Bamidbar describes the census taken of the tribes of Israel and their spatial assignments around the Mishkan. Like a census today that assigns resources to different demographics, this census assigned encampments and roles, particularly to the Levites and Kohathites. Unlike a census today, not everyone was counted: the task was to count only men over 20 who could bear arms. This number came to 603,550 (shesh meot elef v’shloshet alafim v’chamesh meot v’chamishim), not including the Levites, because their role was to perform sacred duties in the Mishkan rather than take up arms. It should strike us that this number is absurdly high. I did some back-of-the-envelope population calculations to see what this could be.
First, we need to set the average age at death. Note that there’s a misconception that people in ancient times only lived to be 30 (based on high infant mortality) the actual life expectancy of someone who survived 20 could be 60-80. Life spans in Bereshit were magically long (let’s not complicate the absurdity with trying to factualise it through midrash), but seemed to be in decline so that Moses died at 120. Bamidbar 8:25 states that the priests should retire at age 50, which Rashi explains as more of a gentle retirement from hard labour rather than leaving Temple service entirely. Pirkei Avot (5:21) suggests age categories by decade: “At sixty old age; at seventy fullness of years; at eighty the age of “strength”; at ninety a bent body; at one hundred, as good as dead and gone completely out of the world.” A former colleague of mine at the Petrie Museum of Egyptology researched the Instruction of Ptahhotep, a wisdom text that instructs the young to listen to and venerate the elderly and also advises the aged king to retire. The Middle Kingdom-era Westcar Papyrus indicated that 110 years was an ideal lifespan. Ramesses II reportedly died at 90, and although scientific methods of age assessment are imperfect for the super-elderly, research on his mummy indicates he was certainly extremely old. So, let’s use a uniform distribution model (an equal number of people across age categories), and cap maximum age at 80 (except for Moses). That would mean men age 20-80 are 76.25% of the total male population, and the total number of men is 791,541. If the population ratio is 1:1, then there’d be an equal number of women, giving a total of 1,583,082 Israelites in the camp, minus the Levites.
The Levite males were counted from age 1 month and up. Assuming the same demographic spread, there would be 16,500 Levite men over 20, and a total Israelite population of 1,627,082. This doesn’t account for any other demographic distribution patterns, like a higher proportion of children in populations with high birth rates (at least, children who survive past 5 years), a higher number of older women, and other smaller trends over the life course. Some other estimates that include a higher number of children calculate 2.4 million Israelites.
First: these numbers are absurdly high.1.6 million is the population of Glasgow, which is a very large number of people to move through the desert at any reasonable pace. Considering temporary desert encampments, the size of the area surrounding the Mishkan would be the equivalent of 22 Burning Man festivals or 8 Glastonburys (other temporary encampments centred around a ritual site). This presents numerous issues with acquiring water and sharing space (food isn’t an issue, because they’re given mannah and birds), and don’t forget the rules about digging latrines in Dvarim 23:12-14, which must be outside the camps, indicating space between the tribal camps.
There’s an alternative explanation for this number: the word elef, which is commonly translated as 1000, might instead mean family or clan. This is also useful in Shmot 12:37, where 600,000 (sheshet me’ot elef) fighting men left Egypt; this could be 600 clans of fighting men, and the 603,500 men about could similarly be a tenth of the size we were imagining. It makes reading the list of thousands of men into a list more like synagogue membership: “46 families, with 500 men”. The total for that reading would be only around 14,500, which is much smaller and manageable – only 1/5 the size of Burning Man, or the size of the Cambridge Folk Festival.
A question remains after the population estimates: who’s not counted? God instructed Moses to “take a census of the whole Israelite community” and then specifies to count by “every male” (1:2). Were women not counted in the edah? Are we not included in the covenant either? Or was there something else going on? When the census in Britain began in 1801, census takers found married women difficult to count. That first census asked professions, but families usually worked together. Census-takers marked women’s occupations variably as the same as her husband (usually agriculture) or as “other”, not being certain about women’s employment. In cases where women were employed prior to marriage, their businesses were thereafter marked as those of their husbands. In the 1821 census, it was suspected that women lied about their ages depending on whether they were married or not. It is also suspected that married middle-class women lied about having occupations at all. Of course, the people taking the census were men. Even in these Victorian censuses where we can rely on an accurate count, women are somehow slippery, becoming invisible in the same way the Israelite women were when they remained uncounted.
Thinking of the unstated purpose of the Israelite census – not just space assignments, but a count of military-age men – it’s possible the reason women were excluded was because they were not going to be fighters nor priests. They were included in the community, but not the count, similar to the Victorian census where the total mattered but not the minutiae. I’m pleased that today, women’s presence and work, though not recognised in historic censuses, is now seen, recognised, and counted as part of the minyan; while we may have been uncounted in the wilderness, we were always fully present.
Dr Stacy Hackner, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.