The Pulpit Commentary — Numbers — Section 6

an interval of nine mouths had elapsed between them (Colenso 'on the Pent.,' VoL I. oh. vii. p. 42), But without insisting on the faot that etntionary communities, i11 respect of population, are by no means unknown in modem times, it ma.y be legitimately urged either, (1) with Michaelis, Kurtz, and others, that there was no actual numbering at all on the occasion of the lifting of the poll tax, but that the real census was taken on making up the muster roll, the number yielded by it , being employed without hesitation to indicate the amount raised by the tax, in 'consequence of the variation in the sum total being but trifling; or, (2) with Gerlach, Keil, 'Speaker's Commentary,' &o., that the second registration was not a fresh census in the strict sense of the term, but simply a olaseification of the results of the preceding enumeration by thousands, hundreds, and tens, in accordance with Jethro's suggestion; or, (3) with Lange, that the two censuses were really one, which, beginning with the view of lifting a tax and ending with the conetru.ction of an army, extended, like the oensUB of David at a later period (2 Sam. xxiv. 8), over the entire space of nine months or a year. II. THE NUMBER OF THE OONGREGATION, Accepting then what seems to be indisputable, that the census of the adult males reached the round !l1lID of 600,000, and estimating the proportion of those adult males or persons in the prime of life and capable of bearing arms, to the rest of the population, in accordance with the somewhat precarious standard of modem statistics, as that of one to four or five, it may be safely concluded that the entire body of the people, or "the whole congre- gation," numbered between two and three millions. But neologic criticism professes itself at a loBB to understand how in the course of 215 years the seventy souls that came into Egypt (Gen. xlvi. 26, 27 ; Deut. x. 22) could have developed into so formidable a community; how in the Arabian peninsula, which at the present moment is a scene of barrenness and desolation, scarcely capable of sustaining a population of over 5000, so vast a multitude could have subsisted for a period of forty years, and how, if the Israelites had been so large a nation in the Mosaic age, they should either have been so long in conquering the land of Canaan as the Books of Joshua, Judges, and 1 Samuel represent them to have been, or have found it possible to live alongside of the Oanaanites within so limited a territory. 1. Colen~o ('Pent.,' Vol. I. eh. xvii.), following Bohlen, declares the increase of seventy souls into two and a half millions in the space of 215 years, the interval between the descent into Egypt and the exodus from Egypt, to be open to serious difficulties, if not impossible (cf. Kuenen·, • The Religion of Israel,' Vol. L eh. ii p. 163); and it may be frankly conceded that if his principles of computation are correct, his conclusion cannot possibly be set aside. If in the 215 years there were only four descents, if the rate of increase was no greater in Egypt than it had been previously, i. e. four or five sons to a family, and if none but pure Israelites were recognised as forming part of the congregation, then it need not surprise one to learn that, "instead of 600,000 warriors in the prime of life, there could not have been 6000," that "if the numbers of all the males in the four generations be added together (which supposes that they were all living at the time of the exodus), they would only amount to 6311,'' and that, even with the addition of the ohildren of the fifth generation, " the sum total of males of all generations could not, according to these data, have exceeded 28,466, instead of being 1,000,000." But none of tht above assumptions can be regarded as established certainties. The first indeed appears to reoeive support from Exod. vi. 16, 18, 20, whioh seems to style Mose1, the great-grandson of Levi. But as Levi was at least forty years of age at the desoent into Egypt, and had three sons before that event, we may reokon that viii THE AUTHENTICITY AND AUTHORSHIP OF