In English, the book we begin this week is called Numbers for an obvious reason.

It begins with a census. It takes the numbers of the Israelites,

and there's a second count towards the end of the book.

So on this view, the central theme of the book is Numbers.

Demography. The Israelites still at Sinai at the beginning of the book,

but on the brink of the promised land by the end,

are now a sizable nation numbering 600,000 men of an age to embark on military service.

Within Jewish tradition, however, the book has become known as Bermidbar in the wilderness,

and this suggests a very different theme. The superficial reason

for the name is that it's the first distinctive word in the book's opening verse. However, there

may be a much deeper reason, and the work of two great anthropologists, Arnold von Genep

and Victor Turner, suggest a completely

deeper possibility. The fact that Israel's formative experience was in the desert, in the wilderness,

turns out to be highly significant, because it is there that the people experience one of the Torah's most revolutionary ideas,

namely that an ideal society is one in which everyone has equal dignity under the sovereignty of God.

How does this connect up with the work of these anthropologists?

Von Genep, in his rites of passage, argued that societies develop

rituals to mark the transition from one state to the next, from childhood to adulthood,

or from being single to being married. And they involve three stages. The first is a ritual

of separation, a symbolic break with the past.

The third is incorporation, re-entering society with a new identity.

Between the two is the crucial stage of transition.

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