Weekly Torah Reading (in Israel) Pineḥas, July 16, 2022

Numbers 25:10-30:1

The Return of Pineḥas

 

Last week’s Torah reading ended with a certain Israelite hero slaying a flagrantly offending couple, thereby turning aside God’s wrath. The name of the hero is written Phinehas in English, although Phineas used to be its regular spelling. In Hebrew the name is rendered as Pineḥas—but it’s actually not a Hebrew name. Egyptologists are not sure of its etymology, but it is clearly of Egyptian origin; it seems to have been used to refer to the dark-skinned Nubians who dwelt in the south, hence “southerner” or “dark-skinned one.”

 

This minor mystery is not the only one accompanying the story of Phinehas. There is also the whole matter of Phinehas’s reward for his quick action, which, this week’s reading reports, would be a “covenant of eternal priesthood.” Ancient interpreters were puzzled by this. After all, the Torah specifies that Phinehas was Aaron’s grandson. Hadn’t the Torah already said that the descendants of Aaron would inherit the priesthood for all subsequent generations (Exod 28:1-4, 29:1-8, etc.)?  If so, it would seem that God was rewarding Phinehas with something that had already been given to him.

 

Some interpreters saw this “covenant of eternal priesthood” as referring not to the priesthood in general, but to the high priesthood; in other words, Phinehas and his descendants would forever serve as high priests in the Temple. Ben Sira, a Jewish sage of the early second century BCE, thus wrote that God “established a law for him, a covenant of peace to uphold the sanctuary—that the high priesthood should be for him and his descendants forever” (Sir. 45:24 [Hebrew ms. B]).

 

But there was another possibility. Interpreters noticed that Phinehas led an extraordinarily long life. Not only was he around after the death of Moses, but he is presented at the end of the book of Judges as still functioning as a priest in those days, standing before the ark of the covenant (Jud 20:28).

 

In fact, the Hebrew Bible contains no account of Phinehas’s death. (The old Greek translation of the Bible does contain a brief notice of his passing in Joshua 24:33, but this seems to have been a later addition.) Not mentioning his death, interpreters reasoned, could hardly have been an accidental omission: surely the death of such an honored figure, and someone who had survived so long since the days of Moses and Aaron, would have been marked with honored burial and an extended period of mourning, such as that decreed for his grandfather Aaron.

 

Interpreters thus came to the conclusion that Phinehas didn’t die. At some point after his last appearance in Jud 20:28, he must have ascended into heaven while he was still alive, just as Enoch and Elijah had. In other words, his “covenant of eternal priesthood” must have meant that he would be immortal and, hence eternal.

 

Eventually, attention came to be focused on a later figure, the opponent of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, Israel’s great northern prophet Elijah. For all his greatness, he had no last name: from his very first appearance in he was just “Elijah,” without the specification “son of X” (the equivalent of a last name in modern societies). Neither does the Bible contain an account of Elijah’s birth or childhood; he just shows up as a grown man. Could it be that this prophet was none other than Phinehas redivivus? Phinehas—the man who was promised to be a priest forever—might simply have gone somewhere for a few centuries and then made his reappearance under a different name, a name that sounded suspiciously symbolic (Elijah/Eliahu means “my God is the Lord”).

 

What is more, Phinehas and Elijah shared a particular quality: they were both “zealous” for the Lord. This is what God says of Phinehas in Num 25:13 (“because he has been zealous for his God”), and it is what Elijah says (twice!) about himself, “I have been extremely zealous for the Lord” (1 Kings 19:10, 14). Surely this could not be a coincidence!

 

So it was that midrash came to identify Phinehas and Elijah as one and the same person, the priest who never died. After he returned to earth for a time, Elijah/Phinehas took up his place in heaven again; Elijah’s miraculous ascent into heaven on a fiery chariot is recounted 2 Kings 2.

 

And there, according to tradition, Phinehas remains to this day. When will he return to earth? The prophet Malachi reported God’s words on the subject: “For I will send to you the prophet Elijah, before the great and awesome day of the Lord. And he will return the mind of the fathers to their children, and the children’s minds back to their fathers” (Mal 3:12-14). To which Ben Sira added, “and he will reestablish the [lost] tribes of Israel” (Sir 48:11). That’s a pretty tall order, even for an eternal zealot.

 

Shabbat shalom!

Weekly Torah Reading (in Israel) Pineḥas, July 16, 2022

Numbers 22:2-25:9

A People Dwelling Apart?

In this week’s Torah reading, the pagan seer Balaam is hired to curse the people of Israel, but every time he tries, he ends up blessing them instead. In the first of these blessings he says as follows:

How can I curse those whom God has not cursed? And how can I doom those whom the Lord has not? I see them from the mountaintops, looking upon them from these heights: A people who will dwell apart, and not be counted among the nations. (Num 23:8-9)

The phrase in the last line, “a people who will dwell apart” (an alternate translation is “a people dwelling apart” or “dwelling alone”) has a long history. It has often been taken as a warrant for Jewish separatism: intermarriage (exogamy), or any other form of intermingling with other peoples, is to be avoided because, as Balaam said, we are “a people dwelling apart.”
Sometimes it is cited in order to claim that we Jews are a people different by nature from all others. The book of Jubilees, written by an anonymous Jew in the second century BCE, says as follows:

All of the descendants of his [Abraham’s] sons would become nations and would be counted with the nations. But one of Isaac’s sons [Jacob] would become a holy seed, and he would not be counted among the nations, because he would become the portion of the Most High (see Deut 32:8-9), and all his descendants would fall into that [share] which God owns, so that they would become a people whom the Lord possesses out of all the nations. (16:17-18)

Here, Balaam’s words (in italics above) are cited in support of Israel’s inherently separate status: Jacob, the ancestor of the people of Israel, will become a “holy seed” (for this phrase in connection with intermarriage, see Ezra 9:2) and his descendants “would not be counted among the nations” because, unlike all other nations, the Jews will be God’s own, personal possession. 

Targum Onqelos translates “a people dwelling apart” as “a people destined to inherit the world [to come],” while another ancient Aramaic translation renders “and not be counted among the nations” as: “they do not share the laws/customs of other nations.”

Elements of these understandings survive to this day: Balaam’s words are often cited, especially in modern Israel, as a way of saying that we Jews are altogether different. Indeed, I have heard this verse cited more than once in connection with another common sentiment, “The whole world is against us.” How could it not be against us, given our special and altogether separate status as “a people who will dwell apart”?

None of this, however, seems to be what Balaam really meant. He could hardly be talking about any actual, physical isolation, given the proximity of various other peoples neighboring the Land of Israel. Philo of Alexandria, the first-century Jewish commentator who lived in Egypt, certainly knew the geopolitical facts. He says explicitly that Balaam did not say what he said “because their dwelling place is set apart and their land severed from others.” 

Instead, Balaam’s blessing seems to reflect what might be the wish of any inhabitant of ancient Israel: to be left alone and not annexed to someone else’s empire (as indeed so often happened to Israel and Judah during the biblical period). That is what the adjoining phrase, “and not be counted among the nations,” seems to mean—not to be considered part of the mighty Hittite, Egyptian, Assyrian, or neo-Babylonian empires.

Shabbat shalom!