Numbers 3:40-43

"And Jehovah said unto Moses, Number all the first-born males of the children of Israel from a month old and upward, and take the number of their names. And thou shalt take the Levites for me (I am Jehovah) instead of all the first-born among the children of Israel; and the cattle of the Levites instead of all the firstlings among the cattle of the children of Israel. And Moses numbered, as Jehovah commanded him, all the first-born among the children of Israel. And all the first-born males according to the number of names, from a month old and upward, of those that were numbered of them, were twenty and two thousand and threescore and thirteen."

There is no difficulty whatever with these verses, except in the matter of the final total of all the first-born in Israel. The critics have been screaming for a hundred years that this number of 22,273 is absurd for an accurate account of the first-born males among a nation of some 2,000,000 people. Well, for the demographic experts in this field, this figure must indeed appear extremely small, and critics extrapolate these numbers to show that, according to these figures, every Jewish family would have had to have about fifty children!

However, the critics have missed the point altogether. Only those Israelites born AFTER the exodus were covered by this law of the dedication of the first-born, and this figure of 22,273 represents the first-born who were born AFTER the exodus. As Keil expressed it:

"Of course, the reference was only to the first-born of men and cattle that came into the world from that time forward (the time of the announcement of the law regarding the first-born), and not to those whom God had already sanctified to Himself by sparing the Israelites and their cattle (the night of the 10th plague)."[15]

Critics, however, are never satisfied, and their answer to this true explanation of the low number is shouted, `that figure is too large for the births in a little over a year after Exodus.' Well, the answer to their objection is patently obvious. That very first year when the Hebrews received their liberty, after years of galling service under the yoke of Pharaoh, there were bound to have been as many marriages (and consequently births) as would normally have occurred in five or ten years. It is easy to see that every person of age fit for marriage would have celebrated their liberation by choosing a mate. This figure of 22,273 first-born sons proves it. How else could it have happened? To be sure, the number is abnormally high for a similar statistic in any normal year for any people on earth, but that was not a normal year in any sense of the word. That certainly takes care of the nonsense about these figures being "absurd."[16] What an amazing folly is demonstrated by men who seek to "correct" writings of the third millennium anterior to themselves, especially in view of the fact that they simply do not have the knowledge to sustain them in such an effort. Long after this generation of unbelievers has been buried and forgotten, people will go on believing the Sacred Scriptures as has already been demonstrated throughout history.