Comentários de Citação sobre Números 3:50

And [left] two blank. The text should read “He wrote ‘elder’ on seventy and left two of them blank,” meaning that afterwards he placed them in the container and mixed them together. You might ask: He should have merely taken twelve and written on ten “six elders” and on two “five elders. Then whoever chose the note saying “six” would chooses six elders from that tribe… (Gur Aryeh) The answer may be that if so, the tribe that chose the note saying “five” would be entirely disgraced, as if Hashem had not found favor with the entire tribe. However now, only those elders [picking the blank notes] would be disgraced. See Kitzur Mizrochi who asks further on this. See also the passage of the leaders (Bamidbar 3:50) and what I wrote concerning the redemption of the firstborn by the Levites.

ולקחת חמשת חמשת שקלים, "You shall take 5 shekels apiece, etc." Why did the Torah commence this verse with the conjunctive letter ו before the word לקחת seeing it is part and parcel of the legislation commencing in verse 46 about the redemption of the extra 273 firstborn for whom no equivalent Levites could be found? Perhaps the letter ו alludes to the fact that the money redeeming these 273 people was to come out of the pockets of the firstborn and not out of the pockets of the Levites. You could have reasoned that the process of redemption would be parallel to the redemption of the animals of the Levites when the money for the redemption had to be paid by the Levites. It would have been logical to conclude that the Levites had to pay. To disabuse us of such thinking the Torah had to write מבכור בני ישראל, "from the firstborn of the Israelites" (at the end of verse 46). The Torah spells this out when it came to the actual carrying out of these instructions in verse 50. The Torah describes Moses as taking the redemption money from the firstborn, not from the Levites. In our verse the additional information is the amount of the redemption money per person, i.e. 5 shekels each. The letter ו means that we are dealing with a second commandment. The Torah repeats the word תקח to tell us there is a third commandment i.e. that the five shekels are "holy shekels" worth 20 geyrah each. Every detail mentioned here was an essential part of the procedure.