Numbers 22:2-25:9 

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 Balaam says as follows:

 

 How can I curse those whom God has not cursed? And how can I condemn those whom the Lord has not? I can 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” has a long history. It has sometimes been taken as a general disapproval of any form of intermingling with other peoples because, as Balaam said, Jews are “a people dwelling apart.” One of the earliest exponents of this belief was the author of book of Jubilees, written by an anonymous Jew in the second century BCE, who opined:

 

All of the descendants of his (Abraham’s) sons would become nations and would be counted with other nations. But one of Isaac’s sons (Jacob) would become a holy seed and would not be counted among the nations, because he would become the portion of the Most High.

 

 Here, Balaam’s words are cited in support of Israel’s inherently separate status: Jacob, the ancestor of the people of Israel, will become a “holy seed” (see likewise 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.

 

Such passages may indeed support the view of many exponents, especially in our own times. but none of them actually seems to be what Balaam really meant. He could hardly be talking about any actual, physical isolation, given the proximity of various other peoples inhabiting or neighboring the Land of Israel. Philo of Alexandria, the first-century Jewish commentator who lived in Egypt, certainly knew the geopolitical facts. He explains that Balaam said what he said “not because their dwelling-place is set apart and their land severed from others.” Because it isn’t.

 

Instead, Balaam’s blessing seems to reflect what might be the wish of any inhabitant of ancient Israel: not to become part of 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 give in to the mighty Hittite, Egyptian, Assyrian, or neo-Babylonian empires.

 

The interpretations put forward in the book of Jubilees above may indeed have fostered Jewish pride and sustained the Jewish people through the toughest of times. Yet sometimes the intended meaning seems blessing enough, “to be a free people in our own land.”

Shabbat shalom!