YISD 0401_5785

(1) On the first day of the second month, in the second year following the exodus from the land of Egypt, ה׳ spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of Meeting, saying:

(42) [Of] the descendants of Naphtali, the registration of the clans of their ancestral house as listed by name, aged twenty years and over, all who were able to bear arms— (43) those enrolled from the tribe of Naphtali: 53,400.

(2) The Israelites shall camp each man with his standard, under the banners of their ancestral house; they shall camp around the Tent of Meeting at a distance.

(13) For every male first-born is Mine: at the time that I smote every [male] first-born in the land of Egypt, I consecrated every male first-born in Israel, human and beast, to Myself, to be Mine, ה׳’s.

(1) והיו לי הלוים אני השם, "and the Levites will belong to Me I am the Lord." The reason the Torah added the words "I am the Lord," is to tell us that although according to Yalkut Shimoni 364 there will come a time when the firstborn will once again be performing the priestly functions in the Holy Temple, the Levites will not therefore be demoted and cease to belong to G'd. [I have not foumd a reference in the Yalkut to the firstborn being reinstated as priests in the future. Ed.] The very expression והיו לי indicates that just as G'd's name is eternal so is the appointment of the Levites to their task.

(39) All the Levites who were recorded, whom at ה׳’s command Moses and Aaron recorded by their clans, all the males from the age of one month up, came to 22,000.

[...] Now the tribe of Levi was not like all the other tribes, for [even though they were counted] from a month old and upward [unlike the other tribes who were counted only from the age of twenty years and over], they were still only twenty and two thousand, and from thirty years old and over they were all together [only] eight thousand [and five hundred and fourscore]. Thus, their number from twenty years old and over does not reach even a half of the [number of the] smallest of [the other] tribes of Israel! And they did not as yet carry the ark, [that we should say] that its holiness took a toll of them! This is indeed astonishing, that His servants and His pious ones should not be blessed of the Eternal as were the rest of the people! Therefore I am of the opinion that this is a confirmation of what our Rabbis have said, that the tribe of Levi was not [subject to] the enslavement of Egyptian bondage and the rigorous work [that was imposed on the rest of the tribes]. Now since the children of Israel’s lives were made bitter by the Egyptians with hard work in order to diminish them, the Holy One, blessed be He, increased them [miraculously] to overcome the decree of the Egyptians, just as He said, And as they afflicted them, so they multiplied and so they grew, and just as it is said also with reference to the decree that if it be a son, then ye shall kill him — and the people multiplied, and waxed very mighty — since the Holy One, blessed be He, said: “We shall see whose words shall stand, Mine or theirs. ” But the tribe of Levi [which was not subject to bondage] reproduced and increased in a normal way, and therefore they did not become as numerous as the other tribes. Perhaps also [their small numbers were] on account of the anger of the patriarch [Jacob] towards them, for the tribe of Shimon which now had a large population decreased, so that at the time of their entry into the Land [they numbered only] twenty-two thousand [and two hundred — whereas most of the other tribes increased in the same period, or decreased relatively slightly]; similarly, Levi, the tribe of His pious ones, was not decreased in the plague [caused because of Peor, and yet at the time of entry into the Land they numbered only one thousand more than their present twenty-two thousand! Thus we see that it was the anger of the patriarch which affected the numbers of both Shimon and Levi.]