Vulgate: Numbers

Numbers, the fourth book of the Pentateuch, takes its name from the census of the tribes of Israel with which it opens. Its thirty-six chapters follow the Israelites from Sinai through forty years in the wilderness to the plains of Moab: the ordering of the camp, the rebellions of the people and of Korah, the spies sent into Canaan, the bronze serpent, the prophet Balaam and his speaking ass, and laws for the coming settlement. Jerome translated it from the Hebrew for the Vulgate.

Numbers mixes narrative and law in a record of Israel’s wandering and repeated failures of faith, which Paul and later Christian writers held up as warnings. Its episodes, such as Balaam’s oracle of the star rising out of Jacob and the bronze serpent lifted up in the desert, became favourite types of Christ in sermons and art. The priestly blessing of chapter 6 entered both Jewish and Christian liturgy, and the census lists themselves preserve early traditions about the tribes of Israel.