The first recorded descriptions of attempts to determine the size of a religiously distinct population appear, appropriately, in the Bible. The planning, execution, and results of these attempts, furthermore, typify how sets of religious statistics have been assembled and have come to be regarded to this day. For the Bible is pocketed with descriptions of human pride and human fallibility, and of catastrophic mixtures of the two; it is heavy with stories of grand schemes gone awry and of conflict following on confusion. So is the history of statistics on religion. In the Biblical accounts of how the “numbering of Israel” was several times undertaken and accomplished lies evidence of recurring problems in the collection of data on religious membership (cf. Price, 1967; Wolfe, 1932: 358).

The Old Testament's Book of Numbers (chapters 1 and 2) recounts how the God of the Israelites, fresh from leading His people out of Egypt and into the Sinai wilderness, commanded His prophet Moses to recruit a specific assistant from each tribe and, along with His priest Aaron, to register all men in their midst over the age of twenty, “all in Israel who are able to go forth to war, you and Aaron shall number them, company by company” (Numbers 1:3). Together, the account claims, the fourteen original census takers counted more than 600,000 warriors for the nation of Israel. Only the Levites, whom the Lord had specially designated as guardians of the tabernacle, escaped this initial enumeration.