After all the territories had been divided into allotments for the ten tribes plus the two ‘half tribes,’ all of the family groups of Israel had their own geographical homeland, except for the descendants of Levi. So “the heads of the families of the Levites came to the priest Eleazar and to Joshua son of Nun and to the heads of the families of the tribes of the Israelites; they said to them at Shiloh in the land of Canaan, “The Lord commanded through Moses that we be given towns to live in, along with their pasturelands for our livestock’ ” (Joshua 21:1-2).

This created an interesting dynamic. All of the descendants of, say, Zebulon would live in the same territory, which would be labeled ‘Zebulon.’ Similarly for Gad and Asher, Manasseh and Judah, and all the rest: all the farmers and townspeople for many miles in any direction would be your close relatives and distant cousins. But the three branches of the tribe of Levi – the descendants of Levi’s three sons, Kohath, Gershon, and Merari – would be in individual towns scattered into different territories (21:5-7). So your immediate neighbors in your Levite town would be Levites, just like you: but as soon as you walked a mile or two into the countryside, the people you saw would be from a different tribe.

I think this would frequently lead to some awkwardness, to a sense that “those people are different from us”
– in both directions. Because the Levites had their own cities and pastures, they could be self-sufficient and could reinforce their Levite identity, and not start to think of themselves as, say, Reubenites or Danites.

The result of this sense of differentiation would be to emphasize that the people who lived in any of the Levite communities – 48 towns in all (21:41) – didn’t really belong to the tribe in whose territory they lived: they belonged to the Lord. They had a particular identity, and a particular calling: their role in the life of the people of Israel was to care for all the labor of the religious life of the nation, for the furnishings of the tabernacle, and the whole structure of the people’s worship of the Lord.

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We can see, Lord, that the life of the Levites was structured to help them understand that “we have a particular calling to which we must adhere.” We, too, have a calling: grant us your grace to structure our lives to follow you, with all our heart.

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