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This week we are reading a double parashah as the end of 5786 gets closer: Nitzavim and Vayelech, two short parshiyot, so what we are reading is slightly less than three chapters of the book of Deuteronomy: Deut 29:9–31:30, the end of chapter 31. There are a total of 54 different weekly readings, enough for one each week in a Jewish leap year with 13 months.

This year — not a leap year — there are still two parshiyot left. There is one more two weeks from now, on Saturday, September 11^th, the regular Sabbath that falls between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (insofar as that Sabbath can be “regular”), Parashat Ha’azinu, the 53^rd parashah of the year. Then we end the Torah reading cycle with V’zot Ha-bracha two weeks after that on Simchat Torah (two weeks and a day for those of you on the Diaspora calendar).

Still, Nitzavim and Vayelech bring us quite close to the end of the Torah. While we are still in Deuteronomy, I’d like to turn to a subject that I imagine I talk about whenever Deuteronomy is the subject. Perhaps I don’t really do that as often as I think I do, though I certainly have written a lot about it, and this week’s reading has a focus on it.

It’s this: Deuteronomy is a biblical book that’s very concerned with the human mind. Deuteronomy does not only care what you do, it cares what you think and how you feel. Let’s start our examination of that here:

^{Deut 29:17} Perchance there is among you some man or woman, or some clan or tribe, whose heart is even now turning away from the LORD our God to go and worship the gods of those nations—perchance there is among you a stock sprouting poison weed and wormwood. ¹⁸ When such a one hears the words of these sanctions, he may fancy himself immune, thinking, “I shall be safe, though I follow my own willful heart”—to the utter ruin of moist and dry alike. ¹⁹ The LORD will not be willing to forgive him; rather will the LORD’s anger and passion rage against that man, till every sanction recorded in this book comes down upon him, and the LORD blots out his name from under heaven. [NJPS]

What’s happening here? Moses is speaking to all of the Israelites gathered in front of him, and certainly nobody is performing any sort of idolatrous worship there standing there listening to him talk — but who knows what they might be thinking? Someone’s heart may “even now” be turning away from YHWH to worship some other god.

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“Heart” is לבב levav, the same word in “with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut 6:5). It sometimes occurs in what must be a shortened form of the same word, לב lev. Though this certainly refers to the heart as an anatomical organ, the word is never actually used to mean that in the Bible. They of course killed animals for sacrificial purposes and for meat, so they undoubtedly encountered this organ as part of an animal body. When they speak of the human heart, however, “heart” frequently means what we would call the mind.

If your heart is turning even now away from YHWH your God … there you are, standing and listening to me, Moses, talk to you, and you are thinking, I don’t buy it! I want to go worship the sun or the moon or the stars or one of the gods of the neighboring nations. No rush, I’ll wait until Moses is finished. When he’s done I’m gonna go worship the God I want to worship.

That is precisely what the Moses of Deuteronomy 29 is worried you might be thinking. Why? Because worshipping the gods of those nations is “a stock sprouting poison weed and wormwood.” Your thoughts about committing idolatry might perhaps poison the rest of the nation.

When v. 18 says that “such a one” might “fancy himself immune,” the Hebrew really says he might הִתְבָּרֵ֨ךְ בִּלְבָב֤וֹ hitbarekh bil’vavo — he might “bless himself in his heart.” Again, what Deuteronomy wants is not merely for you to do the right thing; Deuteronomy wants to make sure that the wrong thoughts do not even enter your mind. Don’t even think of parking here!

We’re going to ignore “the utter ruin of moist and dry alike” (a fine topic for another year, not this one) and look at one more psychological aspect of this passage: “The LORD will never forgive him” (v. 19). A more precise translation would be, “The LORD will refuse to forgive him” — and there are two ways in Biblical Hebrew to say refuse. One is מאן m‑aleph‑n, as when Joseph “refused” to sleep with Mrs. Potiphar in Gen 39:8.

The other is ours, the Deuteronomy way of saying it, with אבה aleph‑b‑h: not to be willing to do it, not to want to do it, to have no appetite for it. See Ps 119:20, where the psalmist’s soul is “consumed with longing [תַּאֲבָה ta’ava]” for God’s law. Our modern word תֵּאָבוֹן te’avōn ‘appetite’ comes from this root, as does אֶבְיוֹן evyōn ‘needy’.

So it’s God’s mind as well that Deuteronomy is thinking about, that Deuteronomy has in mind. I’ll skip the terrible things YHWH will want to do to this person, which brings us to the famous conclusion of Deuteronomy 29:

^{Deut 29:28} Concealed acts concern the LORD our God; but with overt acts, it is for us and our children ever to apply all the provisions of this Teaching.

That is, we will handle whatever we can see. As far as what is in your mind goes, God is going to have to handle it — and he will.

Lest you think that Deuteronomy is nothing more than the thought police, let me remind you that we spoke a few weeks ago about Deuteronomy’s stemming from the biblical wisdom tradition. That tradition, in a nutshell, thinks that “honesty is the best policy.” That is, to put it in biblical terms, righteous behavior is the intelligent thing to do. Why would any decent, intelligent person behave in any other way?

^{Deut 30:11} Surely, this Instruction which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. ¹² It is not in the heavens, that you should say, “Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?” ¹³ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?” ¹⁴ No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.

It’s not rocket science. Just stop and think, and it will be obvious to you that these are the things that you should do.

Moses continues with this message:

^{Deut 30:15} See, I set before you this day life and prosperity, death and adversity … ¹⁹ I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life!

This is not the Graduate Record Exam. It’s one multiple choice question, and Moses is telling the Israelites the answer! “Choose life, and you will live.” Perhaps, though, that is not as easy as it sounds. That is something for us to think about next Friday evening, when the New Year begins. Wishing everyone a sweet New Year; the column will be back in two weeks.

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This week we are reading Parashat Ki Tavo, Deut 26:1–29:8, getting close to the end of the book and to the end of our Jewish year 5786. Last week I talked about a couple of dis legomena, words that are used only twice in the Bible, one of which is actually used four times but only in two verses. This week I have another word that is a dis legomenon of a kind, and it’s connected to the ones I talked about last week.

I first mentioned this week’s pair of words a month ago, in the column for Parashat Ekev, where in the very beginning of that parashah, Deut 7:12, there is a hendiadys (I have an overstock of Greek grammatical terms that I’m trying to get rid of before the end of the year):

^{Deut 7:12} If you heed these ordinances, by diligently observing them, the LORD your God will maintain with you the covenant loyalty [‏אֶֽת־הַבְּרִית֙ וְאֶת־הַחֶ֔סֶד] that he swore to your ancestors. [NRSV]

See that column for all the details; I’ll just remind you that where NRSV combines those two direct objects (as you are meant to do with a hendiadys) into a single concept called “covenant loyalty,” NJPS makes חסד ḥesed into an adverb, “faithfully.”

I showed you then a couple of verses in this week’s parashah where that covenant loyalty is expressed. Here they are again, with that dis legomenon highlighted:

^{Deut 26:17} You have affirmed^e [הֶאֱמַ֖רְתָּ] this day that the LORD is your God, that you will walk in His ways, that you will observe His laws and commandments and rules, and that you will obey Him. ¹⁸ And the LORD has affirmed^e [הֶאֱמִֽירְךָ֣] this day that you are, as He promised you, His treasured people who shall observe all His commandments.

The verb אמר aleph-m-r ‘say’ is one of the commonest in the Bible, but it is used here in a very uncommon way: not in the simple (Qal) verbal conjugation where it means “to say” but in the causative (Hiphil) verbal conjugation. ⇥ See Lesson 15 of my Hebrew course for the technical details. ⇤ As an example, if in the simple conjugation you do the verb אכל aleph-k-l ‘eat’, in the Hiphil you cause someone to eat, that is, you feed him. ראה r-aleph-h means “to see” in the Qal, and “to cause someone to see” in the Hiphil, that is, to show them.

So far so good. But what does it mean “to cause someone to say”? NJPS translates it as “affirmed,” with this footnote:

^e Exact nuance of Heb. uncertain.

It’s not exactly clear to me how “causing someone to say” would be the same as “affirming” something. Nonetheless, the Hiphil is not always causative, and perhaps the NJPS translators were assuming that it is not causative here. I would like to assume that it is causative. Let me explain how I understand it, first by presenting it retranslated:

^{Deut 26:17} You have this day caused the LORD to say that he is your God … ¹⁸ And the LORD has caused you to say, this day, that you are, as He promised you, His treasured people …

That is — as I suggested a month ago — this is the moment when YHWH and Israel “bespeak” each other, when they cause each other to be “spoken for.” Save the last dance for me!

Now we move from there to what exactly it is in v. 18 that YHWH is “bespeaking” the Israelites to be: He wants them to be his “treasured people,” in the words of NJPS, and in the original Hebrew an עַ֣ם סְגֻלָּ֔ה am segula.

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That word segula is not a hapax legomenon or even a dis legomenon but an octolegomenon (don’t tell the people over in the classics department that I coined that absurd word). It appears eight times in the Bible, still quite rare. In the book of Ecclesiastes it refers to “treasure”; in 1 Chron 29:3 King David similarly uses it to claim that he has donated his “private hoard” (per NJPS) of silver and gold to the Temple.

It may have been the normal word for treasure of this kind in biblical times, but ordinarily the Bible does not use it that way. In the Hebrew of the Bible — with those two exceptions — you normally find it used to describe people, people who are treasured by God:

^{Mal 3:17} And on the day that I am preparing, said the LORD of Hosts, they shall be My segula, My treasured possession; I will be tender toward them [those who revere the LORD and esteem His name, v. 16] as a man is tender toward a son who ministers to him.

Three more of the eight occurrences of this word in the Bible are found in our book of Deuteronomy: the one we’ve just seen in this week’s parashah; one in Deut 14:2, where Moses assures the Israelites that YHWH has chosen them “from among all other peoples on earth to be his am segula”; and one in Deut 7:6, just a few verses before the one about “covenant loyalty,” which uses almost precisely the same words. For the sake of completeness, let me add Ps 135:4, which mentions YHWH’s choosing Israel as his segula, something precious that he treasures.

Deut 26:18, though, says one more thing about this — not merely that the Lord has bespoken you today to be his treasured people, but that he has done so “as He promised you.” The Hebrew word I and NJPS alike translate there as “promised” is simply דִּבֶּר dibber ‘he spoke’, but this is a quite accurate translation, since dibber is regularly used not to mean only “to speak” but “to declare” or “to promise” (or “to threaten,” which if you think about it is nothing other than a promise to do something bad).

It could be that this promise alludes to Deut 7:6 and/or 14:2, the other two verses in the Bible that use the expression am segula. I prefer to think that it is alluding to the only other verse in the Bible that uses the word segula, its first biblical occurrence, in the run-up to the revelation at Sinai, where God tells Moses to say this to the Israelites:

^{Exod 19:5} Now then, if you will obey Me faithfully and keep My covenant, you shall be My treasured possession [סְגֻלָּה֙ segula] among all the peoples [הָ֣עַמִּ֔ים ha-ammim]. Indeed, all the earth is Mine, ⁶ but you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

In fact, our “bespeaking” in Deut 26:17–18 goes on to say this:

^{Deut 26:19} He will set you, in fame and renown and glory, high above all the nations that He has made; and that you shall be, as He promised [דִּבֵּֽר dibber], a holy people [עַם־קָדֹ֛שׁ am-qadosh] to the LORD your God.

There’s a catch to this promise, of course: “if you will obey Me faithfully and keep My covenant” (Exod 19:5). Deut 26:18 refers to that too: “you are, as He promised you, His treasured people who shall observe all His commandments.”

How to do that, what that means today, is the big challenge facing us as the Jewish new year approaches. Next week, a double parashah will be the last column before Rosh Hashana. See you then.

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This week we are reading Parashah Ki Tetze, Deut 21:10 through the end of chapter 25.

Regular readers know that I love to use the expression hapax legomenon whenever I get the chance to do so (and sometimes even when it takes a little extra effort). For newer readers, I should explain that hapax legomenon is a technical term among biblical scholars and scholars of other literature, two Greek words describing a word as having been “read once” (and once only). In our case, that means a word that occurs only once in the Bible.

A few years back, discussing this parashah, we discussed a dis legomenon, a word that appears only twice. This year we will have two words, each of which makes one appearance in our parashah and in only one other verse in the Bible (where one of them occurs three times). Let’s start with this:

^{Deut 22:9} You shall not sow your vineyard with a second kind of seed [כִּלְאָ֑יִם], else the crop—from the seed you have sown—and the yield of the vineyard may not be used. ¹⁰ You shall not plow with an ox and an ass together. ¹¹You shall not wear cloth [שַֽׁעַטְנֵ֔ז] combining wool and linen. [NJPS]

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Both these words are so rare that they are difficult to translate — not necessarily to understand, but to translate. The word כִּלְאָ֑יִם kil’áyim, which NJPS translates as “a second kind of seed,” they must be translating that way because of the -áyim ending of the word, an ending that tells you there are two of whatever it is. (The grammatical name for this is a “dual ending.”)

It works for numbers, of course:

• שְׁנַ֫יִם shnáyim 2

• מָאתַ֫יִם ma’atáyim 200

• אַלְפַּ֫יִם alpáyim 2,000

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But it works for other words as well, like נַעֲלָ֫יִם na’aláyim ‘a pair of sandals’ or מִכְנָסַ֫יִם mikhnasáyim ‘a pair of pants’. Even מִצְרַ֫יִם mitzráyim, the word for Egypt, is dual, because Egypt was a double country in antiquity: Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt together made mitzrayim.

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Our next featured word, שׁעטנז sha’atnez, is even stranger. כִּלְאָ֑יִם kil’áyim at least has the sound and shape (and the dual ending) of a Semitic word, a Hebrew word. שׁעטנז sha’atnez just can’t originally have been a Semitic word. Yet Noonan’s Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible doesn’t go anywhere near it. Albright & Lambdin proposed two generations ago that it might be Egyptian; we really don’t know.

Now for the only other verse in the Bible where either of these words appears:

^{Lev 19:19} You shall observe My laws.

You shall not let your cattle mate with a different kind [כִּלְאַ֔יִם]; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed [כִּלְאָ֑יִם]; you shall not put on cloth from a mixture of two kinds [כִּלְאַ֙יִם֙ שַֽׁעַטְנֵ֔ז] of material.

If I had to write a commentary on the NJPS translation, I would assume that in that last phrase they are translating sha’atnez as “mixture” and kil’áyim (with its dual ending) as “two kinds [of material].” If we turn to the JPS Torah Commentary series for an explanation, the excellent Leviticus commentary (by the late Baruch Levine of New York University) discusses our two words this way:

Hebrew kilʾayim has been variously explained. It is most probably cognate with Ugaritic klʾat, “both,” said of both hands, and with Akkadian kilallan, “both, a pair.” On this basis, Hebrew kilʾayim would mean “two kinds (together).” It is used of animals, plants, grain, and cloth.

The etymology of Hebrew shaʿatnez, “mixture,” is not known.

That etymology of kilʾayim is at least minimally helpful. The etymology of shaʿatnez is “not known”? That is for sure.

Sha’atnez itself, however, the combination of wool and linen — despite the fact that it is outlawed in the Bible — was, as you probably know, quite common in American colonial times. You may well have heard the word for it: linsey-woolsey, cloth with a warp of linen and a weave of wool. (Some say the “linsey” part of this word comes from a village in England called Lindsey rather than from “linen.”)

The benefit of this combination is that linen is somewhat stiff, while wool is pliant; linsey-woolsey combines the best features of both fibers. Since linen is made of flax and wool comes from a sheep, you are not merely combining two different materials, you are mixing a plant with an animal. Is that why they care?

Returning to our parashah and to the JPS Torah Commentary, but this time for the book of Deuteronomy by Jeff Tigay, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, we find this:

This prohibition cannot be viewed as protecting the distinction between species. It does not prohibit combining wool and linen, but only wearing a cloth made from that combination. The rabbis could think of no explanation for this prohibition and considered it one of the commandments for which there is no apparent reason and which other nations and the “impulse for evil” challenge, like the ceremony of the broken-necked heifer in 21:1–9. Josephus’s conjecture is probably correct: the prohibition applies to the laity, because the priests, when they officiate, do wear garments made of such mixtures. The status of such garments is thus comparable to that of the sacred anointing oil and the incense that is used in the sanctuary and may not be made or used by laypersons, as stated in Exodus 30:22–37.

So what we have here is Deuteronomy — not an anti-priestly book but a book that does not care about sacrifices, a book that wanted to limit sacrificial worship to a single location in Jerusalem rather than permit sacrifice to be done all around the country as it had been done at one point, a book that takes very great care to make sure you understand that the Levites need your support because it goes to great lengths to throw them all out of work — Deuteronomy too does not want you to wear linsey-woolsey.

In Deuteronomy, it can’t be because everybody was trying to pretend to be a priest, and certainly not the high priest. It can only be because Deuteronomy is stepping in on the side of the priests and saying, Yes, there is a very strict line between what priests can do and what anyone else can do. This is a case where Deuteronomy, despite its apparent (you might almost say) disdain for priests and priestly ritual instead treats that ritual with respect. It wants to make sure that the uniform worn by the priest and the cloth that those uniforms are made out of is not worn by ordinary people.

Looking for the latest, straightest dope on sha’atnez, I found this instead:

Both wool and linen have remarkably high vibrational frequencies—measured at 5,000—compared to the average human body frequency of around 100. These elevated frequencies, according to the study, are advantageous to the wearer and can support health and vitality. However, when these fabrics are combined—either woven together or layered—their energies are said to cancel each other out, resulting in a net frequency of zero. The suggestion is that wool moves energy from left to right, while linen flows from right to left, creating a kind of energetic stalemate.

Everything old is new again, and retro American linsey-woolsey encounters retro biblical linsey-woolsey, with disastrous results, like the encounter of matter with anti-matter. From my own 21^st-century perspective, I would rather go back and accept Josephus’ (and Tigay’s) conjecture. If they are correct, it’s actually somewhat refreshing to see Deuteronomy look over at the priestly side of things with a kindly eye for a change. Let’s hope we can find something equally kindly next week.

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This week we are reading Parashat Shoftim, Deut 16:18–20:19, and, as is quite common, the name שֹׁפְטִ֣ים shoftim comes from the very first Hebrew word of our parashah:

^{Deut 16:18} You shall appoint magistrates and officials for your tribes, in all the settlements that the LORD your God is giving you, and they shall govern the people with due justice. ¹⁹ You shall not judge unfairly: you shall show no partiality; you shall not take bribes, for bribes blind the eyes of the discerning and upset the plea of the just. ²⁰ Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that the LORD your God is giving you.

A modern Israeli would think of shoftim and shotrim as meaning “judges” and “police,” but (more appropriately for Biblical Hebrew and biblical times) NJPS translates those words as “magistrates and officials.”

“You shall show no partiality” is more literally “you should not recognize a face” and therefore give the person special treatment. The instructions not to judge unfairly and not to take a bribe seem rather obvious. It’s the phrase following the instruction not to take a bribe that I want to talk about today. Somewhat unusually for the laws of the Torah in general, though common enough for Deuteronomy, the verse goes on to explain why you’re not supposed to take bribes:

^{Deut 16:19} הַשֹּׁ֗חַד יְעַוֵּר֙ עֵינֵ֣י חֲכָמִ֔ים bribes blind the eyes of the discerning

וִֽיסַלֵּ֖ף דִּבְרֵ֥י צַדִּיקִֽם׃ and upset the plea of the just

It’s quite clear that this is biblical poetic parallelism, and it’s equally clear this is not a poem. So this is poetic parallelism of the rhetorical kind. This is meant to be a very memorable phrase; that’s the purpose of this kind of stylistic writing. In this case, when I read it I thought: Gee, this sounds familiar. In fact, it sounds like something you would see in the book of Proverbs.

The difference between Proverbs and the Torah is that in Proverbs they are not so much telling you what to do as explaining the world to you. Here, Deuteronomy is doing just that kind of explaining: Bribery blinds the eyes of the ḥakhamim, the sage ones — who would otherwise be expected to rule intelligently — and twists the words of the tzaddikim, the (otherwise) righteous.

NJPS takes דבר davar to mean “thing” rather than “word”; it’s also possible to read it as I’ve suggested. Everett Fox translates, “twists the words of the equitable.” Whether it is the plea of the actually innocent (as tzaddik can also mean) that is overturned or the decision of the otherwise righteous judges that is twisted, an innocent person loses this case because a bribe has perverted justice.

Rather than pursuing that line of inquiry, we’re going to follow my instinct and take a journey to Proverbs — not only because of the way this verse sounds, but also because of a chain of thought that goes back, at the very least, to the book Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School by Moshe Weinfeld. Weinfeld proposes, and it is widely accepted, that Deuteronomy is really in the intellectual chain of the biblical wisdom tradition.

The wisdom books of the Bible — specifically Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job — are really books of philosophy avant la lettre (and in the case of Ecclesiastes probably not really avant). They discuss the world from a human perspective. They are Jewish books, certainly, written in Hebrew and accepting the Israelite god, but reasoning out what the correct to thing to do should be. That is why Proverbs can adapt Egyptian wisdom and Ecclesiastes can quote the Epic of Gilgamesh.

In any case, I wanted to check whether this was indeed a proverb. In the old days you had to open a concordance, a book compiled over many years with great care by a dedicated scholar, to search for words that might be repeated in other places in the Bible. These days, a few clicks connect you to the right place.

The least common word in our phrase seemed to be סלף s-l-f ‘twist’, and a few keystrokes took me to the nine verses in the Bible where this verb occurs. Indeed, seven of the other eight examples come from wisdom literature: one from Job and a full six from Proverbs. Two of the examples from Proverbs are the noun סֶלֶף selef ‘perversity, deviousness’; the others are our verb. Here’s the example from Job:

^{Job 12:19} He makes priests go about naked,

And leads temple-servants astray.

The “leading astray” is done by our verb סלף.

Here’s an interesting example from Proverbs:

^{Prov 19:3} A man’s folly subverts [תְּסַלֵּ֣ף] his way,

And his heart rages against the LORD.

It is not the man’s evil nature that twists him, but his foolishness. Proverbs frequently compares evil with foolishness or wisdom with righteousness. That’s precisely what you see in our Deuteronomy verse, where the “synonym” of “wise” is “righteous.”

The bottom line, then, is that this is quite clearly another example of wisdom influence on the book of Deuteronomy. N’est-ce pas? No, I’m afraid not. The ninth example of סלף in the Bible, which is the really the first one a Bible reader would encounter, is from the laws of the Covenant Code:

^{Exod 23:8} Do not take bribes, for bribes blind the clear-sighted and upset the pleas of those who are in the right.

כִּ֤י הַשֹּׁ֨חַד֙ יְעַוֵּ֣ר פִּקְחִ֔ים וִֽיסַלֵּ֖ף דִּבְרֵ֥י צַדִּיקִֽים׃

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It is exactly our same phrase, with one exception: The Deuteronomy verse calls the wise חכמים ḥakhamim, while the Exodus verse uses a fancier synonym: פקחים piqḥim — “the clear-sighted” in the NJPS translation. This verb פקח is used in Modern Hebrew to name the inspectors on the light rail who make sure you’ve swiped your card or scanned the QR code to pay; in Genesis 3, this is the what happens to the eyes of the original humans in the garden when they eat the fruit of the tree that was good for making you wise.

One other interesting difference is not the wording of this expression but its placement. In Exodus, it comes at the end of the Covenant Code, while in Deuteronomy the ס before v. 18 marks this paragraph as a beginning — and Jewish tradition has put it at the beginning of a weekly portion, the portion that serves as the basic text of Jewish political science. You must appoint “magistrates” throughout the country to rule on the law and “officials” to enforce their rulings; and “they shall govern the people with due justice,” equal, fair, and impartial.

Then the passage continues with these famous words:

^{Deut 16:20} Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that the LORD your God is giving you.

Just about any Jew with any kind of serious connection to Jewish tradition knows these words, at least, in Hebrew: צֶ֥דֶק צֶ֖דֶק תִּרְדֹּ֑ף tzédek tzédek tirdof, ‘justice—justice!—shall you pursue’. That is the basis of any society that operates, as stable, free societies do, under the rule of law. If wisdom tells us anything, it tells us that. And laws, to the extent they are universal, are another aspect that can be shared between cultures, as indeed the Bible’s Covenant Code draws from the ancient Near Eastern legal tradition. So we see that the biblical wisdom tradition (a/k/a humans reasoning things out for themselves) did not have to wait for Deuteronomy and Proverbs to come along.

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This week we are reading Parashat Re’eh (Deut 11:26–16:17). Re’eh means “See!” For grammar fans, it’s the Qal masculine singular imperative form. ראה r-aleph-h is the standard verb in Biblical Hebrew, and in Modern Hebrew, for seeing something. And what is it that we are supposed to see?

^{Deut 11:26} See, this day I set before you blessing and curse: ²⁷ blessing, if you obey the commandments of the LORD your God that I enjoin upon you this day; ²⁸ and curse, if you do not … [NJPS]

Clearly, then you’re not “looking” at something that’s visible. This is “see” as we use it in colloquial English today to mean, “Think about what I’m going to tell you.” The reason that’s on my agenda this week is because of something Jonathan Sacks, the late Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth used to say. He was a fine writer, so good that the synagogue handouts here in Jerusalem reprint his old columns alongside those of living but less skilled writers — and thinkers.

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Nonetheless, he had one particular bee in his bonnet that has always annoyed me. No doubt it came from his education. Many people still learn it — but it is wrong, as I’m going to demonstrate to you this week. Here it is:

And for those who may not be able to play the audio right now, a transcription:

Shema Yisrael — “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our G-d, the Lord is one.” These words are the supreme testimony of Jewish faith. Each word is worthy of careful study, but it is the first — the verb Shema — that deserves special attention.

There was a profound difference between the two civilizations of antiquity that between them shaped the culture of the West: ancient Greece and ancient Israel. The Greeks were the supreme masters of the visual arts: art, sculpture, architecture and the theatre.

Jews, as a matter of profound religious principle, were not. G-d, the sole object of worship, is invisible. He transcends nature. He created the universe and is therefore beyond the universe. He cannot be seen. He reveals Himself only in speech. Therefore the supreme religious act in Judaism is to listen. Ancient Greece was a culture of the eye; ancient Israel a culture of the ear. The Greeks worshipped what they saw; Israel worshipped what they heard.

It sounds profound, yet in fact it misses the mark. This is an old idea in European civilization, this idea that the Greeks were visual and the Jews were oral. I don’t expect Rabbi Sacks ever read my dissertation; if he had he would have found out that (despite what he learned at Cambridge) there is no civilization that relies on the ear as opposed to the eye.

We’re all primates, and primates are totally visual. If you read the Bible you will see — that is, you will realize — that just as in English, the product of Greek civilization, “seeing” in the Bible means not only to encounter something with your eye but also to visualize it mentally, to have a mental concept of something. We saw precisely this at the beginning of this week’s parsha:

See, this day I set before you blessing and curse:

I don’t think anyone, least of all Jonathan Sacks, has ever imagined that God dumped something on the ground in front of the Israelites and they were looking at a blessing and at a curse. This was a visual metaphor, something they were supposed to think about.

The same use of “seeing” runs through the entire Hebrew Bible. Three examples from Genesis will be enough to make the point:

• First, when Joseph become the Grand Vizier, Pharaoh says to him, “See [רְאֵה֙], I put you in charge of all the land of Egypt” (Gen 41:41).

• Second, when Laban concludes a Memorandum of Understanding with Jacob at Gilead, he threatens, “If you ill-treat my daughters or take other wives besides my daughters—though no one else be about, remember [רְאֵ֕ה], God Himself will be witness between you and me” (Gen 31:50).

• Finally, when Isaac blesses Jacob — mistakenly thinking he is blessing Esau — he says, “Ah [רְאֵה֙], the smell of my son is like the smell of the fields that the LORD has blessed” (Gen 27:27).

In none of these cases is anyone actually being asked to look at an object or a scene in the vicinity. Note that NJPS goes so far as to translate the second of these examples as “Remember” and the third, most strikingly, as “Ah.” Yet all three are the same word as the word that gives this week’s parashah its name, the command form of the verb “to see,” Re’eh.

We find the same thing seven more times in Deuteronomy; see my article “To See a Sound” for more on this subject. There are a couple of other times when God says this word to Moses where he is actually telling him to have a look at the land that he is not going to enter, but seven times besides our verse there is a re’eh that means “Get this mental concept … picture this” — just the way you would tell a classical Greek to do it, not by listening, but by looking.

The one I most want to highlight is in stark contrast to what Jonathan Sacks said about ancient Greece being a culture of the eye and ancient Israel a culture of the ear — “the Greeks worship what they saw; Israel worshipped what they heard.” It uses the same form of the verb that begins Parashat Re’eh, except in the plural rather than the singular. It is certainly true that Israel did not see God, but “seeing” is the relationship that they are supposed to have with the idea of God:

• ^{Deut 32:39}

  See [רְא֣וּ], then, that I, I am He;

  There is no god beside Me.

  I deal death and give life;

  I wounded and I will heal:

  None can deliver from My hand.

The Torah says sh’ma when it wants to get our attention, re’eh when it wants us to think about something. See what I mean?

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This week we are reading Parashat Ekev, the third parashah in the book of Deuteronomy (Deut 7:12–11:25). Here is the very first verse of this week’s parashah:

^{Deut 7:12} If you heed these ordinances, by diligently observing them, the LORD your God will maintain with you the covenant loyalty that he swore to your ancestors.

That’s the NRSV, not the NJPS translation that I often use in this column, partly because I want to look back a few verses earlier — in last week’s episode as we Jews read the Torah, but already in Deuteronomy 7 according to the Christian chapter breaks. Partly, though, it’s because I want to focus on that phrase “covenant loyalty.” Here is where we read it, just three verses previously, last week:

^{Deut 7:9} Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who maintains covenant loyalty with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations.

NRSV makes “covenant” an adjective; NJPS turns “loyalty” into an adverb and stretches the phrase out this way: “keeps His covenant faithfully [v. 9] … will maintain faithfully for you the covenant [v. 12].”

Really what we have here is a hendiadys. Per the Oxford English Dictionary, that’s:

A figure of speech in which two words are connected by a conjunction in order to express a single complex idea.

The complex idea we’re discussing today, the “covenant loyalty” in the NRSV translation of Deut 7:9 and 12, is the combination of these two nouns in Hebrew:

• בְּרִית b’rit ‘covenant’

• חֶ֫סֶד ḥésed ‘loyalty’

Both those English “equivalents” barely scratch the surface of the Hebrew words they translate. Nonetheless, both NRSV and NJPS are coping (in their separate ways) with the fact that YHWH is not really “keeping” or “maintaining” (Hebrew שׁמר sh‑m‑r ‘keep, guard’) two separate things: the brit and the ḥésed combine in a way that needs something more complicated than “the covenant and the mercy” offered by King James.

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This idiom of “keeping covenant loyalty” (as I’ll continue to say for simplicity’s sake) occurs just six other times in the Bible:

• “You, who keep Your gracious covenant with Your servants when they walk before You in wholehearted devotion” (1 Kgs 8:23, NJPS). The Hebrew of that verse is repeated more or less exactly in 2 Chron 6:14, where (however) a different committee of JPS translators made our phrase into “You who steadfastly maintain the Covenant.”

• “I will maintain My steadfast love for him always; My covenant with him shall endure” (Ps 89:29). Here — as in Ps 114:8 — the two words of the hendiadys are pulled apart to be used to link two parallel lines of poetry.

• And the three others: “stays faithful to His covenant” (Dan 9:4, Neh 1:5 and 9:32).

Even שׁמר shamar ‘keep’ is not a perfectly easy word to translate in this idiom. As I explained previously in this column at great length, שׁמר shamar is the word that Deuteronomy uses for what we might call remembering information — keeping track of things. A ברית b’rit is basically a treaty, an agreement, or a promise. In this case, it is the contents of the b’rit that YHWH is remembering.

The most difficult word of the three to translate into English is ḥésed. I taught Biblical Hebrew at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College for a while, and when I first started there I asked a student to translate a verse and the student simply said ḥésed where חסד appeared. It turned out that David Golomb, who taught Hebrew there before me, had forbidden his students to translate the word ḥésed into English.

Nevertheless, I’m going to go where angels (or at least Reconstructionist rabbinical students) fear to tread and translate that word ḥésed as “loyalty.” “Fidelity” might work as well. I understand ḥésed to be the kind of loyalty you owe to someone, or something, that you love: a spouse, a parent, a child, your country. The love is genuine; at the same time, it conveys an obligation to maintain that love and all that it entails. You do that willingly because, after all, you actually love the person.

Now, b’rit. Like an agreement between countries, a biblical b’rit can be imposed by the more powerful partner — who of course is always God in these affairs — but it can also be presented as an agreement between equals. That is how God can bind himself to “covenant loyalty.” Loyalty is something that obligates you, and here it is God who is obligated by his loyalty to Israel.

That’s very appropriate for the book of Deuteronomy. As Moses will tell the Israelites a few weeks from now:

^{Deut 26:17} You have affirmed this day that the LORD is your God, that you will walk in His ways, that you will observe His laws and commandments and rules, and that you will obey Him. ¹⁸ And the LORD has affirmed this day that you are, as He promised you, His treasured people who shall observe all His commandments.

What NJPS is translating as “affirmed” (with a note reading “Exact nuance of Heb. uncertain”) is the verb הֶאֱמַ֖רְתָּ he’emarta, the Hiphil or causative form of the verb אמר amar ‘say’. This verb occurs some 5500 times — one of the most common words in the Bible when you see it in the basic, Qal conjugation. In the Hiphil, the two examples in the verses I’ve just quoted are unique. Perhaps this usage was invented specifically for these verses.

What does it mean? When you meet someone whom you’re attracted to and you want to find out if that person is single, you can ask whether he or she is “spoken for.” I think that in Deut 26:17–18 God and Israel are asserting that they have “spoken for” each other. They are a couple.

That is why, at the beginning of this week’s parashah, in Deut 7:12, it is very appropriate for God to promise that if the people obey God’s commandments then God will maintain the brit and the ḥésed with them: covenant loyalty, if you like, or (if you prefer) the fidelity he promised the patriarchs he would maintain.

Next week, Parashat Re’eh and the beginning of the great central section of the book, Deuteronomic law.

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This week we are reading Parashat Va-etchanan (Deut 3:23–7:11). Longtime readers know that I often get hung up on a single word in the parashah; that’s not going to happen this week. This week I’m hung up on two words, and the two words I’m hung up on are: “Ten Commandments.”

Yes, the “Ten Commandments” from Exodus 20 are repeated in this whole long section of the Torah in which Moses is reminding the Israelites of what has gotten them to this point in the story, waiting on the east bank of the Jordan River, “in the steppes of Moab, across the Jordan from Jericho,” as they have been since the beginning of Numbers 22. You most likely remember that in Deuteronomy 5 Moses repeats the Ten Commandments with some interesting and extremely important variations. That’s not our subject today.

What I’m interested in talking about today is what the Ten Commandments are called — not in Deuteronomy 5, where Moses repeats them, but in Deuteronomy 4, where he reminds the Israelites about them. Moses says to them:

^{Deut 4:12} The LORD spoke to you out of the fire; you heard the sound of words but perceived no shape—nothing but a voice. ¹³ He declared to you the covenant that He commanded you to observe, the Ten Commandments; and He inscribed them on two tablets of stone. [NJPS]

In Modern Hebrew we call the Ten Commandments עשׁרת הדיברות aséret ha-dibrot, but that’s not what they’re called here. Here they are aséret ha-d’varim. D’varim is the plural of דבר davar ‘word, thing’. “The sound of words” in v. 12 is ק֤וֹל דְּבָרִים֙ qol d’varim, just the same Hebrew word that there are ten of in v. 13. It doesn’t, of course, mean a single word, in the sense of one word out of many words in a sentence or in a dictionary. It means a “word” in the sense of a message: What’s the good word?

And of course it can be used even more generally. That “thing” we were talking about is also a davar, and the word is used in the Bible the same way, as when “YHWH afflicted Pharaoh … because of the Sarai thing [עַל־דְּבַ֥ר שָׂרַ֖י]” in Gen 12:17. So Moses in Deuteronomy 4 is reminding the Israelites of the ten “things” that God told them in Exodus 20.

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The word we use to name them now, dibrot, is the plural of the word דִּבֵּר dibber — not the verb meaning “he spoke,” which it perfectly resembles, but a noun meaning “an utterance,” or perhaps better “an Utterance,” which occurs just once or twice in the Bible:

• ^{Jer 5:13} The prophets shall prove mere wind

  For the Word [הַדִּבֵּ֖ר] is not in them;

  Thus-and-thus shall be done to them!”

• ^{Hos 1:2} When the LORD first spoke [‏תְּחִלַּ֥ת דִּבֶּר־יְ׳הוָ֖ה] to Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea …

Some consider this last to be a verb used like a noun, as in בראשית ברא of Gen 1:1; the King James Version, like the Greek translation, reads it as the Jeremiah noun. (My teacher Mayer Gruber, in his Hosea commentary, devotes more than four pages to this phrase.)

The previous verse, the beginning of Hosea, uses the plain-vanilla noun:

^{Hos 1:1} The word of the LORD [דְּבַר־יְ׳הוָ֣ה] that came to Hosea son of Beeri, in the reigns of Kings Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah of Judah, and in the reign of King Jeroboam son of Joash of Israel.

That’s the word we would expect, and that’s what the Ten Commandments are according to this week’s parashah: the ten d’varim.

I said we’d be talking about two words today, so now I’m going to drop davar and go back to aséret ha-d’varim, the Ten Commandments. How do we know that there are ten?

Well, didn’t the Bible just say that there were?

^{Deut 4:13} He declared to you the covenant that He commanded you to observe, the Ten Commandments; and He inscribed them on two tablets of stone.

That’s what Moses said, to be sure, but when you go back to when God actually spoke the commandments, in Exodus 20, the text merely says, “God spoke all these words [הַדְּבָרִ֥ים ha-d’varim]” (Exod 20:1). Neither God nor Moses nor the Torah itself announces how many of them there are. That is why Jews and Christians disagree — not on how many commandments there are, but on which words belong to which commandment, or (more precisely) which words are a commandment.

According to us Jews, “I am the Lord your God” is a commandment. It sounds more like an assertion than an instruction, but accepting that assertion is understood to be a commandment. Here’s a look at some of the different ways of counting them:1

Yet Moses is not making up the number 10 in this week’s parashah. Instead, it indeed comes from Exodus, but not from the chapter whose contents Moses is repeating and (subtly) altering. Instead, it comes from Exodus 34.

After the Golden Calf incident, after YHWH has declared his 13 attributes to Moses, he has Moses make another set of two stone tablets, which the latter brings back up the mountain. Then:

^{Exod 34:10} He said: I hereby make a covenant. Before all your people I will work such wonders as have not been wrought on all the earth or in any nation; and all the people who are with you shall see how awesome are the LORD’S deeds which I will perform for you. ¹¹ Mark well what I command you this day … ²⁷ And the LORD said to Moses: Write down these commandments, for in accordance with these commandments I make a covenant with you and with Israel. ²⁸ And he was there with the LORD forty days and forty nights; he ate no bread and drank no water; and he wrote down on the tablets the terms of the covenant, the Ten Commandments [עֲשֶׂ֖רֶת הַדְּבָרִֽים aséret ha-d’varim].

That, of course, is the same phrase that we have in this week’s parashah. Even in Exodus 34, where they are specifically called “ten,” it’s an interesting challenge to count ten commandments. I must ask again why there have to be ten when in Exodus 20 we’re not told how many there are.

It could, I suppose, just be an accident of history — perhaps literally an accident, as portrayed here. That’s one possible explanation. Another explanation is that ten is a mathematically “perfect” number, the sum of 1+2+3+4 that gives ten bowling pins that perfect triangle you try to knock apart.

Since we (most of us) have ten fingers, ten is a great number of something to have because it makes them easy to count — like, for example, the ten plagues that occurred in Egypt. How do we know that there were ten of them? Well, you can go to the book of Exodus and count them. They are much easier to count than the Ten Commandments are. In fact, they make a very nice pattern of three, three, three, and one.

Look in Nahum Sarna’s introduction to the plagues in the JPS Torah Commentary volume to Exodus, starting at 7:14, and probably in any other good commentary on the book of Exodus, to find a description of that pattern. There’s no way 3+3+3+1 can equal anything but ten, just like our bowling-ball pattern. Yet (as you’ll also see there) if you look at Psalms 78 and 105, which tell the story over again, each of those psalms describes only seven plagues.

So the truth is that we don’t know how many the Ten Commandments originally were. Were there 7? 10? 15 (thanks, Mel)? or just a bunch of incredibly important commandments that God announced, in a suitably imposing manner, and that at some point in biblical history the Israelites decided there must be ten of them? It is another one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Bible. No doubt we’ll meet another such puzzle next week — though probably not one of such consequence.

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This week we are reading Parashat Devarim, which means we are beginning the book of Deuteronomy, reading all the way from 1:1–3:22. And this week what I thought I would do is take a page out of my own book. I mean that quite literally. I have a book called The Bible’s Many Voices that perhaps some of you have read.

When I say that the Bible has many voices, that’s an expression that can be taken in a number of different ways. There are, of course, the different voices of the different biblical characters who speak in the Bible. However, there’s something else I mean by “voice” that I think gets too little attention: what I would call literary voice or perhaps writerly voice. When a writer is very good (or occasionally not so good but very idiosyncratic), you can pick up a piece of unmarked writing and recognize that you have something by that particular writer. I have friends who have looked at the “Frequently Asked Questions” in the Commentators’ Bible and say: I can hear your voice asking those questions.

It’s a very interesting and somewhat goofy exercise, when you are reading a writer with a very strong writerly voice, to put down that writer and then pick up something else written in a totally different way — the newspaper, a cookbook — and continue reading. For a moment or two, at least, you can make yourself hear the original writer’s voice reading you a recipe or the results of the baseball game. It can be startling and amusing.

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Anyway, one of the things I discuss in The Bible’s Many Voices is something in this week’s parashah that’s rather unusual for the Torah: a footnote. It’s true, we scholars love our footnotes, and of course there are editions of the Bible with footnotes. What I’m talking about, though, is a biblical text that is itself a footnote. It’s quite clear that what I’m going to talk about today is one.

And this is not a unique occurrence. There are other footnotes in the Bible. I (naturally) don’t mean that they are written literally at the bottom of the page; like ours in Parashat Devarim, they are incorporated into the text. The kind of page formatting that we use had not been invented yet. Here (in the NJPS translation) is an example of what I mean. Saul and a servant go looking for some of Saul’s father’s lost animals and get so desperate that they decide to ask a prophet where to find them:

^{1 Sam 9:3} Once the asses of Saul’s father Kish went astray, and Kish said to his son Saul, “Take along one of the servants and go out and look for the asses.” … ⁷ “But if we go,” Saul said to his servant, “what can we bring the man? For the food in our bags is all gone, and there is nothing we can bring to the man of God as a present. What have we got?” ⁸ The servant answered Saul again, “I happen to have a quarter-shekel of silver. I can give that to the man of God and he will tell us about our errand.”— ^{9 b}Formerly in Israel, when a man went to inquire of God, he would say, “Come, let us go to the seer,” for the prophet of today was formerly called a seer.— ¹⁰ Saul said to his servant, “A good idea; let us go.” And they went to the town where the man of God lived.

^{1 Sam 9:11} As they were climbing the ascent to the town, they met some girls coming out to draw water, and they asked them, “Is the seer in town?”

^b This verse explains the term “seer” in v. 11.

NJPS, using modern punctuation but treating the Bible as Bible, put dashes around the explanation of the word “seer” (רואה) and includes a footnote of its own to tell you what this verse is explaining. It’s easy for us to see that v. 9 is really a footnote to v. 11, awkwardly incorporated into the text itself.

In my Bible Guy column, I translated Gen 6:4 this way: “(The Nephilim were on earth in those days.*)” — at which point I moved the rest of v. 4 into a footnote, referenced by that asterisk. Since I haven’t published my own translation in print, I too simply explained this rather than putting it at the bottom of the page.

There’s a footnote similar to the Samuel one in chapter 4 of the book of Ruth:

^{Ruth 4:7} Now this was formerly done in Israel in cases of redemption or exchange: to validate any transaction, one man would take off his sandal and hand it to the other. Such was the practice in Israel. ⁸ So when the redeemer said to Boaz, “Acquire for yourself,” he drew off his sandal.1

Once again, a remark that, if it were in published in our day, would be relegated to a footnote to v. 8 is incorporated right into the text.

As I said, there is such a footnote in this week’s parashah as well. In fact, there are two of them. Here is a long selection (again in the NJPS translation) from Moses’s farewell speech, taken from Deuteronomy 2. You remember that he is reminding the Israelites, who are camped on the east side of the Jordan River, exactly what has happened to them to bring them to this point, where they are about to cross over to the west side of the river and take possession of the land of Canaan. Here is what he says, starting in Deut 2:8:

We then moved on, away from our kinsmen, the descendants of Esau, who live in Seir, away from the road of the Arabah, away from Elath and Ezion-geber; and we marched on in the direction of the wilderness of Moab. And the LORD said to me: “Do not harass the Moabites or provoke them to war. For I will not give you any of their land as a possession; I have assigned Ar as a possession to the descendants of Lot. Up now! Cross the wadi Zered!” So we crossed the wadi Zered.

Could you tell — without verse markers — that I left out three verses of that passage? After v. 9, when God explains to Moses, “I have assigned Ar as a possession to the descendants of Lot,” the passage continues this way:

^{Deut 2:10} It was formerly inhabited by the Emim, a people great and numerous, and as tall as the Anakites. ¹¹Like the Anakites, they are counted as Rephaim; but the Moabites call them Emim. ¹² Similarly, Seir was formerly inhabited by the Horites; but the descendants of Esau dispossessed them, wiping them out and settling in their place, just as Israel did in the land they were to possess, which the LORD had given to them.

These three verses are all technically inside a speech of “the Lord.” It’s true that the Lord does sometimes call himself “the Lord” in the third person, but that’s not what’s happening here. This is a different voice, interrupting — if you like — the Lord’s speech to Moses with some interesting geographical and ethnographic information, facts that we might want to know or (at least) that the author of Deuteronomy wants available to us.

They make no sense as part of God’s instruction to Moses and even less sense as part of Moses’s recounting that instruction to the people. Have a look at vv. 16–25 of this same chapter, this time in the NRSV translation, where there is another such footnote. NRSV puts it inside parentheses and outside quotation marks, both of which I have removed; your challenge is to find where they were:

^{Deut. 2:16} Just as soon as all the warriors had died off from among the people, ¹⁷ the LORD spoke to me, saying, ¹⁸ Today you are going to cross the boundary of Moab at Ar. ¹⁹ When you approach the frontier of the Ammonites, do not harass them or engage them in battle, for I will not give the land of the Ammonites to you as a possession, because I have given it to the descendants of Lot. ²⁰ It also is usually reckoned as a land of Rephaim. Rephaim formerly inhabited it, though the Ammonites call them Zamzummim, ²¹ a strong and numerous people, as tall as the Anakim. But the LORD destroyed them from before the Ammonites so that they could dispossess them and settle in their place. ²² He did the same for the descendants of Esau, who live in Seir, by destroying the Horim before them so that they could dispossess them and settle in their place even to this day. ²³ As for the Avvim, who had lived in settlements in the vicinity of Gaza, the Caphtorim, who came from Caphtor, destroyed them and settled in their place. ²⁴ Proceed on your journey and cross the Wadi Arnon. See, I have handed over to you King Sihon the Amorite of Heshbon, and his land. Begin to take possession by engaging him in battle. ²⁵ This day I will begin to put the dread and fear of you upon the peoples everywhere under heaven; when they hear report of you, they will tremble and be in anguish because of you.

All right, I admit it, it was not that difficult a challenge — just something to get you into this same exercise of listening to the different voices in the Bible.

It’s not, therefore, just a curiosity that there are footnotes here. It does actually tell us something rather interesting about the writer of the book of Deuteronomy. Let me step back for a moment and show you, with a certain amount of amazement, the sheer number of voices that we find when we read Deuteronomy 2:

• a scholar adding encyclopedia-style footnotes (vv. 10–12 and 16–25) within …

• a speech of God that is being …

• quoted by Moses, whose farewell address is …

• introduced by a narrator, whose voice was …

• created by an author whom we call the Deuteronomist.

Perhaps you have a different attitude toward the text and simply call that author “God.” It actually makes no difference to this argument. There are still five different layers of voices when you read Deut 2:10–12. It’s nested five layers down: a footnote, in a speech, that’s being quoted, by a character, who himself is being presented by a narrator, all of which is being written by an author.

Although Deuteronomy may be the most complicated biblical book in that sense, it’s by no means alone. It’s well worth thinking about the different levels of voices that you “hear” when you read the Bible. Let me emphasize that (from my perspective) if you read the Bible all in that one King James voice, you are not understanding what the original writers of the Bible are saying to you.

If you understand the Bible, as I think most Jews do, to be the history of your family, written by your ancestors, then you certainly want to listen very carefully to their voices. If that is indeed your perspective, you will not be surprised when you hear certain voices trying to speak louder or more insistently than the next.

That is Torah Talk for this week, all in my own single voice (except for what I’m quoting); by all means do add your voice by leaving a comment. Next week, a recap of the Ten Commandments.

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This week we are reading a double parashah, Mattot and Masei (Num 30:2–36:13), finishing the book of Numbers. Most of the other combined pairs are read separately during leap years (see here and here for details), but it’s normal for these two parshiyot to be combined except on the rarest of occasions. If my Hebrew calendar app is correct, they will not each get to stand on their own again until 2035. In any case, this week I’m going to look at Numbers 35.

I’ve been saying for quite some while that the book of Numbers should really be called the Book of the Tribes. As you remember, in the book of Numbers those tribes include Ephraim and Manasseh and exclude their father Joseph as well as Levi, ancestor of the Levites who are separated from the rest of Israel in the book of Numbers. We presume the Numbers arrangement implies that Joseph is getting the double portion of the firstborn son, two tribes instead of just one. (Alternatively, it was treating the Levites separately that was important, and using Ephraim and Manasseh was a convenient way to fill out the roster of twelve.)

The מַטּוֹת mattot are indeed the tribes, mysteriously invoked in Num 30:2 to be taught the laws of vows (whence that parashah gets its name) and more pertinently in 33:54, to introduce the subject of allotting Canaan to the various tribes. At this stage of the story, the Israelites are camped on the east bank of the Jordan River, waiting to cross into the land promised in Genesis to their ancestors.

The Levites are not going to get one of the twelve geographical areas that the other tribes are all going to get. Instead, they are going to get towns of their own scattered through the territories of the (other) tribes. The Levite aspect of these towns involves their also being cities of refuge for people who commit manslaughter, that is, who kill someone accidentally. That leads the chapter to continue by discussing deliberate murder:

^{Num 35:30} If anyone kills a person, the manslayer may be executed only on the evidence of witnesses; the testimony of a single witness against a person shall not suffice for a sentence of death. ³¹ You may not accept a ransom for the life of a murderer who is guilty of a capital crime; he must be put to death. ³² Nor may you accept ransom in lieu of flight to a city of refuge, enabling one to return to live on his land before the death of the priest. ³³ You shall not pollute the land in which you live; for blood pollutes the land, and the land can have no expiation for blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of him who shed it. ³⁴ You shall not defile the land in which you live, in which I Myself abide, for I the LORD abide among the Israelite people. [NJPS]

That is, the only way in which the “pollution” created by a murder can be cleaned up is by the “blood” — that is, the death — of the person who did the original killing.

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Since we are not merely discussing criminal procedure but חנף ḥ‑n-p ‘polluting’, it seems reasonable to think that the blood of someone who is accidentally killed would equally pollute the land in which YHWH abides. In this case, though, unless we decide that the accidental killer must be executed despite his lack of moral guilt, there is no obvious way to provide similar “expiation” for the blood of the murdered man.

Numbers 35, however, has a solution for that problem — one that I suspect feels more Christian than it does Jewish to most Jews nowadays: vicarious atonement. Someone has been killed, and so someone must die. Here is where the Levitical cities of refuge come in. Once the killing is ruled accidental, in the ancient Israelite equivalent of a legal proceeding, the accidental killer can take refuge in one of those cities. It is the legal equivalent of being on base: you cannot be tagged out — killed by the dead person’s avenging relative — as long as you stay inside the city.

But that is not necessarily a life sentence:

^{Num 35:22} But if he pushed him without malice aforethought or hurled any object at him unintentionally, ²³ or inadvertently dropped upon him any deadly object of stone, and death resulted—though he was not an enemy of his and did not seek his harm— ²⁴ in such cases the assembly shall decide between the slayer and the blood-avenger. ²⁵ The assembly shall protect the manslayer from the blood-avenger, and the assembly shall restore him to the city of refuge to which he fled, and there he shall remain until the death of the high priest who was anointed with the sacred oil. ²⁶ But if the manslayer ever goes outside the limits of the city of refuge to which he has fled, ²⁷ and the blood-avenger comes upon him outside the limits of his city of refuge, and the blood-avenger kills the manslayer, there is no bloodguilt on his account. ²⁸ For he must remain inside his city of refuge until the death of the high priest; after the death of the high priest, the manslayer may return to his land holding.

^{Num 35:29} Such shall be your law of procedure throughout the ages in all your settlements.

That is, when someone is killed, someone has to die. When the killing is deliberate, the killer himself must pay that penalty. When it is not, no one should have to suffer the penalty of death. Yet we all do suffer it eventually — and in ancient Israel (at least according to the book of Numbers) the death of the high priest, as representative of the nation, atones vicariously for the unhappy accidental killing.

Christian readers can tell me whether their fellow Christians ever even read the book of Numbers. If they did, I imagine they would be quite happy to find in the “Old Testament” an ancient Jewish example of vicarious atonement. That does not really jibe with the way we live in the world today: no high priest, no “pollution” of a metaphysical kind, along with the expectation — not always fulfilled — that we should take personal responsibility for our actions. Yet we see that in biblical Judaism, the only way to deal with the metaphysical problem of a killing that no one deserves to die for is to wait until someone who has taken the burden of dying for it dies naturally. And that is the high priest.

I will leave as an exercise for the reader the question of whether and how these ideas might be applied to solve, or at least to soothe, the desire for vengeance that multiplies, rather than eliminating, the pollution of blood. Next week, we begin the book of Deuteronomy.

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This week we are reading Parashat Pinchas (Num 25:10–30:1). Some of you will remember from last year a Maryland woman who was saddled with the name of the woman whom Pinchas killed. She was killed at the end of last week’s episode, at the beginning of Numbers 25, but we learn her name only this week: Cozbi daughter of Zur. Her paramour is also named: Zimri son of Salu.

I’m interested in Cozbi (that’s the NJPS spelling, not the Car Talk caller’s) also because of her lineage. Who was Zur? Answer: “He was the tribal head of an ancestral house in Midian” (Num 24:15), just as Salu was “chieftain of a Simeonite ancestral house” (v. 14). We’re going to start this week with pursuing Cozbi’s lineage a bit further. In Joshua 13, here is part of the land that Moses gave to Reuben:

^{Josh 13:21} all the towns of the Tableland and the entire kingdom of Sihon, the king of the Amorites, who had reigned in Heshbon. (For Moses defeated him and the Midianite chiefs Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur, and Reba, who had dwelt in the land as princes of Sihon.)

Further on right here in Numbers (we’ll read it next week) we find all five of them killed along with Balaam:

^{Num 31:8} Along with their other victims, they slew the kings of Midian: Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur, and Reba, the five kings of Midian. They also put Balaam son of Beor to the sword.

So it seems that Cozbi was the daughter not merely of a heavy hitter but of someone who was considered a king. (If you think it is unusual to have five kings in the same country, have a look at 1 Samuel 6.) Why do we care about these five kings (as I’ll call them) of Midian? Rashi’s comment to v. 15 explains (in my Commentators’ Bible translation):

This is to tell you how much the Midianites hated the Israelites. To get an Israelite to sin, they prostituted a king’s daughter.

And Gersonides adds, in his comment to v. 14:

We see that Pinchas was taking his life in his hands when he killed these two.

Today, however, we’re going to take a look at the names of the five kings.

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• Both Evi and Reba are names found only in the two verses cited above. We don’t know anything else about them.

• Hur is a very popular name in the Bible; the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament lists six different Hurs: (1) the companion (and per rabbinic tradition, nephew) of Moses; (2) grandfather of Bezalel, the artisan who designed the Tabernacle; (3) our Midianite king, also mentioned only in those two verses; (4) the father of Ben-hur, not the cinematic hero but one of Solomon’s provincial governors; (5) the father of one of the deputy mayors of Jerusalem in Neh 3:9; and (6) a son of Caleb according to Chronicles.

• Rekem is a name shared by two Israelites: a grandson of Caleb and a descendant of Manasseh (both according to Chronicles). There is also a Benjamite town by that name and, per Josephus, Antiquities 7:1, our Midianite Rekem is the guy who built Petra, the “rose-red city half as old as time.”

• Finally, Zur is a name that sounds as if it ought to be the ancient Midianite equivalent of Cliff, or perhaps Rocky, since that is essentially the meaning of this sound as a Hebrew word. We have just seen it in our Monday literature series. Our particular Zur is the only one of these Midianite kings who gets a third, somewhat disreputable mention in the Bible — as Cozbi’s father. For Zur as a name, there is yet another Benjamite connection, this time not a town but a man in a genealogy repeated at the end of 1 Chronicles 8 and 1 Chronicles 9.

Why do we care? Because this Zur, the Zur from the tribe of Benjamin, has a kid brother named Kish. See Chronicles for the genealogies, but for ease (and interest) of reading I refer you to 1 Samuel:

^{1 Sam 9:1} There was a man of Benjamin whose name was Kish son of Abiel son of Zeror son of Becorath son of Aphiah, a Benjaminite, a man of substance. ² He had a son whose name was Saul, an excellent young man; no one among the Israelites was handsomer than he; he was a head taller than any of the people.

Saul, of course, will become the first king of Israel (apologies to Abimelech son of Jerubbaal, who had claimed that title in Judges 9). I have to wonder whether our Zur, the father of this woman who is no better than she should be, is supposed to make us think that Saul the first king of Israel was also no better than he should be. Given that Rekem too is a Benjamite name, we might wonder whether the upcoming verse about those five kings is meant to imply that the Benjamites were somehow contaminated by a connection with these non-Israelite Midianites.

As long as we are casting aspersions, let’s take a quick look at Genesis 36:

^{Gen 36:31} These are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom before any king reigned over the Israelites … ³⁷ When Samlah died, Saul of Rehoboth-on-the-river succeeded him as king.

All right, this Saul was not our Saul, and he was an Edomite, not a Midianite. In fact, the grandfather of this Saul defeated the Midianites in battle. (Fun fact: This Saul’s grandson, the last of this line of Edomite kings, will marry a woman named Mehitabel, namesake of Archy the cockroach’s artsy feline pal.) Is all of this meant to taint the Israelite Saul, rival to the Davidic dynasty?

For a responsible opposing viewpoint, I must remind you of that other famous Israelite who had sex with a Midianite woman — Moshe Rabbenu. Moses’s wife Zipporah was not only a Midianite, she was the daughter of Jethro, the priest of Midian.

There is no Midian on the map today, and there have been no Midianites on the planet — not by that name — for a long, long time. That doesn’t stop me from wondering just what the biblical writers were thinking when they wrote about Midianites, being related to Midianites, sleeping with Midianites, and all the rest. The implication is that this was a loaded subject. Unfortunately, for us 21^st-c. readers it is now a completely unloaded subject. We don’t get the full implication of what it meant to be related to a Midianite. Certainly in Parashat Pinchas it does not sound like a good idea.

This column will be pushing past the five kings to some other subject next week. Do stop to tip your cap as you pass them by.

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This week we are reading Parashat Balak, Num 22:2–25:9. (Welcome back on board, Diaspora readers.) Let’s start today with these words, traditionally the first words one is supposed to say after entering the synagogue for morning prayers:

^{Num 24:5} How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, and thy tabernacles, O Israel! [KJV]

מַה־טֹּ֥בוּ אֹהָלֶ֖יךָ יַעֲקֹ֑ב מִשְׁכְּנֹתֶ֖יךָ יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃

mah-tovu ohalekha ya’aqov mishk’notekha yisrael

These words that begin Jewish communal prayer every morning were, of course, written by a non-Jew, by Balaam, the famous non-Jewish prophet. Some of you, perhaps not everyone, know that Balaam is the first biblical character we encounter whom we know from ancient texts, outside the Bible.

There is an earlier archaeological mention of David found at Tel Dan, but David is not going to come along in the text of the Bible for quite some time. There’s no one in the books of Genesis, Exodus, or Leviticus whom we know from a tradition that’s not in the Bible but that’s as old as the Bible, not until we get to Balaam.

What am I talking about? There is a text, written on a physical object that can be dated to the end of the 8^th-c. BCE, that mentions Balaam, who was evidently quite a famous non-Jewish prophet, just as he is portrayed in our story. It was found at Tell Deir Alla, due east of Nablus but on the Jordanian side of the river (take Rte. 65 when you visit). I have a two-page spread on it on pp. 140–141 of the Numbers volume of the beautiful new “Land of Israel Tanakh” series from Koren. (I don’t get anything if you purchase it from them, but don’t let that stop you.)

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So … what kind of a guy was Balaam? Following Jewish tradition, perhaps I ought to be calling him Bil’am ha-Rasha: Balaam the wicked. He is most definitely considered to be an early entrant in the long line of enemies of the Jews that has continued from ancient times up to the present day. Is that really what one would expect, though, if the only thing we knew about Balaam were chapters 22, 23, and 24 of the book of Numbers?

Those are the chapters where he blesses Israel, in accordance with his role as a prophet of YHWH and very much against his own economic interests. He was hired to curse Israel, and here he is singing “How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, and thy tabernacles, O Israel!”

Balaam is mentioned a number of other places in the Bible and it seems that the attitude toward Balaam evolved over time. When you look at the prophet Micah — presumably one of the earlier sources — God has him announce:

• ^{Mic 6:5} My people,

  Remember what Balak king of Moab

  Plotted against you,

  And how Balaam son of Beor

  Responded to him.

  [Recall your passage]

  From Shittim to Gilgal—

  And you will recognize

  The gracious acts of the LORD. [NJPS]

This very much seems to imply, as a reading of our parashah would indicate, that Balak was the enemy of the Jews and Balaam did God’s bidding in blessing them. Balaam was not one of us, but he was a good guy. He was on our side because God used him in that way.

When you read the book of Deuteronomy, however, things begin to skew around. Balaam’s hat begins to turn a little bit less white:

^{Deut 23:4} No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted into the congregation of the LORD; none of their descendants, even in the tenth generation, shall ever be admitted into the congregation of the LORD, ⁵ because they did not meet you with food and water on your journey after you left Egypt, and because they hired Balaam son of Beor, from Pethor of Aram-naharaim, to curse you.— ⁶ But the LORD your God refused to heed Balaam; instead, the LORD your God turned the curse into a blessing for you, for the LORD your God loves you.

So it would seem that Deuteronomy’s take is that Balaam indeed tried, or at least wanted, to curse Israel, but God would not do it.

In Joshua, the next book of the Deuteronomic history, we read this:

^{Josh. 24:9} Thereupon Balak son of Zippor, the king of Moab, made ready to attack Israel. He sent for Balaam son of Beor to curse you, ¹⁰ but I refused to listen to Balaam; he had to bless you, and thus I saved you from him.

You can already see that Balaam is turning into a bad guy, someone who in fact did want to curse Israel. Numbers 31, which we’ll be reading two weeks from now, tells us in plain Hebrew that the Israelites killed Balaam when they wreaked YHWH’s vengeance on Midian. Moses blew his stack! But not for the reason our reading of Numbers 22–24 might have suggested to us:

Num. 31:14 Moses became angry with the commanders of the army, the officers of thousands and the officers of hundreds, who had come back from the military campaign. ¹⁵ Moses said to them, “You have spared every female! ¹⁶ Yet they are the very ones who, at the bidding of Balaam, induced the Israelites to trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, so that the LORD’S community was struck by the plague.

That is, by now Moses is accusing Balaam not merely of being perfectly ready to curse the Israelites and indeed wanting to do so, but going ahead and inventing a nefarious plan to lure the Israelites into idolatry. See the midrash if you want more details of this scene, which would have fit quite nicely before the last verse of Numbers 24 if it had actually occurred.

It’s also a little suspicious — it’s very suspicious — that this God was named Peor with a P and Balaam’s father was named Beor with a B. The Moabites who invite the Israelites “to the sacrifices for their god” in Num 25:2 should really be inviting them to sacrifices for Chemosh, the actual god of Moab, whom we have already read about last week in Num 21:29. Instead, that role is played at the end of our parashah by Baal-peor. So would seem to be some nepotism involved.

What we actually see is a range of biblical responses to Balaam:

• in Micah, the notion that Balaam seems to have prevented the harm Balak wanted to do;

• in our parashah, an expansion of that perspective, with four of the most remarkable poetic oracles in the Bible, yet also a strange scene where Balaam is trying to go forward and an angel whom only his donkey can see is blocking him;

• Deuteronomy suggests that in fact Balaam did want to curse the Jews; and

• just a few chapters from now, in Numbers 31, we will find Balaam cooking up a plan to lure the Israelites into idolatry.

There’s no obvious reason why the Balaam of our story would want to do that. Balaam is a prophet of the Israelites’ own God and has been saying the right thing all along:

^{Num 22:38} Balaam said to Balak, “And now that I have come to you, have I the power to speak freely? I can utter only the word that God puts into my mouth.”

He was a prophet — as, again, we know from non-biblical sources too — and a prophet’s job is to say what God wants him to say.

Rabbinic literature turned Balaam into an extremely wicked person, one of the most wicked in all of Jewish history, but for me the bottom line is that he gave us the beautiful words, set to so many beautiful melodies, mah tovu ohalekha ya’akov mishk’notekha yisrael. Shai Agnon thought so too (or at least the narrator of his story “The Sense of Smell” thought so. I’ll give him the last word:

Balaam the wicked — no one wickeder than he, who advised the daughters of Moab to whore themselves, through which advice 158,600 Israelites perished — by virtue of having spoken in Hebrew, and in praise of Israel, he earned the right to have a section of the Torah called by his name, as well as the right to have all Jews begin their prayers each morning with the phrase “How beautiful thy tents,” Balaam’s word of praise for Israel.1

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This week we are reading Parashat Hukkat, Numbers 19:1–22:1. Yes, Num 22:1 is at the end of Hukkat and not at the beginning of Parashat Balak, another case where the Christian division of the chapters and the Jewish division of the parshiyot are misaligned.

That’s something that perhaps we can discuss another time — because Hukkat is the parashah that has Numbers 19, the famous passage about the red heifer. A פָרָ֨ה אֲדֻמָּ֜ה para aduma is really nothing more than a red cow, as the NJPS translates it; “red heifer” comes to us from the King James Version.

It certainly sounds like a more important ritual if you call this a heifer rather than just a cow, but that too is not what I want to focus on this week. Let me simply add that a “heifer” (per the Oxford English Dictionary) is “a young cow, specifically one that is over one year of age but has not yet calved.” That’s not specified in our chapter but does seem to be implied.

What I want to look at this week is a different question, one that asks about the bigger picture. What’s this chapter doing here? Numbers 18 discusses the sacred “gifts,” that is, the parts of the sacrifices brought by ordinary Israelites that must be given to the priests and the Levites; in the first verse of Numbers 20, Miriam dies. In the course of that chapter Aaron too will die and — though it’s never mentioned explicitly — four decades will pass and the generation of the wilderness joins Miriam and Aaron in death.

Why then this commercial interruption for the ritual of the red heifer? For the answers, I’m going to turn (this week) to the traditional commentators in the Numbers volume of my Commentators’ Bible. Don Isaac Abarbanel, the finance minister of Spain under Isabella and Ferdinand, who, with all the other Jews, was exiled in August of 1492 — I like to think that he authorized Columbus’s expense voucher before he left the country — spent the rest of his life writing commentary. He had a lot of questions to pose about Numbers 19:

• What is special about this commandment that it should be called a “ritual law” (v. 2)?

• Why must it be a cow and not a bull?

• Why must it be red?

• Why must it be a cow “on which no yoke has been laid”?

• Why is Eleazar, rather than his father Aaron, instructed to perform this ritual?

• Why is it slaughtered “outside the camp” (v. 3)?

• Why is the fat of the cow not offered on the altar?

• Why must “cedar wood, hyssop, and crimson stuff” (v. 6) be thrown into “the fire consuming the cow”?

• Why are “the priest” (v. 7), “he who performed the burning” (v. 8), and “he who gathers up the ashes” (v. 10) all made unclean by these procedures?

• Why is this called “water of lustration” (v. 9) rather than “water of the cow” or “of the cow ash”?

• If this cow is “a purification from sin” (v. 9, OJPS), why is it treated so differently from any other sin offering?

• How can this water cleanse one “who touches the corpse of any human being” (v. 11)?

• How can this water cleanse those who are unclean, when it defiles the clean people who prepare it?

• Why does the chapter not end with “The Israelites did so, as the LORD had spoken to Moses,” or “Eleazar did so, as Moses had commanded him,” as the Torah usually says?

But his very first question is ours, too:

Why are the instructions about the red cow recorded only now after Korah’s rebellion, when it was needed as soon as the Tabernacle went into operation? (Indeed, Jewish tradition says these commandments were given back then.)

The purpose of the red heifer, as you may have deduced from his questions, is to facilitate the cleansing of ritual impurity, a cleansing that is basic to the sacrificial system described in Leviticus and even more so simply to the existence of the Tabernacle, a home for God’s Presence among the Israelites. You could not approach the Tabernacle if you were unclean! The red heifer is turned into red heifer ash (read all about that in Numbers 19), which is used with “water of lustration” (v. 9) for ritual cleansing.

I have a vivid memory of the Jewish community of Boston having arranged a celebration in the Massachusetts statehouse on Beacon Hill. They had no way of knowing that Tip O’Neill, the Boston pol who had been Speaker of the House of Representatives, would die that weekend, and that his body would be lying in state in the rotunda. Tip — may he rest in peace — had to be hustled out of the building, because amongst the Jews who would be celebrating were kohanim, those whose ancestors had been priests in Temple times, who to this today cannot be under the same roof as a dead body.

Why? Because we no longer have the ash of a red heifer with which the impurity communicated by a corpse can be made clean. So — again — Abarbanel asks: Why do we only find out about the red heifer now, in Numbers 19, when we needed it as soon as the Tabernacle became sacred?

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In fact, the commentators don’t really give many good explanations of why this chapter occurs when it does. Here is the comment of Abraham ibn Ezra, another Iberian who ended up in Europe, four centuries before Abarbanel:

This passage too was said in the wilderness of Sinai, when God said, “Instruct the Israelites to remove from camp … anyone defiled by a corpse” (5:2); remember that we have already encountered “some men who were unclean by reason of a corpse and could not offer the passover sacrifice” (9:6). It is given here, following ch. 18, because it is another aspect of the priestly ritual.

As we’ve seen, chapter 18 discusses the priestly gifts; it’s a reasonable assumption that it does so because in chapter 17 the famous miracle with the almond staff has just proven that Aaron is indeed the one who was chosen to be priest and not his cousin Korah or anyone else.

Nahmanides, the 13^th-c. Spanish commentator who sometimes looks at Ibn Ezra with (let’s say) a bit of a jaundiced eye — adds just slightly more of an explanation:

This chapter completes the rules for priests, but it is included here after the priestly gifts of ch. 18 (rather than in Leviticus) to emphasize that the Israelites require the services of a priest for their ritual purification.

He too is implicitly also saying this is happening after the Korah rebellion.

Now we turn to Hizkuni, a northern French commentator and follower of the school of Rashi and Rashi’s grandson Rashbam:

This was on the 1^st of Nisan, the same day that the Tabernacle was set up; the cow was burnt on the next day so that they could be clean in order to offer the passover sacrifice.

That is, he dates our chapter to when it would have been necessary but doesn’t really explain why it’s found in the Torah only now. Abarbanel, who asked the question, did have to give an answer — he structured his commentary as answers to the questions he posed. He says this:

In fact, Moses prepared the first cow on that day (when he himself was still the High Priest). But now, in the 40^th year, the Holy One foresaw that as a result of the battles to conquer the land many Israelites would become contaminated by corpses, and the ashes of the cow prepared by Moses would not suffice. Notice that we are not told that Eleazar “did as the Lord commanded,” as this was spoken on the day the Tabernacle was set up; the point was that this should be done when (eventually) necessary.

On that original 1^st of Nisan, Moses himself was still serving in lieu of the high priest; Aaron had not yet been inaugurated. I said earlier that in Numbers 20, after our red heifer chapter, somehow 38 years go by without us noticing; Abarbanel says that’s already true here in Numbers 19. Only now, as a result of the battles east of the Jordan, would there be so many Israelites contaminated by corpse impurity that they would run out of the ashes of the cow originally prepared by Moses. This “ritual law” was spoken on that original 1^st of Nisan but did not have to be carried out until now.

It’s true that in the fortieth year — where we will be in Numbers 20 or, if Abarbanel is correct, where we already are here in Numbers 19 — the Israelites are getting ready to conquer the land of Canaan. But if we are in the fortieth year, that means something else has happened: All the people older than twenty years old who came out of the land of Egypt (except for Caleb, Joshua, Moses and Miriam and Aaron) are dead.

That a lot of dead people, to be precise, 600,000 dead men of military age, not to mention their wives. (The children are not necessarily dead, but presumably many of the women would be.) There’s a lot of death to deal with now and that, I believe, is why the red heifer chapter has to happen before Numbers 20, when we wake up from this wilderness dream and discover that we are in the fortieth year and are about to be plunged back into the reality of a battle for the land of Canaan.

Next week, it is on to Parashat Balak (not Parashat Bil’am!). See you then.

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This week we are reading Parashat Korah (that’s קֹ֫רַח qóraḥ, with a guttural ḥet at the end of his name, not just an -ah), Numbers 16–18. Ordinarily he’s considered the villain of this week’s story, “the Korah rebellion.” Modern scholars and traditional ones all have a lot to say about this story, but this week I’m going to take us in a completely different direction: parshiyot named after people.

There are relatively few of them. In Genesis there is just one:

• Parashat Noah (make sure to say נֹ֫חַ too with a ḥet), Gen 6:9–11:32, the second one in the book of Genesis after Parashat Bereshit, the story of creation. Parashat Noah is indeed (mostly) the story of Noah and the Flood. Read about that in much more detail here.

In Exodus as well, there is just one:

• Parashat Yitro, named after Jethro, Exodus 18–20. Exodus 18 is indeed about Jethro’s interaction with his son-in-law Moses, but the real subject of the parashah, comprising Exodus 19–20, is “the Ten Commandments” — in air quotes because this is not where they are numbered as “ten” and because they are never (in Hebrew) called “commandments.”

Numbers has several, including two in a row:

• Parashat Korah.

• Parashat Balak, Num 22:2–25:9.

• Parashat Pinhas (that’s another ḥet), Num 25:10–30:1.

Parashat Balak is the story, not of Balak (who’s really a secondary character there) but of Balaam, the famous prophet. Parashat Pinhas is even less about Pinhas, who is mentioned only in the first paragraph there (and in the last paragraph of Parashat Balak).

And those are the only people who have a parashah named after them. No Parashat Avraham for Abraham, none for Isaac, for Jacob, or for Joseph, not even a Parashat Moshe, though Moses is mentioned in every parashah outside of Genesis but one. No Parashat Aaron or Parashat Miriam either.

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The exception that proves the rule — that is, as Ambrose Bierce explained in The Devil’s Dictionary, that “probes” it, tests it — is Gen 23:1–25:18, Parashat Hayyei Sarah, “the life of Sarah,” which begins with Sarah’s death.

That, of course, is because it is named — like all the parshiyot — for the first significant words in the parashah. Our parashah too does indeed begin with Korah’s name. The first Hebrew words are וַיִּקַּ֣ח קֹ֔רַח va-yiqqaḥ qóraḥ ‘Korah took’. What exactly is meant by “took” we can discuss another year. The point is that this parashah is named Korah not because it’s about his rebellion but because his name is the first really distinctive word of the parashah.

Again, when we get two weeks from now to Parashat Balak, we’ll read:

^{Num 22:2} Balak son of Zippor saw all that Israel had done to the Amorites.

Once again, due to Biblical Hebrew’s VSO (verb-subject-object) narrative pattern, in Hebrew his name is the second word of the verse: וַיַּ֥רְא בָּלָ֖ק va-yar balaq. If that parashah had been written so that the first verse of it said “Balaam son of Beor” saw what had happened to the Israelites, we would call the parashah Parashat Bil’am, matching his name in Hebrew, בִּלְעָם. (Like so many biblical names, his English name comes from the Greek transliteration: Βαλααμ.)

Because the prophecies of Balaam make up such a large portion of that section of the book of Numbers, we would think the parashah was named after him when really it would merely have been named that way because his name would have been the first distinctive word in the opening verse. Since that didn’t happen it is named Balak, though everybody understands that Balak is no more than a supporting actor.

In our parashah, as in the hypothetical Parashat Bil’am or the real Parashat Noah, we might easily conclude that the parashah is about the Korah rebellion. Yet Korah is not the only one named even in the very first verse of the parashah:

^{Num 16:1} Now Korah, son of Izhar son of Kohath son of Levi, betook himself, along with Dathan and Abiram sons of Eliab, and On son of Peleth—descendants of Reuben— ² to rise up against Moses, together with two hundred and fifty Israelites, chieftains of the community, chosen in the assembly, men of repute. ³ They combined against Moses and Aaron and said to them, “You have gone too far!” [NJPS]

V. 3, with its plural verbs, demonstrates clearly that all 254 of the “chieftains” are in it together. The NJPS translation singling out Korah is perhaps based on the singular verb that we saw as the very first Hebrew word of the parashah. Yet, as the grammars make clear, when there’s a compound subject — and certainly in a case like this where there’s a long stretch of words after Korah, separating him from the rest of the compound subject — the verb often matches just the first element of that compound subject.

So it really would be quite accurate to translate Num 16:1 this way:

^{Num 16:1} Now Korah (son of Izhar son of Kohath son of Levi), Dathan and Abiram (sons of Eliab), and On (son of Peleth) betook themselves …

This episode was a much bigger thing than “the Korah rebellion.”

The academic scholars (of whom I am one, at least when I’m wearing my other hat) agree that there are two different stories in here, one about Korah’s rebellion and one about Dathan and Abiram. (Start here if you are interested in learning more about that.) As the two stories are woven together in the book of Numbers, this is “Korah’s rebellion,” and Dathan and Abiram are pushed off to the side.

Now let’s go down to Numbers 26, where there’s a second census of the Israelites after the one at the beginning of the book of Numbers, the one taken shortly after the Israelites have entered the wilderness. By Numbers 26, the Israelites are getting ready to leave the wilderness; they’re being counted before they enter the land. In this passage we get not just the numbers but also the genealogy, the descendants of the ancestral clans:

^{Num 26:5} Reuben, Israel’s first-born. Descendants of Reuben: [Of] Enoch, the clan of the Enochites; of Pallu, the clan of the Palluites; ⁶ of Hezron, the clan of the Hezronites; of Carmi, the clan of the Carmites. ⁷ Those are the clans of the Reubenites. The persons enrolled came to 43,730.

^{Num 26:8} Born to Pallu: Eliab. ⁹ The sons of Eliab were Nemuel, and Dathan and Abiram. These are the same Dathan and Abiram, chosen in the assembly, who agitated against Moses and Aaron as part of Korah’s band when they agitated against the LORD. ¹⁰ Whereupon the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up with Korah—when that band died, when the fire consumed the two hundred and fifty men—and they became an example. ¹¹ The sons of Korah, however, did not die.

See the Numbers volume of the Commentators’ Bible for the light that v. 9 here may be shedding on our story. But … what are the sons of Korah (who was a descendant of Levi, not of Reuben) doing here? Abraham ibn Ezra explains:

They are mentioned here in connection with the tribe of Reuben to contrast them to the sons of Dathan and Abiram, whose grown sons and minor children alike did die in the Korah incident. We see that what Dathan and Abiram did was worse than what Korah did.

So it seems that Numbers 16 is not the story of the Korah Rebellion but of the Dathan and Abiram rebellion. Sometimes it’s a good idea to elbow yourself to the front of the line and get a parashah named after you, and sometimes it’s a really bad idea.

Next week, an animal that’s actually been in the news recently: the famous “red heifer.” See you then.

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This week we are reading Parashat Shelach Lecha (Numbers 13–15), and I’m looking at a passage at the end of Numbers 14. The Hebrew words שְׁלַח־לְךָ֣ sh’lakh l’kha, naming our parashah, come from YHWH’s instruction to Moses in 13:2 telling him to send out some men to Canaan for reconnaissance in anticipation of the Israelites crossing there to take possession of the land promised to their ancestors.

As you no doubt remember, the spies come back and they say, “It’s great! — except that it is a country that devours its inhabitants, who (by the way) are giants, much bigger than we are.” That night, the people weep (14:1) and conclude, “It would be much, much better if we could go back to Egypt.”

And here is a small excerpt of God’s angry response:

^{Num 14:32} Your carcasses shall drop in this wilderness, ³³ while your children roam the wilderness for forty years, suffering for your faithlessness, until the last of your carcasses is down in the wilderness. ³⁴ You shall bear your punishment for forty years, corresponding to the number of days—forty days—that you scouted the land: a year for each day. Thus you shall know what it means to thwart Me. [NJPS]

Okay, wow. After a night’s sleep, however, the people realized they had over-reacted:

^{Num 14:40} Early next morning they set out toward the crest of the hill country, saying, “We are prepared to go up to the place that the LORD has spoken of, for we were wrong.”

Too late! Moses tells them there’s no reversing that harsh decree, and if they do indeed go ahead with their plan to invade Canaan, they will be defeated. That is indeed what happens during what Rainey and Notley (in The Sacred Bridge) call “the Israelites’ ill-fated razzia” to Hormah, a location somewhere in between Beersheba and Arad on today’s maps.

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There is no lack of what to discuss in this passage — for one thing, see Num 21:1–3 and Deut 1:41–45 — but what struck me is this Hebrew phrase from v. 40 in our passage:

[We are prepared to go up] to the place that the LORD has spoken of.

אֶל־הַמָּק֛וֹם אֲשֶׁר־אָמַ֥ר יְ׳הוָ֖ה

el-ha-makom asher amar yhwh

I instantly thought of the story of the Akedah in Genesis 22:

^{Gen 22:3} So early next morning, Abraham saddled his ass and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. He split the wood for the burnt offering, and he set out for the place of which God had told him [אֶל־הַמָּק֖וֹם אֲשֶׁר־אָֽמַר־ל֥וֹ הָאֱלֹהִֽים] … ⁹They arrived at the place of which God had told him [אֶֽל־הַמָּקוֹם֮ אֲשֶׁ֣ר אָֽמַר־ל֣וֹ הָאֱלֹהִים֒].

The highlighted phrase occurs just seven times anywhere in the Bible, all but once spoken by God. I’ve written elsewhere about the curious link between the Binding of Isaac in Genesis 22 and the beginning of the story of Balaam in Numbers 22, and one of those links shows up in this earlier, completely unrelated Numbers passage as well:

Both men get up in the morning to start their journeys:

וַיַּשְׁכֵּ֨ם אַבְרָהָ֜ם בַּבֹּ֗קֶר (Gen 22:3)

וַיָּ֤קָם בִּלְעָם֙ בַּבֹּ֔קֶר (Num 22:21)

Now we can add:

וַיַּשְׁכִּ֣מוּ בַבֹּ֔קֶר (Num 14:40)

The Israelites too “got up early in the morning” to go to “the place that YHWH had spoken of.” It seems that this is not a good thing to do:

• In Genesis 22, Abraham was in a big hurry to do something that apparently YHWH did not actually want him to do. Note that in 22:11 it is “an avatar of YHWH [מַלְאַ֤ךְ יְ׳הוָה֙]” who prevents him from killing his son. (For that wonderful translation of mal’akh as “avatar,” see here.)

• In Numbers 22, Balaam is being hired to hex the Israelites. There too, “an avatar of YHWH [מַלְאַ֧ךְ יְהוָ֛ה]” tries to prevent him from going.

That phrase “the place that YHWH said” also reminds us of Genesis 12. I’ve written in detail about the links between that chapter and Genesis 22, but in this case there’s a subtle difference. In Genesis 12, when YHWH tells Abram to leave his home for parts unknown — which turn out to be the land of Canaan — he does not say to the land “that I will tell you [אֲשֶׁ֖ר אֹמַ֥ר אֵלֶֽיךָ],” as in Gen 22:3, but to the land “that I will show you [אֲשֶׁ֥ר אַרְאֶֽךָּ].”

Maybe that is a clue for us in understanding Num 14:40. When they talk not about the land that YHWH had shown them but the land that YHWH had said to them, maybe it’s a clue that getting up early in the morning to go there is not the right thing to do — as indeed it turned out not to be.

There is another perhaps relevant example of our phrase to point out. It is from Solomon’s long prayer after the dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem (read more about that here):

^{1 Kgs 8:29 // 2 Chron 6:20} May Your eyes be open day and night toward this House, toward the place of which You have said [אֶל־הַ֨מָּק֔וֹם אֲשֶׁ֣ר אָמַ֔רְתָּ], ‘My name shall abide there’; may You heed the prayers which Your servant will offer toward this place.

When disaster strikes, according to this long passage, there is a kind of antenna that will pick up our prayers for help. There is much, much more to say about Numbers 14, ranging from the philological to the theological, but I’m happy that this week I’ve been able to take us from “the top of the mountain [רֹאשׁ־הָהָ֖ר]” (Num 14:40) where disaster struck the Israelites, through the mountain where disaster to Isaac was narrowly averted, to “the mountain of YHWH’s house” (Isa 2:2) where we can, perhaps, find some hope.

Next week will give us an opportunity to turn to something less portentous: parashot named after people. See you then.

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This week we are reading Parashat Beha’alotcha (Numbers 8–12). You remember that in last week’s episode, the tribal leaders were bringing carts full of sacrificial offerings to dedicate the altar during 12 days of the opening ceremonies of the new tabernacle that the Israelites had erected in Exodus 40. Our parashah begins with Numbers 8, which starts with a paragraph instructing Aaron how to set up the lamps — which he does. Then we read the continuation of the ceremony inaugurating the Temple:

^{Num 8:5} The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: ⁶ Take the Levites from among the Israelites and cleanse them. [NJPS]

File v. 7 there under Grooming Hints for Levites, and v. 8 under the instructions to offer sacrifice. Then the Levites themselves are brought forward and, in sight of the entire community:

^{Num 8:11} Aharon is to elevate [וְהֵנִיף֩] the Levites as an elevation-offering [תְּנוּפָה֙], before the presence of YHWH,

on behalf of the Children of Israel,

that they may serve the serving-tasks of YHWH. [Everett Fox]

King James suggests that he “offer” them; NRSVue that he “present” them; and NJPS that he “designate” them. OJPS has him “offer” them “for a wave-offering.” The verb הֵנִיף henif and the noun תְּנוּפָה t’nufa both derive from the root נוף n‑w‑f, the three letters that you see in front of you in the noun. Both v. 13 and v. 15 repeat that the Levites must be “waved” as a “wave-offering” (וְהֵנַפְתָּ֥ אֹתָ֛ם תְּנוּפָ֖ה v’henafta otam t’nufa). Then, in v. 21, it actually happens:

^{Num 8:21} The Levites decontaminated-themselves and scrubbed their garments;

Aharon elevated them as an elevation-offering before the presence of YHWH,

and Aharon effected-purgation for them, to purify them. [Fox]

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This verb occurs 34 times in the Bible (per Accordance; the Dictionary of Classical Hebrew makes it 35), four of which are these from Numbers 8 — quite a large chunk of them, in percentage terms. What does this verb really mean? Here are some examples:

• to brandish a weapon or wield a tool:

^{Exod 20:22} And if you make for Me an altar of stones, do not build it of hewn stones; for by wielding your tool [הֵנַ֥פְתָּ henáfta] upon them you have profaned them.

• to wave one’s hand, as when Naaman, the Aramean army commander, came to Elisha to be healed of leprosy:

^{2 Kgs 5:11} But Naaman was angered and walked away. “I thought,” he said, “he would surely come out to me, and would stand and invoke the LORD his God by name, and would wave his hand [וְהֵנִ֥יף v’henif] toward the spot, and cure the affected part.

• but mostly, to wave before the Lord as an offering:

^{Lev 8:25} He took the fat — the broad tail, all the fat about the entrails, the protuberance of the liver, and the two kidneys and their fat — and the right thigh. ²⁶ From the basket of unleavened bread that was before the LORD, he took one cake of unleavened bread, one cake of oil bread, and one wafer, and placed them on the fat parts and on the right thigh. ²⁷ He placed all these on the palms of Aaron and on the palms of his sons, and elevated them [וַיָּ֧נֶף va-yánef, OJPS: “waved them”] as an elevation offering before the LORD.

Everett Fox, famous for the Bible translations in which he tries to apply the Buber-Rosenzweig translation method to English, adds this note to his translation of t’nufa in v. 11 as “elevation-offering”:

Traditionally “wave-offering,” which, as Milgrom shows, is probably incorrect.

Jacob Milgrom, in his JPS Torah Commentary to Num 8:11, writes:

This ritual must be presumed to have been executed only in symbolic form.

In a 1,000-word excursus on “The ‘Tenufah’ Offering,” Milgrom explains:

The nature of the ritual is nowhere defined. The rabbinic rendering “wave offering” (Mish. Men. 5:6) has been accepted by nearly all translations, dictionaries, and commentaries. The Septuagint exhibits total bewilderment. It renders tenufah in the purification ceremonial for the healed leper (Lev. 14) by three words. The Targums, on the other hand, consistently translate tenufah and its verbal forms by the root r‑w‑m, “raise, elevate.” This rendering is corroborated by most occurrences of henif in the Bible (Isa. 10:15; 11:15; 13:2; 19:16), where the rendering “elevate” is clearly superior to “wave.” Also, it stands to reason that since the tenufah ritual is frequently carried out with many objects simultaneously (Exod. 29:22–24; Lev. 8:25–27), a “waving” motion would topple the entire offering, whereas their “elevation” is physically manageable.

Remember that Leviticus 8, although it’s a whole book’s worth of chapters ago from what we’re reading this week, is (somehow) happening as part of the same inaugural ceremony as our chapter, Numbers 8.

Baruch Levine, in his Anchor Bible commentary, says this:

The offering was not “waved,” as many have explained it, but was rather carried to and fro, while being held high, in order to display the offering before the Deity … Usage here is more figurative than literal. Referring to the Levites as a tenupah merely meant that they were being presented to God as an offering.

I have to ask: If the Levites were not really being “waved” or even “elevated” what is the point of using this verb l’hanif? It’s not as if one would obviously understand that it didn’t mean to wave or to elevate them. In the context of the story — as it’s being told — God tells Moses to use this particular verb: l’hanif the Levites. It should be should be something that you can do to the Levites with your hand.

It’s not as if we should expect Moses to be able to understand what this actually meant. All this is happening for the first time. They have not been offering these t’nufa offerings over and over again for many years. Yet somehow we are supposed to understand that the Levites were treated like an offering that is “waved” or, if you insist, “elevated” before YHWH.

Fox says the Levites are not meant literally as a sacrificial offering, but I beg to differ:

^{Num 8:13} You shall place the Levites in attendance upon Aaron and his sons, and designate them as an elevation offering to the LORD. ¹⁴ Thus you shall set the Levites apart from the Israelites, and the Levites shall be Mine. ¹⁵ Thereafter the Levites shall be qualified for the service of the Tent of Meeting, once you have cleansed them and designated them as an elevation offering. ¹⁶ For they are formally assigned to Me from among the Israelites: I have taken them for Myself in place of all the first issue of the womb, of all the first-born of the Israelites. ¹⁷ For every first-born among the Israelites, man as well as beast, is Mine; I consecrated them to Myself at the time that I smote every first-born in the land of Egypt. ¹⁸ Now I take the Levites instead of every first-born of the Israelites; ¹⁹ and from among the Israelites I formally assign the Levites to Aaron and his sons, to perform the service for the Israelites in the Tent of Meeting and to make expiation for the Israelites, so that no plague may afflict the Israelites for coming too near the sanctuary. [NJPS]

Num 3:39 records that there were 22,000 Levites, and v. 43 records 22,273 first-born males (both numbers counting “from the age of one month up”). The extra 273 had to be redeemed at a price of 5 shekels per head, giving us the five coins by which a first-born son is redeemed today in the pidyon ha-ben ceremony.

The very least that has to happen is that the Levites, the replacement of the Israelite first-borns who were rescued from the fate suffered by the Egyptian ones, must be waved before the Lord as if they were part of a sacrificial offering. A note in the Artscroll Talmud (n. 7 on Sanhedrin 110a) explains that Aaron did exactly this:

God had instructed Moses to shave the entire body of each eligible Levi, after which Aaron physically lifted and waved them, one by one.

22,000 freshly-shaved Levites lined up and walked past him so that each one could be individually picked up and waved in all six directions — front, back, right, left, up, and down. Hope you took your vitamins, Aaron!

By next week, things will have taken a wrong turn. I’ll see you then nevertheless, for Parashat Shelach Lecha.

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We saw last week that the synagogue reading cycle interrupts Numbers 4 in a most surprising place. That’s where we are starting this week as we read Parashat Naso (Num 4:21–7:89). Why is Numbers 7 such a long, long chapter, long enough to have 89 verses? Because that’s the chapter in which the setting up of the Tabernacle is finished, and each of the tribal chieftains brings an offering.

They were generous fellows, each one brought a full six verses of goodies as his tribe’s donation, and each offering is delineated item by item for each of the 12 chieftains. As an illustration, let’s give Shelumiel ben Zurishaddai — nebekh, he is the eponym of the Yiddish word shlemiel — a place in the sun:

^{Num 7:36} On the fifth day, it was the chieftain of the Simeonites, Shelumiel son of Zurishaddai. ³⁷ His offering: one silver bowl weighing 130 shekels and one silver basin of 70 shekels by the sanctuary weight, both filled with choice flour with oil mixed in, for a meal offering; ³⁸ one gold ladle of 10 shekels, filled with incense; ³⁹ one bull of the herd, one ram, and one lamb in its first year, for a burnt offering; ⁴⁰ one goat for a sin offering; ⁴¹ and for his sacrifice of well-being: two oxen, five rams, five he-goats, and five yearling lambs. That was the offering of Shelumiel son of Zurishaddai. [NJPS]

Add a paragraph like that for each of the other 11 chieftains and you have 72 verses even without any extra description of the situation. That description is going to present us with today’s Torah Puzzler™:

^{Num 7:1} On the day that Moses finished setting up the Tabernacle, he anointed and consecrated it and all its furnishings, as well as the altar and its utensils. When he had anointed and consecrated them, ² the chieftains of Israel, the heads of ancestral houses, namely, the chieftains of the tribes, those who were in charge of enrollment, drew near ³and brought their offering before the LORD: six draught carts and twelve oxen, a cart for every two chieftains and an ox for each one.

Get it? Six carts, one “for every two chieftains.” If any of you are event planners, I’m sure you are way ahead of me on this: Who were the six pairs of chieftains who shared a cart?

As I often point out, the book of Numbers is really the book of the Tribes. It is the one book of the Torah which enumerates the 12 tribes of Israel, not just once but over and over again. Let’s start by looking at how these same tribal leaders are listed when they are named in Numbers 1 to facilitate the census:

• From Reuben, Elizur son of Shedeur.

• From Simeon, Shelumiel son of Zurishaddai.

• From Judah, Nahshon son of Amminadab.

• From Issachar, Nethanel son of Zuar.

• From Zebulun, Eliab son of Helon.

• From the sons of Joseph:

• from Ephraim, Elishama son of Ammihud;

• from Manasseh, Gamaliel son of Pedahzur.

• From Benjamin, Abidan son of Gideoni.

• From Dan, Ahiezer son of Ammishaddai.

• From Asher, Pagiel son of Ochran.

• From Naphtali, Ahira son of Enan.

With apologies to Shelumiel and the rest of the gang, I am going to list them from here on simply by their tribes, not their personal times, since that’s what I imagine should be the crucial factor in pairing them up. Do notice that the tribes — as always in Numbers — exclude Levi (see Num 17:16–18) and Joseph, whose two sons “adopted” by Jacob in Genesis 48 each have a tribe of their own. (Yes, that gives Joseph the double portion of the inheritance to which the first-born son is entitled.)

Perhaps this is the time to note that in Genesis 49 the twelve are Jacob’s actual sons, including Levi and with Joseph as a single “tribe” of his own, while in Deuteronomy 33 we find Levi and Joseph, but Simeon is missing and the two Numbers tribes belonging to Joseph are included in his blessing. All through Numbers, though — at least five times — the 12 tribes are those whose chieftains bring the offerings.

Let’s try a thought experiment and assign tribes to wagons in a natural way if we can:

• Ephraim and Manasseh are a natural and obvious pair: Joseph’s sons.

• Gad and Asher, sons of Zilpah, make sense as a pair too.

• Dan and Naphtali are sons of Bilhah, another natural pair.

• Issachar and Zebulun are next to each other in every tribal list.

Who’s left?

• Reuben

• Simeon

• Judah

• Benjamin

I can somewhat awkwardly pair them up this way:

• Simeon, centered around Beersheba, belongs with Judah geographically

• Reuben, the oldest, tried to save Benjamin, the youngest, back in Genesis 37.

Those aren’t the only questions about Numbers 7, which does not describe how 12 ceremonial days of presentation could avoid having at least one of those days be the Sabbath, nor what exactly happened with the half-empty carts at the end of each odd-numbered day. That latter point suggests another way to think about the pairs.

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Since each of the chieftains brought his offering on his own individual day, you would think that the offerings on Day 1 and Day 2 would be in the same wagon, and the same with Day 3 and Day 4 (in Wagon #2) and so forth all the way down. Otherwise, if Chieftain #1 on Day 1 brings his offering in Wagon #1, if Chieftain #2 happens to have his offering packed in Wagon #6, the valet parkers are going to have their hands full. So let’s rearrange the tribes according to the lineup in Numbers 7 …

• Judah

• Issachar

• Zebulun

• Reuben

• Simeon

• Gad

• Ephraim

• Manasseh

• Benjamin

• Dan

• Asher

• Naphtali

… and now let’s pair them up:

• Wagon #1: Judah & Issachar

• Wagon #2: Zebulun & Reuben

• Wagon #3: Simeon & Gad

• Wagon #4: Ephraim & Manasseh

• Wagon #5: Benjamin & Dan

• Wagon #6: Asher & Naphtali

Ephraim and Manasseh are a natural pair and in fact we find that they are bringing their offerings on Day 7 and Day 8, so they are fine sharing Wagon #4. None of the other obvious or even reasonable pairs are sharing a cart. Issachar and Zebulun are next to each other, as always, but would not seem to be sharing a wagon. Bumping Issachar to Day 3 and Reuben up to Day 2 would put Leah’s sons #5 and #6 back together, but Reuben, her firstborn, wouldn’t necessarily take kindly to being demoted behind Judah, who was #4.

What the order in Numbers 7 really matches, all the way down the line, is the listing in Numbers 2 — a military configuration which has three tribes camped in each quadrant around the Tabernacle and peeling off from that configuration, one by one, to march forward when the cloud lifts off, six tribes ahead of the Tent and six tribes behind it.

• East:

  • Judah

  • Issachar

  • Zebulun

• South:

  • Reuben

  • Simeon

  • Gad

• West:

  • Ephraim

  • Manasseh

  • Benjamin

• North:

  • Dan

  • Asher

  • Naphtali

No problem morphing that list into one of 12 days, but it is a problem when you try to mesh the 3s and the 2s together. Nahmanides (in the Numbers volume of my Commentators’ Bible series) explains these three groups of four in his comment to Num 2:3; Rashi concludes (in his comment to 7:11) that “the Holy One instructed Moses that they should present their offerings according to the order in which they would march.”

No one but me seems to be puzzled about how sharing the wagons worked out, with just a single “natural” pairing of brothers sharing a wagon. Either that’s just what happened, or (more probably) this is a strictly literary order, paying no attention whatsoever to practicalities. It is based on the arrangement in Numbers 2 and completely ignores all the other literary material that suggests some of these brothers don’t really want to share a wagon at all.

Even Diaspora Jews have at least begun reading Parashat Naso by now. Do let me know if any of your traditional all-night Shavuot learning sessions offer a different solution to the Wagon Conundrum. Chag same’ach if you are celebrating. See you next week.

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This week we are beginning the book of Numbers, so we’re reading Parashat Bemidbar (Num 1:1-4:20). You notice that Numbers 4 is split between this week’s reading and next week’s. That seems strange, since Numbers 3, which is all about YHWH choosing the Levites to serve him, carefully notes that Moses is to take a census of the Levites. It goes on to point out that there are three different Levite clans: those descended from Levi’s sons Gershon, Kohath, and Merari.

Yet in Numbers 4 YHWH gives Moses three separate commands to count and record the three clans individually — and two of those commands, and all three of the censuses that do the actual counting, will have to wait for next week. Why does this week’s reading stop after v. 20?

Don Isaac Abarbanel, the Iberian-Jewish politico (specializing in financial affairs) who left Spain with the rest of the Jews who refused to convert in 1492, was a scholar as well. He posed the same question (given here in my Commentators’ Bible translation) at the beginning of his commentary on Parashat Naso, as one of the mysteries he intended to solve:

Why does the weekly portion [of Naso] begin with the census of the Gershonites rather than at the beginning of the chapter, with the census of the Kohathites? It would have been even better to include all of ch. 4 in the previous portion and begin the new portion with ch. 5.

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It’s perhaps even more surprising that the chapter begins with the Kohathites, and they are given the responsibility for “the most sacred objects” (Num 4:4). After all, whenever all three boys are listed together, Gershon’s name comes first:

• “Levi’s sons: Gershon, Kohath, and Merari” (Gen. 46:11)

• “These are the names of Levi’s sons by their lineage: Gershon, Kohath, and Merari” (Exod 6:16)

• “These were the sons of Levi by name: Gershon, Kohath, and Merari” (Num 3:17)

• “The sons of Levi: Gershom, Kohath, and Merari” (1 Chron 5:27)

• “The sons of Levi: Gershon, Kohath, and Merari” (1 Chron 23:6)

Yet there is one place where the order is Kohath, Gershon, and Merari as in Numbers 4. Here it is:

^{Josh 21:1} The heads of the ancestral houses of the Levites approached the priest Eleazer, Joshua son of Nun, and the heads of the ancestral houses of the Israelite tribes, ² and spoke to them at Shiloh in the land of Canaan, as follows: “The LORD commanded through Moses that we be given towns to live in, along with their pastures for our livestock.” ³ So the Israelites, in accordance with the LORD’S command, assigned to the Levites, out of their own portions, the following towns with their pastures:

^{Josh 21:4} The [first] lot among the Levites fell to the Kohathite clans. To the descendants of the priest Aaron, there fell by lot 13 towns from the tribe of Judah, the tribe of Simeon, and the tribe of Benjamin; ⁵ and to the remaining Kohathites [there fell] by lot 10 towns from the clans of the tribe of Ephraim, the tribe of Dan, and the half-tribe of Manasseh.

^{Josh 21:6} To the Gershonites [there fell] by lot 13 towns from the clans of the tribe of Issachar, the tribe of Asher, the tribe of Naphtali, and the half-tribe of Manasseh in Bashan.

^{Josh 21:7} [And] to the Merarites, by their clans—12 towns from the tribe of Reuben, the tribe of Gad, and the tribe of Zebulun. ⁸ The Israelites assigned those towns with their pastures by lot to the Levites—as the LORD had commanded through Moses.

And there we have our answer. Num 4:5 mentioned tasks to be done by “Aaron and his sons”; Josh 21:4 tells us clearly that “the descendants of the priest Aaron” get first pick of whatever goodies there are to be gotten. They are the ones closest to Jerusalem, while the rest of the Kohathites are stuck way up north. As for the Gershonites and the Merarites, they both are given some towns all the way over on the east bank of the Jordan, the ultimate biblical definition of “out of town.”

It’s not, therefore, so surprising after all that Kohath comes first in Numbers 4. He was the grandfather of Moses and Aaron: Aaron, the first high priest, and Moses, the ruler of the Israelites in the desert. What a coincidence that YHWH should decide to give the priesthood, the highest rank among the Levites, to Aaron and his descendants.

That is, in fact, Abarbanel’s explanation (in next week’s reading) for the surprising break between vv. 20–21 in this chapter:

The weekly portion begins with [the Gershonites], as the eldest, restoring to them the honor taken away from them when the most prestigious tasks were given to the Kohathites—which was due to the fact that Moses and Aaron were Kohathites themselves.

Abarbanel had been around the block himself and knew how things work. The Kohathites are given the plum jobs and, along with them, the plum place in this chapter. (We’ll be reading about another Kohathite, a cousin of Moses and Aaron named Korah who didn’t think his own job was plum enough, in a few short weeks.)

Yet I don’t really think his explanation for why the next parashah begins with the Gershonites is enough to explain why this parashah ends where it does. It’s especially unsatisfying — indeed, strange — because at the very end of the parashah we read this (in the NJPS translation):

^{Num 4:17} The LORD spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying: ¹⁸ Do not let the group of Kohathite clans be cut off from the Levites. ¹⁹ Do this with them, that they may live and not die when they approach the most sacred objects: let Aaron and his sons go in and assign each of them to his duties and to his porterage. ²⁰ But let not [the Kohathites] go inside and witness the dismantling of the sanctuary, lest they die.

I understand that “being cut off” means death by divine wrath. Still, separating them from their Levite brethren by cutting off the parashah just at this point is a little too similar for my taste — especially when that makes the last word of the parashah וָמֵֽתוּ va-méitu ‘and they shall die’.

There is, after all, a tradition that argues strongly against ending a reading with that kind of negativity. Jewish practice is that the biblical books of Isaiah, Malachi, Ecclesiastes, and Lamentations — all of which end with words of ill omen — are not simply left that way. Instead, after that unpleasant last verse, the second-to-last verse of the book is repeated. Yet somehow Parashat Bemidbar ends with “they shall die.”

It pays to be connected. In the Torah just as in our own day, it’s not necessarily what you know but who you know. Yet insisting on flaunting your connections and pushing them to the limit can leave you — as it leaves the Kohathites at the end of this week’s parashah — with some seriously bad karma.

I too, following synagogue practice, will regrettably have to keep the Gershonites and the Merarites in the wings until next week. See you then.

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This week we are reading another double parashah, Behar and Behukkotai (Leviticus 25–27), meaning we’ll finish the book of Leviticus this week. Because they’re combined, I don’t have to deal with the subject of why Behar includes the first two verses of Leviticus 26; maybe next year. What I want to talk about today is the phrase from one verse in our parashah that’s inscribed on a big, cracked bell seven blocks from where I used to live in Philadelphia:

^{Lev 25:10} And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.

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Those who know some Hebrew but don’t know the verse may be guessing what word is translated “liberty” there. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing; I would certainly not have been able to guess correctly when I might first have tried. The word is a somewhat surprising one, not obviously connected to “freedom” or “free.” It’s דְּר֛וֹר d’ror, a word that also happens to mean “a swallow” (the bird).

That version of the word occurs once in Psalms and once in Proverbs, both times parallel to צִפּוֹר tzippor, a more generic word for “bird.” So we might think that when you have liberty you are as free as a bird. But maybe it’s not that simple. Let’s look at some of the other Hebrew words for freedom and liberty and see what that comparison tells us.

One of them is חירות ḥeirut, and Passover is called in the Jewish prayer book זמן חרותינו z’man ḥeiruténu ‘our time of freedom’. But ḥeirut is not a biblical word. There is a biblical word ḥarut, describing God’s writing as being “incised” on the second set of two tablets (Exod 32:16), which Jewish tradition insists is the moral equivalent of ḥeirut:

^{m. Avot 6:2}

אַל תִּקְרֵי חָרוּת אֶלָּא חֵרוּת

Don’t read חרות as חָרוּת [“engraved”], read it as חֵרוּת [“freedom”].

The actual biblical root for the concept of freedom is חפשׁ ḥ‑p‑sh, occurring once in the Bible in verb form and once in noun form (both in Lev 19:20, which we read two weeks ago), and 17 times in the form חָפְשִׁי ḥofshi ‘free’:

^{Exod 21:2} When you acquire a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years; in the seventh year he shall go free [חָפְשִׁ֖י], without payment. ³ If he came single, he shall leave single; if he had a wife, his wife shall leave with him. ⁴ If his master gave him a wife, and she has borne him children, the wife and her children shall belong to the master, and he shall leave alone. ⁵ But if the slave declares, “I love my master, and my wife and children: I do not wish to go free [חָפְשִֽׁי],” ⁶ his master shall take him before God. He shall be brought to the door or the doorpost, and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl; and he shall then remain his slave for life. [NJPS]

So it would seem that, if you were a slave expecting to be freed at the jubilee — the 50^th year after 7 cycles of 7 years, each ending in a sabbatical year — this is the kind of “freedom” you would expect. In fact that is the word that is always used for a slave going free, and there are only two occurrences in which the word is used another way. One is Job 39:5, “Who sets the wild ass free [חָפְשִׁ֑י]?” The other is a strange expression in Ps 88:6 where the psalmist calls himself “חָ֫פְשִׁ֥י among the dead,” which I won’t try to solve.

Let’s keep our eyes on the prize: What about our word דרור d’ror, the “liberty” word of Lev 25:10? We do find that word too in a number of places in the Bible:

In Isa 61:1, the prophet says YHWH has sent him לִקְרֹ֤א לִשְׁבוּיִם֙ דְּר֔וֹר “to proclaim liberty to captives.” (The entertaining poetic parallel word in the next phrase, translated by NJPS as “liberation,” is פְּקַח־קֽוֹחַ p’qaḥ-qo’aḥ; feel free to explore this unusual, fun-to-say hapax legomenon on your own.)

Jeremiah 34 has not only our דרור d’ror word, “liberty,” but also חפשׁי ḥofshi ‘free’. It’s the passage where YHWH reminds Jeremiah that the Israelites had been commanded to free their Hebrew slaves after six years of work — which they did, but only technically; they had immediately re-enslaved them, with the following consequence:

^{Jer 34:17} Assuredly, thus said the LORD: You would not obey Me and proclaim a release [לִקְרֹ֣א דְר֔וֹר], each to his kinsman and countryman. Lo! I proclaim [קֹרֵא֩] your release [דְּר֜וֹר]—declares the LORD—to the sword, to pestilence, and to famine; and I will make you a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth.

What we see from the Jeremiah verse is that d’ror does not mean “liberty” as we normally think of that English word. What it seems to mean is “You’re on your own!”

Now we turn to The Context of Scripture for an ancient Near Eastern analogue to our word. It comes from a receipt for the purchase of a debt slave:

Exclusion clause (lines 6–7)

6 At a general release

7 she may not be released.¹

And that footnote gives the original Akkadian:

ina an-da-ra-ri-im ul i-na-an-da-ar.

Richard Hess, the translator of the text, introduces it this way:

Debt slavery was well known in the ancient Near East. The use of the andarārum was a special dispensation that allowed all those in debt to be freed of their debts. In order to circumvent this possibility, Sumunnabi had a special clause written into the agreement. Perhaps this type of permanent servitude, with no exclusions, was what Leviticus 25:39–42 addressed. It required release of all those in debt during the Year of Jubilee.

Indeed, Leviticus 25 takes things much further than merely “releasing” the slave to his own devices. If we look at what’s not inscribed on that famous bell, we find this: “ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.”

It is not a matter of handing the guy $5 and some civilian clothes. It is “release” in the sense that a spring is released and returns to its original shape. When you are released through דרור you are supposed to return to your own family and to your original landholding, the one your family was awarded when the land was first divided among the (descendants of the) slaves freed from Egypt.

Our Leviticus chapter is all about counting off seven years and then counting seven of those sevens, then adding a year to get to the Year of Jubilee. As this post is dropping, we’re in the middle of the annual microcosm of this 50-year jubilee, the seven weeks between Passover and Shavuot. We can’t really do in a few weeks what the Israelites were instructed to do every 50 years, but it was this: hit the reset button on the economy and send everyone back to “Go” to start all over again with equal resources.

2 Chron 36:21 suggests that even the sabbatical years never actually took place, let alone the Jubilee. Nonetheless, that reset of the economy is what Leviticus means by d’ror. That’s what it means to “proclaim liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof.” Some people like to say that American democracy derives from the Bible. If that’s so, this seems like a good text to look at when we are ready to start reviving our original tradition.

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This week we are reading Parashat Emor (Leviticus 21–24), getting very close to the end of the book. For now, I’m looking at a text toward the end of Leviticus 22:

^{Lev 22:26} The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: ²⁷ When an ox or a sheep or a goat is born, it shall stay seven days with its mother, and from the eighth day on it shall be acceptable as an offering by fire to the LORD. ²⁸ However, no animal from the herd or from the flock shall be slaughtered on the same day with its young.

My question today is this. Why can an ox or a sheep or a goat not be born and offered to God right away? That’s especially so if it is the firstborn. If it’s not a firstborn animal and you don’t have to offer that particular animal to God, wouldn’t it be a good idea to keep it for a few months and fatten it up? Perhaps you should even wait until it is an adult animal and you have actually put some time, effort, and expense into it before you offer it to God. That way you would really be giving up something that means something to you.

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After all, when a new fruit tree is planted you’re supposed to not eat the fruit for the first three years, after which all the fruit of the fourth year is supposed to go to God. Only starting with the fifth harvest from that tree can you begin to eat the fruit. We all know about “dog years,” but is the eighth day of a mammal’s life really the equivalent of the fifth year of a tree? An ox or a sheep or a goat is not fully grown or mature by the eighth day of its life. So what is “the eighth day” of Lev 22:27 about?

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As you know, there are lots of other things that happen in Judaism on the eighth day. The most prominent one in the book of Leviticus is at the beginning of Leviticus 9. Let me go back to Leviticus 8 to set the scene for you. It is the ordination of Aaron and his sons as priests. Baruch Schwartz (in the Jewish Study Bible) lays out the five stages of it:

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(1) Investiture: The priests are clothed for the first time in the garments required to perform their service (vv. 7–9, 13).

(2) Invocation: The priests present a burnt offering (vv. 18–21).

(3) Consecration: The blood of a ram of offering is applied to the priests’ bodies (vv. 22–24a).

(4) “Filling the hands”: The priests receive for the first time their allotted share of the sacrifices; they offer a portion to the LORD (vv. 26–29) and eat the remaining meat and loaves (v. 31).

(5) Anointment: The priests are anointed with the sacred oil, infusing them with holiness (vv. 12, 30).

Then, most significantly for us today:

Afterwards the priests remain within the Tabernacle for seven full days, completing their consecration (vv. 31–36).

Here is where Moses gives that perhaps unexpected final instruction:

^{Lev 8:34} Everything done today, the LORD has commanded to be done [seven days], to make expiation for you. ³⁵ You shall remain at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting day and night for seven days, keeping the LORD’S charge—that you may not die—for so I have been commanded.

Then “Aaron and his sons did all the things that the Lord had commanded through Moses” (ending Leviticus 8) and Leviticus 9 begins:

^{Lev 9:1} On the eighth day Moses called Aaron and his sons, and the elders of Israel.

So there were seven days of … shall we call it practice? Rehearsal? Spring training? One way or another, they were days of preparation. Then the ceremony is done once and for all — on the eighth day — and Aaron and his sons are ordained for the priesthood.

Of course, there’s another quite famous eighth day in Judaism, which we talked about two weeks ago:

^{Lev 12:1} The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: ² Speak to the Israelite people thus: When a woman at childbirth bears a male, she shall be unclean seven days; she shall be unclean as at the time of her menstrual infirmity.— ³ On the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised.—

True, the woman who gives birth is going through a seven-day waiting period. Along with her, though, the baby too is going through that same seven-day waiting period until, on the eighth day, his entrance into the covenant with God (by means of circumcision) will be considered acceptable. Before that — like the firstborn ox or sheep or goat — no.

In the next chapter in this week’s parashah, Leviticus 23, we’re going to be reading all about the festival calendar. It goes through a cycle pegged to the months of the year, and the “set times” occur on certain days in those months. The day (the amount of time it takes the earth to rotate once) and the month (the amount of time it takes the moon to complete one cycle) and the year (the amount of time that it takes the earth to go around the sun) are all to do with the observable universe.

But what is seven days? It’s a week, of course, but where in the universe can we observe it? It is roughly one quarter of the moon’s cycle, from new moon to half moon to full to half and back to new moon — but it is not really an astronomical measurement the way days, months, and years are.

You know what the seven days represent, of course: the Sabbath — as portrayed (with a wink and a nudge, not quite with that precise word) at the beginning of Genesis 2:

^{Gen 2:1} The heaven and the earth were finished, and all their array. ² On the seventh day God finished the work that He had been doing, and He ceased [וַיִּשְׁבֹּת֙ va-yishbot] on the seventh day from all the work that He had done. ³ And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased from all the work of creation that He had done.

This version of Creation (v. 4 will swing you around to Version 2) makes the seven-day week a cosmic part of creation, not just something dreamed up by calendar-makers or labor lawyers. That’s why …

• a boy cannot be circumcised and enter the covenant until his creation is complete by living through seven days;

• the priests cannot assume their roles until they have gone through seven days of preparation; and

• an animal cannot be offered to God until it has gone through seven days that somehow complete its creation and bring it fully into the universe. Then, and only then, it can be given as an offering to God.

We’ll finish the book of Leviticus next week.

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As we did last week, this week we are reading two parshiyot combined into one: Aharei Mot and Kedoshim (Leviticus 16–20). What I’m thinking about this week is the first verse of the first of those two parshiyot, and specifically the words that give it its name: אַחֲרֵ֣י מ֔וֹת Aharei Mot ‘after the death of’.

The people whose death we are after are “the two sons of Aaron” (Lev 16:1), deaths that occurred quite a long time ago in the story, way back in Leviticus 10, in Parashat Shemini:

^{Lev 10:1} Now Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu each took his fire pan, put fire in it, and laid incense on it; and they offered before the LORD alien fire, which He had not enjoined upon them. ² And fire came forth from [מִלִּפְנֵ֥י] the LORD and consumed them; thus they died at the instance of [לִפְנֵ֥י] the LORD. [NJPS]

Our verse says this:

^{Lev 16:1} The LORD spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron who died when they drew too close to the presence of [לִפְנֵי] the LORD.

I’m not going to discuss the nature of their “alien fire” (which I think is explained by the very next phrase), nor am I going to discuss why NJPS translates lifnei-yhwh so differently in these two places. לפני י׳הוה is a surprisingly difficult phrase, as I discussed at great length in my column on Nimrod in Gen 10:9. What I want to look at is specifically that phrase aḥarei mōt, which we find used elsewhere in biblical literature to indicate the end of one era and the beginning of another. I have these specific examples in mind:

• After the death of Moses (‏‏וַיְהִ֗י אַחֲרֵ֛י מ֥וֹת מֹשֶׁ֖ה, Josh 1:1)

• After the death of Joshua (‏וַיְהִ֗י אַחֲרֵי֙ מ֣וֹת יְהוֹשֻׁ֔עַ, Jud 1:1)

• After the death of Saul (‏וַיְהִ֗י אַֽחֲרֵי֙ מ֣וֹת שָׁא֔וּל, 2 Sam 1:1)

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All three of these obviously mark the end of an era of Israelite history. 1 Sam 1:1 begins in a very different way; if you’re interested, you will find much more discussion about it in my article “Three Biblical Beginnings” and a subsequent blog post that also explains why 1 Kgs 1:1 does not begin that way. I might as well go on and note that there’s a bit of a difference the next time our phrase occurs:

^{2 Kgs 1:1} After Ahab’s death [אַחֲרֵ֖י מ֥וֹת אַחְאָֽב], Moab rebelled against Israel.

No va-yehi in this one; the phrase that NJPS translates last is actually the beginning of the verse. Nonetheless, this too is a new era in Israelite history. Can it be that Leviticus 16 somehow also marks such a new beginning?

The “two sons of Aaron who died” in Leviticus 10 are not even named in our verse, but of course we know them from Lev 10:1. They are Nadab and Abihu. What is the new era that begins after their death? Not to gossip, but their father Aaron built a Golden Calf (see Exodus 32), and King Jeroboam I of Israel, who built two Golden Calves, had two sons named Nadab and Abijah. The splitting apart of the United Monarchy of David and Solomon was a new era in Israelite history all right, but I don’t think that is being alluded to here.

When we follow through the rest of Leviticus 16, we see the following:

• vv. 2-4 under what conditions “only” Aaron may “enter the Shrine”

  vv. 5-6 the offerings with which Aaron makes expiation for himself and Israel

  vv. 7-10 designation of goats for the Lord and for Azazel

  vv. 11-19 purging the Shrine

  vv. 20-22 the second goat is sent off to the wilderness

  vv. 23-25 Aaron completes the ritual of purgation

  v. 26 return of the man who took the Azazel-goat

  vv. 27-28 the remains of the other sacrifices are dealt with

Then we read this (in the NJPS translation; the emphasis is mine):

^{Lev 16:29} And this shall be to you a law for all time: In the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall practice self-denial; and you shall do no manner of work, neither the citizen nor the alien who resides among you. ³⁰ For on this day atonement shall be made for you to cleanse you of all your sins; you shall be clean before the LORD. ³¹ It shall be a sabbath of complete rest for you, and you shall practice self-denial; it is a law for all time. ³² The priest who has been anointed and ordained to serve as priest in place of his father shall make expiation. He shall put on the linen vestments, the sacral vestments. ³³ He shall purge the innermost Shrine; he shall purge the Tent of Meeting and the altar; and he shall make expiation for the priests and for all the people of the congregation.

³⁴ This shall be to you a law for all time: to make atonement for the Israelites for all their sins once a year.

And Moses did as the LORD had commanded him.

As I suggested in an earlier column on Aharei Mot, Leviticus 16 is presented as if this is the moment when the day of atonement, Yom ha-Kippurim, was invented. I speculated then that it was because God realized:

I had better have a ritual of this kind scheduled once a year so that this kind of impurity can be cleaned away on a regular basis.

Now I’m going to look at that same phenomenon from a different angle. You remember that, back in Leviticus 10 where the boys actually die, we see this very strange scene:

^{Lev 10:3} Then Moses said to Aaron, “This is what the LORD meant when He said:

Through those near to Me I show Myself holy,

And gain glory before all the people.”

And Aaron was silent.

If that were not strange enough, we don’t have this statement of the Lord anywhere in the Bible. We have to interpret what Moses meant and whether he was perhaps referring to some statement that we do have but in a different way. Rashi (in my Commentators’ Bible translation) explains it for us:

Where did he say this? “There I will meet with the Israelites, and it shall be sanctified by My Glory [kevodi]” (Exod. 29:43). Do not read it as kevodi but as kevudai, “those through whom I am glorified.” Moses said to Aaron, “Aaron, my brother, I knew in advance that the Tabernacle would be consecrated by the death of those with whom God was most intimate. I presumed it would be me or you. Now I see that they were greater than you or I.”

What that means, in plain English, is that the establishment of the Tabernacle required human sacrifice — not humans deliberately sacrificed by other humans; nonetheless, it required human death at its foundation in order to give it a mystical power of sanctity and the power to expiate sin.

We might think that when a new era begins with these deaths (which Moses’s comment in Lev 10:3 seems to phrase as something incredibly positive, a very powerful moment of sanctity and of holiness) — we might think, I say, that that was indeed enough to expiate sin for all time, and that that is the new era that begins aḥarei mōt, “after the deaths,” of Aaron’s two sons. Our chapter is devoted to saying No. After their death there is still required this yearly Day of Atonement. Their deaths may have been crucial to establishing a realm in which God could live amongst the Israelites on earth, but they did not atone for all sins.

More of Leviticus next week with Parashat Emor.

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