The Building of Community
These verses are a kind of index for the next five chapters. The details matter little but the underlying principles are fundamental for any society. They say something important about the structuring of a community from a rabble by a method which they believe was as God would wish. That is not to suggest that we copy the details but see the principles rather as a litmus test for any community which claims to be founded on the Judaeo-Christian tradition; one might almost say contemporary western society. There are five steps.
First, if they are to fulfil their desire for unity and cooperation they need to know who they are, and to recognise their near neighbours.
Second, they need security, not necessarily within their community but as they travel together through rough and unknown territory, and that means identifying men over 20 with a capacity to defend them when needed.
Third, they need mature men (and in this world men it had to be) who could exercise overall care and responsibility for keeping the rules and regulations, and the ethos of the society, and since they had to be impartial they were to be identified from the start as ‘different’; hence the special role of the Levites.
Fourth, every tribe needed to know its place in the overall scheme of things. There was a pecking order when they came to move. Each tribe had its own space and place and one wonders if they planners gave thought as to which tribes could live cheek by jowl and which needed to be kept at a distance.
Fifth, they needed a focal point as a marker, equally accessible to all, and that was the Ark of the Covenant, symbol of Yahweh and all that he meant to them.
Success depended on strong leadership. It was a plus that they all had the same ancestry, even if that was hundreds of years ago. A minus was that during those years they had lived separately. No doubt each had developed their own customs and traditions, and sometimes being similar but different can be more demanding than being wholly other.