May The Lord Bless You And Keep You

This blessing sits in the wilderness years, after Israel came out of Egypt and before they reached the land. The people are counted, organised and on the move, and they are also tired, anxious and quick to grumble. Right there, God gives Moses these few lines and tells him to hand them to Aaron and his sons, the priests, to speak aloud over everyone. What I find striking is that the words travel before they ever settle on a single person. God says them to Moses, Moses passes them to Aaron, Aaron and his sons say them out loud, and only then do they rest on ordinary, weary Israelites standing in the crowd. That is worth holding on to. The priest is not the source. He is a voice carrying something handed down from higher up. Whenever I have heard these lines read at a font or beside a grave, the person reading them is doing exactly what Aaron did: lending their mouth to a promise they did not invent and could never guarantee on their own. The blessing was never the speaker’s to give. It was always God’s, on loan to a human voice.

Look at the shape and you notice this is not three stray sentences. It grows. The first line is short and plain: bless and keep. The second runs a little longer and adds the picture of a shining face and the word gracious. The third is longer still, and it draws everything into peace. The Hebrew behind that final word is shalom, and its sense is wider than calm. Shalom carries the idea of wholeness, of a life that is sound and held together rather than merely free of trouble. So the blessing does not close on a please-stay-calm note. It closes on God making a person whole. The other thing I nearly always miss until I slow down is the repetition. Each line opens with the LORD, the covenant name, said three times over. Read it aloud and you feel where the weight falls. It never lands on you and what you must manage to do. Again and again it lands on him and what he commits to be towards you.

Twice the blessing speaks of God’s face: making it shine, and lifting it up towards you. That image carries real freight across Scripture. For God to hide his face is the language of distance and trouble, and you can hear people cry out about exactly that in the Psalms. So when this blessing asks for his face to shine and to turn towards us, it is asking for the opposite of being left alone. It is asking for nearness and for a God who looks our way. Psalm 67:1 takes up these very words, praying that God’s face would shine on us, and then widens the hope so the blessing spreads to every nation. The longing for a face that lights up was never meant to stop with Israel. For me this is where the line runs on to Christ. When John’s Gospel describes what God’s nearness finally looked like, it speaks of seeing his glory in a human life that came among us (John 1:14). The turned-towards God of Numbers 6 is not a distant wish. In Jesus he came close enough to be looked at.

I have said this blessing over people, and I have badly needed it said over me. What helps me is that it does not hang on how I feel or how well the day has gone. On the mornings when I have already got things wrong before nine, when a relationship is strained or bad news is sitting in the room with us, the easy assumption is that God’s face has turned away in disappointment. This blessing tells me the opposite, and it tells me that whether or not I can feel it. Notice too that it is spoken over a person rather than chosen by them. You do not bless yourself here. Someone else says it to you. So if you are flat and faithless today, you do not have to work this up from inside. You can simply let it be said to you, the way a tired Israelite stood in the crowd and heard Aaron speak. I sometimes let it be the last thing I read at night, not as a performance but as a kind of settling under the wholeness the third line promises.

There is a line right after the blessing that I used to read straight past. God tells Moses that when Aaron and his sons say these words, they are placing his name on the people of Israel, and then he himself will bless them (Numbers 6:27). That small instruction changes the weight of the whole thing. These are not warm wishes for a good week, the kind we scribble on a card and half mean. They are God’s own name being laid on ordinary, named people, with his commitment to stand behind what the words say. A wish hopes for the best and can do nothing to make it happen. A name placed on you works differently. It marks who you belong to. When a priest spoke this over the crowd, he was not hoping out loud on God’s behalf. He was lending his voice while God wrote his own name across a whole tired people and promised to be the one who makes the blessing good. That is why I can never quite hear these lines as merely lovely. Behind them stands the one whose name they carry, and he does not put his name to things lightly.

There is a hunger in us to be looked at kindly, and most of us feel it long before we can name it. Watch a small child do something and then immediately search the room for a face, wanting to see it light up. We do not grow out of that. We mostly just get better at hiding it. This blessing speaks straight to that hunger when it asks for God’s face to shine and to lift towards us, because it offers the very thing we keep scanning the room for: attention, warmth, a look that is glad we exist. That is the opposite of a face turned aside or kept hidden, which is the picture Scripture reaches for when it wants to describe being far from God. The Psalms know the ache from the inside. One of them remembers God calling people to seek his face, and the writer answers that seeking that face is exactly what his heart wants, then pleads that God would not hide it from him (Psalm 27:8 to 9). That movement is honest. We long to be seen, and we are half afraid the face will turn away. These few old words have been spoken over gathered people for thousands of years, and I suspect they have lasted partly because they meet that fear so gently. They do not tell us to stop wanting to be looked on. They tell us whose face is already turned our way.

I want keep you to mean a shield. I have wanted it that way for years, and I have heard it said over frightened people as though the words themselves settled the outcome: God will keep you, so nothing here can actually go wrong. Read on a few chapters and that reading dies. The camp these words were handed down for, the one Aaron was told to speak them over, stood at the edge of the land, refused to trust God, and were told plainly that their bodies would fall in that wilderness (Numbers 14:29 to 35). Later some were bitten by snakes (Numbers 21:6). Thousands were lost in a plague in the camp (Numbers 16:49). That is not buried away in some distant corner of scripture. It sits in the same book that gave us the blessing, a few pages on. So keep cannot mean that nothing will ever reach you. It never did. What I think it means is that the keeping is God’s own grip on a person, not a fence around their circumstances, and Israel found out the hard way that those are not remotely the same thing. Promise the fence and you have promised something this book will not back you on.

If you are building a talk on this, resist lifting it off the page as three lines floating free of everything around them. Look either side. The run-up in Numbers 6 is the Nazirite vow: no wine, no razor near the head, no going near a dead body, not even for your own mother or father (Numbers 6:1 to 21). Costly, and freely chosen, a way of being set apart to God for a season. Then God hands Aaron these words. And straight after, chapter 7 opens on the day Moses finished setting up the tabernacle (Numbers 7:1), and the tribal leaders start arriving with wagons, oxen and silver, one leader a day for twelve days, the same gift written out twelve times over as though nobody’s generosity could bear to be summarised. The blessing sits on that hinge. Behind it, what devotion costs. Ahead of it, what gladness gives. Preach it alone and it drifts into a nicety for the end of a service, said over anyone regardless. Preach it where it stands and it becomes what God says over people who have just given something up, in the moment before they start giving something away. That is a different talk, and a better one.

I would use this at a funeral without hesitating. It does not promise that the dead will be raised by Tuesday or that grief will lift to schedule, and because it promises none of that it can stand honestly at the foot of a coffin: his face has not turned from the one who has died, nor from the people standing there unable to sing. That use I trust completely. What I have grown careful about is saying it fresh into the first hours, over someone still shouting at God about what has just happened to them. Said too soon it can sound like hurrying a person past their fury towards a tidy ending, and this blessing was never a way of closing a conversation down. God gave Aaron the words. He did not give him the timing, so the timing is on us. My rule now, for what it is worth: wait until a person can bear to be looked at kindly. Some griefs need a long silence sat through first, mine included. Then say the words, and say nothing after them. Do not explain them. They have lasted this long without our commentary, and they will survive the silence.

In 1979, in a burial cave at Ketef Hinnom on a slope just outside the old city of Jerusalem, archaeologists found two tiny rolled strips of silver lying among human bones. Getting the metal unrolled without it crumbling to dust took years. What was scratched into it, in letters from before the Babylonian exile, was a version of this blessing. Not word for word what you read at the top of this page, and I want to be careful about that, but close enough that nobody doubts what it is, and older than any other scrap of the Bible we possess, older than the Dead Sea Scrolls by centuries. What I cannot get past is the practical side of it. Someone, six or seven hundred years before Jesus, wanted these lines hammered thin and rolled tight so they could be carried on a body. Not filed away. Not read out from a scroll in public. Worn, the way you might wear a locket, or tucked into a grave beside someone they had just buried and could not stop loving. Whoever did that had no notion the silver would outlast Jerusalem’s walls and end up photographed under laboratory light. They only wanted the blessing close. On the skin, in the dark. I cannot build an argument out of that, and it would prove nothing to a sceptic over coffee. But it tells you what these words have been to the people who actually held them, which was never a nice line for a card. They are the words you want touching you when you cannot see the road ahead.

Go to a synagogue when the priestly blessing is said and you will see men who trace their family back to Aaron come to the front, raise their hands, and spread their fingers into a particular shape while these three lines are spoken over everyone standing there. In Israel many communities do it daily. Outside it, in Ashkenazi practice, it is usually kept for the festivals, which is its own small sadness. The actor Leonard Nimoy told the story often, in interviews and in his own memoir, that he lifted that hand shape from watching the blessing as a boy and handed it to the Vulcans. I cannot check it beyond his own telling, so take it as his account rather than mine. I like it anyway: a gesture from a wilderness tent, smuggled into a California television studio.

But the trivia is not the thing. The thing is that nobody had to rescue this. There was no revival of it, no committee that decided it should be brought back. Aaron was told to say it, Aaron died, and people went on saying it, because the words never belonged to him in the first place and never depended on him being alive. That is why it can still be said by a man in Golders Green who never met a wilderness. And while you were reading this paragraph, somewhere, someone probably said it in Hebrew with their hands up over a room of people who had had a rotten week.

Here is the part I have no clean answer for. These words need a mouth. They were given to be said out loud, at people, with a face towards their faces, and that is lovely right up until you are the reader with nobody. No church, because it shut, or because someone in it hurt you badly enough that the car park is as far as you can get. No family near, or none who would say such a thing without dying of embarrassment. No minister, no praying friend, no one. I am wary of anybody who tells you it works out the same either way, that you can just say it to yourself and nothing is lost. Something is lost. There is no voice and no face in the room, and I would rather admit that to you than hand you a slogan.

What I have is smaller than a fix, and it is two things. The first: the blessing was never the speaker’s property, so a silent room does not cancel it. It leaves you without the comfort of hearing it, which is a real deprivation and not a small one, but it does not put you outside it. The second is harder and I offer it carefully. You can be the voice for somebody else. That can sound like cold consolation when you are the one starving, and some days it is. But of the people I know who have gone years with nobody to say this over them, the ones who came through least bitter were the ones who kept saying it over other people anyway.

Paul ends one of his hardest letters with a blessing of his own: grace, love and fellowship, one line each for Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 13:14, numbered 13:13 in some Bibles). Read it straight after Numbers 6 and something rhymes before you can say what. Three lines. A last word that gathers rather than asks for one more thing. And in both, the final thing said to the people is not a single item of what they must now go away and do.

I am not going to claim Paul had the Numbers scroll open in front of him, because I do not know that and neither does anyone else. He would not have needed it. He was a Pharisee. He had heard the priestly blessing said over him since he was a boy, and words like that go in deeper than study does. What I cannot shake is the sense that the second is what became of the first. Aaron says the Lord, the Lord, the Lord, and never explains who that is. Paul, in the same threefold shape, can say the names.

And look who each one lands on. Numbers 6 blesses a nation camped in a desert who will shortly refuse to trust God at all. Paul blesses a church in Corinth that had questioned whether he was even a real apostle, and that he had once written to out of anguish and with many tears (2 Corinthians 2:4). He blesses them anyway. That is the family likeness. Neither blessing waits for the blessed to deserve it first.

Ask a room of eight-year-olds what blessed means and somebody will say having nice things, and somebody else will say nothing bad happening. Let that stand and you are one rotten week away from a child quietly concluding God has gone off them. So if I only had ten minutes with children on this, I would not spend them on the shining face. They already understand faces. Children read a face across a room years before they can read a sentence, and they know exactly which grown-up is pleased to see them.

I would spend the ten minutes on keep. Ask them what they would grab first if the house caught fire. Where that thing sleeps. Whether they would lend it to anybody. That is keeping: not shutting it in a drawer where nothing can reach it, but never once letting go. Then ask them who keeps them. Somebody will have a name ready, and somebody in that room will not, and that silence is precisely why this blessing exists.

Because some child there has a parent whose face does not light up, and not because God failed anywhere: because a grown-up is ill, or gone, or worn through by their own life. That child needs telling plainly that this is not a report card on how loved they were at home. Then let them say it. Hand flat on a friend’s head, the real words, out loud, awkward and giggling. A blessing you have said with your own mouth over someone else lodges in a way one you only ever received does not. Let them give it away before they have finished deciding whether they believe it.

• Where am I quietly assuming God’s face has turned away from me, and what might shift if I trusted it was turned towards me instead?
• When did someone last speak a blessing over me, and have I ever done that for the people I love?
• Is the peace I keep reaching for only the absence of trouble, or the deeper wholeness this blessing actually offers?
• What would it look like to let these words be said to me today rather than trying to earn them first?

If you would like to stay with this a while longer, you could read more of Numbers or find words for exactly where you are today at Bible verses for how you feel.