ספר במדבר

Numbers ‎1,2. “take a census of the whole community of ‎the Children of Israel by their families according to their ‎ancestral houses, etc;” Deuteronomy 1,18. ‎‏ ‏‎“and on the ‎first day of the second month they convoked the whole ‎community who were registered by families and their ‎ancestral houses;” According to Rashi the word ‎ויתילדו‎ means that each male brought a document confirming his ‎birth date and the name of his father.Personally, I am inclined ‎to accept the word ‎ויתילדו‎ at face value, a word derived from ‎לידה‎, ‎‎“birth,” and that the Torah emphasizes the difference between ‎how gentiles identify themselves and how Israelites identify ‎themselves. Gentiles identify themselves only according to their ‎mothers, as one can never be certain who the father is, seeing ‎that gentiles do not observe the rules of marital fidelity, and even ‎when they do, they engage in extra marital relationships that ‎produce children. The Torah’s emphasis on the Israelites being ‎able to identify themselves according to their “families” as ‎meaning according to their “father’s houses,” is one of the ‎greatest compliments the Torah could pay the Jewish people. The ‎very commandment to arrange a census being addressed to the ‎‎“heads” of the Children of Israel, i.e. their male family heads, ‎shows that after having constructed G’d’s residence on earth, the ‎Tabernacle, they were now allowed to conduct the census based ‎on paternity rather than on maternity.‎