Bamidbar: Numbers

Accounting is a course that I did not take in college. I wish I had.  The interpretation of  numbers and the valuation of goods and services remains an arcane art to me.  This week we have a parsha that is mostly numbers. 

The accounting begins with a census, documenting the number of military age men in each of the twelve (non-Levite)  tribes.  The size of the tribe presumably correlates with  political power and it will, eventually, determine the size of  its portion in the promised land.  The tribes are also presented in groupings that roughly reflect their maternal lineages - perhaps another  parameter of status.  This census, like all national censuses, has political implications

We are also informed of the strength of the army: 603,550.  This is a terrifyingly large force.  The size of this force should deter any enemy attack.  The arrangement of the armies is also given relative to the central  zone of the tabernacle and the direction of travel.  Thus, a well informed enemy ( perhaps Amalek) would know the front from the rear and the relative number of soldiers on the flanks, and could plan an attack from the rear. 

I grew up with several numbers that can be expressed as 6 X 10^n.  The number in the parsha, 600,000, 6 X 10^5, is the number of military aged men that left Egypt, the tally assembled at Sinai.  This is the seed of Israel. This is also the number of Jews in Palestine in 1947, just before the declaration of the state.  Then there is 6 X 10^6, 6,000,000, the rounded best estimate of the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust.  (I know that I did not need to mention that one.)

The number of firstborn males is also given: 22,273. That can give us estimate of the number of children per family . By straight division  (603,550/ 22,273)  we see that  approximately 1 in 27 males was firstborn.  Since half the firstborn children were female, and they were not in the count, we half that number and the average family would have 13.5 children (a credible number in parts of Brooklyn).  This number needs to further corrected for the exponential curve of population growth, which makes the younger portion of the population  a higher percentage.  But that gets into accounting.  

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