From a linguistic standpoint (BTW, this is also something that Fr. Mitch Pacwa pointed out in EWTN’s
Open Line of last week’s Wednesday I believe), the Hebrew word for one ‘thousand’,
'eleph, also has the meaning of (military) ‘unit’, ‘clan’, ‘squad’, or ‘family’. It is used in the latter sense in passages such as Judges 6:15 and 1 Samuel 10:19. In this usage,
'eleph does not represent a literal number, but rather a major subgroup. In a few cases, such as in Deuteronomy 7:13; 28:4, 18, 51; Psalm 8:7; Isaiah 30:24, it even seems to mean a flock or ‘herd’ of cattle - the word
'eleph after all seemingly being related to
'aleph, ‘ox’ (also the name of the very first letter of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet and its descendants - incidentally, it was a hieroglyph of an ox’s head!). Back then, farmers would keep a herd of cows by letting them graze with one
'aleph, ox. The ox protected the whole herd, and the cows therefore tended instinctively not to stray far from him. Thus wherever one saw a herd of cattle, one normally saw it arrayed around an ox. By simple economy of speech,
'eleph came to mean ‘herd’ in general, and from there, because ‘herd’ connotes a large group, the various definitions - ‘unit’, ‘clan’, ‘tribe’, ‘division’, etc. - came into being. Then, for purposes of numerical counting,
'eleph was borrowed to denote ‘thousand’ in the decimal system.
'Eleph also served another meaning
in the ancient Israelite army. The army was organized by units of size that are called by words that were all or mostly all borrowed originally from other meanings (cf. Deuteronomy 1:15). You have the “tribe” (
shebet, ‘staff’, ‘scepter’, ‘branch’, ‘rod’); the
'eleph;
me’ah, the “hundred”;
chamisshim (plural of
chamesh, ‘five’), the “fifty”; and
'asarah, “ten” (from
'asar). There are those who believe that these units were groups of varying sizes that served under a ranked leader. For example, the commander of the
'eleph would be known as the
'alluph. Now, this brings the question as to how big a single military
'eleph could have been. It is believed that it is composed of all the men of fighting age that a single tribal subset (i.e. a family) or village or district could produce. The clincher is, we don’t know how many fighting-age men a subset could produce in those days: it could be as low as twenty, or, in the case of more smaller divisions, only a handful. For general purposes of calculation, an
'eleph is usually understood to be composed of not larger than fifteen men at the average.
Hence, supposing that Exodus 12 does use
'eleph in this way, we could thus understand it not as a literal “
six hundred thousand” but “
six hundred families/squads/clans/units”. And if we suppose that
'eleph is used in the military sense, it would imply that the Israelites who left Egypt may have numbered at around 5,500 to 7,200 fighting men. Add to that the number of wives, children and other people who could not fight either due to age or infirmity and we would arrive at 22,000-27,500, or even 28,000-36,000 Israelites who fled from Egypt. Still a large and formidable number, but not too numerous by modern standards. Large enough to require the provisions of manna and water and to form a decent fighting force, yet still small and compact enough to be able to encamp around the Tabernacle in the various places described in the Bible.
Hi Scopby!