Here in Greenville, Texas, one of the main complaints I see posted on community message boards on the daily is that we’re not developing the town as it grows. When I moved here in 2009, the city had about 25,000 people. Now, thanks to the growth from the Dallas/Fort-Worth Metroplex, we’re closer to 40,000.
The town still looks and feels like it did seventeen years ago…which isn’t necessarily a good thing. Many of the roads are broken, the main drag through town is crowded, traffic is a nightmare, and construction feels more like a fact of life rather than a minor annoyance that will one day go away.
In short, it doesn’t feel like the people who planned Greenville a hundred years ago ever thought it would grow like it has. But hey, that’s life, right? Gotta deal with it.
If you’re a Levite though, you don’t have to worry about crowding or overgrowth, because according to Numbers 35:4, as the population of your Levitical city grew, so did the physical borders of the town itself.
If you’ve spent any time in Numbers before, you probably know that God apportioned 48 towns that are strictly for the Levites. They have no inheritance in the land; every other tribe gets a region, but the Levites get cities.
This is for a good purpose. The people needed their priests nearby for sacrifices and religious teaching, so God spread them out through the nation in order to efficiently serve His people.
As a side note, some of these cities will be cities of refuge, which serve an even more specific purpose. But that’s a conversation for another time.
Each one of these towns has a standard layout. The city is in the middle, with pasture land surrounding each city for their flocks to graze. Israel is by nature a shepherd people—remember Jacob’s family that came to Egypt? (Genesis 46:32)—and that includes the Levites. They’ll need space for their animals, too.
God built this pasture land into the dimensions of the city. According to Numbers 35:4, the pasture extends a thousand cubits past the city in each direction, creating a starting perimeter of 2,000 cubits on each side (Numbers 35:5).
That sounds great, but think about the implications of that statement. If the pasture land extends past the walls of the city, that means that as the town grows (and the walls are pushed further and further out), the pasture land will extend too.
I hate math, but let’s use it for a second to think through the logistics. If each wall is represented by X, then the initial perimeter of the city would be X+X+X+X (or 4X, for you smarty pants). That’s the amount of pasture land each city is given at the start—even when there’s only a single occupant.
Now, four hundred years later, that town has grown quite a bit. There’s a few thousand now, which means the walls have extended an extra 500 cubits out from their original space. That means that the perimeter of the wall is (X+500)+ (X+500)+(X+500)+ (X+500). Or, once again, 4x(X+500).
Of course, we understand that cities don’t grow in linear fashion. Some sides are longer than the others, walls aren’t built in a straight line, and so on. But this gives us a general idea of the layout for the cities of the Levites.
In short, the tribe of Levi didn’t have to worry about having enough space for their livelihood, because God built that into the original design of the city.
Unlike Greenville, where we constantly feel like we’re getting in each other’s way.