I’m not a numbers guy (which is ironic, since we’re literally in the book of Numbers), so “contradictions” that have to do with population numbers have always given me trouble.
I’m also a Biblical literalist though, which means I believe that every word in Scripture is factual, inerrant, and trustworthy. Because of that, when I do come across “inconsistencies,” I need to sit down and work through it.
So, here we are at Numbers 3:39. On the surface, it doesn’t seem like much of a contradiction. God says that the population of Levi is 22,00, so that’s the number I’ll take.
But then, when you add up the numbers from the three individual families in the Levitical tribe—the Gershonites, the Kohathites, and the Merarites—you get a slightly different number: 22,300. That’s a difference of 300 people. Did God make a mistake? Or did those 300 people just not matter?
There several explanations that people have put forth in order to justify this difference. The most popular one is the one I am most uncomfortable with: a scribal or copyist error. This is the belief that somewhere, a guy flipped his pen the wrong way and wrote a number that was slightly incorrect, and that error was copied in Bibles throughout centuries.
I’m uncomfortable with that idea for two reasons. First, if you open the door for a number error, what other type of error could be hiding in plain sight? Is Heaven not even Heaven? Was Jesus not a man? Was Paul actually from Oklahoma?
The other problem I have is that there are usually enough copies of Biblical manuscripts that we can go back and check most of these numbers. That’s why the Dead Sea Scrolls are so valuable—they verify that what we have now is what the Old Testament looked like in Jesus’ day.
(Speaking of the Texts in Jesus’ day, His generation would have most likely used the Septuagint, which puts the number of Kohathites at 8300, which would make the final number an even 22,000. Boom. Contradiction solved.)
Look, I know humans make mistakes. I get that. Several well-studied and yet still-believing scholars hold this position concerning this specific “Biblical contradiction.” But we’re dealing with the Word of God here. We owe it to God and ourselves to turn over every stone.
Another explanation is that the copyists simply rounded the numbers up or down, which explains why the final tally doesn’t match the individual counts. If Merari only had 6151 (instead of 6200), Kohath only had 8551 (instead of 8600) and Gershon only had 7451 (instead of 7500), that would equal 22153, which rounds down (according to thousands) to 22000.
That explanation involves too many hoops, though. It’s inconsistent in its counting, so it doesn’t seem the most probable.
The Babylonian Talmud, on the other hand, argues that these 273 “extra” Levites were firstborn themselves, so they wouldn’t have been included in the final number. So that’s a third explanation.
In the end, I’m more inclined to believe in a hybrid approach. The numbers are too “perfect” to be exact—all the tribes ended in exactly a multiple of hundreds? Seems like a symbolic number to me.
But I also think that number was corrected in the Septuagint. The New Testament writers quoted from the Septuagint on several occasions, which makes it authoritative as well.
What do you think? How would you reconcile these two numbers?
