After a rebellion against YHWH by various leaders of tribes among the Children of Israel—a revolt that caused YHWH to open the earth and swallow up these leaders, along with their wives, children, and households—God recognizes that He needs to revise the way He interacts with these difficult human beings. With apparent sadness, and to avoid future loss of life, He spells out a more restricted interaction with humans than before.
Instead of everyone being welcome to “draw near” to Him in the Tent of Meeting, God recognizes that many people are simply not interested in making themselves holy enough to spend time that close to Him. Going forward, it is primarily Aaron and his sons who interact with God in this direct way.
We see dramatic mistranslations in the modern Revised Standard Version. In the Hebrew, no one “strange” or “alien”—that is, no foreigner—can now come to the outer chamber of the Tent of Meeting. The RSV shockingly mistranslates this sentence as barring everyone except the priests. This mistranslation is further evidence that modern English Bibles often overstate the middleman role of organized religion and falsely write out of the Old Testament the many ways God remains directly accessible to human beings.
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