After the plague killed twenty-four thousand, God ordered a new census. The Targum's version of (Numbers 26) opens with a phrase absent from the Torah: "the compassions of the heavens were turned to avenge His people with judgment." The counting was not mere administration—it was an act of divine mercy, a way of showing that Israel still existed despite catastrophic losses.
The tribal listings contain one of the Targum's most important theological insertions. When it reaches Dathan and Abiram, rebels who joined Korah's revolt, the Targum notes that the earth swallowed them and fire consumed the two hundred fifty incense-bearers. But then it adds: "The sons of Korah were not in the counsel of their father, but followed the doctrine of Moses the prophet; and therefore they died not by the plague, nor were smitten by the fire, nor engulfed in the yawning of the earth." Three distinct forms of death missed them entirely—plague, fire, and the swallowing earth—because they chose the teacher over the father.
The census reveals that Her and Onan of the tribe of Judah "died on account of their sins, in the land of Canaan"—the Targum specifies the reason where the Torah is terse. Zelophehad's five daughters are named, foreshadowing their legal challenge in the next chapter.
The entry for Asher contains a remarkable legend. His daughter Serach "was conducted by six myriads of angels, and taken into the Garden of Eden alive, because she had made known to Jacob that Joseph was living." For delivering good news to her grieving grandfather centuries earlier, she was granted entry into paradise without dying—one of the very few figures in Jewish tradition to achieve this honor.
The census closes with a stark observation. Of the generation counted at Sinai under Moses and Aaron, "none of them remained except Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun." Six hundred thousand men had been replaced, one generation swapped entirely for another, the price of forty years of faithlessness.