Book of Numbers

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The Book of Numbers is the fourth of the five books of the Torah, the long account of Israel’s passage through the wilderness between the giving of the Law at Sinai and the threshold of the promised land. Its English name comes by way of the Greek Arithmoi and the Latin Numeri, after the two military censuses the book records. Its Hebrew name is Bamidbar — “in the wilderness” — taken, as Hebrew book-titles are, from an early word of the opening verse, and it names the book’s real subject better than the count does. Between the two names lies the whole tension of the book: a register of fighting men set against the desert that will keep nearly every one of them from the land they were counted to take.

The shape of the journey

The narrative carries the people from the foot of Sinai out into the desert and through nearly forty years of wandering, moving by stages — the wilderness of Paran, the oasis of Kadesh, and at last the plains of Moab by the Jordan, opposite Jericho, where the book ends with Israel encamped within sight of Canaan but not yet across. Much of the early material is ordinance and arrangement: the numbering and marching order of the twelve tribes around the tabernacle, the camp laid out by compass point with the tent of meeting at its center; the duties of the Levites in carrying and guarding the sanctuary; laws of purity, vows, and offering. The book is, in its first chapters, a portrait of a sacred camp on the move — a people organized as an army and a liturgy at once, with Aaron and the priesthood at its heart and the holy things borne in its midst.

The story proper turns on failure and consequence. Twelve spies are sent into the land; ten return afraid, reporting walled cities and giants, and the people refuse to enter. For that refusal the generation that left Egypt is condemned to die in the desert over forty years — one year for each day the spies surveyed the land — so that only their children, and the two faithful scouts Joshua and Caleb, will cross. Around that judgment cluster the book’s best-remembered episodes: the rebellion of Korah, who challenges the exclusive priesthood of Aaron and is swallowed alive when the earth opens beneath him; the water struck from the rock at Meribah, where Moses himself forfeits the land by striking where he was told to speak; the bronze serpent raised on a pole against a plague of venomous snakes, so that the bitten who look on it live; and the foreign seer Balaam son of Beor, hired by the king of Moab to curse Israel and brought instead, four times over, to bless it. The book closes with the apostasy at Baal-Peor, the second census, the appointment of Joshua as successor, the cities of refuge, and the daughters of Zelophehad winning the right to inherit — a string of last arrangements for a people about to become a nation in a land.

Two censuses, two generations

The name Numbers is more than a clerk’s label. The book is built on its two counts, and the counts are not the same census taken twice. The first, at Sinai, tallies the men of fighting age — those twenty years old and upward, able to bear arms — at 603,550, the Levites set apart and numbered separately. The second, taken a generation later on the plains of Moab, comes to 601,730. The totals are nearly equal; the men inside them are almost entirely different. The modern scholar Dennis Olson built an influential reading of the whole book on exactly this: the two censuses frame Numbers into two halves, the death of the old and the birth of the new. The first census enrolls the Exodus generation, which the wilderness will bury; the second enrolls the children who will inherit. Between them stands the sentence passed after the spies. The arithmetic of the title, on this reading, is the book’s deepest argument — a roll of the doomed answered by a roll of the heirs, with the desert as the long interval in which one list is exchanged for the other.

Authorship: the Mosaic Torah and the priestly layer

Jewish and Christian tradition long received the whole Torah as the work of Moses, and read Numbers as sacred history and binding law together — the Torah of Moses, delivered at God’s command, of which this is the fourth fifth. Modern biblical scholarship reads the book otherwise. Where the eye trained on the text finds doubled stories, shifts in vocabulary and divine name, and a sustained preoccupation with the sanctuary, the priesthood, the camp, and ritual order, critical study identifies the dominant hand in Numbers as the Priestly source (P) whose concerns also fill Leviticus and stretch across the Pentateuch — older narrative material about the rebellions and the journey carried within a priestly framework of census, calendar, and cult, the whole reaching its final form well after the events it describes, in or after the Persian period that followed the Babylonian exile. The classic statement of the source-critical paradigm is Julius Wellhausen’s Prolegomena of 1883; later scholars have loosened its neat partition into supplementary and fragmentary models without abandoning the underlying perception of strata. The two accounts answer different questions: the traditional asks what the text commands and means, the critical how and when it came to be written. Within the Old Testament canon Numbers sits where it has always sat — after Leviticus, before Deuteronomy, with the conquest of Joshua and the unsettled age of Judges to follow, and the monarchy of Saul, David, and Solomon (the matter of the first book of Kings) far down the same line.

The priestly blessing and the silver amulets

Numbers carries, in its sixth chapter, the three-line benediction the priests were to pronounce over the people — The LORD bless thee, and keep thee: The LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: The LORD lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace. It is among the most widely used liturgical formulas in both Judaism, where it is the priestly blessing spoken in the synagogue, and Christianity, where it survives as the Aaronic benediction. It is also, by an extraordinary accident of preservation, the oldest passage of the Hebrew Bible recovered from the ground in a physical object. In 1979 the archaeologist Gabriel Barkay, excavating a burial cave at Ketef Hinnom — the shoulder of rock above the Hinnom Valley, southwest of the Old City of Jerusalem — found two tiny rolled plaques of silver among the bones in a repository. Unrolled, they proved to be amulets incised in paleo-Hebrew letters, each bearing a benediction that closely parallels the priestly blessing of Numbers 6. Barkay’s team dated them paleographically to the late seventh or early sixth century BCE — to the last decades of the First Temple, before Babylon’s armies came. A later challenge argued for a much younger date; a re-examination with advanced photographic imaging, published in 2004, reaffirmed the original reading. The amulets do not prove that the Book of Numbers existed in its present form by 600 BCE; what they show is that the words of its most-spoken passage were already on the lips, and around the necks, of the people of Judah in the age of the kings — worn against the dark of the grave, which is where they were found.

The serpent on the pole and the star out of Jacob

Two images from Numbers traveled far beyond the book. The first is the bronze serpent. When venomous snakes afflict the camp, Moses is told to fashion a serpent of bronze and set it on a standard; whoever is bitten and looks up at it lives. The object had an afterlife in Israel: it was kept and venerated until King Hezekiah, centuries later, broke it up as an idol and gave it the dismissive name Nehushtan, “a thing of bronze.” But its image proved unkillable. In Christian reading the serpent lifted in the wilderness became a figure of the crucifixion — the Gospel of John has the lifting of the serpent prefigure the lifting of the Son of Man, a typology built directly on the healing-by-looking of Numbers 21. In the alchemical and Hermetic emblem-books of the early modern centuries the serpent on the cross or the pole took on a further sense: the medicine drawn from poison, the venomous made curative, the serpens in cruce of an art that read the world for hidden reversals. A sign of death turned into a sign of life is precisely the kind of object that tradition keeps.

The second image is Balaam’s oracle. Compelled to bless rather than curse, the foreign seer utters a vision of a king to come — a star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel. The line was read messianically across centuries: the sectarian writings recovered at the Dead Sea cite it; the second-century leader of the last great revolt against Rome was hailed by Rabbi Akiva as Bar Kokhba, “son of the star,” from this verse; and the rising star of the nativity narratives draws on the same well. A curse turned to blessing, spoken by an outsider who can say only what is put in his mouth, became one of the standing texts of expectation. Balaam himself splits in two across later reading — the reluctant prophet of the blessing and the wicked diviner blamed for the seduction at Peor — but the star out of Jacob belongs to the first.

Scholarship and texts

The standard critical commentaries on Numbers are Jacob Milgrom’s volume in the JPS Torah Commentary (Numbers / Bamidbar, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990), which reads the priestly material with unmatched ritual precision, and Baruch A. Levine’s two-volume Numbers in the Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1993 and 2000), which gives the fullest philological and historical treatment in English. The structural reading by the two generations is Dennis T. Olson, The Death of the Old and the Birth of the New: The Framework of the Book of Numbers and the Pentateuch (Brown Judaic Studies 71, Chico: Scholars Press, 1985). The source-critical frame within which Numbers is read descends from Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Berlin, 1883; English translation 1885), mapped for general readers in the standard survey of the documentary hypothesis and the later supplementary and fragmentary models. On the Ketef Hinnom amulets the definitive re-edition is Gabriel Barkay, Marilyn J. Lundberg, Andrew G. Vaughn, and Bruce Zuckerman, “The Amulets from Ketef Hinnom: A New Edition and Evaluation,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 334 (2004): 41–71, which used computer-enhanced imaging to confirm the late-First-Temple date and publish a corrected reading of the inscriptions. For the wider literary and historical setting of the wilderness narratives the indispensable older reference is Martin Noth, Das vierte Buch Mose: Numeri (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966; English: Numbers: A Commentary, London: SCM, 1968).

The name and the desert

A book counted twice and named for its arithmetic spends almost the whole of its length watching the first count erased. The men of war enrolled at Sinai are not the men who will fight for the land; they are the men the wilderness is for. What the title preserves is the register of a generation that had to die in open country so that a generation it never met could cross the Jordan — the fathers counted into the desert, the children counted out of it, and forty years of sand between the two columns of the same ledger.

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