Comentário sobre Números 3:50

חמשה וששים ושלש מאות ואלף A THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED AND THREESCORE AND FIVE — This is the total sum: five shekels per head for two hundred firstborn if one thousand shekels; for seventy firstborn is three hundred and fifty shekels, and three firstborn give fifteen shekels, — thus altogether 1,365. — He, (Moses) said, “How shall I proceed? Any firstborn to whom I will say, “Give five shekels’ will answer me, ‘I am one of those redeemed by the Levites’!” What, then, did he do? He brought 22,000 tablets and inscribed them with the words “A son of Levi”, and 273 tablets, and wrote upon them the words “Five shekels”. These he mixed up, putting them into an urn. He said to them, “Come and draw your tablets and decide the matter by lot” (Sanhedrin 17a).

Twenty-two thousand slips. Meaning pieces of paper. Similarly “inscribed in a book” (Iyov 19:23), is translated by the Targum as בפתקא יתרשמון, meaning “on slips they shall be noted.” (Divrei Dovid) This is the view of Rabbi Yehudah, however Rabbi Nechemyah questions this: If all of the slips marked “Levite” were gone and I drew one —what would I get? Who could tell me that if there had been a “Levite” slip there, that I would not have merited it? Rather Moshe did the following: He wrote upon twenty-two thousand two hundred and seventy-three slips “Levite,” and upon two hundred and seventy-three slips [he wrote] “five shekolim.” Re’m writes that one may even question this: Even so, the last ones to draw could say that if they had drawn first when there were many “Levite” slips — twenty-two thousand two hundred and seventy-three and only two hundred and seventy-three “five shekolim” slips — who could say that they would not have drawn “Levite” slips, based on the dictum, כל מה דפריש מרובא קפריש — “whatever is separated [from a group] is [assumed to have been] separated from the majority [of the group].” Apparently the answer is that whoever drew a slip would then toss it back into the container so that the number of slips there was always equal. However this raises the difficulty: If so, perhaps all of them would draw a “Levite” slip, one after the other and the initial problem would remain. One cannot say that as soon as twenty-two thousand “Levite” slips had been drawn, the remaining would be “five shekolim” slips and they would inevitably be required to redeem themselves. Because if so who would want to draw last instead of drawing first. Unless we say that they drew according to their age or their importance, which is difficult to propose. There are those who answer that it is known that whatever Moshe did was through Divine Inspiration, therefore there were no complaints. However this is untenable, because if so why was there a lottery at all; let Moshe say to each person “You are obliged to redeem yourself,” and “You are exempt,” all through Divine Inspiration. However, it appears to me that [this whole question is really] no difficulty: At the end of the first chapter of Kesubos we establish that כל קבוע כמחצה על מחצה דמי — “anything that is fixed [in a single location] is considered to be half in half.” This is so even where it leads to a leniency, such as a case where someone threw a rock into a group of ten people comprising nine Jews and one was a gentile. Even if the person killed is a Jew the thrower is exempt from the death penalty because the one gentile who was among them (being viewed as a fixed group) is considered as if he comprised half of the group. This law was clear to every Jew in all matters and therefore there would have been no complaint here. Even if the minority of the slips had been marked “Levite,” since the [slips of paper] were fixed [in a single location] there they would have been considered as numerous as the majority. Nachalas Yaakov explains that the Talmud Yerushalmi writes that the slips came out alternately, one “Levite” and one “five shekolim” in a miraculous fashion.

מאת בכור בני ישראל, “from the firstborn of the Children of Israel;” this refers to the 273 who were in excess of the 22000 firstborns listed earlier.