All that were numbered of the Levites, which Moses and
Aaron,
numbered at the commandment of the Lord, throughout their
families,
&c.] Whence it appears, that Moses was not alone, but Aaron
with him, in numbering the Levites, and that by the appointment
of the Lord. The word "Aaron", in the Hebrew text, has a dot on
every letter, for what reason it is not certain; the word itself
is left out in the Samaritan and Syriac versions:
all the males, from a month old and upward, [were] twenty
and two
thousand;
22,000 men; but by putting the sums together they amount to three
hundred more; for of the Gershonites there were 7,500, and of the
Kohathites 8,600, and of the Merarites 6,200, in all 22,300;
which difficulty some endeavour to remove by saying, as Aben Ezra
observes, that the Scripture takes a short way, mentioning the
thousands, and leaving out the hundreds but this, he says, is not
right, nor is it the way of the Scripture in this chapter: and in
an after account of the firstborn of the Israelites, not only the
hundreds are mentioned, but the broken number of seventy three.
Others think there is a corruption crept into the text somewhere
in the particular numbers, through the inadvertency of some
copyist; and suppose it to be in the number of the Kohathites,
where they fancy (vv) ,
six, is put instead of (vlv) , three: but there is no occasion to suppose
either of these, for which there is no foundation, since the
reason why three hundred are left out in the sum total may be,
because there were so many firstborn among the Levites, and these
could not be exchanged for the firstborn of the other tribes;
they, as such, being the Lord's, and one firstborn could not
redeem another; and so it is said in the Talmud {t}, these three
hundred were firstborn, and there is no firstborn redeems a
firstborn, or frees from the redemption price of five shekels.