"And the LORD spake unto Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tabernacle of the congregation, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they were come out of the land of Egypt, saying, Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, after their families, by the house of their fathers, with the number of their names, every male by their polls; From twenty years old and onward, all that are able to go forth to war in Israel: thou and Aaron shall number them by their armies.”

[Old Testament, Book of Numbers, 1:1]

According to the Book of Numbers the population of men twenty years of age or more were counted for war, and they represented every tribe—all twelve, i.e., the tribe of Reuben, the tribe of Simeon, the tribe of Gad, the tribe of Judah, the tribe of Issachar, the tribe of Zebulun, the tribe of Joseph, the tribe of Manasseh, the tribe of Benjamin, the tribe of Dan, the tribe of Asher, and the tribe of Naphtali, each numbered in the thousands and each group was related to Moses and his brother, Aaron.

The Old Testament, despite being a mythology, spans a representational period from 1,200 to 300 BCE (Finkelstein and Siberman 2002) during which large social groups (numbering in the tens of thousands) became sedentary, lived in city states, and were often unified under a common ideology. By 1,200 BCE, the region of Egypt supported a population of up to 1 million people (Roser 2022). It is important to contrast this with early human populations of 30,000 years ago, which included both Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis; they tended to congregate in small groups of 10 to 30 and they were nomadic (Hoffecker 2009; Skov et al. 2022). These groups did not require a formal code of ethics to enforce group cohesion even though they likely had their own mythology based on their clan history; nevertheless, the groups of this period were distributed throughout Africa and Eurasia and beyond (see Fig. 1; Haber et al. 2019; Posth et al. 2016).

“For the LORD had spoken unto Moses, saying, Only thou shalt not number the tribe of Levi, neither take the sum of them among the children of Israel: But thou shalt appoint the Levites over the tabernacle of testimony, and over all the vessels thereof, and over things that belong to it... …And the LORD spake unto Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, saying, Number the children of Levi after the house of their fathers, by their families: every male from a month old and upward shalt thou number them.”

[Old Testament, Book of Numbers, 1:48-50, 3:14-15]

The Levites (numbering 8,600 individuals including children) were put in charge of the twelve tribes who would congregate at the tabernacle (the ideological center) which represented Moses/Aaron and the dictates of ‘God’. Thus, a bicameral society was established, and each tribe was assigned a captain. Aaron was considered a high priest and subordinate to Moses, and Moses was subordinate to ‘God’.

The biblical text of Numbers outlines the hierarchical structure of society which also included a preponderance of slaves who served the different Judaic tribes. The laws regulating the relations between the master class and the slave class are listed in the Book of Exodus and summarized in the commandments from ‘God’. The invention of written texts in the period of 1,200 to 300 BCE (and before) acted as a communicative glue (despite the high degree of illiteracy) that linked city-state members throughout Eurasia including the Mediterranean belt, Persia, India, and China (Daniels and Bright 1996) thereby furnishing the various states with a code of ethics that also included a hierarchical structure with slavery (Bankston 2022; Hunt 2015; Stilwell 2013) that exists up until today except for the slavery. Currently, this structure is maintained by controlling entry into elite institutions of education (putatively based on merit) which is dominated by the United States, but soon to be supplanted by China (see ‘China’s New Army of Engineers’, The Economist, June 27, 2025). But most significantly, by institutionalizing mandatory education throughout the world post-1950, economic abundance has been the norm (despite disparities) and the people of the planet are smarter as an aggregate, even though there are issues related to the over-extraction of resources which has caused ecological degradation. Of course, this degradation can be remedied through international cooperation and realization that zero-sum economics will fail (Sachs 2024), which highlights the self-destructive nature of the current regime in Washington.

Figure 1. Chromosomal-identified locations of Homo sapiens (B) according to a timeline spanning from 101,100 to 1,900 years ago (C, marked as 101.1 and 1.0, respectively). Between 71,400 and 2,100 years ago (marked as 71.4 and 2.1, respectively), humans occupied most of the continents save Australia and Antarctica for the Y chromosome types specified. Data from figure 1 of Haber et al. (2019).