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, Eliezar 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 312, 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 Levite, 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.

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