“The Lord spoke to Moses in the Tent of Meeting in the wilderness of Sinai on the first day of the second month of the second year after the Israelites came out of Egypt.”
The fourth book of the Bible is known in English as the Book of Numbers, so named because it begins with a command to count the Israelites—to take a census and establish their population. In Hebrew, however, the book is known by the key word of its opening sentence: Bamidbar, meaning “In the wilderness.” By tradition, this book is always read on the Shabbat before Shavuot, the festival celebrating the giving of the Torah.
Is there a deeper significance to these facts? Are they interconnected? Is there a profound link between the wilderness, revelation, and the act of counting? Furthermore, why did Jewish tradition prefer to name the book “Wilderness” rather than “Numbers”?
The Hebrew word for wilderness, midbar, shares the same root as the word davar, meaning “word” or “thing.” It also shares the same letters as medabber, which means “speaking.” It is specifically in the wilderness that the Israelites encounter revelation—the word and the speaking of God.
Fundamental to Judaism is the belief that God cannot be seen. For nearly every other ancient faith, the gods were physically present in the phenomena of nature: the sun, the stars, the sky, and the sea. They were visible; they were things seen. In Israel, however, a revolutionary idea found expression: God is beyond nature. As the Psalmist writes:
“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place...” (Psalm 8:3)
In this view, the vast universe is merely the work of God’s fingers. Everything we see is not God, but merely God’s handiwork. This is the root of the repeated prohibitions against making images or icons. In Judaism, the idea that God is visible is equated with idolatry. God exists beyond the totality of all things seen.
But how, then, can He be perceived? For Judaism, revelation becomes a unique challenge. In other cultures, revelation was self-evident—the gods were all around. In polytheism, the gods are close and visible. In Judaism, a God who is vast beyond imagining would seem to be infinitely distant. The answer Judaism provided was world-transforming: the God who transcends nature is close because He exists not in things seen, but in words heard.
As the historian Heinrich Graetz explains in The Construction of Jewish History:
“The pagan perceives the divine in nature through the medium of the eye, and he becomes conscious of it as something to be looked at. On the other hand, to the Jew who conceives God as being outside of nature and prior to it, the Divine manifests itself through the will and through the medium of the ear. He becomes conscious of it as something to be heeded and listened to. The pagan beholds his god; the Jew hears Him, that is, apprehends His will.”
While almost every other civilization has been a culture of the eye, Judaism is a culture of the ear—of words, speech, listening, interpreting, and understanding. Even Sigmund Freud, though generally hostile toward religion, was impressed by the psychological weight of this idea. In Moses and Monotheism, he wrote:
“Among the precepts of Mosaic religion is one that has more significance than is at first obvious. It is the prohibition against making an image of God, which means the compulsion to worship an indivisible god... [This] was bound to exercise a profound influence. For it signified subordinating sense perception to an abstract idea; it was a triumph of spirituality over the senses... It was certainly one of the most important stages on the way to becoming human.”
A revolution of this magnitude cannot occur under ordinary circumstances. In the river lowlands where civilization began, the eye is captivated by nature; in the great cities, it is captivated by the works of man, such as art and architecture. Only in the emptiness of the wilderness is the eye subordinate to the ear. Only in the silence of the desert can the “sound beneath the sound” be heard.
In Hebrew thought, the Book and the Desert are contingent upon one another. When God first charged Moses with freeing the Hebrews, the terminology of “freedom” or “liberty” was not used. Instead, the concept of emancipation was expressed as “going on a three days’ journey into the desert, to sacrifice to God our Lord” (Exodus 3:19). It is as if God could not be fully apprehended without this initial journey into the desert. Or as Edmond Jabès writes in Du Desert au Livre:
“The word cannot dwell except in the silence of other words. To speak is, accordingly, to lean on a metaphor of the desert, a space of dust or ashes, where the triumphant word is offered in its most essential and absolute form.”
Historian Eric Voegelin viewed this as fundamental to the discovery of a new form of spirituality:
“If nothing had happened but a lucky escape from the range of Egyptian power, there only would have been a few more nomadic tribes roaming the border zone... but the desert was only a station on the way, not the goal; for in the desert the tribes found their God. They entered into a covenant with Him, and thereby became His people... When the world has become Desert, man is at last in the solitude in which he can hear thunderingly the voice of the spirit... by listening to the voice, by accepting its offer, and by submitting to its command, they had at last reached life.”
This is also why Judaism has no direct counterpart to the word “secular”—a term derived from the Latin seculum, meaning “the world.” In Western civilization, religion is often viewed as unworldly or otherworldly. In Judaism, God is not set against the world. Instead, the opposite of kadosh (holy) is chol, which literally means “sand.”
Sand represents what the holy is not. It is unstable, shifting, and incapable of sustaining rooted life. The first Psalm illustrates this:
“Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked... But his delight is in the law of the Lord... He is like a tree planted by streams of water... Not so the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind blows away.” (Psalm 1:1-4)
Chol is a desert metaphor. God is a Rock—immovable and the opposite of shifting sand. His word is like water, and those who heed it are like flourishing plants. Moses’ final song brings these images together:
“Let my teaching fall like rain and my words descend like dew, like showers on new grass, like abundant rain on tender plants... He is the Rock, His works are perfect.” (Deuteronomy 32:2-4)
It is no accident that the Sages chose to call this fourth book Bamidbar. There is an intrinsic connection between the desert (midbar) and the God who reveals Himself in speech (medabber).
What, then, of the census? There is a mystical Jewish tradition that every individual is like a letter in a Torah scroll; if even one letter is missing, the entire scroll is defective. Regarding the census, the Sefat Emet (Rabbi Yehudah Arye Leib of Gur) notes that it is included to teach us that “every Jew has some specific task to perform for God, and for that reason he was created.” The Maharsha adds that there were 600,000 Israelites at Sinai because the Torah has 600,000 possible interpretations; it was given to an entire people so it would contain all possible holy meanings.
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas developed a similar idea:
“It is as if the multiplicity of persons... were the prerequisite for the fullness of absolute truth, as if each person, by his uniqueness, ensured the revelation of a unique aspect of truth... the voice of Revelation precisely in as much as it is inflected by the ear of each person, would be necessary for the Whole of Truth.”
Once we connect the census with the idea of revelation, a dazzling possibility emerges. Normally, a census is dehumanizing; it measures a nation’s strength through cold statistics. In a standard census, the individual is a mere number, and one person can easily be substituted for another. The most dehumanizing act of the 20th century was the stripping of names from concentration camp inmates to replace them with numbers. Where power is the ultimate reality, the individual does not matter—only the totality does.
Judaism is a sustained protest against this reductionism. The Mishnah famously states that “a single life is like an entire universe.” Interestingly, the Torah uses a unique locution when commanding the count. While Hebrew has many verbs for “counting,” the text here uses the phrase se’u et rosh, literally, “lift the head.”
The purpose of a biblical census was not to quantify, but to affirm the worth of every individual within the society of the holy. While a secular census turns a person into a number, God’s count turns a person into a letter in a scroll—indispensable and unique. This is why the title “Numbers” is precisely wrong. In the wilderness, away from the empires of power and economy, we become beings in our own right. We are not a workforce or “man-in-the-mass”; we are persons created in the image of God.
Thus, Bamidbar—in the wilderness—Israel heard the medabber (the One who speaks) and learned that God speaks not only to a nation, but to every individual. The path to the Holy Land lies through the wilderness. It was there the Israelites learned to build a society that was the "anti-type" of Egypt—not an empire of power, but a community of equal dignity under the sovereignty of God.
As Eric Voegelin concluded:
“What emerged from the alembic of the Desert was not a people like the Egyptians or Babylonians... but a new genus of society, set off from the civilizations of the age by the Divine choice. It was a people that moved on the historical scene while living toward a goal beyond history.”
In the desert, they heard the Word, and they became the People of the Word.
