[Avodah] Why so few first-borns??

[T613K at aol.com]

SBA
> Can somebody explain how is possible that from shishim  riboy yiden  aged 20
> -60 there were only 23 thousand  bechorim

> Most were probably married to at least one wife and possible  more.
> If they all had children 50% would be boys - thus there should be at  least
> 300 000 bechorim???

Another similar question has to do with the 22, 000 Levi'im who "ransomed"
22, 000 first-borns, and then there were an additional 273 first-borns who
were "extra" and had to pay five shekalim each. (This is from last week,
P' Bamidbar.) But if you count up all the numbers from when Gershon,
Kehas and Merari were each counted, and add them up, you find *22, 300*
Levi'im (not 22, 000 as a later pasuk says) so there should have been
plenty of Levi'im, and no bechor should have needed to pay five shekalim.

Rashi answers this by saying that the 300 extra Levi'im were first-borns
themselves and therefore had to "ransom" themselves so to speak, and
thus were not available to ransom other bechorim.

So far so good, but now take out your calculator. There were 22, 300
male Levi'im and only 300 of them were bechorim?! What's the ratio?

Even if we say that half of all children are born into a family where
the first born is a girl, that would leave us with 11, 000 Levi'im in
families where the first born was a boy, yet there are only 300 bechorim
-- a ratio of one bechor for every 37 later-born boys!

A typical Levi wife had 37 sons?! (And presumably an equal number of
daughters?!)

Eliyahu Kitov discusses this at length in his Sefer Haparshios, a lot
to say but I'm too tired and busy right now. However, bottom line, he
himself admits in a footnote that his answers are not fully satisfactory.
Al regel achas we are of course talking about nissim, not a natural rate
of increase.

(Yet with each Levi wife having sixty or seventy children, Shevet Levi is
still smaller than the next-smallest shevet?! Kitov talks about this too)

(BTW -- not discussed in Sefer Haparshios, but just my own thought --
you could have a HUGE number of births and then a HUGE number of deaths
and end up with a small number of people, net.)


From: Micha Berger <micha at aishdas.org>
On Sun, May 16, 2010  at 01:27:45AM +1000, SBA wrote:
: From: AMK
:> Can somebody explain how  is possible that from?shishim riboy yiden  aged 20
:> -60 there were  only 23 thousand bechorim

We discussed this before. See RGStudent's first  post to Avodah (1999)  at
http://www.aishdas.org/avodah/vol04/v04n089.shtml#08

and the  discussion (2002)  at
http://www.aishdas.org/avodah/getindex.cgi?section=P#PROPORTION%20OF%20FIRST%20BORNS%20TO%20ALL%20BNEI%20YISRAEL
(or  http://bit.ly/9Xk8Oz )

I read this after I sent in my post on the subject.  I see that in his  
1999 post,  RGS asked a somewhat similar question to my question,  about the 
ratio of first-born to later-born Levi'im.  Here is part of what  he wrote 
there:
    I was thinking that many of the firstborns were killed during Makas
    Choshech but the question arises why they died so disproportionally
    to the rest of the nation. R. Aryeh Kaplan in The Living Torah
    suggests that many Jews did not observe the first Pesach and did
    not put blood on their doorpost. Therefore, their firstborns
    were killed in the makkah. He also suggests that maybe Hashem
    intentionally caused women to give birth to girls first but does
    not offer any explanation as to why Hashem would do this.

--Toby  Katz
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