While doing this study, the importance of land to the Israelites became very obvious. And this is not just a human matter, God seems to be leading in it as the next section shows. I was impressed that this affects our study of the Bible in two ways: 1. why did God consider land so important? 2. The importance of places in Bible Study.

These five ladies are mentioned at least four times in the Bible, and they were responsible for the laying down of two important legal precedents. They are first mentioned in the genealogy of the tribe of Manasseh in Numbers 26:33.

In Numbers 27:1-11 is a story of a request they made to Moses. Their father had no sons, so they came to Moses requesting that they be allowed to receive his inheritance and maintain his name. Moses took the matter to God, and God decreed that their request was just and that God gave a list of the order in which an inheritance should be passed if a man had no sons.

In Numbers 36:1-12 we find the leaders of the tribe coming to Moses and complaining that if these ladies married outside of the tribe, then the inheritance would pass out of the tribe. Moses made a decree that the request was just. There is no record of him going to the Lord for the answer, but it says that "Moses commanded them according to the word of the Lord" that when women received an inheritance in this fashion, they could marry whoever they wished as long as their husband was of the same tribe.

Joshua 17:3 records that at the division of the land the daughters came forward and received their father's inheritance.

This may seem a small matter to take up four scriptural references, but obviously the Holy Spirit in inspiring the creation of the Scriptures knew that there was a value in recording this story. I think it goes beyond the mere holding of land in the hands of the correct families. I feel that this has a message relating also to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of the many. The whole Biblical pattern of Jubilees and non-alienation of land was an attempt by God to stop the few possessing so much as we see in the world today when in a land like Australia less than 20% of the people hold over 80% of the wealth. This applies on a global scale also, where the minority of the population of the world use the majority of the energy, water, food etc, while the masses survive on next to nothing. This is not God's plan.

A second aspect of land that impressed itself on me as I studied was the light that the linkage between place names and families throws onto the rest of the Bible record. Several times I turned to the commentary to get extra information when I came across a genealogical snipped embedded in the record away from the main genealogical records. Many times there was nothing in the story to indicate which tribe the person belonged to, but the commentary was able to tell me from the place names in the story. In many places as I read the genealogical records, the list of families was interspersed with a list of the places that were given to those families in the division of Canaan, or that were taken over by a family later. The commentary writer who had recorded these links was thus able to place a name in a tribe better still in a clan of a tribe by the name of the town where they lived.