The Levites thirty years old or more were counted, and the total number of men was thirty-eight thousand. – 1 Chronicles 23:3

Today’s Scripture Reading (August 6, 2019): 1 Chronicles 23

The legal age for the consumption of alcohol, where I live, is eighteen. Amazingly, the legal age for the use of alcohol seems to be the moment when our culture considers a person to move out of their teenage years and into adulthood. I have had opportunities to leave the country with eighteen-year-olds and have had to sit them down and give them a chat on the facts of life. Where we live an adult might be considered to be anyone eighteen years of age or older, but not everywhere in the world agrees. You might think you are an adult, but the area into which we are moving reserves that right for people over the age of twenty-one. You might not believe that that is fair, but it is the law, and when we get off the plane, we have to live by laws of the country that we are visiting. That is why your parents had to sign off on this trip, even though you think you are an adult.

So that brings up a bigger question; at what age do you really become an adult? The matter is one of a bit of debate. As life gets longer, it would seem the period that we are adding into is actually adolescence. At the time the biblical writers were working with their quills, adolescence was an unknown. And adult in Israel was anyone who had passed the age of Bar Mitzvah, twelve or thirteen. Mary probably was between the ages of twelve and fourteen when she gave birth to Jesus and got married to Joseph. She was already considered to be an adult. At that age, our kids are barely ready for their Junior High or Middle School years. But some research indicates that our brains don’t finally mature until we are twenty-five or maybe a little older. It is possible that we do not become adults until almost a decade after our eighteenth birthday.

The author of Chronicles says that David gathered and counted the Levites over the age of thirty, and those enumerated were put to work in the Temple, likely on a rotating basis. The age of thirty is in accordance with the Law found in Numbers 4:1-3. There are a lot of things that we can excel at when we are younger, but it would seem that God designed us to excel at the wisdom needed for the Temple once we had passed the third century of life. Maybe it is not until then that we have the capability to stand up for what is right in the face of pressure to do things differently, although admittedly it is a capability that we do not always put to use. What is interesting in this passage is that David seems to have omitted the higher age. Numbers 4 clearly says that those who minister in the Temple should be between the ages of thirty and fifty. David includes the first limitation but omits the age of mandatory retirement from Temple duties. The reason for this omission is unknown, but it might be that he needed the older men for duty, or just that as David grew older, he privately recognized the wisdom contained within the older Levites, and didn’t have the heart to force them to retire them from their duties.     

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: 1 Chronicles 24