Jesus' opponents repeatedly tried to catch Him out over His knowledge of Scripture and tradition: they would pose some more or less familiar problem from the field of Halakha (Jewish canon law) and see how this Teacher would handle it. The Sadducees' question about the woman whose...
Jesus' opponents repeatedly tried to catch Him out over His knowledge of Scripture and tradition: they would pose some more or less familiar problem from the field of Halakha (Jewish canon law) and see how this Teacher would handle it. The Sadducees' question about the woman who had several husbands, each of whom died in turn, was of the same kind. Yet Jesus' answer proved completely unexpected. He immediately rejects not only the traditional solutions to the problem, but also the very perspective from which it is posed; He breaks, so to speak, the traditional paradigm of thought. And this is hardly surprising: for Jesus the world is the Kingdom. That is the only way He perceives it.
Such a perception does not come easily to us, whereas He was born with it. It is not that He is unable to look at the world differently, but such a view is unnatural to Him. That is why He sees unexpected and paradoxical answers to traditional questions. In this case too, the Saviour answers quite differently from what might have been expected. As always, He speaks of the Kingdom: there are no dead in it, just as there is no concept of marriage in the earthly sense. People do not, of course, become angels after the resurrection, but in some respects their life truly becomes more like the life of angels than that of people in the fallen world.
Everything is different in the Kingdom, entirely unlike what the overwhelming majority of Jesus' contemporaries imagined. For the fullness of life there is absolute: each person has his or her own fullness, yet for everyone it is absolute. There are no dead there, whereas our human mind imagines even the Kingdom within the familiar paradigm of life and death. We often imagine even immortality not as a new quality of being, but as the endless continuation of its present earthly quality, with all the relationships of this earthly life and all its problems, some of them truly insoluble if extended unchanged into infinity. This, in fact, is precisely what the Sadducees were doing when they presented their opponents with problems like the one they put to Jesus.
But He answers in His own way, from the Kingdom, from that fullness of true life which alone can be called life in the genuine sense of the word. And those who questioned Him fall silent. They have nothing more to say: the world disclosed to them in the Saviour's answers is too unlike the one to which they are accustomed, as different as heaven and earth.
1 Orders given to Moses to number the people, Num 1:1-4.
Persons named to assist him therein, Num 1:5-16.
The particular number of each tribe, Num 1:17-43.
The sum of all together, Num 1:44-46.
The Levites excepted, Num 1:47-54.
1:1 In the wilderness - Where now they had been a full year or near it, as may be gathered by comparing this place with Exo 19:1 Num 1, Exo 40:17, .
1:2 Take the sum - This is not the same muster with that Exo 38:26, as plainly appears, because that was before the buildingof the tabernacle, which was built and set up on the first day of the first month, Exo 40:2, but this was after it, on the first day of the second month. And they were for different ends; that was to tax them for the charges of the tabernacle; but this was for other ends, partly that the great number of the people might be known to the praise of God's faithfulness, in making good his promises of multiplying them, and to their own encouragement: partly for the better ordering their camp and march, for they were now beginning their journey; and partly that this account might he compared with the other in the close of the book, where we read that not one of all this vast number, except Caleb and Joshua were left alive; a fair warning to all future generations to take heed of rebelling against the Lord. It is true, the sums and numbers agree in this and that computation, which is not strange, because there was not much time between the two numberings, and no eminent sin among the people in that interval, whereby God was provoked to diminish their numbers.Some conceive that in that number, Exo 30:11-16 and Exo 38:25-26, the Levites were included, which are here excepted, Num 1:47, and that in that interval of time, there were grown up as many more men of those years as there were Levites of the same age. Israel - So the strangers mixed with them, were not numbered. Their fathers - The people were divided into twelve tribes, the tribes into great families, Num 26:5, these great families into lesser families called thehouses of their fathers, because they were distinguished one from another by their fathers.
1:5 Reuben - The tribes are here numbered according to the order or quality of their birth, first the children of Leah, then of Rachel, and then of the handmaids.