Judges: Chapter 18

 

Scry,

but do not speak--

eyes wide shut

always seek advantage

on your path outward

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This chapter, like the last, is also set in an achronological "in those days". Yet if the previous chapter seems to have stepped out of history, this chapter is dense with intertextuality, reaching deep into the nation's past and future.

True, it continues the previous chapter, linked by the refrain "In those days there was no king in Israel," and by continued insistent allusions to the Samson saga. The Dannite warriors set out from "between Tzorah and Eshtaol," echoing the opening and closing of Samson's story "between Tzorah and Eshtaol". What is more, the repeated references to the "encampment of Dan" in the Samson story are now retroactively explained: the Danites live in an "encampment" because "no inheritance had fallen into their lot among the tribes of Israel," and so they remained unsettled, a kind of second Levi.

Yet this description is itself puzzling, for the Dannites were given an "inheritance among the tribes of Israel"--in the seventh lot, back when the tribes's territories were apportioned by Joshua--a territory bordered by "Tzorah and Eshtaol", which included the fateful Timnah, where Samson met his wife. Rather, as we were told way back at the opening of this book, the Dannites were blocked from this inheritance by the Amorites, who drove them to the hills--a dispossession that haunts this period as an implicit threat.

The Danites' solution here is to send out five warriors to "spy out (רגל) the land and investigate it" . The action is dense with meaning, awakening a plethora of echoes. The first reference to rigul / spies is the Joseph saga (which so dominates the initial apportionment of the tribes): "You are spies!" Joseph accused his brothers. "The nakedness of the land you have come to see."And indeed the Danites are searching for vulnerability. Reaching Laish, they see perfect prey: "a tranquil and unsuspecting people, with no one in the land to molest them." Similarly, after partaking of Micah's hospitality, they see opportunity: "Here the five men who had gone to spy (r'g'l) ... remarked to their clans, “Do you know, there is an ephod in these houses, and oracle idols, and a sculptured image and a molten image? Now you know what you have to do.”

Yet the Dannite quest is no less in dialogue with other incidents of spying--most centrally, the infamous mission to "scout out" the Land, which ended in a 40-year exile. Moses's mission statement was not to spy (r'g'l), but rather to explore (t'r לתור), with detailed questions, involving every aspect of the land: "see what kind of country it is." The relative vulnerability of the population is simply another detail: are the people weak or strong?  Ultimately, however, this exploration is destroyed by how it awakens the people's sense of their own vulnerability:  we were as insects in their eyes, and so we were in our own. Caleb and Joshua are the lone dissenting voices, insisting that vulnerability is in the eye of the beholder: Have no fear then of the people of the country, for they are our prey: their protection has departed from them, but God is with us. 

The Dannite spies attempt to channel Caleb and Joshua's energy, merging their various speeches as they exhort the Dannites to capture Laish: "God has delivered it into your hand. When you come, you will come to an unsuspecting people; and the land is spacious and nothing on earth is lacking there.” Yet there is a deep irony in this appropriation, for their message is fundamentally opposed to that of Caleb and Joshua. Caleb and Joshua insist that the dangers are illusory, and that the people should fight for their inheritance. The Dannite spies, by contrast, urge abandoning the Dannite lands to go attack an "unsuspecting people." What God has apportioned is meaningless: the central question is relative strength. The fearless Caleb defines and initiates the conquest of the Land; Joshua exhorts the people "How long will you be slack in going to possess the land that God, the Lord of your fathers, has given you?" The Dannites, by contrast, remain ever-slack: they turn away from the land God has given them,  acceding to their dispossession. Let us abandon our territory, is their implicit message, and look for someplace easy. In this, they truly are an encampment of nomads, connected to no specific nahala. Like the young Levite-priest, they go on a "path", looking for what they can find." This stands in contrast to the primal Danite warrior, Samson, who for all his erratic action and insistent loneliness, focused his efforts on the Dannite ancestral lands near Timnah.

Caleb and Joshua they are not. But the Dannite warriors have learned one thing by attempting to recreate the story of the scouts: the power of language.  The battle between Caleb and the rest of the spies is one of words: they do not argue about facts, but about how to speak of them. The scouts sin is their speech :  דיבת הארץ--the speaking of the land. In presenting themselves as modern day Calebs ad=bd Joshuas, the Dannite spies are careful to allow no dissent: shut your mouth, they order. Be silent. No one is to undermine their narrative. 

Yet the Dannites do not wholly accept it. Instead, they split:  600 warriors take off for easier climes, the rest stay in the homelands of Tzorah and Eshtaol. On the way "out" (as the move to Laish is defined in Joshua 19), the Dannite contigent also carry off the Levite and Micah's gods. The opportunistic  Levite, who searched to "live wherever he could find", and was drawn in by Micah's concrete monetary offer,  is happy to set off to bigger and greater things. The hapless Micah is forced to turn around with nothing, the thief losing what he stole, along with the relationships he thought he had baught. Commodification and betrayal are triumphant. 

The stolen gods are set up in the stolen Laish "until the exile of the land"--a dark dart into the future. The dispossession of the Dannites indeed foretells the eventual dispossession of all the tribes. The schism in Dan is echoed in the schism between  Micah's house of God and the Tabernacle in Shilo. Relationships dissolve. communication is silenced.  

Joshua: Chapter 14

Halves that connect

Who we were then

Who we are now 

Follow your heart

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This chapter continues directly from the last, with narry a break in the Masoratic text. Whearas the last chapter decribed the allotment of the two and a half tribes on the eastern side of the Jordan, this chapter introduces the allotment of the remaining tribes by Joshua on the western bank. Again and again, the two half tribes of Menasseh are emphasized--two parts of a whole that weave together the two sides of the Jordan, a glue holding the nation together.

The new allotment begins with the tribe of Judah, as the next section of the introduceds a new doubling. Joshua's old comrade, Caleb, "comes close" (g'sh'n)--a root with deep resonances, alluding to the historic reapproachment between Joseph and Judah in Egypt--to ask for the inheritence he was promised. The scions of Judah and Joseph meet again, the first interaction we have see since both spoke in favor of the Land all those years ago in "Kadesh Barnea".

"You know the thing that God spoke to Moses...concerning me and concerning thee in Kadesh Barnea," Caleb says, creating a sense of the deep intimacy between these two men. Yet immidiatly after asserting the bond, we also begin to see a split: when Caleb speaks of the experience scouting out the land, his "bretheren" are the other spies, not Joshua. Joshua does not appear in Caleb's story at all. 

Caleb's story rather revolves around the relationship to the "heart." Caleb.  (literally "ka-lev", "like a heart" or, midrashically, "all heart") "brings back what is in his heart", while the other spies cause the "heart" of Israel to melt.   Joshua's defense seems to have been driven by something else.

The whole-hearted devotion with which Caleb is "full after God" seems to give him an everlasting youth. In contrast to Joshua, who is "old and coming into days," unable to continue the battles, Caleb is "as strog this day as I was on the day that Moses sent me, as my stregth was then, so is it now, for war, to go in and come out."

Underscoring the disparity between Caleb's vigor and Joshua's withering, the chapter closes by repeating the refrain from chapter 12: "and the land rested from war"--the war this time led by Judah's Caleb, rather than Joshua.]

Joshua: Chapter 2

What keeps watch at the doorway, between? 

Are you penetrable,  knowable? 

Shut the door,  yet open the window

Give me a sign.

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This chapter continues the focus on theme of transition, which here is given a tangible embodiment.
 We begin with the transition between Moses to Joshua. Joshua acts as Moses,  sending out spies. Yet this time, in a successful reiteration, Joshua sends only  two--a recreation of the successful spies, Caleb and himself. The other ten spies are forgotten.
We move on to the transition between the Encampment and the Land.  The spies are to scout out "Jericho, and the land", looking both at the countryside and the city. They stop at the liminal space between the two--the house of Rahab, who lives within the city wall itself, straddling the separation. Rahab becomes the key to the spies success in Jericho, straddling metaphorically between Israel and the inhabitants of the land. It is she who gives the spies their information. And saving  their lives, she demands to be saved in turn. Her literal liminality indeed becomes the key to salvation: she saves the spies by lowering them by rope out her window, and is saved in turn by hanging a "red thread" in her window. This thread, tikvat (lit. 'extension' 'hope') hut ha-shani, signals a way forward, and opening for hope.
Rahab not only lives in a liminal space--she herself is a liminal space, an entrance waiting to be penetrated. The language of the chapter is unremittingly sexual.  Rahab is described as a zonah (which means both innkeeper and whore). The spies "come to her" (repeatedly) and "lie there" in her home; she is told the spies have come to "plow" the land; and she repeatedly speaks of "knowing" (the carnal daat) and "not-knowing."  Indeed, there are many echoes of the Sodom story, with its threat of sexual violence. Rahab's advice to the spies to flee "to the mountain" echoes the angels' advice to Lot to "flee to the mountain" (hahara nasu).
Yet it is Rahab and her family who actually play the part of Lot, saved from the destroyed city. In  saving the spies--"sending them forth", as Joshua had "sent" them --Rahab metaphorically opens herself and the city up as conquest. In exchange, she is granted a protection that echoes Israel's protection in Egypt during the plague  of the firstborn. By marking the limen, she is set aside].

Deuteronomy: Chapter 3

Stand and gaze

At the limits of longing

To see, and not to have

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After the long list of all the land that has "not been given" (n't'n --the key word of these two chapters) to Israel, we come at last to the land that is "given": "And God said, fear him not, for I have given him into your hands." We come to  Og, the last of the "remnant of the Rephaim"--that mysterious race of giants whose country Israel wanders. He is the giant who has been been left in waiting until Israel arrives to inherit. 
Yet to truly have what is "given," one must also actively :take"--va-nikakh. Only after an active involvement can give over the gift, as Moses does when "gives" the land of Og to Reuben and Gad; or rename the gift, as the tribe of Manasseh does, making the land truly theirs. 

The refrain of multiple names developes the key theme of retelling, recounting--the "deuter (second, retelling) nomos (of the law)" that gives this book its name. Renaming is retelling in the deepest sense,highlighting different perspectives, the alternate realities.  

Yet the chapter that begins with "giving" and inheritance ends with denial, and with absolute limits:"It is enough for you(rav le-kha! Do not continue (al tosef) to speak to me on this matter." We return to the refrain of limits, the "rav le-kha" that began this journey. Moses will not be allowed into the Promised Land. 

His longing is palpable. It paints the land in idealized shades: "the good land" "the good mountain." Even when recounting the story of the spies, Moses can only say the favorable aspect of the report: "the Land is good." However, despite this love, Moses, like the generation that rejected the land, will die in the desert: "God was wroth with me because of you." 

But if the nation would not even "see" the land, Moses is allowed to look: "Climb you to the top of the mountain, and lift  your eyes westward, and northward, and southward, and eastward, and behold with thine eyes." This is a gaze with no consummation. It is Joshua  who will be granted the fulfilled eyesight: "And I commanded Joshua at that time, saying: 'Your eyes have seen all that God your Lord has done to these two kings; so shall God do unto all the kingdoms where you cross over."

The final verse, with its reference to being "across Peor,"  sets up an implicit link between Moses, in his longing  lonely lookout, and Balaam's earlier all seeing gaze, looking over the people of Israel. Broad scope that comes at the expense of having. Like Balaam, Moses' voice is ultimately silenced: "Do not speak of this matter again" This "book of words" is also the book of the  limit on human speech in the face of divine decree]

Deuteronomy: Chapter 1

Who and when and where?

Layers of narration

Before and between and across

Mutability of relation

What lies before your face



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A new book, and what a change of ambiance! If the closing of Numbers revolved around a growing complexity in our relationship to language, the opening of this Book of Words (the literal meaning of the Hebrew name, Devarim) feels almost like a text book play on literary narration. 
We open with am omniscient narrator: "These are the words that Moshe spoke to all of Israel--on the edge of the Jordan, in the wilderness, in the plain, across the Sea of Reeds, between Paran and Tofel...." From there we move to the interdiegetic  first-person narration in Moses' voice: "God our Lord spoke to us in Horeb, saying..." And from there into an intra-inter-diegetic level of narration, in the reported speech: "and you crowded on me, all of you, and said: 'Let us send men before us, that they may search the land for us, and bring us back word of the way by which we must go up, and the cities unto which we shall come."
And with the proliferation of narrative levels comes an almost post-modern play on the narrative strategy and the process of storytelling. For Moses' retelling is a not a straightforward rendition of the stories we have heard before. Speakers change--words that were spoken by God are now spoken by the people, words attributed to Moses are suddenly put in God's mouth, Moses' prayer to God becomes an adress to the people; stories are conflated --the punishment of Moses becomes part of the story of the spies, rather than a separate incident; related events merge into a single cry of pain. Jethro's advice to appoint judges in conflated with Moses' later demand for help "How can I bear alone, your cumbrance, your weight, your strife."
Yet even as the players and events change, they key words remain the same--"alone" "spy" "cry": we can recognize the incident through the indelible presence of the leitwort, which takes on its own reality. A dream redreamed, a story retold. There is a core of truth--the key word--seen through different levels of perspectives (Moses' viewpoint) and time (retrospective recounting).  Not for nothing is the chapter built around multiple coordinates in space and time, a dizzying mix of prepositions:"in" "against""before"  "between".  Robert Alter's comparison between Biblical narration and Cubist art is particularly apt in this chapter.  
The conflation of time frames emphasizes the thematic image of childhood that echoes throughout the chapter: "you saw that God carried you, like a man carries his son, through all the paths you walked, until you came to this place". We return to the childhood of humanity itself:  "your little ones...and your children, who today know not good and evil, they shall go in [to the Land], and unto them will I give it, and they shall possess it."
Implicit is also the return to Moses' childhood. Moses' address is defined by the coordinates of the "Reeds" and the Jordan River--two boundaries of water for the child who was "drawn from the water." If the Jordan represents unpassable water, the "Reeds" returns us to those moments on the back of the water, before the arc got caught "in the reeds", and the later moment when Moses "parted the waters" to allow Israel to escape Egypt. 
Moses' birth, his moment if greatness,  and his end are all held within these boundaries. And the sad irony that the man who split the sea cannot cross the river. 

Numbers: Chapter 32

What you see

And what is given 

to be taken

We separate

even as we connect

the bonds that tie

Reflected, refracted 

We reach across waters

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After the bringing of the booty in the previous chapter, this chapter highlight the cost of possession. The key word is "mikne"--commonly used as "cattle", but literally "possession, that which was bought": "Now the children of Reuben and the children of Gad had a very great multitude of cattle (mikne); and they saw the land of Jazer and the land of Gilead, and behold, the place was a place for cattle". As is thematic in Genesis, the increase of possession leads to a break between "brothers" (a'h--another key word of this chapter). The tribes of Reuben and Gad of-the-many-possession desire to split from the rest of the children of Israel: "we will not inherit with them on yonder side of the Jordan or forward, because our inheritance has fallen to us on this side of the Jordan to the east". Not for nothing is the tribe of Menasseh, that eventually joins them, suddenly identified as "Menasseh son of Joseph": the chapter is raising the specter of the primal split between "brothers" : the sale of Joseph for "profit".
 In a book for of echoes and recreations, this is the most dangerous reverberation yet. Much of the Book of Numbers recreates the earlier books of the Torah: The complaints about the Manna; the demand for meat; the lack of water. Often, the tale of the first generation that left Egypt is retold within the second generation. This is especially accentuated here, when Moses literally re-tells the saga of the wilderness (ba-midbar--the Hebrew name for this book), fearing a twice-told tale, in which the children repeat the sins of the fathers: "behold, you have risen up in your fathers’ stead, an increase of sinful men, to add to God's flaming toward Israel.  For if you turn away from Him, He will yet again leave them in the wilderness, and you will destroy all this people.”
Moses seems to be right on mark in identifying a danger here. There are indeed echoes of the sage of the spies: if the spies were sent to "see the land," and end up  rejecting the "place" (makom--another key word) that "God has given"; Reuben and Gad "see the land" that isn't theirs, and ask for it to be "given" to them: an inversion between seeing, and not wanting what is yours, to seeing and wanting what is not yours. 
Disaster is averted, however, by making the eastern tribe's inheritance contingent on that of their "brothers'. If they bind up their fate with the rest of Israel's, then the nation itself will "give" them the land.]

Numbers: Chapters 16

Swallowed in the whole

Or set

 

Apart

Are we all

Or one?

Come up, 

or descend all the way down

 

Gather and separate  

Alive and dead

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The dissolution continues.  The first section of Numbers deals with setting up the encampment:the tribes are numbered; leaders are appointed; Levi is placed at the center, the transitional glue connecting the people to the inner heart of the Dwelling. As the book unfolds, each of these elements leads to breakdown. 
The organic whole of the encampment leads to mob psychology, as "the whole congregation" shifts hysterically from rejecting the Land, to attempting to force their way into the Land. The mob psychology continues in our chapter, which is dominated by the word "congregation" (edah) and "assembly" (khal). 

The "princes" (nessim) of the tribes do not  ease the burdens on Moses. Rather, they are some of the sources of disquiet, fermenting despair as spies; and here joining in Korach's rebellion (which is lead by the elite, despite its claims to speak for "the entire congregation")

And here, for the first time, we come to the breakdown of the "sons of Levi" who instigate and lead the rebellion against Moses and Aaron. "Hear now, sons of Levi... is it small to you, that God separated you from the tribes of Israel, and brought you close, to do service in the Dwelling?" Moses demands.
It seems to be the inherent tension of the encampment that leads inexorably to rebellion. The tension of always being part of a whole leads Korach to demand "the entire congregation is holy...why do you set yourself up over the congregation?" even as he himself seeks to be "the leader." The chapter ends as Moses prays "Shall one man sin, and the entire congregation be punished?" attempting a separation between individual and group. This separation is symbolically enacted when the people move away from Korach's tents. 
Levi's impossible position as neither part of Israel, nor part of the Dwelling, given to both, belonging to neither, can be seen as leading directly to the demands to serve as priests, to break down the rigid structure of inside and outside. "To be sperated but no chosen, consecrated, but no the "holy" is a terrible  tension. 
"We will not come up" say Datan and Aviram, revealing the simmering resentment over the decree that their generation will not see the Lan. Instead they descend to a living hell. Yet that is almost easier than the place of the eternal between.]

Numbers: Chapter 15

When you come

To where you
 cannot come

Will you be forgiven
you
and the stranger within?

Spread your wings
trail the sky
and remember

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A miscellany of a chapter, that somehow connects back to the sin of the spies "those who explored (taru) the Land" with the key word t'r, to wander, explore.

After the decree that none of the adults would enter the land, the chapter opens with hopes of forgiveness: two commandments that will take place "when you enter the land that I will give you." Both center around the consecration of produce. Until now, the focus has been on worship through animals, as appropriate for a nomad society. Now the focus shifts to wheat--a promise of a "settled" agricultural society --and to wine--hearkening back to the "cluster of grapes" that the spies brought back with them.

The hints of forgiveness climax with the law of the atonement offering for the congregation: "and you will forgive the entire congregation of Israel"--the key word of the breakdown of the "entire congregation" after the spies report-- "for the entire nation is in error".

Yet that forgiveness is not absolute is highlighted by the story of the man who is put to death for gathering wood on the Sabbath--a story with clear lexical links to the story of the blasphemer that closes the Book of Leviticus. Forming an "entire congregation" requires the "taking outside" of those who break from the "congregation." Even as the chapter repeatedly highlights the inclusion of the stranger, it demands that "he who sins with upraised arm" be "cut off."

The chapter closes with a symbolic embodiment of this problematic liminal area in teh commandment of tzizit, fringes: "make fringes on the edges (kanaf, lit. wing) of your garments..., and put on each fringe an string of blue." The "edges" are the areas with that must be consecrated by the string of blue; they are the wings lifting to the sky. Yet they are also the areas that one must guard against, so as not  to "wander" (tur) after one's eyes and hearts. ]  

Numbers: Chapter 14

What is within

seen and heard

What carries

Gone

And we fall 

down, down, 

down

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The saga of disintegration continues, with the same key words: "complaint" "crying" "carry" (s'a'a') "within" ; the motif of food.

The people once again dissolve in weeping, "crying all that night." Echoing Moses' despairing "kill me now, please kill me" they lament: "Would that we had died in Egypt, or in this wilderness, we had died!" In the face of the national despair, Moses and Aaron dissolve as well, "falling on their face."

God once again loses patience "with the complaints that that are complaining about Me." In a recreation  of the aftermath of the Golden Calf, He resolves to abandon Israel, and turn Moses to a new nation. Moses once again steps into the breach. Being "within" (k'r'v) is not something that can be reversed. Israel has become intertwined with God. There can be no true severing. God must "bear" (lit. carry "s'a'a') with His nation. As in the case of the Golden Calf, God "forgives, as you spoke."

Yet this time, God takes Israel at their word. "As you have spoken in My ears, so I will do to you." The people will indeed die in the desert: "your carcasses will fall here", in a reversal of the spies "going up" to the land.

In response, the people resolve to "go up" by force, and fall in battle. The dissolution is complete.]