Exodus 12:51

51. This verse, as a final summary, brings the account of the departure from Egypt to a formal close.

The selfsame day That is, the fifteenth of Abib, the momentous day whose events have just been related. CONCLUDING NOTE.

Length of Sojourn in Egypt, and Census of Israel at the Exode. These two topics are so connected that it is convenient to discuss them together. Was the Egyptian sojourn a period of four hundred and thirty or of two hundred and fifteen years? In the note on verse forty the short period is favoured. Two things are specially relied upon by the advocates of the long period in proof of their view: (1,) The genealogy of individuals; (2,) The census of the Exode.

The genealogy is supposed to show that in some lines several generations have been omitted. (The genealogy of Moses is discussed in the note on Exodus 6:20. ) While Moses and Aaron are only the third generation from Levi, Dathan and Abiram the third from Reuben, (Numbers 26:0,) and Achan the fourth from Judah, (Joshua 7:0,) Bezaleel is the sixth from Judah, (1 Chronicles 2:0,) Elishama the eighth from Joseph, and Joshua the tenth from Joseph, (1 Chronicles 7:23-27. ) Colenso presents these discrepancies as fatal objections to the authenticity of the history . But we may easily suppose Moses, when past his century, to have been contemporary with Bezaleel, who was of the same generation with his great-grandchildren, so that Elishama and Joshua give us the only real difficulty. But their genealogy is given in only one passage, (1 Chronicles 7:23-27,) which is on all hands confessed to be very obscure, and has probably been corrupted in transcription, so that it ought to have no decisive weight whatever, especially against passages of unmistakable clearness. Colenso, like his kin of all generations, ignores the clear to burrow in the obscure or unknown.

As to the census of Israel at the Exode, we are to consider that extraordinary fruitfulness is spoken of in Exodus 1:7, as it had been specially promised to the patriarchs . There were more than 600,000 men at the Exode, and these numbers would have been reached in two hundred and fifteen years if they continued to multiply as they commenced . This is proved thus: Jacob and his sons averaged five sons each, (not reckoning daughters at all in this calculation,) for he had twelve sons and fifty-three grandsons, (Genesis 46:0,) and (53+12)/13=5 . Now if each man had, at the age of thirty-five, five sons, and had none born to him thereafter, we may reckon six generations in two hundred and fifteen years, since 215/35=6+ . To find, then, the number of Jacob’s male posterity of the sixth generation we have 53×5*6=53×15,625, or 828,125, a surplus of 200,000 over the number of the text . This calculation, moreover, makes no account of the survivors of previous generations .

The census of the Kohathites, given in Numbers 3:28, is also presented by Tiele, Kurtz, Keil, etc . , as an argument for the long chronology or for the omission of generations, since the four families of the Kohathites numbered 8,600, thus averaging 2,150 each, while one of the four, the Amramites, numbered, as far as the record shows, only two men who could have been counted in the 8,600, since Aaron and his sons, and Moses himself, are not reckoned. But, (1,) The general calculation before given covers the whole ground. (2,) We have no right to assume that the record gives us all the Amramites. Amram may have had other children besides the famous historic three, and the argument from silence is always dubious. (3,) Still more dubious is the argument from averages to particulars. (4,) The other three families might have made up the lack of the Amramites, if lack there were. While these facts, given in the record itself, enable us to fully account for the numbers of Israel at the Exode, the objections of Knobel, Colenso, etc., are of no weight.