Exodus 38 · a question people ask
Is this the same count as the census in Numbers?
Exodus doesn't say when its count was taken. Its silver had been cast into sockets (38:27) by the time the tabernacle was raised, "In the first month in the second year, on the first day of the month" (40:17), when Moses "laid its sockets" (40:18). Numbers begins a month later, when the LORD spoke "on the first day of the second month, in the second year" (Numbers 1:1) and said, "Take a census of all the congregation of the children of Israel" (Numbers 1:2). Its total is the same as here: "six hundred three thousand five hundred fifty" (Numbers 1:46). Numbers adds, "But the Levites after the tribe of their fathers were not counted among them" (Numbers 1:47); Exodus 38 doesn't say whether Levites were in its count. Neither book says how the two counts relate.
The verses
“a beka a head, that is, half a shekel, according to the shekel of the sanctuary, for everyone who passed over to those who were counted, from twenty years old and upward, for six hundred three thousand five hundred fifty men. The one hundred talents of silver were for casting the sockets of the sanctuary and the sockets of the veil: one hundred sockets for the one hundred talents, one talent per socket.”
“In the first month in the second year, on the first day of the month, the tabernacle was raised up. Moses raised up the tabernacle, and laid its sockets, and set up its boards, and put in its bars, and raised up its pillars.”
“The LORD spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of Meeting, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they had come out of the land of Egypt, saying, “Take a census of all the congregation of the children of Israel, by their families, by their fathers’ houses, according to the number of the names, every male, one by one,”
“all those who were counted were six hundred three thousand five hundred fifty. But the Levites after the tribe of their fathers were not counted among them.”