Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast,

The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies, and it's an Orthodox

priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Okay, we'll go ahead and get started.

We're going to get started here in just a moment.

We're picking up at the beginning of Numbers Chapter 3.

One of the things about numbers that we talked about a little last time is that the book of

numbers doesn't sort of have a single theme

or even genre within it. We're only two chapters in, so those first two chapters seem to go

together, okay, I understand. But as we keep going, you'll see there's all kinds of different stuff.

There's going to be historical narrative, and we saw census data, and there's going to be

like commandments about certain things, and all of this is just going to be all sort of mixed

together. All that is to say that when we're starting, that makes sort of summarizing and leading into what we're doing now

a little trickier than when we're just in a narrative portion, and I'm sort of doing the story so

far. So that means these summaries will be a little shorter probably in a lot of the book of

numbers unless we sort of break off in the middle of something which may happen from time

to time but basically uh in chapter one uh we read sort of the census data for all of the tribes

except the tribe of levi because that census data was deliberately counting men of fighting age. So if they were going to call up,

because as we talked about in the ancient world, this point, they didn't have standing armies,

they didn't really have a way to support a standing army. And so when war was going to happen,

all the men within a certain age range who were able-bodied

got called up.

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