How exactly were judges were set up in the Jewish camp? We know there were “ministers of ten”, “ministers of fifty”, “ministers of hundreds” and “ministers of thousands”. Were the Jews divided by name into groups, each ten receiving a judge, and they were to direct their questions to only him? Was it only if he didn’t know that they went up a level to the leader of fifty, and so on? What happened when a new Jew was born; did he join a new company, or did he take the place of someone that died?Was this allocation and rearrangement done on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis?
Rashi in Sanhedrin explains the position of Rabbi Nechemiah that a town had to number at least two hundred and thirty inhabitants before being eligible for a Sanhedrin, for that number “is comparable to the leaders of ten [of Moshe]”. Rashi elaborates that two hundred and thirty make twenty three groups of ten, so each Beis Din member can correspond to a leader of ten, for we never find any position of authority when the number is less than ten. Was every member of Beis Din then assigned ten specific charges? Certainly not. So perhaps the makeup of Moshe’s judgmental system wasn’t that specific judges were assigned to specific people, but that there was a general assignment of judges to the number equal to one tenth the population. Ok, but how did it work day to day?
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