"Numbers": because it begins with a census. It may seem odd that God should command Moses to count the people, since according to a certain view He could instead simply consult His omniscience. The A student, however, will detect in this bureaucratic activity not the mind of God but the Priestly source (P), which, alas, is behind at least three-fourths of the book of Numbers. "Our interest," John Updike once wrote, in a review of a new translation of the Pentatuech, "trends downhill." It's not the translator's fault. One of the greatest of Old Testament scholars, Gerhard von Rad, describing P in his Old Testament Theology, speaks of "[t]he coldness and stiffness of the presentation, which gives the appearance of an utter lack of interest in ordinary humanity, psychology, and the poetry of the situations." Jawohl.
The Hebrew title, "In the Wilderness," might be more apt, but let us pause to register the results of the census. The P source's report is somewhat more elaborate than would be necessary, but it wouldn't be P if we were just given the number. So there is a roll call. In repetetive, formulaic phrases, we learn, one at a time, how many men of military age are in each of the tribes. It turns out that there are 603,550 men over the age of 20. If this were true, as it plainly cannot be, the number of all the people alternately encamped and marching in the desert would have been around two million. Suppose they marched a hundred abreast with the length of a single stride between rows. The entire column would then be more than ten miles long. Yet this throng, about three times the population of Boston, may, according to 10:2-3, be summoned to the entrance of the tent of meeting by the blowing of two trumpets. I point this out only because there are millions of Americans who believe that the whole of the Bible is the literal, inerrant, and infallible word of God.
At least in Numbers the story of the exodus continues, with the result that there is some relief from all the business about cereal offerings and sin offerings, etc.:
In the second year, in the second month, on the twentieth day of the month, the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle of the testimony, and the people of Israel set out by stages from the wilderness of Sinai; and the cloud settled down in the wilderness of Paran. (10.11-12)
The windy officiousness permits a preternaturally attentive reader to construct a timeline, for at Exodus 19.1 we had been told, "On the third new moon after the people of Israel had gone forth out of the land of Egypt, on that day they came into the wilderness of Sinai." So it took three months to get to Sinai (according to P), where the people were then encamped for almost a year. Before undertaking this project, one of the few things I thought I knew about the Pentateuch was that the people had wandered in the wilderness for either "forty years" or, if "forty years" is figurative, a hell of a long time. Now, here we are, well into the fourth of Moses's five books, and only about fifteen months have passed since the first Passover. Is the pace about to quicken?
Not really, but more years pass in fewer pages, and events of genuine human interest soon occur: a spying expedition, followed by military operations! The reconaissance mission is ordered by God, which to me seems like another instance where He maybe could have just used his God-power and told His chosen people what they would discover in the land He had promised to give to them. But, no, the spies go out, come back, and report that the land is inhabited by impressive, intimidatingly large specimens of humanity. This news brings to a climax the theme of the people murmuring against God and Moses. All this way across the desert only to face fortified cities defended by giants! We should never have left Egypt! It would have been better if we had perished in the wilderness, before we got this far! That is the gist of it; you can read chapter 14 if you think I might be overstating the complaint. The people are at the point of stoning Moses when God rouses Himself, and boy is He pissed. He's ready to kill all the chosen people right there in the desert, but Moses, knowing God's weaknesses, points out that this would cause the Egyptians to conclude that He wasn't able to lead His people into the land He had promised them. God seems to see the sense in that and, instead of killing everyone, decides that the punishment will be forty years in the wilderness, so that no member of the current faithless generation will ever set foot in the promised land. The people repent, and, that God may have evidence of their faith, an attack upon southern Canaan is ordered. But the action doesn't have His favor, for success would now contravene the verdict requiring forty years' of wandering penance, and "the Amalekites and the Canaanites who dwelt in that hill country came down and defeated them and pursued them, even to Hormah."
One is pleased that the story is not a monochrome of obedience, rewards, and triumph. The character of God, however, has troubled some readers--and by "character" I refer not to one of the dramatis personae but to the question of whether He deserves veneration. Moses, who at his first calling had protested his lack of eloquence, manipulates God by playing to His vanity. Maybe it would be wrong to make too much of this crude anthropomorphism, but it's hardly the only item in the bill of particulars. I've downplayed the dullness of Numbers, which for considerable stretches rivals Leviticus for P-source tedium. But this tedium is punctuated by bursts of grotesque violence that have the divine imprimatur. You are just reading dully along when your drowsiness is suddenly cured by, for example:
While the people of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering sticks on the sabbath day. And those who found him gathering sticks brought him to Moses and Aaron, and to all the congregation. They put him in custody, because it had not been made plain what should be done to him. And the Lord said to Moses, "The man shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp." And all the congregation brought him outside the camp, and stoned him to death with stones, as the Lord commanded Moses.
Not much of an advertisement for Sunday liquor sales--or for the moral stature of the God of Israel, either.
