Numbers8chapter 8

The word used over the Levites is cleansing, where Leviticus 8 made the priests by consecration, with blood on the ear, thumb and toe and the anointing oil poured on the head, and Albert Barnes marks that difference as deliberate. The water of purifying is water of sin in the Hebrew, made with the ashes of the red heifer, and the making of it is not written down until Numbers 19, eleven chapters after this use of it. Shaving all the flesh and washing the clothes is what a cleansed leper does at Leviticus 14:8-9, so the tribe being brought into the sanctuary is handled like a man being brought back into the camp. The young bullock of verse 8 is the sin offering the law appoints for the whole congregation at Leviticus 4:14, which suits men standing in the room of every firstborn in Israel.

The whole assembly is gathered to watch, so the exchange is made in public and before witnesses. In the law the hand is laid on the head of the animal about to die, and Leviticus 4:15 has the elders doing it for the whole congregation; here the same act is done on living men. Adam Clarke reports the argument that this gives a congregation a part in appointing its own ministers, and he himself reads the act as Israel handing over the tribe in place of their own firstborn and binding themselves to keep men who could follow no other trade.

A wave offering is elsewhere a thing lifted and moved before the Lord, the breast of the peace offering at Leviticus 7:30, the sheaf of firstfruits at Leviticus 23:11, the two loaves at Leviticus 23:17, and here it is a tribe of men. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown suggest that Aaron brought them forward one by one and had them make some movement answering to the wave, and Matthew Henry reads the word as a presenting to God rather than an actual waving. Verse 12 then has the same men laying their hands on the heads of the bullocks, so within two verses the Levites are the offering presented and the offerers presenting.

The offering of the Levites is stated three times over, at verses 11, 13 and 15, and each time the going in to serve stands after it. Verse 14 says the Levites shall be mine and verse 19 says they are given as a gift to Aaron, and the book holds both, ownership with God and use under the priest. Numbers 3:9 put it the same way, wholly given unto him out of the children of Israel, and Numbers 18:6 says it a third time.

The ground of the exchange is the night of the tenth plague and the text names it, on the day that I smote every firstborn in the land of Egypt I sanctified them for myself. Exodus 13:2 claimed every firstborn on that ground, Numbers 3:12-13 announced the Levites in their place, and Numbers 3:40-51 counted the two lists against each other and priced the two hundred and seventy three surplus firstborn at five shekels a head. Genesis had spent fifty chapters setting a younger son over an elder one, and here one whole tribe is set in the place of every eldest son in Israel. Luke 2:23 quotes the same law of the opened womb when Christ is brought up to the temple.

I have given the Levites as a gift: The phrase children of Israel falls five times inside this one verse, which keeps the people in view through every clause of it. Matthew Henry puts the division of labour plainly, that the priests made atonement by sacrifice and the Levites made it by attendance, keeping the peace with heaven that the sacrifice had made. The clause about the plague speaks of a real danger, since Numbers 16:46-49 records fourteen thousand and seven hundred dead when the camp came at the sanctuary the wrong way, with Aaron standing between the dead and the living. Numbers 1:53 had already given the same reason for ringing the tent with Levites.

Numbers 8:20-23

The doing is written out in the words of the command, and the last clause of verse 20 names the congregation as the doers, so did the children of Israel unto them. Verse 21 calls the result purified, and Adam Clarke observes that men so solemnly given to God still could not come near until an atonement had been made for them. Verse 22 lets them in to their work at last, and the order has not moved since verse 6, cleansing first, then presenting, then sacrifice, then the service. Verse 23 opens a further word, and it settles how long that service lasts.

Numbers 4:3 set the Levite's entry at thirty years old and upward and this verse sets it at twenty and five, and the difference stands in the text without being explained there. Adam Clarke and John Gill both carry the old reading that the five years were a training, the young Levite learning the service from twenty five and bearing it from thirty, which the Jewish teachers hold. Others read chapter 4 as the age for carrying the sanctuary on the march and this chapter as the age for the ordinary service of the tent. Fifty ends it on either reading, and no such limit is written anywhere for the priests.

The man of fifty stays in the tent and changes what he does there, keeping the charge in place of carrying the load. Matthew Henry reads it as work given according to ability, the younger men to the labour and the elder to the trust, and Adam Clarke takes keeping the charge as direction, counsel and guarding the tent against whoever should not come near it. A third figure stands in Scripture beside these two, since 1 Chronicles 23:24-27 has David numbering the Levites from twenty years old, and 23:26 gives his reason, that the Levites shall no more carry the tabernacle. When the burden stopped moving the age of entry came down.