As with Moshe's census, prophetic vision transforms the wilderness rabble into ranks of order and fruitfulness, into a garden. But we moderns may become confused here. Story lines, fixed points of view, the laws of space and times, slipped through my fingers. The characters sometimes spoke in their own voices and sometimes in other people's, merely to explain to me that history is not always historical, that the truth is never what it appears to be. It took me months and months to tame the chaos.
Every story is, by definition, unfaithful.
Reality, as I've said, can't be told or repeated. The only thing that can be done with reality is to invent it again. Such a message would certainly be palatable to today's reader, but hardly reflects the genius of Torah. The great medieval commentator Ramban provides a clue to this issue. In his commentary on b'Midbar, he struggles with the fact that God commands a census here, but later punishes King David for taking a census.