⁶⁴ Not one person on this list had been among those listed in the previous registration taken by Moses and Aaron in the wilderness of Sinai.

¹⁴ “Thirty-eight years passed from the time we first left Kadesh-barnea until we finally crossed the Zered Brook! By then, all the men old enough to fight in battle had died in the wilderness, as the Lord had vowed would happen. ¹⁵ The Lord struck them down until they had all been eliminated from the community.

¹⁷ And who made God angry for forty years? Wasn’t it the people who sinned, whose corpses lay in the wilderness?

⁵ Yet God was not pleased with most of them, and their bodies were scattered in the wilderness.

³ “You saw for yourself what the Lord did to you at Baal-peor. There the Lord your God destroyed everyone who had worshiped Baal, the god of Peor. ⁴ But all of you who were faithful to the Lord your God are still alive today—every one of you.

²⁹ You will all drop dead in this wilderness! Because you complained against me, every one of you who is twenty years old or older and was included in the registration will die.

Registration of Israel’s Troops

1 A year after Israel’s departure from Egypt, the Lord spoke to Moses in the Tabernacle^[a] in the wilderness of Sinai. On the first day of the second month^[b] of that year he said, ² “From the whole community of Israel, record the names of all the warriors by their clans and families. List all the men