✚cyberpuritan angel 🍚🐝🌱: i wonder whether and to what extent the Book of Numbers was a model for modern census-taking

i wonder whether and to what extent the Book of Numbers was a model for modern census-taking

I regularly insist that a lot of the OT was written by records managers.

Supposedly that bit was written by Moses but it certainly makes you go "hmmm"

I've not read any scholarship, but it wouldnt' surprise me. After all, you know the principle of Anglo-American law going back to Magna Carta that taxes have to be raised with the consent of the governed? Langton was thinking of Samuel's warning against royal taxation (1 Samuel 8:10-22).

I will seriously never not love that Magna Carta was written by the same guy who divided the books of the Bible into the chapters that we still use today.

I just learned this recently (maybe from you) and yeah it's really cool! I like the anecdote that the guy who did the verses was a procrastinator who ended up doing a lot of them in his carriage in a heavy storm the night before it was due

Iirc the modern census tradition dates to the Doomsday Book so if I think to look into this that's where I'll start

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