Numbers 15 has long been seen in scholarship as a vaguely haphazard collection of disparate legal elements, with few obvious connections between them. Although some attempts have been made to find a thematic thread linking the various parts of the chapter, there has been little consensus on how best to understand the rationale behind the location and grouping of these legal passages or their particular order. This paper will make a new suggestion regarding the means by
which Numbers 15 came to have its canonical shape.