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Numbers 36

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The Clan Leaders Speak Up

Chapter 36.

The family heads of Gilead's clan—descendants of Machir son of Manasseh, from Joseph's clans—approached and spoke before Moses and the leaders, heads of Israel's family clans. They said, "Our Father commanded my lord to give the land as an inheritance by lot to Israel's people, and my lord was commanded by our Father to give our brother Zelophehad's inheritance to his daughters." If they marry men from other Israelite tribes, their inheritance will be removed from our fathers' inheritance and added to their new tribe's, shrinking our allotted inheritance. When Israel's jubilee comes, their inheritance joins the inheritance of the tribe they marry into, taken from our fathers' tribe's inheritance.

So Moses commanded the Israelites at our Father's word, saying, 'The tribe of Joseph speaks rightly.' "This is what our Father commands about Zelophehad's daughters: they may marry whoever they think best, only within their father's tribal clan." No Israelite inheritance may pass from tribe to tribe; each Israelite must keep their ancestral tribe's inheritance. Every daughter who inherits in an Israelite tribe must marry within her father's tribal clan, so every Israelite keeps his ancestral inheritance. No inheritance may pass from one tribe to another; each tribe of Israel must hold to its own inheritance.

Just as our Father commanded Moses, so the daughters of Zelophehad did. Mahlah, Tirzah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Noah, the daughters of Zelophehad, married their cousins on their father's side. They married into the clans of Manasseh son of Joseph's descendants, and their inheritance stayed in their father's tribal clan.

These are the commands and rulings our Father commanded through Moses to Israel's people on the plains of Moab, by the Jordan at Jericho.

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