The purpose of this tally of the adult males 20 years of age and older was to identify those who would serve in battle when Israel entered the land (v. 3).11Entrance into the land should have been only a few weeks from the taking of this census. Moses had taken another census nine months before this one (Exod. 30:11-16; 38:25-26), but the purpose of that count was to determine how many adult males owed atonement money. The census described in Numbers 1 excluded the Levites whom God exempted from military service in Israel (vv. 49-50).
The number of fighting men in each tribe counted was as follows.
The total was 603,550 men (v. 46).12Since each figure ends in zero it appears that Moses rounded off these numbers. God was already well on the way to making the patriarchs' descendants innumerable.
"It is in the context of developing a military organization for war that the Levites are assigned their tasks in relation to the tabernacle. In a sense, their military assignment is the care and transportation of the religious shrine. Num. 1:49-53 clearly outlines the requirements for the militaristic protection of the tabernacle by the Levites."13
The total impression of Israel's God that this chapter projects is that He is a God of order rather than confusion (cf. Gen. 1; 1 Cor. 14:40).
The phrase "the Lord spoke to Moses"(v. 1) occurs over 80 times in the Book of Numbers.14
