ISRAEL. 
II 
constantly prepared for a banquet; with a daily renewal of food, golden bowls of wine, 
incense, and lamps burning. The whole tribe of the Levites were the appointed royal 
guards, officers, and attendants. Above the tabernacle shone perpetually the Divine flame, 
the sign of the sovereign residence, the kingly standard, at whose moving alone the camp 
was struck, and at whose standing still, all again stood still . 1 
Probably man has never since seen a human display so striking as the march through 
the wilderness. Xerxes may have been followed by a more numerous multitude, but it 
was a multitude of the Scythian, the Thracian, and the Asiatic; a half-savage and 
tumultuous gathering of wild men, in which the disciplined pomp of Persia was obscured 
and hurried along. The myriads of an Attila or a Zengis were barbarians, sweeping the 
land like an universal flame; or like the locusts, seen, only in the act of devastation, or on 
the wing. But the march of Israel, in its vastness, its strength, and its order, was sublime. 
The simultaneous movement of millions of human beings , 2 marshalled by their tribes, 
advancing under the standards of their princes, to the sound of trumpets and hymns ; and 
the whole mighty mass expanding across the unobstructed plains, seen under the bright 
horizon, and heard in the unruffled air, of the wilderness; with the tabernacle and 
the Glory in the centre, giving a superhuman character to the whole; possesses an 
exclusive and unrivalled grandeur. With such a scene suddenly disclosed to his 
eyes, how well can we comprehend the amazement and delight which wring from Balaam 
his unwilling homage! His first impression is of their incalculable number. 
“ From the top of the rocks I see him, and from the hills I behold him.. 
1 The march of the Israelites forms a striking contrast to the confusion and irregularity of the 
Asiatic armies in all ages. The poetic armies of the Iliad, some hundreds of years after, exhibit the 
primitive confusion; for though the Greeks march steadily to the encounter, their chief order is in their 
distribution under their princes ; but the Trojans are only a gallant mob. Even in more systematic 
days, the march of the Babylonian and Persian armies was rather a diffusion of hordes over the face of 
the country, than the solid movement of a disciplined force. The first march, in the modern sense of 
the word, was perhaps that of the Ten Thousand,” and its success may have been largely owing to the 
astonishment with which its regularity struck the Persian cavalry and the Carduchian mountaineers. 
But we are to recollect that the march of Moses was not even that of an Asiatic army; not of 
soldiers, but of every diversity of population; and not of a multitude, forced to some semblance of order 
by the pressure of an enemy ; but of an immense emigration of peasantry, with no enemy to compel 
their vigilance, and with the desert open round them. 
The march was by sound of trumpet. Each tribe moved under its own prince and its own banner. 
The whole were in four grand divisions, marked by the four quarters of the heavens, with the tabernacle 
in the centre. On the first sounding, the eastern grand division moved, consisting of the tribes of 
Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun. The tabernacle was then taken down and borne along. The southern 
grand division, formed of Reuben, Simeon, and Gad, next moved, followed by the bearers of the vessels 
of the sanctuary. Then the western grand division, of Ephraim, Manasseh, and Benjamin, struck their 
tents and marched. Lastly came the northern grand division, of Dan, Asher, and Naphtali ; the whole 
forming one immense column ; which, on halting, again took its original stations round the tabernacle. 
2 The number of the Israelites, at the close of their Egyptian bondage, has been a matter of some 
dispute. It has been, for instance, denied that the increase from seventy persons to 603,550 males 
above twenty years of age (besides 22,000 males from a month old among the Levites), in the space of 
430 years, was probable. But Jahn (Hebrew Commonwealth), in a learned note, shows that the natural 
increase might have been much more, namely, 977,280 males above twenty years. The actual number of 
the people has been reckoned at two million four hundred thousand souls. 
