Numbers3chapter 3

Numbers 3:1-2

The heading promises the generations of Aaron and Moses and the list that follows gives four sons of Aaron and no son of Moses. Barnes reads the omission as the point, since the standing of Moses was personal and left no successor in his office, while Aaron was the head of a line that ran on by birth. Aaron stands before Moses here, which reverses the order the two brothers usually keep, and Wesley ties that to the priesthood being given to Aaron's house alone.

Numbers 3:3-4

Four sons were anointed and consecrated and two of them are already dead. Leviticus 10:1-2 records the fire that killed them and this verse names the offence again, strange fire before the Lord, so the chapter that hands Levi the sanctuary opens by naming two priests who died inside it. They had no children, which is why the priesthood afterward runs through Eleazar and Ithamar alone.

Numbers 3:5-7

Bring the tribe of Levi near is sacrificial language. Clarke and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown both point out that the verb behind bring near is the word for presenting an offering at the altar, so the tribe is handed over rather than hired, and Numbers 8:11 later has Aaron wave the Levites before the Lord as an offering from the children of Israel. Verse 7 states their work in two directions at once, the charge of Aaron and the charge of the whole congregation, which makes them answerable upward and outward together.

Numbers 3:8-11

The Levites are given wholly to Aaron out of Israel, and the sentence closing verse 10 is the fence around the arrangement. That same clause stands four times in this book, at 1:51, here, at 3:38 and at 18:7, and the stranger it warns off is any Israelite outside Aaron's house, a Levite included. Wesley reads it that way, and Korah in chapter 16 is the case that tests whether it means what it says.

Numbers 3:12-13

I have taken the Levites from: The exchange is stated as an exchange and the ground given for it is the night of Exodus 12:29. Every firstborn in Israel was claimed on the day Egypt's firstborn were struck, which Exodus 13:2 and 13:15 had already set down as a standing due, and one tribe is now taken in place of that entire class. Genesis spent fifty chapters setting a younger son over an elder, Exodus spared the firstborn under blood and claimed them, and Numbers substitutes Levi for them here.

Numbers 3:14-16

Levi is counted from a month old and upward while every other tribe was counted from twenty years old and upward at 1:3. The difference follows from what each count is for, since the other tribes were mustered for war and Levi is being matched head for head against a class of firstborn that begins at a month. Numbers 1:47-49 had already kept Levi off the army roll, and Clarke observes that a count from twenty years would have left the tribe far short of the firstborn it was to replace.

Numbers 3:17-20

Gershon, Kohath and Merari are the three names Genesis 46:11 lists going down into Egypt and Exodus 6:16-19 sets out with their sons. The eight families named here are the working units of the rest of the chapter, since each of the three houses is about to receive a side of the tabernacle, a number, a chief and a load. Kohath is the second son and his house carries Moses and Aaron in it through Amram.

Numbers 3:21-24

The Gershonites number seven thousand five hundred and pitch behind the tabernacle on the west. Their chief is Eliasaph the son of Lael, a name that occurs here and nowhere else in Scripture, and Gill remarks that neither the text nor the Jewish writers say which of the two families he belonged to. Three sides of the tent are filled in turn through this chapter and the fourth is held back until verse 38.

Numbers 3:25-26

Gershon carries the cloth. The curtains, the tent, the covering, the door hanging, the hangings of the court and their cords are the soft parts of the structure, and Numbers 7:7 gives this house two wagons to move them. Everything in their charge folds or rolls, which is why the load is measured in wagons rather than in men.

Numbers 3:27-28

Kohath's four families number eight thousand six hundred, the largest of the three houses. The Amramites are the family of Moses and Aaron, and the Izeharites are the family of Korah, whom Numbers 16:1 traces through Izhar back to Kohath. The men who will carry the holy furniture and the man who will challenge the priesthood come out of the same house of Levi.

Numbers 3:29-30

Kohath pitches on the south side, and Numbers 2:10 puts Reuben's standard on the south as well, so Korah the Kohathite and Dathan and Abiram the sons of Reuben in 16:1 were neighbours in camp before they were partners in a revolt. The chief set over the Kohathite houses is Elizaphan the son of Uzziel, and Uzziel is the last of Kohath's four sons in verse 19 while Korah descends from the second. Gill passes on the Jewish reading that this promotion over an older line was one of Korah's grievances, which chapter 16 itself never says.

Numbers 3:31-32

The ark, the table, the candlestick, the altars and the vessels of the sanctuary go to Kohath, the heaviest honour with the smallest allowance of transport. Numbers 7:9 gives this house no wagons at all, because these things travel on men's shoulders, and 2 Samuel 6:3-7 is where that rule is set aside and a man dies for it. Eleazar is set over the chiefs of the Levites, which puts one priest above the whole arrangement and marks the line the high priesthood passes into at Numbers 20:26.

Numbers 3:33-35

Merari's two families number six thousand two hundred, the smallest of the three houses, and they pitch on the north under Zuriel the son of Abihail. With Gershon on the west, Kohath on the south and Merari on the north, the Levites form an inner ring around the tent inside the outer ring of four standards in chapter 2. The east is left unnamed in this list and verse 38 says who fills it.

Numbers 3:36-37

Merari carries the frame. The boards, the bars, the pillars, the sockets, the pins and the cords are the timber and the metal that hold the structure up, and Numbers 7:8 gives this house four wagons, twice what Gershon received for the curtains. The smallest of the three families draws the heaviest weight.

Numbers 3:38

Moses, Aaron and Aaron's sons take the east, which is the side the door opens on, so the men who go in and out stand between the entrance and the whole camp. Judah's standard is on the east too at 2:3, which puts the tribe of the sceptre and the house of the priesthood on the same face of the camp. The warning of verse 10 is repeated here word for word, at the one point where a man walking toward the tent would actually reach it.

Numbers 3:39

The total is given as twenty and two thousand while the three houses add to twenty two thousand three hundred, and the gap of three hundred is old and much argued. Gill and other writers pass on the answer that three hundred Levites were themselves firstborn and so could not be counted as redeeming anyone else. Clarke instead suspects a copyist and points at Gershon's seven thousand five hundred, since the Hebrew letter for two hundred and the letter for five hundred are easily confused. The lower figure is the one the redemption arithmetic of verses 43 to 46 depends on.

Numbers 3:40-41

A second census follows at once and it counts a class rather than a tribe, every firstborn male from a month old and upward. The cattle are counted with them, so the exchange runs through beasts as well as men, which is what Exodus 13:12-13 had required of every firstling of the herd. Two rolls are being set side by side and the whole point of the exercise is the difference between them.

Numbers 3:42-45

Twenty two thousand two hundred and seventy three firstborn are counted, against the six hundred and three thousand fighting men of 1:46, and the proportion is low enough that readers have asked about it for centuries. Some hold that only those born since the night in Egypt were counted, others that the rule reached only a male who opened his mother's womb and so passed over many households, and the text supplies no reason of its own. Verses 44 and 45 then say the whole thing over again, the Levites for the firstborn, their cattle for the cattle, and the Levites shall be mine.

Numbers 3:46-48

The Levites fall short of the firstborn by two hundred and seventy three, and those are redeemed at five shekels a head. Five shekels is the figure Leviticus 27:6 sets for a male between a month old and five years old, and Numbers 18:16 makes it the standing price for redeeming a firstborn from that day forward. The verse stops to define its unit, the shekel of the sanctuary at twenty gerahs, which Exodus 30:13 had already fixed. The money is paid to Aaron and his sons, so the surplus goes to the house the Levites themselves were given to.

Numbers 3:49-51

The sum is a thousand three hundred and sixty five shekels, which is two hundred and seventy three multiplied by five, and the text writes the arithmetic out instead of leaving it to be assumed. Nothing here says how the two hundred and seventy three were picked out of the whole number, and Jewish tradition supplies a drawing of lots that the chapter never mentions. A claim made on the night of the passover in Egypt is closed out in silver, and the tribe that replaced the firstborn now stands around the tent in their place.