Biblical exegetes throughout the generations have been forever searching for these avenues of understanding and have come up with some pretty elaborate schemes, including biblical codes, mystical symbology, and assuming that every small word of the biblical text has meaning. I will not be doing that, though I will argue that sometimes an author is hiding a message in plain sight through the structure, particularly if the author seeks to subvert. Mainly though I will show how you can understand new things about this ancient text that were not obvious before.

To even a cursory reader of the first 11 chapter of Genesis it is evident that at least one of the authors had an obsession with numbers or lists. Most of Chapters 1, 5, 10, and 11 are devoted to lists with some listing going on in Chapters 2, 4, 6 as well. All in all about 40 percent of the text in these chapters is written in this genre. For many people wading through these lists is boring. What do you care that Yered lived 962 years. It won’t change your life. But it would be a mistake to assume that these lists lacked an underlying logic, you don’t put that much effort into a chart so that it will be nonsensical.

It is clear for example that this author, known to scholars as P loved the number seven, as I have shown in three or four substack pieces. Even that number 962, well it is seven less than the longest lived of individuals – Metuselah, who lived for 969 years. Why 969 though and not 973, well 969 years get Metuselah all the way to the flood, and he couldn’t have survived longer unless he was transformed into a fish. Metuselah was the only person who both knew Adam and saw the flood. He outlived his son Lemech by five years, but Lemech needed to die sooner because it was important that he be 777 years old. This paragraph does not seek to entice you into numerology, but simply to demonstrate that all the numbers in these lists have meaning, there is a pattern to them or rather patterns which sometimes yield interesting insights. I promise that I will only get into the weeds with these numbers when there are actually interesting insights to be gleaned.

The most remarkable of the people on these lists is none other than Noah. Noah was not the longest lived, he only gets the bronze medal for that at 950. But he was the only person who saw 18 or maybe even 19 generations of human beings, from Enosh all the way to Abraham, and perhaps Lot. The only other individual that comes close is his son Shem, who was alive for 3 generations before the flood and saw 13 generations afterwards up until the birth of Jacob’s first children.

But it goes beyond that – Noah witnessed 9 generations before the flood and 9 generations after the flood. He knew Adam’s grandson Enosh, and he knew Abraham before he left for Canaan, pretty symmetrical, eh?

The text notes that Noah was a righteous man in his generation, and the rabbis make a lot of this, and posit that he was a righteous man relative to the shmucks that inhabited the earth before him who were drowned in the flood. But when we comprehend how long this man lived, we understand that phrase ‘his generations’ in the plural was entirely deliberate. He was the most righteous man for 18 generations.

In a very profound way Noah stands in the middle, and not just because the flood that he is associated with is the center and most important moment in Genesis 1-11. Noah knew Enosh and he knew Abraham. He knew the first generations of human beings and the first generation of Israelites.

The immediate association we have with Noah is the ark and the flood. The first author known to scholars as J makes clear that God created human beings but then regrets this because they pose a threat to him. He then corrupts them, and they become murderous. God wipes the slate clean and tries again with a more malleable set of human beings. I write all about this in my book Why God Was Afraid…

The Priestly author rejects this framework. God cannot regret, and so the flood must mean something else. (As a side note this concept of divine regret was fiercely debated among biblical authors. In I Samuel 15, we have perhaps the most explicit case of a contradiction when one author says, God regrets [our J author] and the other author rejects it vehemently)

But what is the meaning of the flood in Priestly literature?

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King David’s reign is bookended by two sins. His sin of adultery with Bat Sheva and the sin of the census. These two sins involve two blameless men Uriah the Hittite and Ornan the Jebusite. Uriah is such a tragic figure that he has captured the imaginations of playwrights, authors, and painters countless times. David ‘takes care of him’ when he can’t get him to engage in sex with his wife and cover up for David’s dalliance.

One incidental fact that the author lets slip is that Uriah was a Hittite one of the proscribed nations.

Many chapters later in II Samuel 24 Ornan serves as a means towards David finally being forgiven for his sins. The God or the Angel of Death have just killed 70 thousand Israelites in a plague brought on by David conducting a census of all things. This is a strange episode, since David’s inexplicable desire to count was planted in David’s mind by God according to the first verse of the chapter.

Following the prophet Gad’s instructions, David finds what he needs to stop the plague at Ornan’s threshing floor and offers a sacrifice to God. Ornan wants to donate the animals and everything else for the sacrifice but David decides that he cannot let him do that, and buys what is necessary from him. One may assume that after this plague brought on by God and this sacrifice David has finally fully atoned for his sin with Bat Sheva.

Oh and did I mention Ornan was a Jebusite, one of the proscribed nations.

In a third episode in II Samuel 21, there is a long famine, and David finds out it is because of the mistreatment of the Gibeonites by Saul. David has five of Saul’s sons murdered and the famine stops. The Gibeonites are members of the Hivvite nation, which is also supposed to be proscribed, though for some reason the author of II Samuel names them Amorites, a fourth proscribed nation.

Lest this author be accused of not being comprehensive, members of two other nations, the Canaanites and Hivvites are mentioned as well as having cities up north in II Samuel 24. All in all five of seven of the nations are mentioned. If you’ve been following my substack you will know that the two others, the Perizzites and Girgishites, are entities that are entirely artificial, so he doesn’t bother with them.

Considered separately, the latter two episodes (the Gibeonites and the census) are not particularly interesting. Uriah the Hittite’s tale, however, is acknowledged as the beginning of the corruption of David’s dynasty. The culture of sexual permissiveness and the wanton murder lead directly to Amnon’s rape of his sister, which leads to Absalom’s murder of Amnon, which leads to Absalom’s banishment, which leads to a partial reconciliation, which leads to a coup attempt.

There is more to this pattern then meets the eye, and the pattern extends further than you may suppose in both directions. The idea that David had the right to take other people’s wives is apparent already in I Samuel 25, where he proposes to Abigail before her husband Nabal is buried. To be fair Abigail is entirely willing, but it is evident that David feels that rules don’t entirely apply to him. He also takes back Michal, “who was promised to him” from her husband Adriel in II Samuel 3, which is its own kettle of rotten fish.

On the other end of the pattern, in I Kings Solomon son of Batsheva the stolen wife who reigns after his father can’t even let his brother Adoniah who lost out to him have the consolation of the concubine Avisag, and has him killed mafia style. Solomon of course is determined to outdo his father in sexual prowess and has 1000 wives. These wives corrupt him and he loses the kingdom.

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Just to jog your memory, Aaron had the Israelites give his gold he threw it into the fire, and a calf came out. He then declared. “This is your God O Israel who took you out from Egypt.”

More recently, I have followed up and elaborated upon the mechanism of forgiveness, which first involved the death of his sons, and then the Golden Calf which was a sin offering in disguise. In the interim Aaron shows his mettle by saving the Israelites from a couple of plagues.

I’ve never been entirely satisfied with this explanation. The Sin of the Golden Calf is just too big of a no-no. The Golden Calf is a god of gold, the same gods of gold which are forbidden in the Ten Commandments and then right after the ten commandments.

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Idolatry is such a horrible sin that it trumps murder according to a number of biblical authors. Even the prophets who are held up as models of virtue mention idolatry before anything else, and in much greater detail. The following passage from the Book of Kings regarding the sins of King Menashe exemplifies this well, it is a long passage, but I bring it in full:

He did what was displeasing to GOD, following the abhorrent practices of the nations that GOD had dispossessed before the Israelites.

He rebuilt the shrines that his father Hezekiah had destroyed; he erected altars for Baal and made a sacred post, as King Ahab of Israel had done. He bowed down to all the host of heaven and worshiped them,

and he built altars for them in the House of GOD, of which GOD had said, “I will establish My name in Jerusalem.”

He built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the House of GOD.

He consigned his son to the fire; he practiced soothsaying and divination, and consulted ghosts and familiar spirits; he did much that was displeasing to GOD—and provoked anger.

The sculptured image of Asherah that he made he placed in the House concerning which GOD had said to David and to his son Solomon, “In this House and in Jerusalem, which I chose out of all the tribes of Israel, I will establish My name forever.

And I will not again cause the feet of Israel to wander from the land that I gave to their ancestors, if they will but faithfully observe all that I have commanded them—all the Teachings with which My servant Moses charged them.”

But they did not obey, and Manasseh led them astray to do greater evil than the nations that GOD had destroyed before the Israelites.

Therefore GOD spoke through the prophets—God’s servants:

“Because King Manasseh of Judah has done these abhorrent things—he has outdone in wickedness all that the Amorites did before his time—and because he led Judah to sin with his fetishes,

assuredly, thus said the ETERNAL, the God of Israel: I am going to bring such a disaster on Jerusalem and Judah that both ears of everyone who hears about it will tingle.

I will apply to Jerusalem the measuring line of Samaria and the weights of the House of Ahab; I will wipe Jerusalem clean as one wipes a dish and turns it upside down.

And I will cast off the remnant of My own people and deliver them into the hands of their enemies. They shall be plunder and prey to all their enemies

because they have done what is displeasing to Me and have been provoking My anger from the day that their ancestors came out of Egypt to this day.”

Moreover, Manasseh put so many innocent persons to death that he filled Jerusalem [with blood] from end to end—besides the sin he committed in causing Judah to do what was displeasing to GOD.

For fourteen verses the sins of Manasseh are catalogued, they are all sins of idolatry. It is only in verse 16 of this chapter, that the author, probably a later author remembers that Manasseh must have also committed crimes in the moral / ethical sphere. Manasseh was the absolute worst king, but his corruption was really primarily of the theological variety.

Seeing that this is the case how could Aaron ever be forgiven for such a sin?!

The priests were nothing but strict. Aaron and Moses do not enter the land because they hit a rock with a stick instead of speaking to it. This is so so so much worse.

It is not as though the Priestly authors are more tolerant of blasphemous behavior, if anything they are less tolerant. So what is going on?

The answer is actually rather simple and has to do with the cutest idols in ancient Israel, the cherubs, which I will speak about next week.

J the Judean generally accepts the framework of gradual expansion the earlier northern authors bequeathed him, except he was decidedly more bloody-minded, and when he defeats a particular city-state, he defeats it comprehensively. He is the first author to tell us of Joshua and his so-called conquest of the land. According to J’s version of events the Israelites conquer only two cities under Joshua, Jericho and Ai.

Following the destruction of these cities, the conquest of the land is indeed incremental, more incremental than the Northeners posited. It is only King David that finished the job with the conquest of Jerusalem in II Samuel 6.

It must be said, however, that in contrast with his northern predecessors J does talk about finishing off peoples, not just armies. Or rather, I should say he talks about finishing off one particular people, the Amalekites.

There is no evidence that the Amalekites ever existed, and to be fair to this author, he probably knew that. J begins the process of creating the scary Amalekite bogeyman, who like an evil phoenix always rises from the ashes to threaten the Israelites in every generation. He takes his cue from an early northern story in which Amalek were the first nation to attack the Israelite after they Egypt. If they were the first, they were probably the worst at least according to J, so J makes them into the eternal bogeyman: As the final verse of Exodus 17 says, “with a hand upon the throne of Yhwh [I swear] to wage Yhwh’s war against Amalek in every generation.”

One should note, that in tandem with a commitment to genocide, this statement also reflects the durability of Israel’s enemy. If the Israel’s were not to fight the evil Amalekites in every generation, why mention ‘generations’ in the first place.

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This is reflected in how the Amalekites are described in the Book of Samuel.

In I Samuel 15:1 Saul is commanded: ““Thus said GOD of Hosts: I am exacting the penalty for what Amalek did to Israel, for the assault he made upon them on the road, on their way up from Egypt. Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and donkeys!”

Saul does the dirty work, but cannot quite finish the job, he does not kill Agag the King of the Amalekites, or the sheep.

Samuel himself has to decapitate the king.

This should be the end of the story, all the Amalekites are gone, end of story.

Except they are not.

In I Samuel 30 there are thousands of them still around. They destroy David’s town Ziklag, and take his family captive.

David of course deals with them, he is always victorious after all, but this time 400 of them run away, because the Amalekites cannot be finished off, by definition.

How are we to account for these differences?

I could take the easy route and say that we are dealing with different authors. Or I could be salaciously creative like the rabbis and say that King Agag worked overtime impregnating women while he was Saul’s hostage, and was able to father a whole generation of Amalekites.

I won’t do either.

Let’s go into the weeds here, and discuss this particular command to kill the Amalekites, so we can understand why there suddenly more of them when we don’t expect.

Let me give you an analogy.

When I am asked to clean up because we have guests coming, my wife intends me to clean up our living room area and our kitchen, not our basement where our guests are not going to enter, and certainly not the neighbor’s house. Similarly, when Saul is asked to kill all the Amalekites, the unstated caveat to that is that he is being asked to kill all the Amalekites available to him.

There could very likely be other Amalekites.

The text in fact tells us the extent of the Amalekites Saul goes on to exterminate. A few verses into the chapter it states that they were smitten from Havilah to Shur. Nobody know exactly where Havila is or where Shur is, but we have some ideas. Shur is likely somewhere in the Negev desert because Hagar runs away to it from Hebron, so it has to be close by. Similarly, we hear that the Israelites travel through the Shur desert separating Egypt from Israel.

Where is Havila though?

No one exactly knows, but the two options are either very far eastward or southwards. It is not to the north.

Why am I going into this so minutely?

Because according to the biblical account there were definitely Amalekites to the north of this territory, however big it was.

There were Amalekites in the mountains – presumably the mountains of Judah, according to Numbers 14.

There were Amalekites in the valley, presumably the area contiguous to Judah, either to the west or to the east, also according to Number 14, and Judges 3

There were Amalekites in central Israel in the mountains of Ephraim according to Judges 12.

There were Amalekites in Northern Israel, who joined Midian to attack the Menashites in Judges 6.

There were Amalekites in the far North who joined the Sidonites in their attacks against Israel in Judges 10.

And so when Saul kills all the Amalekites, he is only actual killing a specific group of Amalekites, there are so many more groups, which is why they keep on popping up.

Given that the Amalekites are a literary construct, the eternal Jewish bogeyman as it were and none of this ever happened, why is it at all important to make these distinctions?

I think that it is vitally important. it shows us that even in the realm of literary fantasy there are limits, yes there are violent fantasies, certainly, as there always are, fantasies in which innocents lose their lives, but J at least drew this red line somewhere.

I’ve never hid where I stand in these debates. I’ve been writing poetry pretty much non-stop for the past 25 years, and I have been locating literary structures for even longer. I have proudly embraced the title ‘chiasmaniac’ because I find chiasms or symmetrical structures everywhere I look in the Hebrew Bible. I believe that structures often convey meaning beyond the simple words, meaning which cannot easily be accessed otherwise.

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In contrast, I have never defended my preoccupation with poetry, but given how much of my life I’ve devoted to this type of writing, I will give it a stab. My love of poetry is due almost entirely to how loaded it is with meaning. There can be more meaning in a line of poetry than in a paragraph of prose. The poets I appreciate most in Hebrew, Agnon, Bialik, and Avraham Ben Yitzchak knew how to create multiple allusions to biblical text, to rabbinic text, to philosophy, and of course to other poetry with just a few words.

The search for meaning beyond the words in the structures of the Bible is similar in this respect to the art of poetic allusion. Both mechanisms allow you to get more from the text than the simple words, and both methods of reading are truly only for the initiated. You have to know your Jewish literature to appreciate the allusions in the Hebraic poets I mentioned, similarly you have to know how to identify literary structures and realize how they convey meaning in order to appreciate what the author was truly to get to.

Why am I speaking so much of chiasmania and poetry today? One of my most ambitious projects which I haven’t yet completed is my study of what I termed ‘the greatest symmetry’: I am going to be sharing a lot about this project in the coming weeks, here is a little taste from the intro

J, or the Yahwistic source, named thusly because he used the name Yhwh for the deity, wrote in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE in the southern Kingdom of Judah and was responsible for the first major metamorphosis of the biblical narrative. By combining the original northern narratives, the Book of the Covenant (a law code found in Exodus 21–24), and the northern Book of Judges (predecessor to the canonical Book of Judges) and supplementing them with his own text, he composed a cohesive historical work that chronicles the events from the creation of the world to the crowning of King David in nine symmetrical story cycles from his particular Judean perspective.

As I was creating my plan to start publishing a new series dedicated to explaining this symmetry and what it helped convey beyond the plain meaning of the words, I discovered that what I termed ‘the greatest biblical symmetry’, wasn’t actually the greatest. There was a greater symmetry. The priestly author, who I initially thought had destroyed this symmetry through his addition of an excrutiatingly boring sacrificial regimen, had actually expanded it into twelve symmetries. There were J’s original nine, and three extra ones in the book of Exodus-Numbers.

The number twelve is aesthetically so right for Priestly literature.

At the center of centers for the Priests stand the Levites, and the Levites are led by Aaron, who carries on his chest a garment with the 12 stones representing the 12 tribes of Israel. You wouldn’t have thought it, but the Priests who were so hierarchal otherwise, were the first to really buy in to a united Israel of 12 tribes.

One last insight I will share with you before I say Shabbat Shalom. At the center of one of the priestly symmetries, is the remarkable dualistic text that posits two gods, Yhwh and Azazel on equal footing, each being given a sacrifice. There are actually not that many explicitly dualistic texts in Priestly literature, so the temptation to sweep this text aside and say it is an aberration is strong. Well P’s symmetry proves that it is not an aberration, the ritual with two gods stands at the very center of the primary priestly cycle devoted to sacrifices. It makes this ritual the most important ritual of the book. This means that dualism may have actually been the actual dominant theology of the Priests, but they may have been afraid to state this in any explicit way.

I think that this is entirely unfair to judge the ancients in this way. While it is true that their circumstances were a lot worse than our own. I don’t think it is fair to judge them as worse people from the moral-ethical perspective. It was after all the author of Leviticus 19, who first stated the grand moral imperative. Love your neighbor as yourself. I truly do not know what our claims of superiority rest on. The worst human atrocities in known history were actually committed in the 20^th century, not in ancient times. This extends to the comprehensive genocides of Jews and Armenians, but Stalin, Mao, and Hitler, were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of their own countrymen as well. Let’s entirely dispense with the fantasy that we were better or worse than our antecedents, we were just as bad or just as good.

It is precisely this understanding of the past, the idea that we are somehow better than our predecessors that informs our acceptance of the idea that the Israelites committed genocide in the land of Canaan 3300 hundred years ago. There is no evidence for it, as readers of this substack should be entirely familiar with. There is actually only one biblical author who asserted that the Israelites dealt with the nations of Canaan in this way, and I use the word asserted advisedly since, it was no more than a general assertion without corroboration. It is to this author we turn in our final piece on genocides in the Hebrew Bible. In the coming weeks we will move to gentler subject matters.

The author that commands that the Israelites kill every man woman and child in Canaan was a Deuteronomist. I want to enter his mind a little, and examine whether he truly believed that the Israelites did this, or it was part of his lurid fantastical thinking.

Below are the two instances wherein he commands this horrible genocide:

When the ETERNAL your God brings you to the land that you are about to enter and possess, and dislodges many nations before you—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations much larger than you—

and the ETERNAL your God delivers them to you and you defeat them, you must doom them to destruction: grant them no terms and give them no quarter.

You shall not intermarry with them: do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons.

For they will turn your children away from Me to worship other gods, and GOD’s anger will blaze forth against you, promptly wiping you out.

Instead, this is what you shall do to them: you shall tear down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred posts, and consign their images to the fire.

For you are a people consecrated to the ETERNAL your God: of all the peoples on earth, the ETERNAL your God chose you to be the treasured one.

The second time comes as an addendum to a more lenient law, which states that if a nation surrenders you should simply subjugate them. Not according to this guy.

Thus you shall deal with all towns that lie very far from you, towns that do not belong to nations hereabout.

In the towns of the latter peoples, however, which the ETERNAL your God is giving you as a heritage, you shall not let a soul remain alive.

No, you must proscribe them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—as the ETERNAL your God has commanded you,

lest they lead you into doing all the abhorrent things that they have done for their gods and you stand guilty before the ETERNAL your God.

This is the same Deuteronomist who suggested a couple of the more absurd laws in the Book of Deuteronomy, namely the law that we should kill teenagers who don’t listen to their parents, and that cities who worship idols should be razed, and people who show them mercy should be killed themselves as well.

The rabbis regarded both the law of the rebellious city and the law of the gluttonous teen as never having existed, recognizing that these were extremes. It’s not that the rabbis were not as zealous in their advocacy of exclusive Yahwism as their brethren in the biblical period, or less patriarchal regarding the role of the father in the family. It’s just that the rabbis consistently legislated from a place that valued each and every life, and so would have shied away from the unyielding yardstick of this Deuteronommist. But it’s more than that, they are able to recognize that these laws could not truly have existed because even relative to the imaginary zealous world projected on the biblical period by the rabbis, these laws would have been out of place. At a time when the world is rife with idolatry, you may rail against idolatry but if you kill everyone who is idolatrous then there would be very very few people left in the world. Similarly if you killed every rebellious teenager, the world would simply cease to exist, as any parent of a teenager could tell you. These laws were fantastic not just in our eyes but relative to the biblical period as well.

The question at hand is if the Deuteronomist believed whether these injunctions regarding genocide that he legislated actually took place. We know they didn’t take place but we have the advantage of archaeology. He did not and he wrote many hundreds of years after these supposed events took place, so he could have conceivably believed that they did take place. As I have been trying to make clear in my past substacks is that he would have been the only one. Every other author hedged when it came to this, and spoke of an incomplete conquest. What made him the exception? Or was he an exception?

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In the original northern account as recorded in the Elohist’s work and in the northern version of the Book of Judges, the Israelites were not promised the land by God though they do return there after their sojourn in Egypt because it was their ancestral land. Since these authors are northerners they also don’t particularly care about Jerusalem, the temple, or about Abraham, so we don’t hear about them.

The conquest of the land in the Elohistic source is one that is entirely focused on Northern Israel, on the lands of Sihon, Og, Yaazer and the Trans Jordan, what they would call the lands of Reuben, Gad, and Gilead. Territorially this area constitutes a significant portion of the Northern Kingdom. The brief conquest narrative is found entirely in Numbers 21 and it is an accidental one. The Israelites want to pass over peacefully westward, but are impeded by Sihon and Og, who wage war against them. The Israelites obliges and obliterate their armies. Comprehensive defeat in a defensive war is what is described in these chapters, not a genocide that includes men, women, children and animals.

In Northern sources the land the Israelites conquer is described as Amorrite, and it is there they dwell beginning in Numbers 21. The Amorites were a group of people who were ubiquitous all over the Ancient Near East, we hear of them or the Amarru as they are called from multiple sources. When the local Amorites are defeated in Canaan, no one would have considered it a genocide.

J, who was a southerner switched the name of the land to be conquered to Canaanite and everyone else followed suit. Why Canaanite and not Amorite, or Perrizites, or Hittites, or even Refaim.

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It actually begins in a story in Genesis 10, where Canaan is cursed by Noah and is named a slave of slaves in relation to his brothers. I actually think that Canaan was originally one of Noah’s sons, a position that is surprisingly corroborated by the Quran. If you want to read more about, please look it up in my substack. What is not often recognized is that the identification of the people of ancient as Israel was a very deliberate choice, and it all starts with this story here.

I submit that the reason they did so was because of a play on words, a play on words that begins with the above story.

The word Canaanite, can mean one who is subdued, from the semitic root kaf, nun, ayin, like a slave who is subjugated. We have several instances listed below where various nations of Canaan are subdued employing this exact root. Of particular note is the deliberate play on words in Judges 4:23, where ‘in that day God subdued (vayakhna) Yavin the King of Kna’an. In other places he is named the King of Hazor.

So though the Canaanites are entirely historical and corroborated in ancient sources, the choice to designate the entire land as Canaanite is purposeful. It is the land of the Canaanites, because it is the land of a nation that will be subdued by the Israelites.

In his list of 10 nations in Genesis 15, the longest list of Canaanite nations to be subdued, he even has the Refaim, a nation that had already been displaced by the Canaanites according to Deuteronomy 2. Only Og the King of Bashan survived, and he was killed by the Israelites in Numbers 21.

There are a couple of other lists of Canaanite nations that do not list Hivvites, and they too are very late, they are found in Ezra and Nehemiah.

People have pondered the omission of the Hivvites for generations. It is one of the great mysteries… Just kidding, nobody has cared less because nobody reads these lists closely. I am not saying you should, but you can find a lot of interesting information in these lists if you are willing to make the effort, as readers of this Substack have certainly heard my ‘sermons’ about genealogies.

Why would these two authors omit the Hivvites from these lists? Well consider how the displacement of these nations is phrased in Nehemiah:

Finding his heart true to You, You made a covenant with him to give the land of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Jebusite, and the Girgashite—to give it to his descendants. And You kept Your word, for You are righteous.

Perhaps the text in Nehemiah and Genesis 15 are connected to each other? I would say that Genesis 15 is later, but it doesn’t matter so much.

More important is the truth of this statement. The author of Nehemiah was certainly aware of the stories about the Gibeonite Hivvites, they were written by the Yahwist 250 years before he wrote his contributions. So how could Nehemiah include this nation in accounts about ‘a displacement’ when their cities were saved in the Book of Joshua:

Joshua established friendship with them [the Hivvites]; he made a pact with them to spare their lives, and the chieftains of the community gave them their oath.

So the Israelites set out, and on the third day they came to their towns; these towns were Gibeon, Chephirah, Beeroth, and Kiriath-jearim….

That day Joshua made them hewers of wood and drawers of water—as they still are—for the community and for GOD’s altar, in the place that [God] would choose.

But it’s more than that, the Hivvites were not just saved they were protected first by Joshua himself:

The five Amorite kings—the king of Jerusalem, the king of Hebron, the king of Jarmuth, the king of Lachish, and the king of Eglon, with all their armies—joined forces and marched on Gibeon, and encamped against it and attacked it.

The people of Gibeon thereupon sent this message to Joshua in the camp at Gilgal: “Do not fail your servants; come up quickly and aid us and deliver us, for all the Amorite kings of the hill country have gathered against us.”

GOD threw them into a panic before Israel: [Joshua] inflicted a crushing defeat on them at Gibeon, pursued them in the direction of the Beth-horon ascent, and harried them all the way to Azekah and Makkedah.

…and then by David after Saul had his fun torturing them for no particular reason other than his “zeal”:

There was a famine during the reign of David, year after year for three years. David inquired of GOD, and GOD replied, “It is because of the bloodguilt of Saul and [his] house, for he put some Gibeonites to death.”

David asked the Gibeonites, “What shall I do for you? How shall I make expiation, so that you may bless GOD’s own people?”

….

Thereupon they said to the king, “The man who massacred us and planned to exterminate us, so that we should not survive in all the territory of Israel—

let seven of his male issue be handed over to us, and we will impale them before GOD in Gibeah of Saul, the chosen of GOD.” And the king replied, “I will do so.”

David is willing to kill other Israelites to appease the Gibeonites, and not even the guilty parties, he kills the children of the guilty parties, relatives of a former king. From a nation so vilified that they were to be exterminated on sight according to Deuteronomy to a nation protected by David to such an extent that Israelites themselves are impaled for touching them… what an elevation in status!

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In the following series of substack posts, we shall investigate what the Bible really says about the so called systematic extermination of the nations of Canaan, whether any of it actually happened, and why this is important to uncover.

But let us begin with a very basic question: Did these Canaanites that we refer to even exist?

The answer is mostly no.

Of the infamous seven nations of Canaan actually existed, four of them were likely a product of the fertile imagination of biblical authors.

The famous seven are:

Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivvites, Jebusites, and Girgashites.

To those seven another four are occasionally added:

Kinnites, Kadmonites, Kenizzites, and Refaim.

And in the most extensive list at the beginning of Genesis we have some more:

Sidonites, Araqites, and Sinites.

Let’s begin with the core seven, because they are the ones most mentioned:

Of these seven, there are three we are certain existed because we have extra-biblical evidence for them. The Canaanites exist as an umbrella term for the nations of the land outside of the Hebrew Bible, though it is not out of the question that they were a distinct group as well.

There is extensive evidence for Amorites outside of the Hebrew Bible, they founded city states and dynasties far beyond the borders of Israel, and were very numerous.

The Hittites were a huge nation to the North of Israel, and certainly existed. In fact, I am studying Hittite right now, since it is one of the oldest Indo-European languages.

In fact these three nations seem to just be members of the most populous groups inhabiting the levant and contiguous regions, rather than small nations inhabiting the tiny land of Canaan.

Regarding the Perizzites, the Hivvites, the Jebusites and the Gergishites there is no evidence outside of the Hebrew Bible.

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Obed too was the son of a convert, Ruth the Moabite, which sounds better than my own antecedent, Katy from Spooner. I don’t know if Ruth and Bo inflicted on their eldest child their misbegotten ideas about withholding candy, but I expect they did.

Now to the subject at hand - there are very few texts in the Hebrew Bible dealing with conversion in anything but a cursory way.

Allow me to list them for you.

The Book of Deuteronomy details the nations and types of people who are never allowed to ‘join the congregation’. Moabite and Ammonites are forbidden forevermore from joining the Jews, and so are mamzers or bastards, Edomites and Egyptians are allowed to join after the third generation.

In II Kings, Naaman, an Aramian general joins the Israelite people, after Elisha cures his leprosy. He takes a bit of earth from the holy land so he can properly worship when he’s outside the borders.

In the book of Esther it says that many of the nations become Jewish because the fear of Mordecai fell upon them. I think that that is a mistranslation actually, and what this text actually means is that the nations pretended to be Jewish so that Mordecai would spare them.

There are only two other texts. The book of Ruth which I have spoken about and Isaiah 56.

Ruth’s statement of radical compassion bears repetition:

Ruth says to Naomi, ‘Wherever you shall go I shall go, wherever you sleep I shall sleep too, your people are my people, and your god is my god. Wherever you die, I shall die too and be buried there. As God is my witness, only death shall separate us.’

The lesser known statement from Isaiah 56 also deserves to be repeated in full and not just because we are going to talk about it right now.

Let not the foreigner say,

Who is joined to GOD,

“GOD will keep me apart from the covenanted people”;

And let not the eunuch say,

“I am a withered tree.”

For thus said GOD:

“As for the eunuchs who keep My sabbaths,

Who have chosen what I desire

And hold fast to My covenant—

I will give them, in My House

And within My walls,

A monument and a name

Better than sons or daughters.

I will give them an everlasting name

That shall not perish.

As for the foreigners

Who are joined to GOD,

To render service,

And to love GOD’s name,

To be devoted servants—

All who keep the sabbath and do not profane it,

And who hold fast to My covenant—

I will bring them to My sacred mount

And let them rejoice in My house of prayer.

Their burnt offerings and sacrifices

Shall be welcome on My altar;

For My House shall be called

A house of prayer for all peoples.”

Thus declares my Sovereign GOD,

Who gathers the dispersed of Israel:

“I will gather still more to those already gathered.”

This text is remarkable.

It speaks from the perspective of a convert to Judaism and his or her fears about the future, and assures them in god’s name that their place among the Jewish people is no less than those born Jewish.

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Later rabbis quibble about this issue. I am not so sure I care. I am disinclined to accept the traditional rabbinic definition of a prayer quorum for any number of reasons, first and foremost because women are not counted either, but secondly because I just don’t see the importance of choosing a specific number for Jewish quora. As a congregational rabbi, I can tell you that Jewish communities are often too concerned about numbers. How many people came, how many members do we have, do we look pathetic. I’ve always seen it as part of my job as creating good vibes no matter what the numbers, even if only a few people show up. I see the nervous preoccupation with numbers as unhealthy.

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Why am I thinking about Jewish quora right now? I just attended the BMitzvah of a child on the spectrum, not in the same band as my Elisha, but close enough that it was relatable. There was no question in the mind of this young person’s parents as to his inclusion in a prayer quorum, he wore phylacteries, he said his blessings, and was seen by the community as a Jewish adult, nobody really questioned it.

What about Elisha?

Elisha, 15 months before his Bar Mitzvah, has his Torah portion memorized already, and will read Hebrew at a 2^nd grade level by the time he is 13, but I am not sure if all rabbis would agree that he should be included. Elisha knows many prayers by heart and can sing many Jewish songs, which make sense given the depth of our family’s involvement in the Jewish community.

I cannot speak, however, at all to his understanding of these prayers or songs, he doesn’t quite know when it is proper to stand, and when it is proper to sit, he doesn’t know when it is proper to speak, and when it is proper to be silent, or when one says Amen, which is one of the criteria for inclusion according to rabbinic decisors.

Another criterion, which frankly surprised me, was the ability to do simple sums. While Elisha has made tremendous progress in reading, when I ask him, he will still insist that 2 plus 2 is three, or sometimes six. Now this very well may be his polite way of telling me to go to hell and stop bothering me with this math mishigas. According to his math teacher his sense of numeracy has advanced in the past year, and she is even doing basic times tables with him. In this and in all matters I a bit of a skeptic, and I dearly want to see evidence of this with my own eyes. Alas, that has not happened yet.

I do have high hopes that the milestones the rabbis relate to are ones he will eventually achieve, maybe not exactly at 13, but in the not too distant future.

The question whether my boychik should count in a minyan is presently moot. He is only 11.7 years old and the issue hasn’t truly come up yet, but even afterwards, I just don’t give a rat’s furry behind. I think that if Elisha himself is ever concerned as to his inclusion, that is when I should be concerned. In the meantime, Elisha is content just being present in Jewish spaces, and occasionally bursting into a rendition of O Chanukkah O Channukah in the middle of my zoom meetings.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’ve thought a lot of nominative determinism, which is the sophisticated way of saying that your name predicts who you are. I named my eldest Boaz, because I’ve always thought that he is the only male character in the Hebrew Bible that would have been considered a good guy by today’s standards. Kind, compassionate, with a strong ethos of responsibility. This is also an apt description of my beautiful boy, as anyone who interacts with him can tell you. I don’t believe in nominative determinism of course, but the coincidences in my family are a bit eerie.

Nowhere are names more deterministic than in the Book of Ruth. Ruth means compassionate companionship, and that is who she, in fact she epitomizes it. In English the word ruth actually means kindness. You’d know this if you played scrabble. But if you don’t play scrabble, consider the word ruthless. ‘Boaz’, means ‘there is strength in him’, and indeed he is the great grandfather of King David. ‘Orpah’ means, the back of the neck, and indeed Orpah shows her back to her mother-in-law.

I could go on, but you get the drift. There are, however, two names in the book which do not fit this mould. The first is Ploni Almoni, the man who had first dibs on redeeming the property of Elimelech which included caring for Ruth and Naomi. The name Ploni Almoni appears in the Hebrew Bible a few times, and it indicates anonymity or lack of specificity. When the author of Ruth who took so much care with his names anonymizes someone we should take note.

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The second name that does not fit this mould is Obed, Boaz and Ruth’s son, who is fostered by Naomi. Obed means worker, or working, a fine name but one without any special significance to the story. The mystery deepens when you consider the following passage:

And the women said to Naomi, “Blessed be GOD, who has not withheld a redeemer from you today! Let his name be called in Israel!

He will renew your life and sustain your old age; for he is born of your daughter-in-law, who loves you and is better to you than seven sons.”

Naomi took the child and held it to her bosom. She became its foster mother,

and the women neighbors gave him a name, saying, “A son is born to Naomi!”

They named him Obed; he was the father of Jesse, father of David.

We are given to expect a name for this child no less than three times, but the name is only given after that third formula. Clearly the name is of great import to the author, but what is the big deal? The name Obed seems to be as generic as Tom is in English.

Alas, I have the space to address only the lesser of these mysterious names today, that of Ploni Almoni.

The literary function of anonymity in the Hebrew Bible has been explored thoroughly. Sometimes it is a reflection that a particular character is not important, or needs to be minimized. That is how many commentators see the name Ploni Almoni, Boaz is the main character, and Ploni, well he is secondary, and we don’t need to really name him. One could be satisfied with that if not for three problems.

Firstly, Ploni Almoni in the other places that is used conveys a place name not a person.

Secondly Ploni Almoni is five and a half syllables, the Hebrew Bible is usually content with one syllable, ‘ish’ or ‘man’, why use ‘Rumpelstiltskin instead of John? The other problem is that this man is actually important to the story. Without him Boaz couldn’t have married Ruth.

While it is true that unlike Kant, biblical authors had no compunctions of using people as a means towards an end, and Ploni is a means to Boaz’s marriage with Ruth, I would argue, however, that Ploni Almoni is also an end unto himself. In the comparable story of Genesis 38, the man who refuses to redeem his brother’s wife is named Onan, and his name reverberates throughout history with (unjustified) opprobrium, and some salaciousness. In this account, however, no shame is attached to Ploni Almoni, his justification that he will degrade his own patrimony is seen as valid, and Boaz who does not share those concerns because he is in love with Ruth, takes up the mantle.

So what does Ploni Almoni convey besides anonymity? The word Almoni at least is one which a Hebrew speaker would be somewhat familiar with, it has to do with widowhood, and indeed the matter at hand is the dispensation of the property of two widows, and for that matter the widows themselves.

The name Ploni, is a bit more difficult, but not by much. The root peh, lamed, yod means to discriminate or distinguish, and indeed Ole Ploni discriminated against two widows.

The very skilled author of Ruth has it both ways with the name Ploni Almoni, he manages to convey some anonymity, but if you dig just a bit deeper, you can identify just a slight shade of opprobrium. That is all the author of Ruth really wants, slight opprobrium, because he is entirely content that Boaz marry Ruth and father Obed.

And speaking of Obed we will get to him next week.

This fantastic episode (fantastic in both senses of the word, A. because it never happened, and B. because it is so fun to contemplate) is chronicled in 19 verses in Genesis 14 (See, I got 1914 in there again, but I lied about the number of verses in the chapter). The King of Sumer, Kedorlaomer the King of Elam, the King of ‘the nations’ and the King of an imaginary place called Elasar fight a local band of five kings, ‘The Son of Badness’ King of Sodom, ‘The Son of Evil’ King of Gemorra, ‘Hated his Father’ King of the Earth; and ‘Named for an Appendage’ King of Tzeboim, and ‘Destruction’ King of Tsoar. All in all 17 national groups are mentioned in this short chapter, which is fewer than the 30 that began the first world war of the modern period but not by that much. Other notable nations that are mentioned are the Refaim, who are either ghosts or giants and Amalek the snakes who first attack Israel in the desert.

This truly remarkable story posits that Abraham defeated the armies of these empires with all of 318 soldiers. That number is entirely ludicrous, given that the likely size of the imperial armies was in the hundreds of thousands and all they would have had to do to win is stampede this puny force. The rabbis minimize Abraham’s ‘army’ even further and posit that it was ‘Eliezer’ (Abraham’s loyal retainer) and Abraham alone who defeated Kedorlaomer forces. They make this claim because if you add the numerical value of the letters which compose Eliezer’s name you get to 318 – aleph-1 + lamed-30 + yod-10 + ayin-70 + zayin-7 + resh-200).

Lest you minimize the screen because I just asked you to contemplate some numerology allow me to quickly explain.

There is a good deal of evidence, that the Hebrew alphabet assigned numerical values to its letters by the Hellenistic period. My doctoral advisor Israel Knohl certainly seemed to think so, he even wrote a book about it. The Judeans borrow this from the Greeks who had began to do this with their own alphabet somewhat earlier in the 6^th century.

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Qualifying this episode as a negative depiction of Balam may be putting it mildly. A donkey chastising a human being of Balaam’s stature is assuredly one of the best put downs in biblical literature. It is also unique. There is only one other instance of an animal talking, that of the snake in Genesis 3, and that took place in the Garden of Eden.

Alexander Rofe offers a masterful analysis of this episode on this site, wherein he identifies this episode as a very late addition to the Pentateuch and argues that it is a polemical burlesque. As Rofe’s erstwhile student a quarter of century ago, I agree almost entirely with this analysis.

But I want to take Balaam’s spicy adventures with his ass in a somewhat different direction (and yes there is a double entendre, and yes it exists in the Hebrew as well).

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There is only other instance in the Torah where Balaam is portrayed negatively at least by implication, and it too is late. Numbers 31:8, wherein Balaam is killed by the Israelites is likely a late priestly elaboration. One may argue that Balaam’s transformation from a Yahwistic proselyte to a villain starts with this laconic remark. Balaam negativity is vastly magnified in Rabbinic literature wherein he is described as an archvillain. An archvillain with a glass eye, and an appetite for bestiality…

Ok ok, I’ve been hinting at the bestiality for a while so let me get into the gory details.

First of all we shall call Balaam’s ass Jenny. Balaam’s donkey was definitely a gal, and ‘jenny’ is actually the technical name for this creature.

In the Talmud, in a tractate dedicated to forbidden idolatrous practices. Balaam’s ‘Jenny’ opens up just a bit more than she does in the original story and notes that she has been very serviceable to him, both in the night and in the day… The rabbis clearly wanted to ridicule Balaam, but they were accessing a suggestive element richly evident in the text. I am going to touch up the translation, so you get it too:

God was incensed at his going; so an angel of GOD took a position in his way to tempt him. He [Balaam] was straddling jenny, with his two servants dangling alongside,

when jenny caught sight of the angel of GOD standing erect in the way, with his naked sword in his hand. Jenny deviated from the road and went into the fields; and Balaam smacked Jenny to turn her back onto the road.

The angel of GOD then erected himself in a tight lane in the depths of the vines, with a verge on either side.

The jenny, seeing the angel of GOD, pressed herself against the wall and squeezed Balaam’s appendage against the wall; so he smacked her again.

Once more the angel of GOD moved forward and erected himself in a spot so tight that there was no room to gyrate right or left.

When jenny now saw the angel of GOD, she lay down prone under Balaam; and Balaam was furious and smacked jenny with his stick.

Then GOD opened jenny up, and she said to Balaam, “What have I done to you that you have smacked me these three times?”

Balaam said to jenny, “You have harassed me! If I had a sword with me, I’d kill you.”

The jenny said to Balaam, “Look, I am jenny that you have been riding hard all along until this day! Have I been in the habit of abusing you?” And he answered, “No.”

Then GOD bared Balaam’s eyes, and he saw the angel of GOD erect upon the way, his naked sword in his hand; thereupon he kneeled down before him.

The angel of GOD said to him, “Why have you beaten your jenny these three times? It is I who came out to tempt, for the errand is obnoxious to me.

I have only touched up the translation here, I hope you get the drift, please await for my next installment of Balaam’s wild adventures…

In the 19^th century my pal Julius Wellhausen hypothesized that before the Pentateuch there was a Hexateuch. What did he mean? Simply put he found that all the authors of the Five Books participated in the composition of Joshua (the sixth book) as well. This insight is undermined somewhat by Deuteronomy 34 which creates an unmistakable ending to the five books. There is nothing like the hero’s death atop a mountain to seal the book deal. Clearly at least one of the authors of the Torah thought that Moses’ death marked an end point.

It is not clear exactly when the rest of the Jewish world agreed with him, though by the 2nd century BCE, the Book of Ben Sira is referring to the Torah distinctly from the prophets. An important caveat to that is that we don’t really know what Ben Sira meant when he referred to the Torah… Malachi a prophet of the 5^th century meant ‘laws’ when he spoke of Moses’ Torah and little else.

But by the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls a century later, however, it is clear, the Torah is no more (and no less) than the Five Books of Moses. We know this because only the Torah (and for some reason the book of Job) were copied in a special script.

These distinctions and when they came about are actually quite important because the demarcation of the Torah as separate from other parts of the Bible ushers in a new religious era, wherein this text is the holiest

I want to suggest that the ending point of the Torah was a matter of debate among the Jewish intellectuals of the post exilic period, and that our pal the Randy Redactor had a strong opinion about it.

But let us return or a moment to Deuteronomy 34. Who was the mystery man who composed the chapter that ended Moses life? It shouldn’t come as any shock to us, but this guy was almost certainly a priest. It isn’t only language (though there are plenty of linguistic markers), the ideas in Deuteronomy 34 are all Priestly. Moses ascended Mount Nebo and died, just like his brother Aaron died on Mount Hor, Moses was mourned for 30 days just like his brother Aaron, Joshua was appointed leader because Moses had placed his hands upon him back in Numbers. The contours of the land as described in Deuteronomy 34 are those described by the Priests in excruciating detail in the Book of Joshua.

What likely happened is that a late priestly author took the Book of Deuteronomy which has its own very interesting transmission history, appended it to the first four books, and then fashioned an ending that brought it all together. This late Priestly author like his predecessors was interested in Mosaic law over and beyond anything else. The Book of Deuteronomy which is primarily a legal book fits that bill, and so this author felt that offering an end at the conclusion of Deuteronomy 34 made sense. It separated the law from the story, or the holy from the profane as it were.

Though it may seem otherwise to many haphazard readers of the Bible, there were actually relatively few authors who elevated the legal realm above others, and so it should come as no surprise that later authors, and in particular storytellers, disagreed with this guy. The man who disagreed most strikingly was our own Randy Redactor, and he had the wherewithal to do something about it.

How do I know?

Well for starters the footprints of Randy are evident in the last chapters of Joshua, and then he goes silent. This is significant, since he certainly was cognizant of the books of Judges and so forth. It means that he felt that the story ended there.

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If one looks for a common thread throughout B or Randy’s interventions its his focus on land. He is interested on the first nations who dwelt in Israel and the ancient Near East, the ties of the Israelites to the land, and finally the conquest of the land. He intervenes in Joshua only twice. The bones of Joseph in Joshua 24 are not particularly interesting, so we will focus on Joshua’s command to God to stop the sun in one of the decisive battles for the control of the Land.

We know that this snippet of text is part of a final redactional layer, because like most texts penned by our pal the Final Redactor, it is totally out there theologically. Never before and never again does a human being command God to do anything. In the Final Redactors version, however, the Israelite god’s children have their way with human females, and demigods walk the earth, Randy the Redactor was just fine with racy theology. This episode is a wonderful end point for Randy’s interventions. It demonstrates that Joshua is actually an improvement on Moses. Moses can perhaps influence God, but Joshua can command him. Moses is often at odds with god, Joshua never is. Moses led the Israelites in the desert, it is Joshua who conquered the promised land. Moses is punished and only sees Canaan from afar, Joshua is rewarded and sees every part of the land as the hero of the settlement.

Joshua is the culmination and not Moses, and this Final redactor subtly emphasizes it. Does this mean that the Torah is less important than Joshua? Perhaps. This author clearly valued history and myth over law, and the ending point of the Israelite’s first story did not end at the borders of Canaan, but rather in Canaan itself.

Here is my planned preface:

There used to be a story in the Torah of a woman who had sexual relations with God himself, of demigods who walked the earth, of men enjoying themselves with talking animals, and of magicians so powerful they could command God.

They are no longer there. Or rather they are there but they are deliberately misunderstood.

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In the first three books of this series I dedicate myself to excavation. To uncovering juicy stories that were buried under layers of pietistic or ‘frum’ biblical redaction so that they could form the basis of a religion. In this book I do something different, I look at stories hidden in plain sight of the readers, stories which are ignored because their true meaning would be shocking. The implications of this final layer of storytelling are far-reaching. This storyteller came after the pious priests and the zealous Deuteronomists, and was unhappy with what he found. I have spoken in previous work about how the ‘bloody priests’ ruined the bible, by neutering the subversive theologies of his predecessor, and making the Torah acceptable to their conservative heirs who perpetuated their vision. I am personally resentful towards those priests because they made the Bible less interesting, but this is tempered by a well of deep gratitude, without them the Bible would have been an interesting text, but not the basis of a religion. I was certainly not the first person to be dissatisfied. In the tumultuous days at the end of the Persian Empire, as the Torah was becoming a foundational holy text, but was not quite there yet, one last author had an opportunity to add his two cents, but it was only two cents. This was already at a time, when it was becoming progressively more difficult to add significant swathes of text, so this author contented himself with adding short stories at the edges.

But oh my the stories he added!

They make fun of God and biblical heroes and are very clearly non-monotheistic. This author has made me re-evaluate the past. If this author was in a position to add these texts there must have been a tolerance in ancient Judea that we don’t normally associate with our conservative antecedents, and that fills me with hope.

Why did this final Redactor create so many problems for the pious, and so many delicious moments for us. Read this book which I will probably publish sometime next year and discover!

Abe began his journey in Iraq in one version, and in Syria in another and the rest is history.

I’ve written in previous substacks about other faded threads in the Bible which offered a different version of Jewish origins. Ezekiel for example asserts, ‘Your origins are in the land of the Canaanites, your father was Amorite, your mother was Hittite.’ In other words, Israelites had been in the land forever. Canaan, after all was the grandson of Noah himself.

No one speaks of these alternative origin stories because of the dominance of the Exodus and Return story, and we are not going to speak of them now. Instead, I would like to focus on how the question of indigeneity played out in the late biblical period.

In the brutal world of the ancients, the Israelites claim that they had conquered the land from its previous inhabitants with the help of their God was deemed sufficient. Initially, there was no need to justify this conquest. God had promised them the land and it was theirs. End of story.

But then the priests and the deuteronomists felt they needed to elaborate.

Why?

Well, its hard to know for sure, and anybody who tell you they know is probably trying to sell you something. But we can take a stab at it.

Let’s start with the Priests. The Priests were ethical thinkers, they regulated the consumption of meat. They legislated care for the less fortunate. And they weren’t satisfied with the ‘might is right’ paradigm. In Genesis 23 the Priests have Abraham buying one of the most important parcels of land in Judea, Qiryat Arba by Hebron, from the locals. Purchase seems to be their preferred method of transferring ownership, not conquest. The priests argue in Leviticus 16 that the reason God pushed out the Canaanites was because they were morally deficient. The hypothetical Canaanites engaged in sexual depravity and idolatrous cult. God then gave the land to the Israelites, but warned them that if they engaged in these same behaviours they too would be cast out.

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The first clue we have is the very short verse at the beginning of Genesis Chapter 2, stating that God planted a garden in Eden in the East, so at least we have a very general direction. But maybe we can be more specific. If a particular location is said to be in the East very generally, we should look to the frame of reference. In this case the frame of reference is the author of this passage who probably haled from Judea, in which case the East means at least as eastward as Edom, but probably quite a bit farther east.

After Adam and Eve sample from the juicy fruit and discover that they are delightfully deficient in clothing, Yhwh Elohim banishes them from the garden and places guardian cherubs with flaming swords to guard the path to the tree of life. This once again heavily implies that the Garden is not celestial.

Earlier in Chapter 2 we hear about the river of Eden with four tributaries:

A river issues from Eden to water the garden, and it then divides and becomes four branches.

The name of the first is Pishon, the one that winds through the whole land of Havilah, where the gold is.

(The gold of that land is good; bdellium is there, and lapis lazuli.)

The name of the second river is Gihon, the one that winds through the whole land of Cush.

The name of the third river is Tigris, the one that flows east of Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

Let’s for a moment play a game of ancient geography. Can you spot the river that doesn’t make sense?

If you guessed Gihon, you were right. Yes there is a tiny stream Gihon in the vicinity of Jerusalem, but that is clearly not what this author had in mind. This is a mighty river that encircles the land of Cush.

But how could a tributary of a river in the East encircle the territory of a nation far to the southwest. Cush is almost exclusively a reference to the lands south of Egypt in the Hebrew Bible.

Some scholars want to say that this is a different Kush, in Iran, but this is unlikely.

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It doesn’t say in Genesis 14 that Melchizedek is a demigod. In Genesis 14, he is only a king and high priest of a city called Shalem. But he isn’t the high priest of Yhwh, there are no Israelites in the world, there is no temple, and so there is no need for a High Priest. Melchizedek is the High Priest of El Elyon. El Elyon is a figure straight out of Canaanite myth, and none other than father of the Gods, there he is either ‘Elyon’ or ‘El’, but El Elyon sounds so much more impressive. By combining these names together our author creates a bit of wiggle room for the pious who can view Elyon as an adjective instead of a name. It is convenient that Elyon can mean ‘the most high’ in biblical Hebrew, and that El is a poetic equivalent to Elohim. Now the title of this divinity is El the most high, or ‘God the most high’. Abraham who is numbered among the pious of course, jumps on this and renames this divinity Yhwh the most high, thereby judaicizing Melchizedek.

The Rabbis do the rest of the job for this late biblical author, and equate the city of Shalem with Jerusalem. Now Melchizedek become the priest of Yhwh in Jerusalem. And we are asked kindly by the rabbis to gloss over the fact that until David’s conquest Jerusalem was in Jebusite possession, a nation who the Israelites were commanded to put out of their misery. So why have I asserted that Melchizedek is the son of God, or the son of a god? I actually only have to assert it and not passionately argue for it, because the text of Psalms 110 says it outright, or it would say it were it vowelized in the way it should.

Here is the verse as it appears in the Hebrew with an English translation attached, I will have to emend it a bit so that you can get my gist.

עַמְּךָ֣ נְדָבֹת֮ בְּי֢וֹם חֵ֫ילֶ֥ךָ בְּֽהַדְרֵי־קֹ֭דֶשׁ מֵרֶ֣חֶם מִשְׁחָ֑ר לְ֝ךָ֗ טַ֣ל יַלְדֻתֶֽיךָ׃

Your people come forward willingly on your day of battle.
In majestic holiness, from the womb,
from the dawn, yours was the dew of youth (yaldutecha)

This verse is difficult, but one word is more difficult than other and that is yaldutecha. There is simply no way that the vowelization is correct. The ‘ut ending of this word which transforms it into the abstract noun ‘youth’ always is spelled with a vav. Here it is not. Clearly a different word was intended, and we have a good idea what that word is. In Psalms 3 it says regarding the messiah: “Yhwh said to me, I am your son, I gave birth to you today.’ The word “I gave birth to you’ uses the same letters as yaldutecha here. There is no other place in the Hebrew Bible that uses those letters in this way. Likely what it says, was I gave birth to you in the dew (of dawn). There are other issues with that verse, but we won’t get into them. In the next verse this figure is identified as the priest Melchizedek:

GOD has sworn and will not relent,
“You are a priest forever, Melchizedek by My decree.

Who is giving birth there? The shocking answer is that it is God himself who is giving birth and his son is Melchizedek. The reason the vowelization was emended here was to hide this possibility from the eyes of innocent readers.

Melchizedek is not named demigod in Genesis, but just like Nimrod, the thought was at the back of this late author’s mind.

It was in other people’s minds as well. Melchizedek is known from post-biblical literature as semi-divine, and features in the Pauline epistles, and in the Dead Sea Scrolls. One could probably right a whole book about this character, but I will stop here.

The gist of my piece was that through subtle additions before and after these two sets of authors managed to undermine the premise of the Tower of Babble story, something they really needed to do, because that story does not reflect well on God, or at least their conception of God. God cannot be afraid, and he certainly cannot be paranoid, and the Priests manage to marginalize that view, and contain the implications of this wonderfully subversive episode.

I want to elaborate on the second (and later response) and focus on one of the most interesting and lesser-known biblical characters – Nimrod.

Here are the verses again:

11:8-13: Cush also begot Nimrod, who was the first mighty figure on earth. He was a mighty hunter by the grace of the Lord; hence the saying, “Like Nimrod a mighty hunter by the grace of the Lord.” The mainstays of his kingdom were Babylon, Erech, Accad, and Calneh in the land of Shinar. From that land Asshur emerged, and he built Nineveh, Rehoboth-ir, Calah, and Resen between Nineveh and Calah, that is the great city.

Before we zero in on Nimrod though, let’s zoom out and talk a bit about the authors of Chapter 10. There are two of them, the author, who liked to beget, and the author who liked to have children. What I mean is that the two distinct genealogists of the chapter used different words to describe the procreative process.

Why does that matter? Well in the case of Nimrod these distinct vocabulary markers expose a problem. It says Cush begot Nimrod, but Cush could not have begotten Nimrod. Cush is south of Egypt, and unless he flew a couple thousand miles on imaginary wings would not have begotten a child who founded the kingdoms of Mesopotamia. Neither would Nimrod be the grandson of Ham, all of whose progeny were African.

The natural place to bring in Mesopotamian heroes would have been in Shem’s genealogy, which includes the nations of Mesopotamia, such as the Assyrians. But of course we wouldn’t want that because the Shemite genealogy is the ‘holy genealogy’ the one with Abraham, and we can’t have some nimrod sullying it.

The author had two options if he wanted to bring Nimrod into the text, he could make Nimrod a son of Japhet, which would take him to the northwest to the Greek Islands or he could take him to the southwest to the nations of Africa and make this son of Kush. He decided on the southwest. Perhaps he was depending on the resemblance between Kush and Kushan. Kushan was an Aramean king in the Book of Judges, and Aram was in the East. In this strange way Cush became the unlikely father of Nimrod.

But there is more to the story.

According to Josephus the first century Jewish writer, Nimrod was a semi- supernatural figure representing humanity’s answer to God’s rulership. Nimrod catalyzed the building the tower of babble according to this historian. This speculative reading depends on three factors: that Nimrod, means ‘we shall rebel’, that Nimrod was a figure who ruled over the land of Shinar where the tower of Babble was built, and finally ‘that he was a hero of the hunt before God’. What does ‘a hero before God’ mean, well Josephus took it to mean in contrast with God, which is one of the meanings of the preposition ‘lifnei’, but the simple meaning of the word simply connotes a tie between Nimrod and God, not any enmity.

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