Sunday Sermonette: My eyes glaze over

It ' s called the Book of Numbers because of the two censuses, and now we come to the second one. The point of this may be obscure to modern readers. The actual numbers are certainly fanciful, since a) these events never occurred and the entirety of Israel was never camped out on the plane of Moab to be counted in this way; b) as with the first census, this claims that the population went from 70 people (Exodus 1:5) to several million -- more than 600,000 adult men -- in 400 years, despite God repeatedly killing off tens of thousands in various plagues and massacres. The population is actually more plausible around the time this was actually written, in the seventh century BCE during the reign of King Josiah.However, the numbers aren ' t really the point. This is about the organization of society. It ' s patriarchal, first of all -- the genealogies name only the men, women do not exist here. Second, it ' s organized into tribes and clans. Numbers in fact has a considerable obsession with this structure, which is repeatedly invoked and described. Why would people care about the names of all these long-dead ancestors? Because they are tokens of identity. But were there actual genealogical records on which this is based? Definitely not, and the proof is that there are four different lists of the sons of Benjamin in the Bible and they are all different. Here is the compilation from Skeptics Annotated Bible: Oops. Other than that, I ' ll just point out that the mention of God...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs