Fun With Numbers

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Originally uploaded by 1daymore.

This is a portion of Numbers 6:13 taken from a 12th century manuscript in the British museum. And you thought reading it in English was difficult.

Admit it. When you think about the book of Numbers, your head goes numb.

Yet a lot happens of great importance in the book of Numbers. Joshua comes on the scene in Chapter 13 and really gains center stage in Chapter 27. (We saw him in Exodus, fighting the Amalekites, but it is in Numbers where we begin to see his importance.)

In the first half of Numbers, we see a lot of numbering going on. There is a census. God asks Moses to count the people by tribe. He has the Levites counted separately. Each tribe brings offerings. Their offerings are counted. It seems pretty redundant, but it is fascinating if you think about it. We're looking into historic records. Today, you can go out on the Internet and look at the U.S. census records and you see large counts of people, with demographic information and geographic data. When we look at Numbers, we are looking at an accurate accounting of the Israelites. It is pure history. The numbers didn't thrill them, either. But God wanted people of future generations to understand how many people he led out of Egypt and how many people belonged to each tribe. He wanted them to understand their roots. These people did a great job of cataloging and counting and recording. It is amazing to think about the precision with which they did these things. But alongside the numbers that seem so tedious, we get MIRACLES!! And the account of these miracles is almost as clinical as the numbers themselves.

"On the day the tabernacle, the Tent of Testimony, was set up, the cloud covered it. From evening till morning the cloud above the tabernacle looked like fire. That is how it continued to be; the cloud covered it and at night it looked like fire."

So, are we to believe that these people who took so much care to record accurate numbers, all of the sudden began to weave half-truths and myths in with the text? I would find it very hard to believe that among all of this meticulousness we would get random doses of pure malarky. In fact, if we had more time, we could go into the way Scripture has been recorded and handed down to us. It is an amazing feat. But the book of Numbers certainly gives us food for thought.

If I get a little more time, I'd like to talk about Balaam. We see him twice in Numbers. Had I not been reading through, I might not have noticed that the second Balaam was the same guy who advised Balak to not attack the Israelites. This portion of Numbers really fascinated me on several levels.