Why these two court cases are featured in Numbers may be answered in Jesus’ lineage (Lk 3:23).
No, you’re not seeing double! The five daughters of Zelophehad featured in our study in Numbers 27, and now here they are again! When they first came to see Moses, they wanted to know if they could have the land in Canaan that would have been their father’s if he hadn’t died in the wilderness. Normally land was passed from father to son, but if he had no sons—just daughters—couldn’t they have their portion? God said yes, that was the right thing to do. But time passes. Now some of the daughters want to get married. If they marry, will they lose their claim? That is the question in Numbers 36. You see, the families had tribal territories and God wanted to keep it that way. If a daughter inherited a piece of land, say, in the tribal territory of Naphtali, near the Sea of Galilee, then married a man from down in Judah in the south, their son would be from Judah. But the land he inherited from his mother was up north. Now a piece of Naphtali would be an outpost of Judah. So it would go until Israel would be a ragtag patchwork of tribal claims. So when the daughters asked if they could marry, here was the answer: “No inheritance shall change hands from one tribe to another, but every tribe of the children of Israel shall keep its own inheritance” (v 9). If they married within their tribe, they could keep their land. The story has a happy ending. Wedding bells! “They were married into the families of the children of Manasseh the son of Joseph, and their inheritance remained in the tribe of their father’s family” (v 12). We don’t have time to look at it here, but this might well be the precedent case that allowed Mary to pass on to her special Son the land purchased by David (1 Chron 21), which in Jesus’ day was known as Calvary!