Numbers 1-2
Dear RTB’ers,
Numbers. My favorite book of the Bible?? Not really, but people joke with me about that, having to do with my love for numbers and number “families”! And no doubt, I’d rather be reading Numbers than going back to Leviticus!!
After those many days of a small number of verses to read in Hebrews, today and twice more in the next three days we have some long readings, the smallest of those three being 88 verses in today’s reading, but many of those verses are repetitive, so not so difficult to follow.
If you have Study Bibles and you read the introductory material, you will see that there is substantial controversy about the tribal and total numbers of Israelites that are setting out from Mt. Sinai. And it is mind-blowing to me – with 603,550 men …from twenty years old and upward, every man able to go to war in Israel… (v. 45b), there would likely be a similar number of women and another similar or larger number of children, so there would be a total number of people on the order of two million. But just staying with the 603,550 men – let’s go back to Leviticus and imagine all these men, maybe in groups of two to ten (or even hundreds) by family, coming to the tabernacle (tent) to offer sacrifices according to the requirements laid out in Leviticus. That would be a lot of animal slaughter and a lot of Levitical labor. I truly wonder whether those numbers have been inflated in various translations or transcriptions over time. But let’s not fuss over the numbers. It’s the larger content (and context) that’s important.
One item worth noting – you probably noticed that both of Joseph’s sons, Ephraim and Manasseh are included in the numbering of the Israelites. That would make for thirteen tribes! However, the tribe of Levi is not included in today’s count. We’ll see why tomorrow when they are numbered.
Blessings!
See also: February 7 (2023) / Numbers 1-2