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Numbers 1:44 - Thoughts on the numbers is Numbers

Good afternoon friends,

Did you have a happy Twosday? Twelve/twenty two/twenty twenty.  Get it?  

Welcome to the 4th book of Moses.  Ready to leave Sinai and head to the Promised Land a little over 2 years after leaving Egypt.  They have the 10 commandments.  God wants them to know what lies ahead, so He directs Moses to count the able body men who are able to go to war.

Blessings,

Jeff

The twelve actual sons of Israel are adjusted when considering those able to go to war..  Joseph is replaced by his two sons (Ephraim and Manasseh) and Levi is omitted as they are the priest and tabernacle guardians.  So there are still 12 tribes able to fight and have specific allotments in the Promised Land.

The process of translating numbers seems to be a bit of a mystery to me.  You may not know it, but the use of 0 as a place holder didn't start until around 300 BC, long after Moses.  So we see these numbers and might think that Moses used Arabic numbers.  The brilliant Romans refused to recognize 0. That is why manipulating Roman numerals is so difficult.  For example, X times X  is C.  We would say 10 times 10 is 100.  Yes I am a bit of a math nerd.

So the Hebrew use multiples of a base number.  603,550 is a multiple of 6 plus some other numbers..  Not very exact to my way of thinking.  

All this to say I think it is interesting that Numbers is an interesting name for a book that uses words and not numbers per se.  It is really the two censuses that give us this name.  Two countings of the people of Israel.

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