The Pulpit Commentary — Numbers — Section 7

Kohath was born in his father's thirty-eighth yea.r, and was accordingly two yee.ra of age when he was deported from the land of Oanaan. But Kohath in turn married, say at thirty yea.rs of age, and had a son named Amram, who is represented as having begotten Moses, say at the age of forty. Adding twenty-eight (30-2) and forty and eighty as the age of Moses at the exodus, we can only make 148 years instead of 215, showing that between Levi and Moses there were more descents than four, and that the Amram of ver. 20, who was Moses' father, was not the son of Kohath spoken of in ver. 18, but a remote descendant of that individual. The accuracy of this caloula.tion is further strikingly confirmed by a reference to the number of the Kohathites in the time of Moses, of whom the fourth part, or 2150 (men and boys), were Amramites (eh. iii. 27, 28); from which it follows, since Moses had only two sons, that he must have been possessed of brothers and nephews to the number of 2147, which is simply inconceivable (cf. Keil' on Ex.,' vi. 27; Knrtz, 'Hist. of 0. C.,' Vol. II. p. 144). Henoe, instead of four descents for the increase of Israel, we may reasonably reckon seven, and in some instances, like that of J oshU&, eight or nine (1 Chron. vii. 20-27); and this, without demanding any higher rate of increase than attended Jacob's sons in the first generation, would abundantly satisfy all the requirements of the case. Of the seventy souls who went down into Egypt, assuming that only Jacob's grandsons, fifty-one in number, were capable of further out-population, and that each of these had only four sons (Oolenso allows four and a half), their increase may be thus represented:- At the end of let 30 years 204 males. ,, ,, 2nd ,, ,, 816 ., ,, ,, 3rd ,, ., 3,264 ,, ,, ,, 4th ,, ., 13,056 ,, ,, ,, 5th ,, ,. 52,224 ., ,, ., 6th ,, ., 208,896 ., ., ., 7th ., ., 835,584 ., That is, the 208,896 fa.there of the sixth descent had at the close of the next thirty years, or immediately before the exodus, 835,584 sons, to whom if we add 64,416 surviving fa.there and grandfathers we shall bring the total up to 900,000 males, the number requisite, according to Oolenso, to give 600,000 fighting men above twenty yea.re of age. It is true that in this calculation we have excluded the operation of the law of mortality among families, but then to counterbalance this we might warrant.ably have claimed a higher rate of increase than that adopted, since it is certain God had promised that the blessing of fruitfulneSB should attend Jacob's descendants in Egypt, and since we know that Pharaoh must have observed something unueual in the rapid multiplication of the Hebrews to ea.use him to promulgate his truculent decree. Thus, without resorting to the (somewhat doubtful) hypothesis of Kurtz(' Hist. of 0. O.,' VoL II. p. 149), that Jacob and his sons were accompanied into Egypt by men-servants and ma.id-servants, whose offspring were included in the family of Israel, there need be no difficulty in believing that the entire congregation of Israelites proper numbered between two and three million souls. 2. Nor was it likely that the question of finding sustenance for themselves and for their flocks and herds occaaioned them as much anxiety as it has since done to rationalistic critics. Oolen.so, again following in the wake of Knobel and Bohlen, has decla.red it an absolute imposeibility that such a maSB of human beings with their cattle could obtain support for such a length of time e.s forty years from the  THE BOOK OF NUMBERS. ix