NOTES for Num 4:1-49
The description of how the Tabernacle was to be moved during the journey through the wilderness gives one pause. Many biblical scholars, not without reason, believed that this was a ritual which, during the journey from Sinai to Transjordan and the borders of the Promised Land, would have been practically impossible to observe in the actual wilderness. Indeed, what is described in the Book of Numbers resembles a solemn procession suitable for a feast, precisely as a ritual, more than a practical situation during a march.
Yet none of this changes the overall conception of the Book of Numbers and its descriptions. That conception is connected with the overall image of a people who would quite soon have to begin conquering the land promised long before to Abraham. This is not so much a picture as an icon, and specifically an Eastern Orthodox icon, wholly permeated by a distinctive symbolism in which it is pointless to seek the pictorial verisimilitude of historical painting.
History is certainly present here, but only as a point of departure, and moreover as a point that belongs more to spiritual reality than to historical reality in the sense in which modern historians speak of history. Its proportions and perspective correspond to this character: no one today is surprised, for example, by the reverse perspective of an Orthodox icon. Clearly, a text of this kind must likewise be read with its particular character in mind. In that case it hardly makes sense to try to reconstruct the people’s movement through the wilderness by taking account of the ritual described in the Book of Numbers, which resembles a religious procession more than nomads moving from one campsite to another.
This is about something else: about God dwelling among His people, “among” them in the most literal way, in the middle, at the center of the military camp described in the book. The camp becomes not merely a military camp of militiamen, but the camp of God’s host, earthly, of course, yet already somewhat and not entirely earthly. They are constantly before God, go into battle with Him at their head, and triumph with Him. This is how the conquest of the land takes place: by people led by God.