Numbers 6:26

Two small silver scrolls bearing this blessing were dug up just outside Jerusalem, rolled tight and buried roughly 2,600 years ago, making them among the oldest pieces of Scripture ever found. The words on them are the closing line of the blessing God gave Aaron to speak over Israel (Numbers 6:22-27), which means people were carrying this exact sentence around, believing it, long before most of the rest of the Bible was written down.

“Lift up his face” is a Hebrew idiom for someone turning toward you with warmth instead of looking away, the opposite of being ignored or overlooked. To have God lift His face toward you meant being personally noticed and attended to. And the blessing names peace, shalom in Hebrew, as what grows out of that attention, a word that reaches well past the absence of conflict into something closer to wholeness: nothing broken, nothing missing.