Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Now that Moses has instructions from God about how to set up their society and

they know how to set up the camp properly, the next focus is on the service of

the newly built tabernacle in the wilderness, and that's what we looked at today.

Aaron and his two living sons, Eleazar and Ithamar, were the ones God established as the heads of the

tabernacle, and all the other people from their tribe, the Levites,

were there to help serve them and help them serve.

To bring some order and intention to the situation,

God calls for three different censuses. The first census is directly related

to something God has been working out for a while now. Typically, the firstborn of each family would be

consecrated and set apart for service to the Lord, but here we see God calls the Levites his firstborn among all of Israel.

In 3.12, God says, I have taken the Levites from among the people of Israel instead of every firstborn who opens the womb among the people of Israel.

So God is making a kind of trade here, Levites in exchange for firstborns.

Each of the male Levites will serve as a representative or

a placement for each of the firstborns from all the other tribes. To make sure each

firstborn of Israel is represented by a male leavite, they have to be counted too, so Moses does

census number two. Once the counting is done, the numbers are pretty close but not exact.

There's still 273 male Levite short

in accounting for all the firstborns of Israel.

So in order to work out the numbers,

God sets up a process where those 273 families who weren't represented could give the

tabernacle five shekels instead.

...