NOTES for Num 2:1-34

The camp of the Hebrews, as it is described in the Book of Numbers, is clearly not merely a nomadic encampment. It is a true military camp, the camp of a tribal militia ready for battle. Of course, the people did not become that way at once: what came out of Egypt was simply a crowd fleeing into the wilderness and miraculously escaping complete destruction. That crowd could not have been either warlike or ready for war.

Here, however, in the Book of Numbers, what stands before us is precisely a military camp, where people live who are ready for war and expecting war. Such changes in the people could not have happened by chance, all by themselves. What happened to the people? On the one hand, one could say that life happened to them. Life in the wilderness, amid many dangers, where the cowardly cannot survive, where one must learn to be brave and warlike - or die. And the young people had grown up by this time as well - those who had already been born in the wilderness, after the Exodus. They no longer trembled at the thought of war, at the thought that they would have to take up weapons and, weapons in hand, break through into the land about which they had heard so much from their fathers.

All these are human factors - but there was also another factor, one so clearly visible in the description of the Hebrews' camp. Here God is at the center. The Tabernacle. The sanctuary. It is God who leads His people into the land He promised to give them. Everything else is only a consequence. God brought the descendants of Jacob out of Egypt. God made them a people - out of the crowd they were when they fled into the wilderness.

God led His forming people through the wilderness. Now God has made them into an army that will be able to conquer the land that He, God Himself, once promised to Abraham. God's primacy and God's guidance are clearly visible in the arrangement of the Hebrews' military camp. There is, however, also a human component here. It lies above all in the ordered formation, in the order that reigns in the camp. The Tabernacle is at the center, and around it are orderly ranks.

For the ranks to be orderly, the inner life of those who stand in those ranks must also be ordered; otherwise the order will be merely external, for show, disappearing at the first difficulties. This ordering, inner and outer, is the human component. Mere bravery and warlikeness are not enough here - what is needed is that inner, spiritual wholeness without which both warlikeness and bravery often fail those who possess them. The camp of the Hebrews gives the impression of precisely such order, connected with inner wholeness. That is what is required for the conquest of the land promised by God.