the stauros/beam was raised with the victim attached to it and fastend to another stauros or a tree. In Yeshua’s case, it was clearly a tree to which He was attached, because we have the Biblical record telling us so. Acts 5:30 and Acts 10:39 tell us that Yeshua ‘hung on the tree‘. In the Greek-sourced texts, 1 Peter 2:24 says so as well.
Yeshua’s being nailed to a ‘tree’ matches what is in the Old Testament. Paul references it when He speaks of the curse people are under when they are ‘under the Torah’, or being burdened by breaking the Torah of God and being punished for it: “Cursed is the man who hangs on the tree“. [Gal 3:13, Deut 21:22-23]
So, the importance of the icon of the ‘cross’ is weakened by studying the texts of scripture. The tree alternative does not detract at all from the fact that Yeshua was executed for us, or that He extended His arms to us in loving compassion when He died for us. But, it puts canopy above His head that is not there on dead wood: a canopy of olive branches, the very symbol of peace, and the source of the oil for ‘anointing’: Messiah means “anointed”; holy anointing oil was made from olives. Yeshua draped in the source of oil for the Messiah at the moment of His death has far much more ‘weight’ than a dead piece of wood! And, it gives strong imagery of His being the source of our Life! He is our “Tree of Life“, is He not?
So, let’s consider the camp of Israel: Israel’s camp was a mirror image of heaven. The Tabernacle itself was fashioned after Heaven, and it is the book of Hebrews that tells us that plainly: “See that you make it according to the pattern shown you on the Mount”, God told Moses, and Paul reminded the Jewish believers to whom He was writing.
Israel’s camp reflected the ‘order’ of Creation. They were assembled in four directions from the locus of the Holy of Holies. These are the directions of the ‘four winds’ of scripture, in which the four ‘banners’ would fly to identify those camps, and ‘indicate wind’. Wind in scripture is always symbolic of the Breath of God [ru’akh = breath, wind, spirit]. This is a picture, on Earth, of Israel assembling around God’s throne in heaven. God’s throneroom in Heaven is actually circular! The rainbow of Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4 is circular, around God’s throne. All the language in Revelation, Ezekiel, and also Isaiah 6 intimates circular, close-knit assembly. Nothing at all in any of that language even hints at cruciform assembly.
This configuration on earth is mirroring not only Heaven itself, but the “Mazzarot“, the ‘pictures’ of Israel in the sky! There is a circle of four constellations in the sky that mirror the banners of the camps of Israel. Each tribe had a banner, the emblem given to them by their father Jacob on his death bed in Genesis 49. And the images on the four camps are from the head/largest tribe in each of the four camps, except for Dan, whose image was a serpent, but his ‘camp’ banner was an eagle. This is long established history in Israel. And we see those ‘banners‘ in heaven in both Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4-5. But, so many people get distracted by mythology, not realizing that in both places God is using earthly imagery to ‘hide’ the obvious: the ‘beasts’ are symbols of the Congregation of God, worshipping Him! In Ezekiel, it is spiritual. In Revelation, it is bodily.
Those beasts are seen in the heavens in the stars.
So, is it possible that the camp of Israel looks like those images in Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4-5? It’s not only possible, it is actual and literal. The banners in each camp reflected those same ‘creatures’.
But, before we elaborate on that, let’s just look at the practical side of the suggested configuration:
In the scriptures when God was establishing Israel’s camp, He gave them certain laws that had to be obeyed in order for them to keep His Presence in their midst. In Deuteronomy 23:12-14, He instructed them to go outside the camp to ‘do their business’, and to take a shovel with them and bury their waste. How many times does a human typically have to do that in a day? Now consider how far a person nearest the Tabernacle in the camp of Judah had to walk to get to do that business multiple times in a day. One of the iterations of this idea is seen below:
That configuration means the certain people really had to hoof it in order to relieve themselves, or to get to the Sanctuary for daily worship! It almost seems like a punishment on the people in the larger tribes to go in either direction.
This camp was a center of worship of God the Creator, and that worship went on daily. And the men had to be there every day, three times a day. But the configuration suggested makes some of them doomed to walk a very long trek to get there. And many more [women, children] just to relieve themselves. It doesn’t make sense.
Next, most people are either not aware, or have forgotten that this camp was also a Military camp. Israel was an Army! And God is יהוה Tzeva’ot, “Yahweh of Armies”. The above configuration would have been laughable to any military general! It would be almost indefensible if attacked on any side! The people in the extremities of any of the four camps would have been exposed and defenseless. And maneuvering as a camp would have been compeletely impracticle.
Generals tend to want layered defense with symmetry of response. So, a different configuration, whatever it was, is demanded from logic alone.
Further, the ‘cross’ configuration is utterly assumed. Where do the column lengths come from? What authority? How many columns were there in each camp to make that configuration? How much space is alloted between each family’s tents? What is their orientation? Were there rows. blocks, arcs, or clusters? Why columns? ALL of that is assumed by this configuration.
There were roughly 603,550 fighting men who needed to be on the ready. Add the families, and there were 2.5 million people, plus the ‘strangers’ of Egypt that had tagged along. If you force that many people into tight formation in a cruciform fashion, the distance is staggering that some had to walk each day, multiple times a day.
If God ‘walks in the midst of the camp’ and there is to be no refuse in it, this configuration is destroyed.
So, how might the tribes have been configured?
We know they were ‘around’ the tabernacle in all ‘four’ directions, with four ‘camps’, each one having a banner.
On those banners were symbols. The banners of the camps are known from the Bible, in Ezekiel 1, and lest we allow anti-Semitism and anti-Ancient Israel sentiment to overtake us, those symbols are also in Revelation 4. They are also recorded in ancient Jewish apocryphal works.
If the camp is a reflection of the sky, then there are four constellations that tell us how they are assembled.
East is Judah, and Judah is a lion, so the eastern constellation is “Leo”.
In the south is Reuben, a “Man”, and the southern constellation is “Aquarius”. That Reuben is ‘unstable as water’ was not arbitrary, man and water are seen in Aquarius.
In the west is Ephrayim’s camp, with an Ox on its banner, and the western is “Taurus”.
In the north is the Eagle of the Camp of Dan, and that is ‘Scorpio’. These were firmed up in the Second Temple era cosmology, and was obviously known to the Megushim, the men who ‘came from the East’, Jews from Babylon who had studied these things their entire lives. This is not Greek astrology. This is Biblical cosmology. The Greeks likely borrowed from Israel, just like they borrowed the idea for an alphabet.
So, when we look up into the sky, we see a reflection of the camp of Israel.
The six pointed star that is the Magen David is an often-used military tactic, because it has many tactical advantages, whereas a ‘cross’ shaped camp would have been very, very weak.
In the ‘Sheild of David’ pattern, there would have been no blind sides. There are interlocking sections of two juxtaposed triangles that give walls of defense. If anyone comes inside the boundaries they are exposed to weapons from two sides. Attackers in this configuration are forced into narrow straits where things are predictable to the defenders and the defense overlaps. The ‘central command’ is quite literally that: central, and it’s never far away. In the star configuration, fewer defenders are necessary; they would camp on the edges, with weaker people in the middle of their ‘angle’. There would be layerd fallback positions.
This would all be utterly speculative, but that this configuration has been used by other generals. Europe has many ‘star forts’, and Napoleon took advantage of them. His engineers understood that ‘geometry wins wars before soldiers do’. He studied Vauban’s fortifications, and used the star configuration for artillery placement, camps, and seige warfare. Italian military engineers discovered that angles deflect force, overlap creates security, and symmetry prevents collapse. Vauban followed suit and used six-pointed-star designs that made France impenetrable for centuries. He inspired Napoleon’s genius.
So, it is not a reach at all to claim that God ordered Israel into a defensible camp, that offered equidistant foot travel to every human who had to go in one direction to be human multiple times a day, and in another direction to commune with the divine multiple times a day. God is all about symmetry, and the camp had to be mobile, and the Tabernacle had to be a the ‘center’: in a ‘cross’, it is not at the ‘center’. In our idea, the sanitation problem is resolved, access is freer, defense is solid, and command and control is more accessible to all camps. The ‘cross’ configuration only appeases emotion and sentiment. Given that this ‘star’ is called the “Shield of David”, and David took up the “Shield of Abraham”, and that this geometry is replete in the plantlife of Israel, a “Magen David” encampment just makes a whole lot of sense. It is one of the most effective forms of military defense.
Last, the movement strategy of the camp that is describe in Numbers 10, for war, or for movement following God, the departure is very meticulously described, and the cross configuration does not work at all, but the Shield does. Movement to disassemble to camp appears to be spiral, according to the Hebrew language in the passage.
From Numbers 10:11-28 we learn that the cloud lifts first, and then the Ark sets out. The Camps leave in a very specific order. Standards move one after the other, and while that is happening, the tabernacle is taken down. The language of movement doesn’t match the ‘cross’ imagery at all. It creates a ‘spiral’ much like a galaxy of stars. The language is ‘rotational’, which means that the Tabernacle is not suddenly exposed! Levites have to move first with the Ark, as it is their war leader, and they have to find it a ‘resting place.’ This is the same kind of language we see in Ezekiel 1, describing the movement of the heavenly congregation. A spiral departure is far more defensible, and fits the Hebrew description of travel. A cross is not defensible, even more so in the disassembly of that kind of camp.
So, pursuing scriptural fidelity over sentiment safeguards us from self-deception while deepening awe at God’s ordered design—whether in the wilderness camp mirroring heavenly worship, Yeshua’s sacrificial death fulfilling the curse on the “tree,” or the enduring call to assemble around His presence without imposed symbols. May we, like Moses, follow the divine pattern shown on the mount, embracing truth that sets us free from emotional veils and draws us closer to the Messiah who is our true Tree of Life.
