The laws and edicts of this period read like paraphrases of Savonarola's sermons, and indeed his counsels were always given as addenda to the religious exhortations in which he denounced the sins of his country and the pollution of the church, and urged Florence to cast off iniquity and become a truly Christian city, a pattern not only to Rome but to the world at large.
The fact is that Numbers is the result of a long literary process of amalgamation both of traditions and of documents, a process that began in the closing decades of the 9th century B.C. and did not finally end till the 2nd century B.C., the earliest date being that of J, and the latest probably that of the various addenda to Balaam's prophecies, e.g.
And Addenda (1880); J.