'And Moses said unto Hobab ... Come thou with us, and
we will do thee good: for the Lord hath spoken good
concerning Israel.'--NUM. x. 29.
There is some doubt with regard to the identity of this Hobab. Probably
he was a man of about the same age as Moses, his brother-in-law, and a
son of Jethro, a wily Kenite, a Bedouin Arab. Moses begs him to join
himself to his motley company, and to be to him in the wilderness
'instead of eyes.' What did Moses want a man for, when he had the
cloud? What do we want common-sense for, when we have God's Spirit?
What do we want experience and counsel for, when we have divine
guidance promised to us? The two things work in together. The cloud led
the march, but it was very well to have a man that knew all about the
oases and the wells, the situation of which was known only to the
desert-born tribes, and who could teach the helpless slaves from Goshen
the secrets of camp life. So Moses pressed Hobab to change his
position, to break with his past, and to launch himself into an
altogether new and untried sort of life.
And what does he plead with him as the reason? 'We will do thee good,
for the Lord hath spoken good concerning Israel.' Probably Hobab looked
rather shy at the security, for I suppose he was no worshipper of
Jehovah, and he said, 'No; I had rather go home to my own people and my
own kindred and my father's house where I fit in, and keep to my own
ways, and have something a little more definite to lay hold of than
your promise, or the promise of your Jehovah that lies behind it. These
are not solid, and I am going back to my tribe.' But Moses pressed and
he at last consented, and the following verses suggest that the
arrangement was made satisfactorily, and that the journeyings began
prosperously. In the Book of Judges we find traces of the presence of
Hobab's descendants as incorporated among the people of Israel. One of
them came to be somebody, the Jael who struck the tent-peg through the
temples of the sleeping Sisera, for she is called 'the wife of Heber
the _Kenite_.' Probably, then, in some sense Hobab must have become a
worshipper of Jehovah, and have cast in his lot with his brother-in-law
and his people. I do not set Hobab up as a shining example. We do not
know much about his religion. But it seems to me that this little
glimpse into a long-forgotten and unimportant life may teach us two or
three things about the venture of faith, the life of faith, and the
reward of faith.