Numbers 30:2-32:42

Taking Care of Business

 

In this week’s reading, Moses is commanded to punish the Midianites for their role in leading Israel astray with the Midianite women. The blunt language hardly requires explanation. “Exact revenge from the Midianites,” Moses is told in Numbers 31:2, “then you may be joined to your forefathers” (that is, then you will be free to die).

 

Setting aside for the moment the bloodthirsty nature of the Midianites’ punishment, one might observe an apparently trivial fact: God had already issued a similar command a few chapters earlier: “Attack the Midianites,” He said in Num 25:17.

 

So what? Only this: any such repetition would normally seem to contradict one of the fundamental assumptions of the Torah’s traditional commentators, namely, that the Torah doesn’t repeat itself—ever! Presumably, if God is speaking, we are listening, and we don’t need to be reminded to pay attention to every word.

 

But this cardinal rule seems to break down in regard to one subject: Moses’ own immanent death. Time and again Moses is told (or Moses himself mentions) his oncoming demise. According to one midrashic tradition, Moses’ death is mentioned or alluded to no fewer than 10 separate times in the Torah. For example:

 

And the Lord said to Moses, “Behold, the time has come for you to die” (Deut 31:14).

 

And the Lord said to Moses, “Behold, now you will sleep with your fathers” (Deut 31:16).

 

[God said:] “Die on the mountain which you are climbing and be gathered to your forefathers” (Deut 32:50).

 

And so forth.

 

It seems unlikely that these repeated mentions of Moses’ death are intended to suggest that he was in any way afraid of dying. Rather, a quite different consideration seems to be at work. Moses was worried about, and sometimes ordered to take care of, unfinished business. So indeed, as with the Midianites in this week’s reading. Once again, Moses is told: “Take care of things before it’s too late.” And along the same lines, “Take care of naming your successor,” “Finish your mission!” or at least, “Come as close as you can.”

 

This applies even in the matter of the grisly slaughter of the Midianites. In fact, the abrupt juxtaposition of those two commandments in this week’s reading seems to have been designed to make a point. It is as if the Torah were saying, “Moses, do as you have been told to do: exact revenge from the Midianites, and leave everything else dangling. Only after that can you begin to think about being joined to your forefathers.

 

Shabbat shalom!

 

Weekly Torah Reading (outside Israel) Pineḥas,

July 23, 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!