I take back some of what I said about Leviticus being boring. Numbers is off to something of a slow start itself.
God tells Moses to take a census of all the tribes, except the Levites, to determine the strength of the army. They count all the men able to serve in the army and find there are 603,550 all together, about 50,000 per tribe. Judah has the most people with 74,600 and the half tribes of Ephram and Menassah, Jacob’s sons, only have around 40 and 32 thousand men, respectively, but they’re both a generation behind the others. The tribe of Benjamin also has only 35,000, but Benjamin may as well have been a generation behind too, he was so much younger than the others.
The Levites are exempt from military service because it’s their job to maintain the tabernacle.
The Lord also lays out how to set up the camp whenever they stop somewhere. The system they are given is very defensible. Not everyone sets up their tents at the same time. The 6 biggest, strongest tribes set up first in two giant divisions near each other. Once they’re placed, the tabernacle is constructed between them. Finally the other tribes pitch their tents on the two most open sides of the tabernacle, so if the first two divisions were east and west of the tabernacle, the last two would be north and south, according to God’s plan for setting up the camp.
So that’s what they did.
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