Finding Yourself in Your Family Story

Finding Yourself in Your Family Story
NUMBERS 1: 1-2: 34

My son Mark just came across a photo from exactly twelve years ago. My wife, Ann, and my mother are sitting at a picnic table; I am lying on the grass (“typically,” Mark said; I am not sure what to make of that). Somewhere in the vicinity are our other son, Steven, and his wife, Sue, because it is a family farewell party on the Sunday before Ann and I undertake the biggest move of our lives. Three days later (twelve years ago tomorrow, as I write), we will get on the plane for that strange flight that starts in mid-afternoon and leaves you in Los Angeles still in the early evening even though it is eleven hours later. Among the poignancies of the moment is the fact that Ann’s being wheelchair-bound means we will not be making the trip back across the Atlantic as other people do, and my mother’s being nearly ninety means she will not be making the trip to see us, so we have had to face the fact that we are unlikely all to be together again. Behind us in the photo is our house, in which you could see the marks of preparation for this move. We have pointed out to our sons that this is the time they have to collect any of the belongings they left there when they moved out, and what they did not collect has gone to the thrift store. Most of the belongings we intend to take were shipped some weeks ago so they would get there before us (they didn’t, but that’s another story). Now, we simply have to pack our actual suitcases...

At the beginning of Numbers, the Israelites encamped at Mount Sinai are about to resume the biggest move of their lives. It should take about eleven days to complete it, rather than eleven hours. Actually it will take astonishingly longer, for reasons that will emerge. The first ten chapters of the book concern preparations for this move.

The story so far has established that the move may involve some battles. They didn’t have to fight the Egyptians, and God has said nothing about fighting the Canaanites; God has taken responsibility for seeing the Canaanites off. But Abraham once had to go to battle to rescue Lot when he got taken captive in the context of war, and Moses and Joshua had to lead Israel in defending themselves against the Amalekites on the way from Egypt to Sinai. God sometimes enables the people of God to live in the world on the basis of extraordinary divine interventions but sometimes lets them live in that world on a basis not so different from the one everyone else uses. Jesus will both urge his disciples to be peacemakers and at the Last Supper tell them to buy a sword. It won’t be surprising if the Israelites need to fight again. So they are going to march as a fighting force.

It might still seem odd that the first thing Moses and Aaron do in preparing to leave Sinai is count their fighting men. In 2 Samuel 24 David gets in trouble for doing this, a difference that reflects how people are sometimes expected simply to rely on God (counting soldiers thus suggests lack of trust) but on other occasions to take responsibility for their destiny in the way other people do. And it is significant that here God, not Moses, commissions the count.

The story has another implication for people listening to it. Like most citizens of the United States or any other country, most of the listeners will never be involved in fighting wars. The kinds of wars Numbers will relate belong in the distant past, as the battles involved in conquering North America and gaining independence lie in the distant past for people in the United States. Yet they are part of the story that defines the nation as a whole.

Although Moses’ count involves only the fighting force, it is described as a count of the whole community. The people who belong to the twelve clans are not just the soldiers but the people of every age and both sexes. The whole community is about to undertake this journey, and there is another sense in which people listening to the story find themselves here not because they belong to a fighting force but because it is their family story. They all belong to Reuben, or Zebulun, or Dan, or one of the other clans. When they hear the name of their clan, it enables them to nudge one another and say, “That’s us!” It is their story.

Maybe there is another hint of this being their family story in a puzzling feature of the story. The fighting force comes to 603,550. With the women, the young people, and the old people, that implies a total community of two or three million. That is about the population of the whole of Egypt at this time. Canaan’s population was maybe 200,000. Never until the twentieth century did Palestine’s population come to two or three million. If the Israelites had proceeded like a wagon train, it would have been 2,500 miles long. Even with wagons ten abreast, it would be 250 miles long.

The problem here is not that God could not have provided such a large company with food and water; God could have done so. The problem is that the numbers are out of all proportion with the numbers of peoples in the area at this time. One reason may be that the numbers have come to be misunderstood. The word for thousand is also the word for company in Numbers 1:16, and elsewhere it can denote a family. If the community was about six hundred families, this would make more sense. Yet six hundred thousand would cover the Israelites over quite a number of generations, and the people listening to the story could see the figure as also covering them. It is as if they were there, taking part in the exodus, the covenant making, and the journey to Canaan.

They are described as clans, kin groups, and households. The clans are often referred to as tribes, but this term is misleading. Tribes suggests separate peoples (Israel itself is more like a tribe). The twelve clans are the descendants of the twelve sons of Jacob, who was also called Israel—physical descendants or people adopted into these clans. Each clan divides into kin groups, and each kin group, into households (I avoid the word family, which can also be misleading). A “father’s household” would be my wife and me, our two sons and their wives, and their children. Israelites might have more sons, though they would likely have lost some in childbirth or infancy (daughters would have married into other families). We would not be living eight thousand miles apart but in adjacent houses in the same village, farming our plot of land nearby. A “kin group” would include the households headed up by my brothers (if I had any). The village as a whole might include a couple of other kin groups from my clan, from whom my sons would have found their wives.


Taken from Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone by John Goldingay