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, and not without reason, thought that this refers to a ritual that would have been practically impossible to observe in the real wilderness during the journey from Sinai to Transjordan, toward the borders of the promised land. Indeed, what is described in the Book of Numbers is more like a solemn procession, appropriate during a feast precisely as a ritual, rather than like a working situation during a march.
Yet all this does not change the overall design of the Book of Numbers and its descriptions, and that design is connected with the general picture of a people who would very 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, all permeated with a distinctive symbolism, where it is pointless to look for the painterly accuracy of canvases in the historical genre. Of course, history is present here, but only as a starting point, and moreover as a point belonging more to spiritual reality than to historical reality in the sense in which modern historians speak about history.
Here both proportions and perspective are of the corresponding kind; no one today, for example, is surprised by the reverse perspective of an Orthodox icon. It is clear that such a text also needs to be read with its specific nature in mind. In that case it hardly makes sense to try to reconstruct the people's movement through the wilderness while taking into account the ritual described in the Book of Numbers, which looks more like a religious procession than the movement of nomads from one camp to another.
This is about something else: about God, who dwells 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 simply the military camp of militia fighters; it is now the camp of God's host, earthly, of course, but already somewhat and not entirely earthly. For they are always before God, and with Him at their head they go into battle, and with Him they conquer. This is how the conquest of the land takes place: by people led by God.