🔢WEB · Numbers 1:40
What does Numbers 1:40 mean?
"Of the children of Asher, their generations, by their families, by their fathers’ houses, according to the number of the names, from twenty years old and upward, all who were able to go out to war;"
— Numbers 1:40 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
those who were counted of them, of the tribe of Benjamin, were thirty-five thousand four hundred.
Of the children of Dan, their generations, by their families, by their fathers’ houses, according to the number of the names, from twenty years old and upward, all who were able to go out to war;
those who were counted of them, of the tribe of Dan, were sixty-two thousand seven hundred.
Of the children of Asher, their generations, by their families, by their fathers’ houses, according to the number of the names, from twenty years old and upward, all who were able to go out to war;
those who were counted of them, of the tribe of Asher, were forty-one thousand five hundred.
Of the children of Naphtali, their generations, by their families, by their fathers’ houses, according to the number of the names, from twenty years old and upward, all who were able to go out to war;
those who were counted of them, of the tribe of Naphtali, were fifty-three thousand four hundred.
Explanation
Numbers 1:40 comes in the middle of a census list, and on its own it's simply a formulaic statement: Moses is recording the tribe of Asher, organizing the count by clans and ancestral households, listing every male twenty years old and up who was fit for military service. The verse itself doesn't give the number—that comes in the next verse (41), which states the total as 41,500. This kind of repeated formula appears for each of the twelve tribes throughout Numbers chapter 1, with only the tribe name and final number changing.
The context is Israel's situation at Mount Sinai, roughly a year after the Exodus from Egypt. God commands Moses, with Aaron's help and the assistance of one leader from each tribe, to take a census of the whole community "by families, by fathers' houses" (Numbers 1:1-4). The purpose was explicitly military: to organize the men able to fight, since Israel was about to leave Sinai and march toward the Promised Land, facing potential opposition along the way and eventual conquest of Canaan. Asher was one of the twelve tribes descended from Jacob's sons, and this census reflects the orderly, tribe-by-tribe structure of the nation as it prepared to move as an organized people rather than a loose mass of former slaves.
Theologically, this verse and its counterparts show that God cares about order, structure, and the practical details of communal life. The counting "by families, by fathers' houses" reflects the importance of lineage and identity within Israel—each person belonged to a specific family, clan, and tribe, and that belon
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