Today, I am reading and commenting on Numbers 1-2.
The Book of Numbers begins with the account of the census which Moses took of the Israelites. The census was a count of the men 20 years old and older, except for the Levites who were excluded from this census. Interestingly, this passage is one of those places where the Israelites are divided into thirteen groups, twelve plus one. The tribes of Manasseh and Ephraim are counted along with the other ten tribes, and the tribe of Levi is set aside as separate and different. A few years ago I was struck by how this “twelve plus one” division of the tribes reflects the twelve plus one nature of Jesus ministry on earth where He traveled around with His twelve Apostles. I have never reached a conclusion about the meaning of that comparison, just noted it for future reference.
The previous paragraph was meant to be an aside before I got to my main point (which is not any more ground breaking). I have had a perception about the relative sizes and significance of the tribes of Israel. For example I always thought that the tribes of Judah and Ephraim were large and important and that the tribes of Dan and Benjamin were small, and not very important. Yet, when a look at the census results I see that the tribe of Ephraim had only 40,500 men counted, only the tribes of Benjamin and Manasseh had fewer men in this census. While the tribe of Dan had 62,700 men, second in size only to the tribe of Judah. Not only that, but the twelve tribes were divided into four camps and one of the tribes was designated as the lead for that camp. Dan was designated as lead for one of the four camps. So, not only was the tribe of Dan much larger relative to the other tribes than I thought, it was one of the more important tribes. None of this is particularly important, but it shows how we need to read the Bible carefully because some of the general impressions we have do not reflect what the Bible actually says.
I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.