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

Today’s passage, and the Book of Numbers begins with God commanding Moses to take a census of the fighting men of the Israelites.   Moses did as God commanded and counted them by the tribe to which they belonged.  However, the Levites were not counted in this census, meaning that the Israelite army was composed of twelve units (one for each tribe counted in the census).  Once the census was completed Moses arranged the Israelite camp around the newly constructed tabernacle.  By setting up this default arrangement, less administrative work was needed each time they moved to a new place as each of the tribes knew where they should go relative to where the tabernacle was set up.  Once again the Levites are left out of this arrangement.  Now, one could easily dismiss this, since the Levites were camped around the tabernacle itself.  However, I think we should notice that this “twelve and one” arrangement resembles that of Jesus with His Twelve Apostles.  There are two things I want to say about this.  First, I believe that Jesus chose Twelve Apostles in order to mimic this arrangement.  Second, there is significance in the “twelve and one” arrangement beyond just the parallel between the Tribes of Israel and Jesus with the Twelve.  I am not quite sure of what it is, but we should pay attention to its appearance in the Bible.

I use 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 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.

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

This passage is one of the reasons which leads secular historians to dismiss the Exodus account as untrue.  They are convinced that the Sinai Peninsula could not support this many people.  In my opinion they are making two mistakes in dismissing the Exodus account on this basis.  The first mistake is that they are assuming that the Sinai Peninsula was no more capable of supporting human life several thousand years ago than it is today.  It would not be at all surprising if a marginally more fertile Sinai Peninsula had been turned into the hostile wilderness it is today by the passage through it of a large group of nomadic people with their flocks and herds.  The second mistake they are making is that they are dismissing God’s ability to provide sustenance to His people in a miraculous manner.   Some variation on the preceding thoughts goes through my head every year when I read this.  However, today I was struck by the fact, a fact I must have seen before, but never noticed, that not only did Moses conduct a census wherein he counted all of the Israelites older than 20 years old, but he also recorded their names and genealogies.  We give little thought to what a daunting accomplishment such an endeavor would be.  Of course the fact that they registered them by clans and families would have allowed for verification that each person they registered was who they said that they were, since the other members of their clan and family would know whether or not they belonged.

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

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).