The book of Numbers opens on a triumphant note. A census of all conscriptable males above the age of twenty yields precisely 603,550, a figure that implies a total population of over two million Israelites. God's promise to Abraham, "I will make of you a great nation" (Genesis 12:2), has been fulfilled. When Jacob, his grandson, relocated to Egypt, his household numbered but seventy persons (Genesis 46:27). Several hundred years later, freed from slavery and about to traverse the wilderness, the clan has grown into a formidable nation, with the military might to reach and conquer its destination.

The haftarah drawn from the prophet Hosea adds a ringing confirmation of God's hand in this population explosion: "The number of the people of Israel shall be like that of the sands of the sea, which cannot be measured or counted" (Hosea 2:1). A nation without number is a sign of God's favor. The restoration which Hosea foresees will mirror a prior moment of greatness squandered in faithlessness. As understood by the midrash, Hosea's words apply to the distant past as well as to the remote future.

According to the midrash, God used a different simile to assure each of the three patriarchs, whose wives had such difficulty conceiving, that their progeny would proliferate beyond number. To Abraham, God promised that his seed one day would be as numerous as the stars (Genesis 15:5) to Isaac, as the sand (Hosea 2:1), and to Jacob, as the dust of the earth (Genesis 28:14). Fully appreciative of God's fidelity, Moses in his final discourse intentionally reiterated the simile of the stars in describing Israel's population: "The Lord your God has multiplied you until you are today as numerous as the stars in the sky" (Deuteronomy 1:10). The simile was predicated upon the just-completed census of the generation of young men born in the desert that came to 601,730 (Numbers 26:51). In other words, the forty-year wilderness sojourn was framed by two nearly identical censuses that proved the same point: God's promise to the patriarchs had not been idle rhetoric (B'midbar Rabbah 2:12).

The midrash identifies at least two occasions when the Israelites were subject to a census. Despite the upbeat tone of our parashah, counting heads was usually fraught with danger. For example, before the construction of the Tabernacle, Moses was instructed to register all males over twenty in a circuitous fashion. Each was to "pay the Lord a ransom for himself on being enrolled, that no plague may come upon them through their being enrolled" (Exodus 30:12). 

Thus to calculate the population, one counted coins, not heads. Since the taking of a census was generally associated with conscription for war, the procedure aroused anxiety and never enacted lightly. 

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