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The Levites were numbered by their three families, “every male from a month old and upward” (Numbers 3:15): the Gershonites “seven thousand and five hundred” (3:22), the Kohathites “eight thousand and six hundred” (3:28), and the Merarites “six thousand and two hundred” (3:34), which is 22,300. Yet the total is “twenty and two thousand” (3:39), three hundred fewer.

The total can’t be a round number. The chapter counts exactly: Israel’s firstborn were “twenty and two thousand two hundred and threescore and thirteen” (3:43), and the 273 “which are more than the Levites” were redeemed at five shekels apiece (3:46–47), “a thousand three hundred and threescore and five shekels” (3:50). That reckoning works only if the Levites counted against the firstborn were exactly 22,000. Many commentators say a copyist wrote “six” for “three” in the Kohathites’ number, which would make them 8,300.

Preferred: The three hundred were the Levites’ own firstborn. The Levites were numbered to be taken “instead of all the firstborn among the children of Israel” (Numbers 3:12, 41, 45), and every firstborn in Israel was already the LORD’s: “Sanctify unto me all the firstborn … it is mine” (Exodus 13:2), “on the day that I smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt I hallowed unto me all the firstborn in Israel” (Numbers 3:13). A firstborn Levite was the LORD’s by his birth before he was His by his tribe, and what is already His can’t be given to Him in place of another. So each family’s number counts every male (3:22, 28, 34), and the sum in verse 39, the Levites who could stand in the firstborn’s place, leaves out the three hundred who were firstborn themselves. This is the old Jewish answer, given in the Talmud: “these 300 were first-born, and there is no first-born redeems a first-born” (Gill).

The chapter itself treats verse 39 as this kind of number. The firstborn were numbered next (3:40), and the twenty-two thousand are matched against them one for one, down to the 273 “which are more than the Levites” (3:46) and the 1,365 shekels paid for them (3:50). The total isn’t the families’ sum rounded off: Aben Ezra, as Gill notes, set that answer aside, since this chapter counts down to the 73.

Verse 39 says these are “all that were numbered of the Levites, which Moses and Aaron numbered at the commandment of the LORD.” The LORD’s commandment was to number the Levites to be His “instead of all the firstborn” (3:40–45), and the firstborn among them were His already. The families’ numbers give the tribe; the total gives those the LORD took for Israel’s firstborn.

The copyist’s error the commentators propose, “six” for “three” in the Kohathites’ number, has no support in the Hebrew, which reads as the KJV does. Gill: “there is no occasion to suppose either of these, for which there is no foundation.”