The Overview & The Wilderness - Torah Study with R. Block

First an overview of the 'plot':

Genesis - the 4 generations from creation to Moses
Exodus - Moses from birth to Exodus
All the rest - "IN THE WILDERNESS"

And, of course, Leviticus is all the "nitty gritty" that actually doesn't move the story anywhere so, if you are reading for the plot line... well... you could skip that book and not miss much!

You pick up in Numbers with a census that seems to say there were 603,550 males over 20 in the population - seems incredulous - especially since adding in women and children... well too many for such a small place.

So there are possible explanations: the number in Hebrew might just have referenced a 'sub-group' and therefore the actual number would have been about 10% less. Or it might have been a mistranslation... well that has happened before... maybe.

"a metaphor is one way to overcome difficult text" and this may be one of the cases.

Anyway...

The discussion continued pointing out that some of the detail descriptions "IN THE WILDERNESS" seemed to indicate that it may have been written looking back from an historic perspective. "the sequence of the Torah may not be exact" sometimes it seems more like a reconstruction of the history. The materials used to build the tabernacle, for example, didn't seem to be the type things the former slaves would have brought with them from Egypt. (but you never know) Actually, the materials listed seemed more like something you might find in Solomon's Temple.



And with that reference back to the blog on Deuteronomy : Deuteronomic History - The Setting Explains the Laws

Amazing study session .... continues with more thought provoking questions to be explored further in the next post.

Learned about another interesting link for study of parashot:

more review of BEMIDBAR
explore this site a bit too... interesting commentary by Dr. Larry Hurwitz.... (thanks to Sherry Blumberg for telling me about this site)