NOTES for Num 2:1-34
The camp of the Hebrews as described in the Book of Numbers is clearly not just an encampment of nomads. It is a genuine military camp, the camp of a tribal militia ready for battle. The people certainly did not become like this at once: what came out of Egypt was simply a crowd fleeing into the wilderness and miraculously escaping total destruction. That crowd could be neither warlike nor ready for war.
Here in the Book of Numbers, however, what we see is precisely a military camp inhabited by people who are ready for war and expect it. Such changes in the people could not have happened accidentally, by themselves. What, then, happened to them? On the one hand, one might say that life happened to them: life in the wilderness amid many dangers, where a coward cannot survive and where one must learn to be brave and warlike or die.
By this time the young people had grown up as well, those who were born in the wilderness after the Exodus. They no longer trembled at the thought of war, of having to take up arms and fight their way, weapons in hand, into the land of which they had heard so much from their fathers. All these are human factors, but there was another one, so clearly visible in the description of the Hebrew camp. God is at its center. The Tabernacle. The sanctuary. It is God who leads His people into the land He promised to give them. Everything else is merely a consequence. God brought Jacob’s descendants out of Egypt. God made them a people out of the crowd they had been when they fled into the wilderness.
God led His emerging people through the wilderness. Now God has made them an army able to conquer the land which He, God Himself, once promised to Abraham. God’s primacy and God’s guidance are clearly visible in the arrangement of the Hebrew military camp. Yet there is a human component here as well. It lies above all in the discipline and order that prevail in the camp. The Tabernacle is at the center, with orderly ranks all around it.
For the ranks to be orderly, the inner life of those who stand in them must also be ordered; otherwise their discipline will be merely external, for show, and will disappear at the first difficulty. This ordered state, inward and outward, is the human component. Courage and a warlike spirit alone are not enough here: what is needed is the inward spiritual integrity without which both courage and a warlike spirit often fail those who possess them. The Hebrew camp gives the impression of precisely this kind of order connected with inner integrity, the very thing required to conquer the land promised by God.