I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Numbers 1-2.

The number of people counted here is used as one of the arguments that the Exodus never happened: such a large group of people would have left archeological records.  If the number of Israelite men, as translated, is accurate, the total number of Israelites who left Egypt would have almost certainly have been over 2 million people, counting women and children.  That would have been about a third of the population of Egypt at the time.  More importantly, the number listed here is inconsistent with the number of first born sons counted a few chapters after this.  However, in the Hebrew the numbers are written out with words, words that have more than one meaning depending on context.  In particular, the word translated as “thousand” has multiple meanings and is translated differently elsewhere in the Bible.  In this case, “thousand” is the most logical translation of the Hebrew word in this context.  So, it may be that the numbers as translated are not the numbers meant by the person who originally wrote this.  As I thought about this, I realized that the Hebrew of the Old Testament was written down over a period of around 1,000 years.  Think about how much the English language has change over the last 1,000 years.  I want to finish with this thought: there is no theological significance to the absolute numbers listed here (although I suspect the relative numbers of each tribe has some theological significance, that is, I believe there is significance from how large each tribe was relative to the other tribes).