God Raises Every Head of Israel in the Desert

On the first day of the second month of the second year out of Egypt, in the Tent of Meeting, Moses was handed an order with a date on it.

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The order was to take a census, and the words the order used were se'u et rosh, raise the head of the whole congregation of the Children of Israel (Numbers 1:1-2). Scribes came with their lists. The tribal standards went up in the wind, and out past the last row of tents there was nothing to look at in any direction.

A Contract, Not a Count

A king had married before, more than once, and had never bothered to write any of those wives a marriage contract, and when he sent them off he did not write a bill of divorce either. Then he saw an orphan girl who was well born and modest and upright, and he went to his groomsman about her. "Do not do with her what was done with the first ones," he said. "Write her a contract. Put down which seven-year period, which year, which month, which district."

The generation of the flood got no such paperwork. Heaven made them and did not write down when, and wiped them out and did not write down when, and all the record says is that on that day the wellsprings of the great deep were breached (Genesis 7:11). The tower generation went the same way, and so did Egypt. But this order in Moses' hands carried the district, which was the Tent of Meeting, and the year, which was the second, and the month, which was the second, and the day, which was the first, and the era, which was of their exodus from the land of Egypt. Nobody dates an errand like that. So what Moses had been handed was not a tally. It was a signature going onto a bond, and he was the one holding the pen.

Heads in a Country With No Walls

"I have not cherished any creation more than you," the Holy One said to Israel, "and so I have given you a head held high and likened you to Me. Just as I am exalted as head over all that comes into the world, I have done the same for you."

The clans came up in order, and the scribes wrote, and somewhere in that line stood a man who had spent his working life carrying wet brick for a foreman who never asked his name. He heard his father's house called out. He gave his name and it went down on the list, and he stepped away with nothing on his head and nothing in his hand.

There was no city out there to lend anybody standing. No gate, no throne room, no fields, nothing but tents and manna and a sanctuary that folded up for travel. The head-lifting happened in that country because it had to come from somewhere else, since the country had nothing to give.

The Wolf Got Into the Flock

Thirty-eight years later the same order came again, and this time it came right after a plague (Numbers 26:1-2). Every time they fell they were counted. A wolf gets in among the sheep and goes back out through the same gap, and then the owner walks in among the animals and counts them, because counting is how a man learns what is missing.

Moses stood in the plains of Moab while the totals came in clan by clan. He had been given about six hundred thousand men on foot at the going out from Egypt, and he had been given them by name and by number. He knew what he was holding now, and he knew it because he had just counted it.

The second count is not a gentler thing than the first. It assumes the wolf, and the blood on the grass, and the fathers and sons who were on the first list and are not on this one. The order was still the same order. Raise the head.

Returning the Flock Counted

A householder hands a shepherd a flock after counting it out in front of him, and when the watch is over the shepherd does not simply walk off and leave the animals in the field. He stands there while they are counted back, one by one, into the hands that gave them. That is what the second census was.

Moses had received them numbered in the wilderness of Sinai and he was about to die. So he returned them numbered, on the near side of a river he had been told he would not cross, and the last thing he did with the people he had carried for forty years was hold them still long enough for somebody to write down how many of them were left.