This also is the number of the sons of Levi by their families: Gerson, of whom is the family of the Gersonites: Caath, of whom is the family of the Caathites: Merari, of whom is the family of the Merarites.

And these are numbered ones of the Levite by their families: of Gershon is the family of the Gershonite; of Kohath the family of the Kohathite; of Merari the family of the Merarite.

Likewise, this is the number of the sons of Levi by their families: Gershon, from whom is the family of the Gershonites; Kohath, from whom is the family of the Kohathites; Merari, from whom is the family of the Merarites.

Isti autem sunt numerati Levitarum per familias suas, de Gerson, familia Gersonitarum: de Cehath, familia Cehathitarum: de Merari, familia Meraritarum.

And these are they that were numbered of the Levites. He treats separately of the tribe of Levi, which God had dissevered from the rest of the people; and of the sons of Levi, the last mentioned is Kohath, the founder of the sacerdotal family. Hence we may probably conjecture that the law of primogeniture was not regarded when God deigned to take the priests from thence. But why Moses should expressly state the name of his mother, contrary to the usual custom of Scripture, does not dearly appear; for it is not likely that he did this as a distinction to his own family, because he at the same time shews how he himself, as well as his children, was deprived of the honor (of the priesthood,) in which certainly there is no appearance of ambition. It is more probable, if the word daughter is literally taken, that he did not conceal a disgraceful circumstance, in order to extol more highly the indulgence of God; for, in this case, Moses and Aaron sprang of an incestuous marriage, since Amram, their father, must have married his aunt, which natural modesty forbade. It will, then, be rather an ingenuous confession of family dishonor, than an ambitious boast. If we inquire how this could have been tolerated, the answer will readily suggest itself, that this license had so largely prevailed among the oriental nations, that no one deemed that to be illicit which was in such universal use. And this we shall presently see [1] to be expressly referred to, when God, by forbidding incestuous marriages, distinguishes His people from other nations. It will be no matter of surprise, then, that those who were not yet prohibited from doing so by the law of God, had followed the general custom.

Footnotes

1 - The Fr. more correctly says, "Ce que nous avons veu ci dessus;" this we have seen above; -- the table of prohibited degrees having been considered ante, vol. 3, p. 96, et seq.

And these are they that were numbered of the Levites, after their families,.... And they were numbered not with the rest of the tribes of Israel, but by themselves, as they were at the first numbering of the tribes; the three principal families of which were, the Gershonite, the Kohathite, and Merarite, so called from the three sons of Levi; but all their sons are not mentioned, of the sons of Gershon only Libni, from whom was the family of the Libnites; not Shimei, because, as Aben Ezra conjectures, either he had no sons, or, if he had, they died without any, and so there was no family from them; and of the sons of Kohath no mention is made of Uzziel, nor of Izhar, but in the Korhites, only of the Hebronite family from Hebron; and of Amram, whose wife Jochebed is spoken of as a daughter of Levi, whom Levi's wife, as Jarchi rightly supplies it, bore to him in Egypt, and which Jochebed was the mother of Aaron, Moses, and Miriam; and it is observed that Aaron had four sons, Nadab, Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar, the two first of which died for offering strange fire to the Lord, and the two last were now living: from Merari, another son of Levi, sprang two families, the Mahlite, and the Mushite; and the whole number of the Levites at this time taken was 23,000 males of a month old and upward; so that here was an increase of 1,000 males since the former numbering of them: the reason why they were not numbered with the other tribes was, because they had no part of the land of Israel divided to them, and had no inheritance in it.

Levi was God's tribe; therefore it was not numbered with the rest, but alone. It came not under the sentence, that none of them should enter Canaan excepting Caleb and Joshua.

Mustering of the Levites. - The enumeration of the different Levitical families into which the three leading families of Levi, that were founded by his three sons Gershon, Kohath, and Merari, were divided, is not complete, but is broken off in Numbers 26:58 after the notice of five different families, for the purpose of tracing once more the descent of Moses and Aaron, the heads not of this tribe only, but of the whole nation, and also of giving the names of the sons of the latter (Numbers 26:59-61). And after this the whole is concluded with a notice of the total number of those who were mustered of the tribe of Levi (Numbers 26:62). - Of the different families mentioned, Libni belonged to Gershon (cf. Numbers 3:21), Hebroni to Kohath (Numbers 3:27), Machli and Mushi to Merari (Numbers 3:33), and Korchi, i.e., the family of Korah (according to ch. Numbers 16:1; cf. Exodus 6:21 and Exodus 6:24), to Kohath. Moses and Aaron were descendants of Kohath (see at Exodus 6:20 and Exodus 2:1). Some difficulty is caused by the relative clause, "whom (one) had born to Levi in Egypt" (Numbers 26:59), on account of the subject being left indefinite. It cannot be Levi's wife, as Jarchi, Abenezra, and others suppose; for Jochebed, the mother of Moses, was not a daughter of Levi in the strict sense of the word, but only a Levitess or descendant of Levi, who lived about 300 years after Levi; just as her husband Amram was not actually the son of Amram, who bore that name (Exodus 6:18), but a later descendant of this older Amram. The missing subject must be derived from the verb itself, viz., either היּלדת or אמּהּ (her mother), as in 1-Kings 1:6, another passage in which "his mother" is to be supplied (cf. Ewald, 294, b.).