The book of Bemidbar starts with a census of the Jews who left Egypt and subsequently died in the wilderness. It closes with a count of the next generation which grew up during the trek and is poised to enter the land of Canaan. For the Moses and Aaron, the census was the exclamation point on a demographic explosive growth by the children of Israel—but they made the mistake of assuming that this trendline would continue during the desert trek. In fact, the final count showed essentially zero population growth. What went wrong?

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