10.  The priestly office, with its sacrifices, was the central part of the Mosaic economy, for it prefigured Christ our great High Priest, with his all-perfect sacrifice on Calvary for the sins of the world.  On this great theme much remains to be said in another place.  It is sufficient to remark here that the book of Leviticus gives the divine view of expiation.  If the expiations of the Levitical law were typical, the types were true figures of the great Antitype, which is Jesus Christ, “the Lamb of God. which taketh away the sin of the world.”  No view of his death can be true which makes these types empty and unmeaning.

IV.  NUMBERS.

11. Bemidhbar, in the wilderness, is the Hebrew name of this book, taken from the fifth word in the original.  It is also called from the first word Vayyedhabber, and [God] spake.  The English version, after the example of the Latin, translates the Greek name Arithmoi, numbers, a title derived from the numbering of the people at Sinai, with which the book opens, and which is repeated on the plains of Moab.  Chap. 26.  This book records the journeyings of the Israelites from Sinai to the borders of the promised land, and their sojourn in the wilderness of Arabia, with the various incidents that befell them, and the new ordinances that were from time to time added, as occasion required.  It embraces a period of thirty-eight years, and its contents are necessarily of a very miscellaneous character.  The unity of the book is chronological, history and legislation alternating with each other in the order of time.  A full enumeration of the numerous incidents which it records, and of the new ordinances from time to time enacted, is not necessary.  In the history of these thirty-eight years we notice three salient points or epochs. The first is that of the departure from Sinai.  Of the preparations for this, with the order of the march and whatever pertained to it, a full account is given.  Then follow the incidents of the journey to the wilderness of Paran, with some additional laws.  Chaps. 1-12.  The second epoch is that of the rebellion of the people upon the report of the twelve spies whom Moses had sent to search out the land, for which sin the whole generation that came out of Egypt, from twenty years old and upward, was rejected and doomed to perish in the wilderness.  Chaps. 13, 14.  This was in the second year of the exodus.  Of the events that followed to the thirty-eighth year of the exodus, we have only a brief notice.  With the exception of the punishment of the Sabbath-breaker, Korah’s rebellion and the history connected with it, and also a few laws (chaps. 15-19), this period is passed by in silence.  The nation was under the divine rebuke, and could fulfil its part in the plan of God only by dying for its sins with an unrecorded history.  The third epoch