Deuteronomy 1:1-3:22
What an Ox and a Donkey Know
This week’s Torah reading, from the beginning of the book of Deuteronomy, is always read on the Shabbat preceding the Ninth of Av (Tish‘ah be-Av), a day of mourning that commemorates the destruction of the first and second temples in Jerusalem. The haftarah (reading from the Prophets) accompanying this week’s portion is likewise fixed: it is always the first chapter of the book of Isaiah, verses 1-27. The two readings share one particular word, eikhah (which occurs in Deut 1:12 and Isa 1:21), which also happens to be the Hebrew name of the biblical book of Lamentations, read in synagogues on the Ninth of Av itself.
Eikhah (or eikh) for the most part means “How?” But it is also used to introduce words of regret or lament, rather like “Alas!” or “How could this happen?” This threefold repetition—in today’s Torah and Haftarah readings, and then again on the Ninth of Av—thus seems singularly appropriate for the season in which Jews lament the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and the subsequent exile.
But the reading from Isaiah was chosen as the haftarah not merely because it contains the word eikhah. Isaiah describes in some detail the sins of the people—sins that, he says, have brought about the conquest of the northern tribes at the hands of the Assyrian army (in 722 BCE) and their subsequent deportation to points unknown in the Assyrian empire.
What were they guilty of? Among other things, corruption and injustice: “From head to toe, no one is straight,” Isaiah says. Still worse, the institutions of religion were used by the guilty in a vain attempt to cover their wrongdoing. “What need do I have of all your sacrifices,” God says; “I’ve had enough burnt offerings of rams, suet of fatlings; I don’t want the blood of bulls and lambs and he-goats.” Instead, he says, “Wash and be cleansed, and remove your evil from out of My sight. Stop your wrongdoing and practice doing what’s right.”
These noble words are only rarely understood to apply to current events; this is as true today as it was in Isaiah’s time. But even if catastrophe was not avoided back then, the words themselves have survived and are still (perhaps more than ever) appropriate today.
I have always been taken by the subtlety of Isaiah’s initial denunciation of his contemporaries: “An ox knows its owner, and a donkey its master’s trough; Israel does not know, My people has not begun to understand.” It used to be said about such lines that they are a good example of parallelism, said to be the hallmark of biblical poetry: each line divides into two clauses, and the two clauses present “the same idea in different words.” But we now know that this is really not a very good description of how these poetic lines work. Usually, they aren’t saying the same thing exactly.
In the case at hand, an ox may not be the noblest of animals, but it is generally obedient; two oxen can be yoked together without protest and jointly plow a farmer’s fields. It is in this sense that oxen know their owners, obediently doing what is demanded. But all a donkey is said to know in this verse is “its master’s trough.” No matter how disobedient he may be, when it comes time to be fed, the donkey will go to his trough to eat the food given by his master. The same cannot be said of Israel, however. In this great, non-parallel descent, Israel comes in third: it does not know what an ox knows, in fact, it doesn’t even know what a donkey knows, that it is his master who is feeding him.
But this compact pair of lines has a secret addendum: the words “owner” and “master” were two ways of referring to the divine. Thus, the word “owner” (koneh) is sometimes used of God in the sense of “creator” (Gen 14:19, 14:22; Deut 32:6, Ps 139:13, 78:54; Prov 8:22). As for “master” (ba‘al), this word was also the common name for a major Canaanite deity, Ba‘al/Hadad, but apparently it could sometime also refer to Israel’s God (see Hos 2:16). So what the prophet is saying is that even a dumb beast knows enough to understand that he has a koneh, a Creator/Owner, and a ba‘al, a Master. But Israel seems not even to have grasped this much; in fact, they haven’t even begun to understand.