The complex reflections on tradition and memory embedded in the narrative of Numbers are made possible by the book's long and interesting compositional history. Numbers comprises a collection of materials dating from fairly early in Israel's history to post-exilic times and includes a noteworthy variety of genres: ancient poetry, narratives of complaint and rebellion, a legendary tale involving a talking ass, law and ritual, two censuses, a travelogue, and an archival list. These different materials, by their careful placement within the larger narrative, create an inner-biblical dialogue that allows different aspects of tradition and memory to be illustrated, considered, rejected, and/or promoted. Those differences are precisely the point, for the final version of Numbers is forged out of a chorus of different voices in interaction, advancing an argument that manages nonetheless to unify the book through a vision of the wilderness period in its entirety. My rereading of Numbers traces competing versions of what took place in the wilderness after the people Israel left Egypt and the uneasy fusion of those discrete materials into a final form.

Several methodological assumptions shape this way of reading. I assume that only some of the multiple traditions found in Numbers neatly fall into sources as identified by the documentary hypothesis, namely, priestly versus nonpriestly sources. Others clearly lie outside the scholarly categories generated by that hypothesis.