In Israel: Mattot
The story of the tribes of Reuben and Gad in this week’s Torah reading contains a rather subtle message. Following Israel’s defeat of Midian, the Reubenites and Gadites realize that the territories conquered on the far side of the Jordan included some grazing land that would be perfect for their vast holdings of cattle and other livestock. So they approach Moses with a request to allow them to settle there.
Moses interprets this as a request to settle there now and reacts with anger. “You mean you want the rest of the tribes to cross the Jordan and wage war while you settle peacefully on this side of the river? That’s exactly how your own fathers reacted after I sent them to scout out the land of Canaan.” Moses was referring to the men who, having surveyed the Canaanite fortifications and their fearsome inhabitants, declared that the proposed invasion of Canaan was doomed to failure. Their lack of faith then brought down divine punishment upon them (Numbers 13).
Numerous readers, ancient and modern, denounce the request of Reuben and Gad. After all, they say, all the tribes ought to have willingly shared in the nation’s burdens, no matter what their own particular situation. What a selfish thing it was for the people of those two tribes to think that they could just sit on the sidelines while their own countrymen risked death in conquering the land that had been promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob! Moses had to make clear to them that every tribe had to do its part.
But there are a few problems with this understanding of the story. To begin with, if that were the whole point, the narrative could have been a lot shorter: Reuben and Gad could have said what they said, and Moses could have sharply rebuked them. End of story. Instead, Moses goes into a long comparison with the earlier incident of the spies—a comparison which, when you think about, is not completely congruent. The sin of the spies was a lack of faith: they reported on what they saw—which was, after all, their mission—but then they went on to conclude that the conquest ordered by God would be impossible. They simply lacked faith in God. By contrast, the present story has nothing to do with a lack of faith or any belief that the conquest would be impossible. Rather, Moses is accusing the two tribes of following their own narrow interests and, in the process, shirking their duty.
Even more to the point: the two tribes never asked to be excused from the fight. What they request from Moses is that “this land [on this side of the Jordan] be given to us as a permanent holding (aḥuzzah); do not have us cross over the Jordan.” Apparently, Moses does not understand that they are talking about where they wish to settle: on the far side of the Jordan. He thinks they’re talking about not participating in the combined military effort to conquer the land. Moses thus ends up blaming them for nothing!
The representatives of the two tribes make it quite clear that they are not shirkers. “Just let us leave our herds and flocks on this side, along with our wives and children, and we will gladly join the fight as ḥalutzim, marching at the very forefront of the Israelite troops. And we won’t rejoin our families until all the other Israelites are settled in their allotted portions” (Num 32:16-19).
Reading this episode again, its needless repetitions are obious. Moses on the one side and Reubenites and Gadites on the other keep saying the same thing. So what point is the Torah making? Certainly not that these two tribes were potential shirkers. Rather, the protracted negotiations between Moses and them seem to be a warning against jumping to conclusions. This may sound a little trite, but experience has taught that such a thing can happen to anyone, even to a great, in fact, a divinely chosen leader like Moses.
Shabbat shalom!
Outside Israel: Pineḥas
The Priest Who Never Died
Last week’s Torah reading ended with Pineḥas (known in English as Phineas) slaying a flagrantly offending couple, thereby turning aside God’s wrath. For his quick action, Phineas was rewarded by God granting him a “covenant of eternal priesthood.” Ancient interpreters were puzzled by this. After all, the Torah specifies that Phineas 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 Phineas by giving him something that he already possessed. That couldn’t be right.
Instead, some interpreters saw this “covenant of eternal priesthood” as referring not to the priesthood in general, but to the high priesthood; in other words, Phineas and his descendants would forever serve as high priests in the Jerusalem 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 Phineas 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 Phineas’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.
Rabbinic interpreters thus arrived at a startling hypothesis: perhaps Phineas 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 himself would be immortal and, hence eternal.
Has Phineas been residing in heaven ever since?
In seeking to answer this question, interpreters came to focus on a later figure, the opponent of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, Israel’s great northern prophet Elijah. For all his greatness, Elijah 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 ancient times). 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 Phineas redivivus? Phineas—the man who was promised to be a priest forever—may simply have gone to heaven 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, Phineas and Elijah shared a particular quality: they were both said to have been “zealous” on God’s behalf. This is what God says of Phineas in Num 25:13: “because he has been zealous for his God”), and it is what Elijah says (twice!) about himself in this week’s haftarah, “I have been extremely zealous for the Lord” (1 Kings 19:10, 14). Now, “zealous” isn’t a particularly common word in Hebrew, any more than it is in English: surely its mention in regard to Phineas and Elijah in particular was no coincidence!
So it was that midrash came to identify Phineas and Elijah as one and the same person, the priest who never died. After he returned to earth for a time, Elijah/Phineas 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, he 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).
Shabbat shalom!
