“Seventy of the elders of Israel”
Bring Me seventy of the elders of Israel known to you as leaders and officers of the people. Bring them to the Tent of Meeting and have them stand there with you. (Numbers 11:16 BSB)
What it sounds like today
Moses simply appointing some helpers.
The cultural key
This appointment of seventy elders to share the load of leadership had a long afterlife. Overwhelmed by governing the people alone, Moses is told to gather seventy respected elders on whom God places 'some of the Spirit' that was on Moses, so they can carry the burden with him. This body of seventy became a foundational model for Jewish self-government. Later tradition traced the great Sanhedrin, the seventy-one-member supreme council and court that governed Jewish religious life in the Second Temple period (and that tried Jesus), back to these seventy elders plus Moses. It is likely no coincidence that Jesus, in Luke, appoints seventy (or seventy-two) others and sends them out, evoking this same pattern. A modern reader sees Moses delegating; the first hearers, and Jesus's contemporaries, recognized the seed of the council of seventy that still governed them.
Recovered meaning
God has seventy elders share Moses's Spirit-empowered leadership; this council of seventy became the model for later Jewish governance and, by tradition, for the Sanhedrin of seventy that ruled in Jesus's day. Moses is founding an institution, not just hiring help.