Numbers 1:17-46

The numbers ascertained by the census.

There can be no doubt that the numbers given in chs. 1 3 and 26 are purely artificial. Gray (Numbers, pp. 10 15) shews that (1) they are impossible, (2) when compared with each other they yield absurd results, (3) they are inconsistent with numbers given in Hebrew literature earlier than P.

(1) The number of male Israelites of fighting age is put at 603,550, which appears in round numbers as 600,000 in Numbers 11:21; Exodus 12:37. But the fighting men could form hardly more than a quarter of the whole; so that the population would reach a total of some 2¼ millions. The present population of the Sinaitic peninsula is estimated at from 4,000 to 6,000, and a body of over 2 million people could not find subsistence even if dispersed all over the peninsula.

(2) The male first-born numbered 22,273 (Numbers 3:43); and it is fair to suppose that the number of families in which the first-born child was a female would be about the same, giving a total of some 44,546 families; in which case there was an average of about 50 children to a family.

Again, from Numbers 3:12 we gather that the -first-born" means the first-born of the mother, not the eldest son of a father who might have several wives. There were, therefore, 44,546 mothers. But this number (assuming that the number of women over 20 years of age was the same as that of the men, i.e. 600,000) involves the extreme improbability that only 1 in 14 women over 20 years of age had any children.

(3) According to Judges 5:8 the tribes of Benjamin, Ephraim. Manasseh, Naphtali, Zebulun and Issachar yielded only 40,000 persons, i.e. apparently fighting men. But in these six tribes the fighting men were 273,300 at the first census, and 301,000 at the second (Numbers 26).

Again, in Judges 18 it is related that the Danites had no proper territory belonging to them; and therefore 600 armed men (obviously the greater part of the tribe) migrated to the north. But the fighting men of Dan numbered 62,700 at the first census, and 64,400 at the second. See, further, the additional note at the end of the chapter.