Bamidbar: Politics

The King James committee called this book  Numbers.  The Talmud calls it Sefer Pikudim: the book of assignments.  The theme of the parsha, and perhaps the whole book is politics. 

Moshe and Aaron and representatives of each tribe enumerate the tribes, they take a census.  This codifies the division of the people into tribes, parties which can be assumed to share distinct interests and ideas.  Even if their opinions were not different before the  separation into tribes, such differences would emerge by virtue of the separation. .A leader ( prince) of each tribe is named.  The tribes are grouped into   armies that surround the unifying tabernacle. 

The numbering is the beginning of democracy.  Notice that the most populous of each group of three tribes is always the leader of the group.  The other two tribes  in the group of three are named in order of status: birth order of the founder, but children of Leah before Billah and Zilpah.

Every male and his family is assigned a position in the camp, a place in the army or in the Holy service. The counting might be different now .(?)

 

Notice that subsequently ( in the time of David), counting the people ( without instructions)  became an offense to Gd.  It also had political  potential: to empower new groups ,who now realized their strength in numbers ( the Hebrew Hispanics?), to assert  themselves.

 

 It was hard to maintain  the people in the desert ( bamidbar), as we shall see as the book unfolds. 

 

 Everyone counts.