Big Families?

We spoke about the calculation Rabbi Zalman Sorotzkin makes about the amazing family size there was at the time Moshe counted them in this week’s parsha. And we had some pretty interesting footnotes to add.
The Torah counts the Jews as 603,550 men between 20 and 50 years of age. The Bechorim counted out to 22,273. They were counted as the Levi’im – from a month old and up. That means there was one male Bechor to every 27 males!

Young Bechorim tend to take up more of the family, because a Bechor a year old probably equals 100% of the children in his family, and therefore since the Bechorim were counted from one month old, the Bechorim were disproportionally more than the actual ratio. In addition, since Bechorim were counted from one month and the Jews from twenty years, there was an additional skewing in favor of Bechorim. Therefore the 1:27 ratio above is actually under the real number – there were even less Bechorim than that.

The Levi’im counted 22,300 and 300 were Bechorim, says Rashi (3:39). That means that there was over 75 normal Levi’im for every Levi Bechor!! Even more than the Jews! (Perhaps the mitigating factors discussed in the previous paragraph account for the difference.)

So the families they had were gigantic! This is an outgrowth of the miracle that they had sextuplets in every birth, so that in ten or eleven births there were so many children.
This is all explained in the Oznayim LaTorah.

We took things a bit farther: The real suffering in Egypt was only 86 years. (Rashi Shir Hashirim 2:13) We also know that according to Chazal only 1/5 or 1/50 or 1/500 left Egypt, the others were unworthy and died there. Rashi says that one of out five left Egypt. There had been five times the amount of Jews who left Egypt, only they died in the Makkah of Choshech.

Does that mean that each family had 135 children? That would entail 22.5 pregnancies at 6 children at a shot, something prodigious at any standard. Rather it would appear that there were good families in Klal Yisroel and bad ones. The bad died off entirely and the good ones remained.

86 years constitutes 3 or 4 childbearing cycles, 3 or 4 generations. Taking only the bald numbers the Torah is explicit about – 27 children in each family, we may infer that the generation before the one that left Egypt consisted of 1/27th the amount of people, i.e. 27,353. The one before that had merely 827 individuals. And the one before that, assuming four generations of 6 per birth, had only 30. That is pretty impossible, considering that they stated with 70!

So we must work with the 5x standard; 603,550 x5 = 3,017,750. A generation beforehand they had 111,768, a generation more: 4,139 and in the fourth generation: 153. Still highly improbable being that the original 70 had 124 years to propagate. The Torah tells us that the Jews became very many, filling the land. That does not sound like 153 individuals, methinks. And the six-fold births are recorded at the beginning – right when Yosef died!

So I am having trouble mapping out a scheme that would allow for six-fold births yet account for the fewness of the Jews leaving Egypt. Unless they had six at a time, but only one or two pregnancies?

And the size of the falimies we do know about – Moshe’s family, Tzelofchod’s family and Aharon’s family, to mention a few, – do not reflect anything other than small-sized normal families….