Things started out well, but ended badly. Silver trumpets, meant to summon the people for marching, for emergencies, hearkening to the Final Trumpet of Revelation, opens this section. Then the people are marching out, headed for the Promised Land, and that is a happy chapter 10.
The next two chapters begin to explain why they do not march into the Promised land, but return to the wilderness for 40 years. First the people complain about their God-provided manna. They want meat. Moses intervenes, and God sends quail, so much meat that it will be coming out their noses by the time they are done.
The second is a round of sibling rivalry and leadership questions. Moses' brother and sister, Aaron (the high priest) and Miriam, come at Moses "because of the Cushite woman he had married". You can interpret that a couple of different ways. Cush is south of Egypt, and is used in a couple of different places in the bible as a marker for people with 'black' skin. This might be a racial challenge. It might be a Gentile challenge, because Moses did not marry a "nice Jewish girl".
But at the end of the day, Miriam is punished for the both of them because Aaron is the High Priest and can't endure God's displeasure.
In the book of Acts, Paul and Barnabas complete their first missionary journey. It was marked with great success. But there is an undercurrent. There is a group from the Jerusalem church that is declaring to join the Way of Jesus, you must get circumcised according to the Law of Moses. Paul has preached that those portions of the law of Moses have been fulfilled by and transcended by Jesus' death and resurrection to a new life and a new way.
Here is the cusp of the 'challenge' between James, the brother of Jesus and Paul, the upstart newcomer. In the middle of chapter 13, John, who was traveling with them, left to return to Jerusalem. It seems that he brought back reports of Paul's teaching style. The circumcision party is then working off that information. It leads to a Grand Bargain.
Paul can continue to teach in the 'new way', but a few pieces of law of Moses are to be preserved, no eating of meat offered to idols (sacrificial worship), no 'fornication' (my best guess, no sexual practices involved in the worship of other religions, and no consuming a strangled animal or its blood.
God taught the people in the time of Moses that the life of the animal was in the blood. Killing (I refuse to call it 'harvesting' the animals like it is talked about today) the animals for food was done in such a way that the blood was drained from them. The blood was then used as part of the sacrificial offering to God in the temple. The lifeblood holds again a worshipful significance that is to be respected by the new converts, Jew or Gentile.
At the end of the Council in Jerusalem, Paul and Barnabas are about to head out on their next journey. John pops us to go along. Paul refuses to have him along again-was it because he carried back reports to Jerusalem as a spy? So, Paul and Barnabas split, find new partners, and move forward.
The interpretation of the Grand Bargain in Zealot is that Paul is being reined in, that the power is still in Jerusalem, that this is a glossed over power struggle. I see the rules laid down in Jerusalem as hedges against other forms of worship being seen as a part of the faith being practiced in Jesus' name.
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