Yitro: Rejected Wife

Mount Sinai, by Elijah Walton, 19th century

Moses, the Israelites, and some menials who joined them in the exodus from Egypt , are camping in the wilderness of Sinai when visitors arrive at the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Yitro.

And Yitro, priest of Midian, father-in-law of Moses, heard all that God had done for Moses and for his people, Israel: that God had brought Israel out from Egypt. So Yitro, father-in-law of Moses, took Tzipporah, wife of Moses, after shilucheyha, and her two sons … (Exodus/Shemot 18:1-3)

shilucheyha (שִׁלּוּחֶיהָ) = she had been sent: sent away, dismissed, or divorced. (A pual form of the root verb shalach (שָׁלַח) = send, let go.)

After Moses received orders from God at the burning bush, he took his wife and sons on the first leg of his journey back to Egypt. They spent the night at a lodging place where God came to kill Moses, and Tzipporah saved his life by circumcising one of their sons and smearing the blood on her husband, calling him a “bridegroom of blood”.¹ (See my post Va-eira & Shemot: Uncircumcised, Part 2.)

Tzipporah’s decisive action indicates she would be a good person to have by his side in a dangerous situation.² Yet something about that dramatic ritual made Moses change his mind about bringing his wife to Egypt. Maybe he did not even believe her account of what happened while he was unconscious. So he sent Tzipporah back to her father’s house after she saved his life, and before he met his brother Aaron on the road.³

Was it merely a separation, or a divorce? Was he protecting or rejecting her?

Sending away versus casting out

The pual form⁴ of the verb shalach appears only 15 times in the Hebrew Bible, usually referring to when a man was sent somewhere. The only other occurrence of this verb in reference to a woman is in second Isaiah:

Where is this scroll of divorce

Of your mother, whom I shilucheyha? (Isaiah 50:1)

Deuteronomy uses the related piel verb form shillach in three laws about sending away wives.

If a man wants a female war captive, he must take her home and let her mourn unmolested for one month before he takes her as a wife. “Then if you no longer want her, veshillachtah her soul, and you must certainly not sell her for silver; you must not treat her brutally, since you overpowered her.” (Deuteronomy 21:14)

veshillachtah (וְשִׁלַּחְתָּה) = then you must set her free, let her go.

If a man tries to return his bride the next morning by claiming falsely that she was not a virgin, “… then she will be his wife; he will not be able to shallechah all his days.” (Deuteronomy 22:19)

shallechah (שַׁלְּחָהּ) = send her away.

And if a man rapes a virgin who is not engaged, he must pay her father and accept her as his wife. “… since he overpowered her, he will not be able to shallechah all his days.” (Deuteronomy 22:29)

In all three of these laws, the verb shillach is used to mean divorce.

Separating

Nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible does a man send his own wife back to her father’s house temporarily, without divorcing her. Yet most commentary before the 20^th century assumed Moses did this, either so that Tzipporah and their children would not suffer,⁵ or so that he could “devote himself entirely to the fulfillment of his mission”.⁶

One piece of evidence for this interpretation is that when Yitro brings Tzipporah back to Moses, she is still called eishet Moshe (אֵשֶׁת מֺשֶׁה) = wife of Moses, and Yitro is still called chotein Moshe (חֺתֵן מֺשֶׁה) = father-in-law of Moses.

The Hebrew Bible uses only two types of words for divorce: variants of shillach (שִׁלַּח) = send away, set free, let go; and variants of goreish (גֺּרֵשׁ) = cast out, driven out. In other biblical books a divorcee is called a gerushah (גְרוּשָׁה), a female who has been cast out.⁷ But Tzipporah is not called a gerushah. Moses did not “cast out” Tzipporah; he “sent her away”.

Divorcing

And Moses went out to invite his father-in-law, and he bowed down to him, and he kissed him, and they inquired about one another’s welfare, and they came into the tent. (Exodus 18:7)

Moses greets Yitro warmly, but he does not even acknowledge the presence of Tzipporah and their two sons. Although there are no instances in the Hebrew Bible of a man kissing his wife or ex-wife in public, men do kiss their kinsmen in front of other people.⁸ Yet the Torah does not say Moses greets his own sons in any way. He does not even perform the basic courtesy of inviting them to dismount and rest.

Inside the tent, Moses tells his father-in-law the details of God’s miracles in Egypt and afterward. Yitro makes a burnt offering to Moses’ God, and feasts with Moses, Aaron, and the elders of Israel. No provision for Tzipporah, Gershom, or Eliezer is mentioned. The next day, Yitro gives Moses advice on how to delegate the legal cases his people bring to him.

And Moses sent off his father-in-law, and he went to his own land. (Exodus 18:27)

Do Tzipporah, Geirshom, and Eliezer go home again with Yitro, ignored and rejected? Or do they stay with Moses and the Israelites, ignored and rejected?

The Kushite wife

The name “Tzipporah” never appears again in the Hebrew Bible. A wife of Moses is mentioned only once more, when Miriam and Aaron complain about Moses “on account of the Kushite wife that he took; for he had taken a Kushite wife”. (Numbers/Bemidbar 12:1) Elsewhere in the bible, a Kushite is a dark-skinned person from Kush, which may be either Nubia (south of Egypt) or part of southern Midianite territory (near the Gulf of Aqaba). The commentary is divided on whether this wife is Tzipporah or another woman. One tradition is that Miriam and Aaron complain because Moses is denying his wife sexual relations.⁹

Certainly Moses does not share his tent with a wife. His tent becomes the Tent of Meeting (with God), and only Moses and his apprentice Joshua sleep there.

Moses’ sons, Geirshom and Eliezer, have no role in the rest of the story of Moses’ life. Joshua inherits Moses’ position as political leader of the Israelites, and Aaron’s son Elazar becomes the high priest. Geirshom and Eliezer are not mentioned again until the first book of Chronicles, which includes them in genealogical lists of Levites in charge of the temple treasuries.¹⁰

So I believe that Yitro does leave his daughter and grandsons behind when he says farewell to Moses and goes home. Moses lets Tzipporah and their two sons travel with the Israelites, but he has little or no contact with his erstwhile family. Although they travel with the Israelites, perhaps pitching their tent with the other foreigners on the edges of the camps, Moses maintains his separation from them.

And I think that when Miriam and Aaron speak against Moses “on account of his Kushite wife” in the book of Numbers, they are referring to his neglect of Tzipporah. (I plan to explore this idea further when we reach Beha-alotkha in the Jewish cycle of Torah portions at the end of May 2018).

After Moses separates from Tzipporah on the road to Egypt, we never see him interacting with a wife or child again. If he is married to anyone, he is married to God. If he has any children, they are the thousands of children of Israel that he has become responsible for. He misses out on the long companionship of marriage partners.

So does Tzipporah. Her heroic act in the bridegroom of blood scene is ignored, forgotten. She is treated like excess baggage, passed back and forth between Yitro and Moses. Her name means “bird”, but she is never allowed to fly.

May we have compassion for all caged birds—and for all great leaders.

Exodus 4:24-26.
Pamela Tarkin Reis, Reading the Lines, Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, MA, 2002, pp. 101-102.
Rashi (11^th-century Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki) follows the Mekhilta by adding dialogue in which Aaron advises Moses not to bring his wife and sons into Egypt. But the Torah says only that Aaron met Moses at the mountain of God and kissed him; Moses told Aaron what God wanted them to do; and the two brothers went into Egypt and assembled the elders of Israel. There is no mention of Tzipporah or Moses’ sons. (Exodus 4:27-29)
The pual stem of a verb is passive form of the piel stem, which is usually an intensive.
Rashi, based on the Mekhilta.
Samson Raphael Hirsch (19^th-century rabbi), The Hirsch Chumash: SeferShemos, translated by Daniel Haberman, Feldheim Publishers, Jerusalem, 2005, p. 301.
Leviticus 21:7, 21:14, 22:13; Numbers 30:10.
Jacob kisses his cousin Rachel in front of strangers when he first meets her at the well in Genesis 29:2, 29:10-12. Lavan kisses his daughters and grandsons farewell in front of his men and Jacob’s servants in Genesis 32:1. Esau and Jacob, long-lost brothers, kiss and embrace in front of Esau’s 400 men and Jacob’s retinue in Genesis 33:4.
Including Exodus Rabbah 46:3, Deuteronomy Rabbah 11:10, Midrash Tachuma Tzav 13, Rashi (11^th-century rabbi Shlomo Yitchaki).
1 Chronicles 23:15-17 and 26:24-25.

Beshalach: See, Fear, Trust, Sing

Crossing the Red Sea,
by Bernardino Luini, ca. 1515

The Reed Sea splits. The Israelites and their fellow travelers cross on dry land. The chariots pursue them. The sea returns and drowns the Egyptian army.

After the miracle at the Reed Sea in this week’s Torah portion, Beshelach (“When sending away”), the consciousness of the Israelites changes in four steps. They perceive God’s power¹, they feel fear and awe, and they give up their reservations (at least for a while) and trust in God and Moses. Then Moses begins to sing, and everyone joins in.

Vayareh, the Israelites, the great power that God used against the Egyptians; vayiyre-u, the people, of God; vaya-aminu in God and in Moses, God’s servant. That was when yashir, Moses and the Israelites, this song in honor of God. (Exodus 14:31, 15:1)

vayareh (וַיַּרְא) = and they saw, perceived, looked at, recognized, acknowledged, considered. (A form of the root verb ra-ah, רָאָה.)

vayiyre-u (וַיִּירְאוּ) = and they felt fear, fear and awe, awe and reverence. (A form of the root verb yarei, יָרֵא.)

vaya-aminu (וַיַּאֲמִינוּ) = and they believed, trusted, relied upon. (Probably from the same root as amen, אָמֵן.)

yashir (יָשִׁיר) = he sang.

Vayareh

Vayareh the great power that God used against the Egyptians …

The Israelites have already witnessed the ten miraculous plagues in Egypt. Why do they only now see God’s power?

Beating a slave, Egyptian tomb, 15th century

I think they have been reluctant even to acknowledge God’s plan for taking them out of Egypt because they know they are doomed if it does not work. After all, the first time Moses asked Pharaoh to give them three days off to worship God, Pharaoh only increased their workload.²

The first two plagues proved that either Moses or his God had strong magic; but Pharaoh’s magicians could also turn water into blood and make frogs overrun houses. The next six plagues, from lice to locusts, could be explained as large-scale natural disasters; only the quick succession of afflictions betrayed a supernatural power at work. The last two plagues, three days of total darkness and the overnight death of the firstborn, were too unnatural to mean anything but the power of a god. But was the God of Moses their savior, or just a god of destruction?

Pillar of Cloud, by Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, 1731

After the Israelites and their fellow-travelers march out of Egypt, they are accompanied by a miraculous pillar of cloud by day and fire by night.³ But it is still hard for them to believe that any god is working for them and against Pharaoh. Everyone in Egypt knows that the pharaoh is not only a king, but the son of all the Egyptian gods.⁴ Their whole lives, he has had absolute power over them. How can they think of Pharaoh any other way?

When they find out that his army has pursued them into the wilderness, they are full of fear (although they do not lose their dark humor).

And Pharaoh came close, and the Israelites raised their eyes, and hey! The Egyptians were pulling out after them! Vayiyre-u very much, and the Israelites cried out to God. And they said to Moses: “Was it for lack of graves in Egypt that you took us to die in the wilderness?” (Exodus 14:11)

They are trapped, camped between that army and the Reed Sea. They cry to God for help, but they expect Pharaoh’s army to win. It always has.

During the night God splits the sea and the Israelites cross on dry land, with God’s pillar of fire as a rearguard between them and the Egyptians. The Pharaoh’s charioteers follow across the sea bed, but the chariot wheels get stuck in the mud. At dawn God makes the water return, and the Israelites watch the Egyptian army drown.

The world changes. I imagine the Israelites trembling with shock. Now their hearts crack open and they finally see the great power of God.

Vayiyre-u

Vayiyre-u of God …

After seeing that God really has drowned the Egyptian army and rescued them from slavery, the Israelites stop being afraid of Pharaoh, and start being afraid of God.

When the Egyptian army drowns, the Israelites see and believe that their world has changed. Amazed, they can now believe that God is liberating them from Egypt altogether. But they do not fall in love with this God who changes the status quo by sending plagues and killing people. Instead, they feel fear and awe.

Va-aminu

Vaya-aminu in God and in Moses, God’s servant …

Only after the Israelites fear God more than Pharaoh do they put their trust in God and Moses. (At least until the next serious setback, when they run out of food in the wilderness of Sin.)⁵

They did not believe or trust or rely upon God when they marched out of Egypt; Pharaoh had kicked them out. They followed Moses because they had to follow somebody. When the pillar of cloud and fire appeared, they followed that. Why not? They had nothing to lose.

When they walk across the bed of the Reed Sea during the last shift of the night, they do not believe that they will get safely to the other side. But the enemy is right behind them; why not go forward?

Only after God destroys the Egyptian army does the Israelite attitude changes from “I’m doomed anyway, I’ll take the risk” to “I am committed to this God.” This trust and commitment comes from awe and amazement at being saved—but also from fear of such a powerful God.

Yashir

That was when yashir, Moses and the Israelites, this song in honor of God. (Exodus 15:1)

Critical scholars agree that the psalm following this introduction is in an older Hebrew than the rest of the story. The details of the story in Beshallach and the psalm they sing do not quite match. (See my post Beshallach & Psalm 136: Miracle at Sea.) But why should we expect Moses to invent a new song on the fly? When people are overwhelmed with emotion and feel moved to sing, they sing the most appropriate song they know.

Everyone sings, and all the women drum and dance to celebrate God’s victory.⁶ This is the first singing in the Torah.

What if you felt oppressed and hopeless your whole life? What if you could not believe anything could change? What if suddenly your old life ended, and you had to cope with an entirely new situation? Could you see and believe in the change? Would you feel afraid? Could you turn your fear into wonder (Abraham Joshua Heschel’s “radical amazement”)? Could you make a commitment to the new reality? And would the emotion welling over inside you come pouring out in song?

(An earlier version of this essay was published in January 2010.)

In this post, I have consistently translated the word yad (יַָד) as “power”. In Biblical Hebrew, yad means “hand” literally, and “power” metaphorically.
Exodus 5:1-21.
Exodus 13:21-22.
See Jan Assmann, “Pharaoh’s Divine Role in Maintaining Ma’at (Order)”, www.thetorah.com.
Exodus 16:1-3.
Exodus 15:20.

Bo & Va-eira: A Hard Habit

Plague of Blood, Golden Haggadah, c. 1320

Blood, frogs, lice or gnats, swarms of vermin, livestock disease, skin disease, hail, locusts, impenetrable darkness, death of the firstborn. Why does it take ten miraculous plagues in the Torah portions Va-eira and Bo before Pharaoh lets the Israelite slaves go?¹

When Moses first returns to Egypt, he and his brother Aaron simply ask the new pharaoh to give the Israelite slaves three days off to make animal sacrifices to their God in the wilderness.² Pharaoh replies that he does not know this god. Then he increases the workload of the Israelites, so they will not even think about taking a vacation. Ruling through oppression is the model his father used, the only model he knows.

Moses and Aaron return to perform a small demonstration miracle: Aaron throws down a staff that turns into a crocodile.³ Pharaoh summons his wonder-workers, who perform a similar trick. Even though Aaron’s magic crocodile eats the Egyptians’ magic crocodiles, Pharaoh refuses to be impressed.

Vayechezak, the leiv of Pharaoh, and he did not listen to them, as God had spoken. And God said to Moses: “Kaveid is the leiv of Pharaoh; he refuses to let the people go”. (Exodus 7:13-14)

vayechezak (וַיֶּחֶזַק) = and it hardened, became stronger, became unyielding. (From the same root as chazak, חָזָק = strong, firm, resolute.)

leiv (לֵב) = heart; conscious mind, conscious thoughts and feelings.

kaveid (כָּבֵד) = heavy, dull and slow, immobilized; oppressive, impressive.

Pharaoh’s mind is already so heavy that it “hardens” itself; he dismisses questions before they arise, and continues to behave as he always has.

We are what we learn

Moses and the current pharaoh both grew up in the Egyptian court. But Moses was the son of Israelite slaves before he was adopted by an Egyptian princess, and he never forgot his origins. As a young man, he left Egypt and joined a Midianite clan east of Sinai. Thus he learned how to adapt to novel situations with curiosity and an open mind. When he saw the bush that burned but was not consumed he approached it, and when he heard God’s voice he believed it.

Nevertheless, Moses argued with God. At the burning bush he tried five times to get out of returning to Egypt as God’s prophet before he finally accepted his mission and changed his life again.⁴

The old pharaoh’s firstborn son, on the other hand, grew up knowing he would someday succeed his father as the god-like ruler of Egypt. All he had to do was learn his predefined role. He had no reason to question anything, no new situations to master.

After the staff-crocodile demonstration the miraculous plagues begin: seven in last week’s Torah portion, Va-eira, and three this week in Bo. Several times Pharaoh promises Moses and Aaron that if they get God to end the current plague, he will let the Israelites go for three days.⁵ But as soon as the plague stops, Pharaoh goes back on his promise. After each plague, Pharaoh’s leiv returns to being either chazak or kaveid. He acts as if he can continue to depend on the labor of his Israelite slaves, and their God will not afflict the country with another miracle.

Pharaoh’s mind hardens on its own after six of the plagues. But after the plagues of skin disease, locusts, and darkness, God–or at least the character of God as portrayed in the book of Exodus–hardens Pharaoh’s heart.

Plague of Boils, Haggadah by Judah Pinchas, 1747

After the sixth plague, a skin rash with boils,

Vayechazeik, God, the leiv of Pharaoh, and he did not listen to them, as God had spoken to Moses. (Exodus 9:12)

Vayechazeik (וַיְחַזֵּק) = and [God] hardened, strengthened, made rigid. (Another verb form from the same root as chazak.)

Why does God intervene? One possibility is that Pharaoh is finally wavering, wondering whether his refusal to listen to Moses is taking too a high toll on his country—or on his own body. Is his “heart” softening, his mind becoming a little more flexible? If so, God apparently wants to prevent Pharaoh from changing his mind too soon, before God has finished the whole demonstration.

Plague of Locusts, Haggadah by Judah Pinchas, 1747

During the plagues of locusts and darkness in this week’s Torah portion, Pharaoh switches from empty promises to genuine offers—with conditions. While the locusts are devouring all the remaining crops, he offers to let the Israelite men go, as long as their children remain hostage in Egypt. Moses refuses the condition.

Vayechazeik, God, the leiv of Pharaoh, and he did not let the Israelites go. (Exodus 10:20)

During the plague of impenetrable darkness, Pharaoh offers to let all the Israelites go for three days, as long as they leave their flocks and herds behind. Again Moses refuses.

Vayechazeik, God, the leiv of Pharaoh, so he was not willing to let them go. (Exodus 10:27)

Pharaoh remains attached to being the all-powerful ruler of an economy based on slavery. Is the God character or Pharaoh responsible for the king’s inability to imagine a new world order?

Free will

If God is deliberately hardening Pharaoh’s mind, then the king of Egypt has no free will. God is depriving Pharaoh of the ability to make choices.

The idea that God can remove a human being’s free will has disturbed commentators through the ages. The ability to make our own choices is part of being human, according to the book of Genesis; God gave Adam and Eve the ability to decide whether to eat from the Tree of Knowledge or not. And we all prefer to believe that we are not automatons, that it is possible for us to choose and change.

Other commentators have argued that God hardens Pharaoh’s mind not by making him more stubborn, but by giving him the courage to bear the suffering caused by his bad choices. God does not want Pharaoh to make a reasonable decision because he realizes that his country is collapsing into poverty and disease. Instead, God wants Pharaoh to believe in the power of God and repent. So instead of making Pharaoh more stubborn, God gives Pharaoh the courage to bear the suffering of Egypt.⁶

Yet the Torah describes God as making Pharaoh’s heart chazak and kaveid, the same two words it uses for what Pharaoh does to himself. It does not use an alternate word or phrase to indicate strengthening by instilling courage.⁷

Another possible reading of God’s intervention is that Pharaoh’s mind is already so inflexible that God does not need to make it any more rigid. He has developed an ingrained habit of hardening his heart the moment a disaster ends.

Some commentators have written that the book of Exodus gives God credit for the power of habit. God made humans so that the longer someone persists in doing evil, the harder it becomes to switch to doing good.⁸

Modern neuroscience shows that the human brain cannot make an unaccustomed choice in the heat of the moment. The choice happens and our words or actions are triggered before we become consciously aware of what we have already decided. In order to make a free choice, we have to train ourselves to pause as soon as we become aware of our reaction, then give ourselves time to make a conscious decision.

One last time

Death of Firstborn, Haggadah by Judah Pinchas, 1747

When Moses announces the tenth plague, death of the firstborn, he storms out before Pharaoh can react. Why should he listen to another empty promise, another unacceptable bargain?

In the middle of the night, death strikes the oldest son of everyone in Egypt, from the Pharaoh to the lowest slave—except for the Israelites who are safe inside the houses they have marked with lamb’s blood for that night.⁹ Only after his own son is killed does Pharaoh come to Moses and insist that all the Israelites must leave, without conditions. In the morning, the exodus from Egypt begins.

Yet in next week’s Torah portion, Beshallach, Pharaoh reconsiders one more time. The damage has been done, so why should he lose so many slaves whose labor could help rebuild Egypt? He sends an army to pursue his ex-slaves across the wilderness. Pharaoh has not truly broken his habit.

Some of us are like Pharaoh, and cannot break our bad habits for more than a day, even after life has hammered at us from every side. Yet many of us are like Moses; although we may refuse to accept our calling five times, we then find the courage to change and do what really needs to be done. What a blessing to know that Moses’ response is also possible!

May every mind that has become hard and heavy finally open, and receive the blessing of change.

—

Psalm 78 lists seven plagues, and Psalm 105 lists eight. See my post Va-eira & Bo: Psalm 78 & Psalm 105: Responding to Miracles.
Exodus 5:1.
When God rehearses this demonstration with Moses in Exodus 4:1-5, Moses’ staff becomes a nachash (נָחָשׁ) = snake. Most modern scholars attribute this version of the demonstration miracle to a story from the northern kingdom of Israel, the “E” source. In the demonstration in 7:10, Aaron throws down the staff and it becomes a tannin (תַנִּין) = crocodile, cobra, or other large reptile. This version is considered a later addition from the “P” source, written by priests sometime after the first Israelite temple in Jerusalem was built.
See my post last week, Ve-eira and Shemot: Uncircumcised, Part 2.
Frogs (Exodus 8:4), swarms of vermin (Exodus 8:21-24), and hail (Exodus 9:27-28).
Nehama Leibowitz cites 15th-century rabbi Joseph Albo and 16th-century rabbi Obadiah Sforno in New Studies in Shemot (Exodus), Part 1, translated by Aryeh Newman, Zion Ezra Production, Maor Wallach Press, Jerusalem, 1996, pp. 152-153.
For example, Deuteronomy 2:30 uses the phrase imeitz et levavo (אִמֵּץ אֶת־לְבַבוֹ) to say that God had made King Sihon’s heart braver.
Rambam (12^th-century rabbi Mosheh ben Maimon, a.k.a. Maimonides), Mishneh Torah, chapter 5, cited in Nehama Leibowitz, New Studies in Shemot (Exodus), Part 1, pp. 155-156.
Exodus 12:21-23.

Va-era & Shemot: Uncircumcised, Part 2

Moses flees Egypt in last week’s Torah portion, Shemot, because he killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew man.¹ He returns to Egypt as God’s prophet, but the new pharaoh responds to his request by increasing the work of the Israelite slaves.²

In this week’s Torah portion, Va-eira (“And I appeared”), Moses tries to convince the Israelite slaves that God really has sent him to liberate them. But they are unable to listen, because they are short of breath (or spirit) from their hard labor.³ When God tells Moses to speak to Pharaoh again, he balks, saying:

“Hey! The Israelites would not listen to me, so how would Pharaoh listen? And my lips are aral!” (Exodus 6:12)

aral (עָרַל) = uncircumcised, possessing a foreskin.

Power of Speech

Moses expresses the problem more literally in last week’s Torah portion, Shemot. When he sees the burning bush, he notices something numinous that others might overlook—a fire that burns but does not consume—and he steps closer to it. So God speaks to the potential prophet and orders him to return to Egypt and demand that the pharaoh let the Israelite slaves go free to worship their own god.

But Moses is unwilling to accept the job. He tries to turn down his mission five times, and each time God answers his objection.⁴ For his fourth attempt to excuse himself, Moses says he is the wrong man for the job because he is not a good speaker.

And Moses said to God: “Excuse me, my lord, I have not been a man of words, yesterday, nor the day before, nor earlier than when you spoke to your servant; for I am kaveid of peh and kaveid of lashon.” (Exodus/Shemot 4:10)

kaveid (כָּבֵד) = (When used as an adjective for a body part): heavy, dull, hard, insensitive, clumsy. (When used as an adjective for a person): honored, impressive, oppressive.

peh (פֶּה) = mouth; statement, spoken command.

lashon (לָשׁוֹן) = tongue; language.

A kaveid mouth and tongue are like aral lips. Some thickness, covering, or blockage prevents Moses from speaking effectively.

Moses could merely be making another desperate excuse to avoid the mission in Egypt. But since he claims his lips are aral in the portion Va-eira, after he is already in Egypt, he must be truly blocked, either physically or psychologically.

Commentators have proposed that Moses has a speech impediment or stutter⁵, that he has forgotten the Egyptian language⁶, and that he lacks the enthusiastic dedication to be eloquent enough to persuade anyone.⁷

In the Torah, circumcision of the foreskin is not just the removal of a covering, but a sign of consecration to God’s covenant with the people of Israel.⁸ The symbol of a man’s power in the Torah is a staff. Circumcision dedicates a male’s power to God.

I think Moses feels powerless in both Shemot and Va-eira because he has had no authority to speak. When he is accused of murder in Egypt, he flees instead of defending himself. Then he serves for decades as a shepherd under the Midianite priest Jethro/Yitro, and defers to his authority. Moses has been silent so long that his mouth, tongue, and lips feel too heavy to move.

Furthermore, he has never spoken as a Hebrew or Israelite before. Once he was weaned, he lived in the Egyptian court as the adopted son of a pharaoh’s daughter. He arrived in Midianite territory as an Egyptian, and married the daughter of a Midianite priest. Only at the burning bush does Moses discover the God of his ancestors.

When Moses pleads that his mouth and tongue are too kaveid to speak well, God replies:

“Who puts the peh in humankind, or who appoints the dumb or the deaf, the clear-sighted or the blind? Is it not I, God? Now go, and I myself will be with your peh and I will instruct you what you shall speak!”

But he said: “Excuse me, my lord, please send by the hand of whom you will send!” And God burned in anger against Moses. (Exodus 4:11-14)

After God overrides Moses’ fourth protest, he has no more excuses. He merely begs God to send someone else. God gets angry, but tells Moses he can use his brother Aaron as a go-between. Finally Moses gives up. He returns to his father-in-law and asks his permission to go to Egypt.

Power of Blood

Moses, Tzipporah, and sons,
Rylands Haggadah

On the way, at a lodging-place, God met him and sought to put him to death. And Tzipporah took a flint, and she cut the foreskin of her son, and she touched it to his raglayim, and she said: “Because you are a bridegroom of bloodshed for me!” And it/he desisted from him. That was when she said: “A bridegroom of bloodshed for the circumcisions”. (Exodus/Shemot 4:24-26)

raglayim (רַגְלַיִם) = pair of feet, pair of legs; a euphemism for genitals.

The only clear information in this brief ambiguous story is that the is that one of Tzipporah’s sons still has a foreskin, and she circumcises him. Which son is uncircumcised? Whom does God seek to put to death? If it is Moses, why would God attack him? Why does Tzipporah circumcise her son? Whose raglayim does she touch with the bloody foreskin? Why does this save him from death?

In last week’s post (Shemot: Uncircumcised, Part 1) I argued that the uncircumcised son is probably their firstborn, Geirshom, and that God seeks to put Moses to death. The remaining enigmas in the “Bridegroom of Blood” passage can all be related to Moses’ feeling that he is incapable of serving as God’s prophet because his lips are aral.

Why would God attack Moses?

According to one Talmudic opinion, God wants to kill Moses because he had not circumcised his son, and therefore left the boy outside the covenant between God and the Israelites. (See Shemot: Uncircumcised, Part 1.)

But there is a more psychologically compelling reason for God to attack Moses: God is still angry about Moses’ five attempts to reject his assignment. (Three later prophets in the bible are initially reluctant, but accept their vocation after one demurral.⁹ Only Moses continues to argue with God. Rashbam⁶ wrote that God’s anger over Moses’ rejection leads to the attack on the way to Egypt.)

In the 21^st century, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg wrote: “It is striking that when he complained about his speech problem at the Burning Bush, God made no move to heal him; he did not even promise him that his situation would change, for this problem is expressive of a radical resistance on Moses’ part, which arouses God’s anger and almost brings about his death …”¹⁰

It is Moses’ responsibility to rise to God’s challenge and remove his own impediment. So far he has failed.

Why does Tzipporah circumcise her son?

The Hebrew Bible requires an Israelite father to circumcise each of his sons eight days after birth, in order to enroll the infant boy into the covenant between the Israelites and God.¹¹ Although Moses knows his birth parents were Israelites¹², he grew up in the Egyptian court, then joined the family of a Midianite priest. Only at the burning bush does he discover the God of Israel.

After Moses finally accepts the job God gives him, it may not even occur to him to mark his firstborn son as a member of the Israelites’ covenant with God.

While Moses lies helpless under God’s attack, his Midianite wife, Tzipporah, takes action. Her first thought might be to appease God through an animal sacrifice. The Midianites as well as the Israelites shared the Canaanite custom of sacrificing animals to their gods.¹³ But the only animal they have with them is the donkey that Tzipporah and the boys need to travel through the desert.

Then Tzipporah has an inspiration. She can sacrifice a small bit of blood and flesh from their own son to the God who has commandeered Moses. She knows that this God approves of circumcision, since Moses is circumcised.¹⁴

Whose raglayim does she touch with the bloody foreskin?

The Torah says only that Tzipporah touches the foreskin to “his” raglayim—to someone’s feet, or legs, or genitals. I believe she uses Geirshom’s foreskin to dab blood on Moses’ genitals as a symbolic second circumcision, a rededication to the God of Israel. Her explanation “Because you are a bridegroom of bloodshed for me!” is an incantation that completes the sympathetic magic.

If circumcising Moses’ firstborn son is not enough to appease God, this additional ritual, she hopes, will do the trick. And it works.

Why does this save Moses from death?

If God is angry at Moses, why would Tzipporah’s actions solve the problem?

The book of Exodus presents God in two different ways. Usually God speaks like an intelligent but easily offended human being. This anthropomorphic God is the character who talks with Moses at the burning bush, and gives him further instructions just before he sets off for Egypt.

Painting blood on the doorposts, Paris Bible c. 1390

This God-character also gets angry, and “his” anger sometimes releases a divine force which slaughters people indiscriminately. Before the tenth plague strikes Egypt, Moses warns the Israelite slaves about the coming “death of the firstborn”, and tells them to daub lamb’s blood on their lintels and doorposts.

And God will pass through to strike Egypt, and “he” will see the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, and God will skip over the entrance, and “he” will not allow the Destroyer to come into your houses to strike. (Exodus 12:23)

Here “the Destroyer” refers to God’s raging alter ego, which does not distinguish between the guilty and the innocent and cannot stop itself without a dramatic visible sign.¹⁵ The blood on Moses’ genitals proves as effective as the blood on the Israelite doorways in halting this primitive aspect of God, which does not distinguish between individuals.

Power of Dedication

Moses is not merely reluctant to become God’s prophet; he is afraid of speaking for God and getting it all wrong. The anthropomorphic God-character becomes angry with Moses for trying to excuse himself from the job instead of trusting God’s assurances. A silent, more primitive aspect of God seeks to kill Moses on the way to Egypt.

Tzipporah responds by physically circumcising their son. Then she symbolically re-circumcises her husband, rededicating him to the covenant with God. This act also serves to metaphorically circumcise Moses’ lips, removing the weight of his determined silence, making his mouth sensitive for God’s use.

At first Moses does not realize the full extent of what his wife has done. He sends Tzipporah back to her father, along with their sons—perhaps for their own safety, now that he knows how deadly God can be. (See my post Yitro: Rejected Wife.) When he first arrives in Egypt, he uses Aaron to speak to the pharaoh for him, believing his lips are still aral. Only when the ten miraculous plagues begin does Moses find his own voice.

What does it mean to be dedicated to God? A Jewish ritual dedicating eight-day-old boys only shows how their parents identify them. Adults might follow all the extant rules of a religion out of habit and to fit in with their community, but lack the personal and vitally serious dedication that Moses accepts after the “Bridegroom of Blood” episode.

Can that kind of dedication to God come only out of necessity, as a life-and-death choice? What about those of us who are not threatened? Can we at least choose to dedicate ourselves to seeking out God?

—

Exodus 3:11-15.
Exodus 5:1-9.
Exodus 6:9. The Hebrew word ruach (רוּחַ) can mean wind, breath, or spirit.
The first three times are in Exodus 3:11-12, Exodus 3:14-15, and Exodus 4:2-9.
Exodus Rabbah 1:26 tells a story in which Moses burns his lips as a child. Rashi (11^th-century rabbi Shlomoh ben Yitzchaki) wrote that Moses stammered and mumbled.
Rashbam (12^th-century rabbi Samuel ben Meir).
g. 19^th-century rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch’s commentary on Exodus 4:10; and Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Bewilderments, Schocken Books, New York, 2015, p. 176.
Genesis 17:9-15.
Isaiah feels unworthy until an angel purifies his lips (Isaiah 6:1-8); Jeremiah protests a single time that he is too young to know how to speak (Jeremiah 1:4-9); and Jonah flees because he does not want to obey God and give his enemies a chance to repent (Jonah 1:1-3).
Avivah Gottleib Zornberg, Bewilderments, Schocken Books, New York, 2015, p. 161.
Genesis 17:10-14, Leviticus 12:1-3. By the fourth century C.E., there were also professional circumcisers called mohalim.
Exodus 2:11.
Tzipporah’s father, Yitro, demonstrates animal sacrifice when he comes to visit Moses and the liberated Israelites camping near Mount Sinai (Exodus 18:10-12).
Moses would have undergone circumcision either as an infant with Hebrew parents, or at puberty as an upper-class Egyptian. Talmud tractate Nedarim 32a and Exodus Rabbah 5:8 imagine Tzipporah watching the angel of death swallow Moses from his head down to his genitals, where Moses’ circumcision stops the process.
Besides Exodus 4:24-25 and 12:29, other examples of God as a mute, irrational force of destruction, unable to distinguish the innocent from the guilty without an obvious sign, appear in Numbers 11:1-3 (fire), Numbers 25:1-9 (plague after Baal Pe-or worship), and 1 Samuel 6:19 (the ark).

Shemot: Uncircumcised, Part 1

Moses’ quiet life as a shepherd for a band of Midianites ends when he sees a bush that keeps burning without being consumed. When Moses comes closer, God speaks to him and gives him a mission: to return to Egypt and tell Pharaoh to let the Israelite slaves go.

Moses tries five times to refuse the job. (See next week’s post, Shemot & Va-eira: Uncircumcised, Part 2.) But God will not let him get out of it. Finally Moses gives up, takes the flock home, and gets permission from his father-in-law to go to Egypt.

As soon as he leaves, God speaks again, warning him that despite the miracles to come, Pharaoh will not let set the Israelites free to worship their own god.

“Then you shall say to Pharaoh: Thus said God: My firstborn son is Israel. And I say to you: Let my son go, and he will serve Me—[or] hey, I will be slaying your firstborn son!” (Exodus/Shemot 4:22-23)

God has plans for the Pharaoh and Egypt that include the tenth plague, “death of the firstborn”. God creates this miracle in the Torah portion Bo, and Pharaoh’s firstborn son dies. But why does God give this information to Moses in Shemot (“Names”, the first Torah portion of the book of Exodus/Shemot)?

The sudden focus on firstborn sons comes right after Moses’ departure for Egypt with his wife Tziporah and their two sons. After God emphasizes the value of sons, a mysterious event takes place at a lodging on the way to Egypt. Everyone survives, but Moses changes his plan and does not take his family all the way to Egypt.

Moses, Tziporah, and sons,
Rylands Haggadah

On the way, at a lodging-place, God met him and sought to put him to death. And Tziporah took a flint, and she cut the foreskin of her son, and she touched it to his raglayim, and she said: “Because you are a bridegroom of bloodshed for me!” And it/he desisted from him. That was when she said: “A bridegroom of bloodshed by the circumcision”. (Exodus/Shemot 4:24-26)

raglayim (רַגְלַיִם) = pair of feet, pair of legs; a euphemism for genitals.

God is uncharacteristically silent in this brief, spooky tale. And the language is so ambiguous, the only clear information is that one of Moses and Tziporah’s two sons still has a foreskin, and she circumcises him.

Can we figure out any more about what commentators call the “Bridegroom of Blood” episode?

Which son is uncircumcised?

The birth of Moses and Tziporah’s first son was reported earlier in this week’s Torah portion:

She gave birth to a son, and he called his name Geirshom, for he said: “A geir I have been in a foreign land.” (Exodus 2:22)

Geirshom (גֵּרְשֹׁם) = a name used for three men in the Hebrew Bible.¹ Moses says he chose the name because it combines two words:

geir (גֵּר) = stranger, resident alien.

sham (שָׁם) = there.

Moses and Tziporah’s second son is not mentioned until after the Israelites have left Egypt and are near Mount Sinai. Then Moses’ father-in-law arrives, bringing Tziporah—

And her two sons, of whom the name of one was Geirshom, because he said “Geir I have been in a foreign land,” and the name of the other was Eliezer, because “Eli of my father was my ezer and rescued me from the sword of Pharaoh.” (Exodus 18:3-4)

Eliezer (אֱלִיעֶזֶר) = a name used for at least eight men in the Hebrew Bible.² The name combines two words:

eli (אֱלִי) = my God.

ezer (עֶזֶר) = help, aid.

This is the first time in the book that a second son is mentioned.³ When was Eliezer born and named? Moses sends Tziporah and their son(s) back to his wife’s father, Yitro (Jethro), after the “Bridegroom of Blood” episode, and before Moses and Aaron meet near Egypt proper. He does not see his wife again until Yitro brings her to him in Sinai, along with both sons. A consistent story requires that Moses named Eliezer before he left for Egypt.

When his second son was born, Moses must have been remembering his youth in Egypt, including his Hebrew parents, his adoption, the death sentence Pharaoh imposed on him when he was a young man, and his flight to Midian.⁴ Pharaoh’s gods would not have helped him, nor would the Midianite gods he had never worshiped. So, I imagine, Moses credits his parents’ God with helping him escape. Given Eliezer’s name, it is reasonable to assume that he then circumcises the infant in honor of the God of his parents.

But the name Geirshom has no reference to God. Moses feels rootless and alienated when he names his first son, perhaps even alienated from his parents’ God. He has not yet seen or heard any evidence of God. Why would he bother with the Hebrew custom of infant circumcision?

(The name Geirshom and the “Bridegroom of Blood” scene inspired a pre-Talmudic story that Moses and his Midianite father-in-law agreed that Moses’ first son would not be circumcised.⁵)

Whom did God seek to put to death?

Did God seek to kill Moses, or his uncircumcised son? In the Talmud Bavli, Nedarim 32a, two rabbis gave two different opinions. Rabbi Shimon b. Gamaliel said the “satan”, the spiritual adversary, came to kill the boy who was uncircumcised. Rabbi Yehudah b. Bizna said God sent two angels of death to swallow up Moses because he had neglected to circumcise his son. Moses could hardly represent God in Egypt when he had left his own firstborn son outside the covenant between God and the Israelites.

Commentators are still divided on the question of whom God sought to kill. One theory is that the “Bridegroom of Blood” scene foreshadows God’s announcement in Exodus 12:7 and 12:12-13 that when the tenth and final miracle arrives, “the destroyer” will strike down the firstborn son of everyone in Egypt—except the Hebrews who have painted lamb’s blood on the doorposts and lintels of their houses.⁶ The act of painting blood on the doorways resembles the circumcision in the “Bridegroom of Blood” scene—as long as it is Moses’ uncircumcised son Geirshom whom God intends to kill on the way to Egypt.

However, I think God seeks to put Moses to death, because in the verses immediately preceding the “Bridegroom of Blood” scene, God is addressing Moses. No other male is mentioned between verse 23 and verse 24.

And there is another reason for God to attack Moses. In next week’s post, Shemot & Va-eira: Uncircumcised, Part 2, I will explore God’s anger at the man God has chosen as a prophet.

The God-character in the Torah is, after all, an anthropomorphic version of second Isaiah’s God:

Forming light and creating darkness,

Making peace and creating evil,

I, God, do all these. (Isaiah 45:7)

God gives with one “hand” and takes away with the other. It is up to us human beings to find meaning in the twists of our life stories.

—

The name Geirshom refers to the firstborn son of Moses and Tziporah in Exodus 2:22 and 18:3, Judges 18:30, and 1 Chronicles 23:15-16 and 26:24. It is used for a son of Pinchas/Phineas in Ezra 8:2, and for a son of Levi in 1 Chronicles chapter 6.
The first Eliezer in the bible is Abraham’s steward in Genesis 15:2. Moses’ son Eliezer is mentioned in Exodus 18:4 and 1 Chronicles chapter 23. At least six other men named Eliezer appear in Ezra 8:16, 10:18, 10:31, and 10:23; 1 Chronicles 7:8, 15:24, 26:25, and 27:16; and 2 Chronicles 20:37.
Modern biblical scholarship explains that a redactor combined two or more accounts of the exodus: one (sometimes called J) in which Moses and Tzipporah have only one son, and another (sometimes called E) in which they have two sons.
Exodus 2:11-15.
Jethro said to him: ‘The son that is born to you first will be given over to idolatry [and hence will not be circumcised]; those born thereafter can be given to the worship of [your] God.’ He accepted the condition … For that reason did the angel seek to kill Moses at the inn, whereupon “Zipporah took a flint and cut the foreskin of her son.” (James L. Kugel, How to Read the Bible, Free Press, New York, 2007, p. 219, translation from Mekhilta de R. Ishmael, Yitro.)

At this point, Moses’ father-in-law Yitro is still a Midianite priest, and might well want his grandson to worship the gods of Midian. (It is an unrealistic detail, however, for Yitro to call his own religion “idolatry”!)

For example, see Serge Frolov, “A Murderous Bridegroom”, in www.thetorah.com.

Ki Tavo & Ki Teitzei: You Are What You Wear, Part 2

A person’s inner state and outer garment should match, according to the Torah.

And God said to Moses: Go to the people and consecrate them, today and tomorrow, and they shall wash their semalot. Then they shall be ready for the third day, for on the third day God is coming down before the eyes of all the people on Mount Sinai. (Exodus/Shemot 19:10-11)

semalot (שְׂמָלוֹת) = plural of simlah (שִׂמְלַה) = a long, loose outer garment resembling a caftan or cloak. (A variant spelling is salmah (שַׂלְמָה), plural salmot (שַׂלְמֹת).)

If you are consecrated, made holy enough to behold God, then your simlah must also be purified. Although men remove their semalot to do physical labor, stripping down to a less bulky garment underneath, the Israelites in the Bible wear their semalot for public appearances, as well as for protection from wind, sun, and rain. At night one’s simlah serves as a blanket.

Three of the laws in last week’s Torah portion, Ki Teitzei, assume every individual has the right to a simlah. Even an impoverished debtor and a captive of war must be allowed to sleep in their semalot. Depriving someone of a simlah would not only expose them to the elements, but deprive them of human dignity. (See my post Ki Teitzei: You Are What You Wear, Part 1.)

Two other laws in the portion Ki Teitzei (4 and 5 below) show how a simlah can reveal something about the essential nature of the person who wears it. And this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tavo (“When you enter”), ends with miraculous semalot that reveal the nature of humankind.

Abominable or godly?

One of the laws about the simlah in Ki Teitzei has become notorious:

The equipment of a man shall not be on a woman, and a man shall not put on the simlah of a woman, because anyone doing this is to-eivah to God, your God. (Deuteronomy/Devarim 22:5)

Head of a prince or princess from Ugarit, 13th century B.C.E.

to-eivah (תוֹעֲבַה) = abhorrent, abominable, anathema.

The first clause in this verse may be a reaction against a Canaanite myth (discovered in the ruins of Ugarit) about Paghat, a young woman who wears weapons under her female clothing and sets out to avenge her brother’s murder.¹The Bible frequently denounces Canaanite religions, and the Talmud (Nazir 59a) agrees that the “equipment of a man” consists of weapons of war.

The second clause in the verse may be a reaction against a Canaanite practice in which male temple functionaries cross-dressed and offered themselves as surrogates for gods in homosexual religious acts. According to the Bible, this happened even at the Temple in Jerusalem until King Josiah put an end to it.²

A man wearing a woman’s simlah may be to-eivah because the only men who appeared that way in public were those paid for sexual rituals from another religion—a practice God clearly abhors according to a later law in Ki Teitzei:

No daughter of Israel shall be a female religious prostitute, and no son of Israel shall be a male religious prostitute. You shall not bring into the house of God, your God, the fee of a harlot [female prostitute] or the price of a dog [male prostitute] for any vowed offering, because both of them are to-eivah to God, your God. (Deuteronomy 23:18-19)

Nevertheless, for more than two millennia people have used the law in Ki Teitzei about cross-dressing to promote the traditional gender roles in their own societies. (See my post Ki Teitzei: Crossing Gender Lines.)

Today many people reject the idea that every individual must squeeze into one of two gender roles defined by a particular society. Some individuals in the 21^st century C.E. choose apparel that blurs gender lines in order to reveal their own nuanced identities.

In the 7^th century B.C.E. kingdom of Judah, a man who wore the simlah of a woman also revealed an essential part of his identity: he was dedicated to gods other than the God of Israel, and he served these gods by providing ritual sex for worshipers.

Fraud or honesty?

The remaining law in Ki Teitzei that mentions a simlah is about the virginity of a bride. It begins:

If a man takes a wife and he comes into her, and then he hates her, and he brings charges against her and gives her a bad name, and he says: “I took this woman, and I approached her, but I did not find evidence of virginity in her!”— (Deuteronomy 22:13-14)

This was a serious charge in ancient Judah. A marriage was a contracted alliance between two households. The legal contract included the dowry paid to the groom’s household, and the bride-price paid to the bride’s household. When the bride and groom had intercourse, the marriage was completed. The bride (but not the groom) was expected to be a virgin (unless the contract stipulated otherwise).

So if a man claimed, after the wedding, that his bride was not a virgin, he was not only defaming her and her parents, but also suing her family for contract fraud. If the village elders ruled in his favor, he got a divorce, the bride (if she was permitted to live⁴) became unmarriageable, and the bride’s father had to return the bride-price to the groom. The grooms’ household, on the other hand, got to keep the dowry, the bride price, and the family’s good name.³

What if a groom tells a lie in order to get a divorce with a lucrative financial settlement? Then, according to Ki Teitzei, the bride’s parents should bring “evidence of the girl’s virginity” to the elders sitting as judges, and the bride’s father should say:

“But this is evidence of the virginity of my daughter!” And they shall spread the simlah before the elders of the town. (Deuteronomy 22:17)

The evidence is the simlah the bride wore on her wedding night. When the couple goes to bed, she lies on top of her own simlah—and leaves a bloodstain if her hymen breaks.

In much of the ancient Near East, a bride’s parents collected her wedding simlah the morning after—just in case they would need to display it.

The law in Ki Teitzei affirms that a bloodstained simlah is evidence of virginity, and punishes the lying husband. He is flogged; he pays 100 shekels of silver to the bride’s father (to compensate for impugning his honor); and he may never divorce the bride.

The good name of the bride’s family is restored. The bride herself at least has the consolation of a salvaged reputation and a guaranteed home (even if she might prefer to be the property of a different man).

Thus the condition of the bride’s simlah proves something about her character: she was honest when she affirmed she was a virgin.

Natural or miraculous?

At the end of this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tavo, Moses quotes God:

“And I led you forty years through the wilderness. Your salmot did not wear out upon you, and your sandal did not wear out upon your foot. Bread you did not eat, and wine or alcohol you did not drink, so that you would know that I, God, am your God.” (Deuteronomy 29:4-5)

During their 40 years in the wilderness, the Israelites did not need to grow grain and grind it into flour; manna miraculously appeared every morning. They did not need to cultivate grapes and make wine; God provided fresh drinking water in the desert. They did not need to make leather for sandals, or weave cloth for semalot; God continuously renewed their clothing.⁵

Instead, the Israelite women wove cloth to make God’s sanctuary. All the weavers were generous volunteers.⁶ And God generously volunteered the small miracles that kept the people clothed and fed. All God wanted was acknowledgement “he” was their god.

The Israelites in the books of Exodus and Numbers did praise God for saving them at the Reed Sea and for giving them victories in battles. But in ordinary daily life, they complained about the food, were impatient when they ran out of water, and did not even notice the condition of their semalot.

Moses introduces God’s words at the end of Ki Tavo by saying:

But God did not give you a mind to know, or eyes to see, or ears to hear, until this day. (Deuteronomy 29:3)

Only at the end of 40 years in the wilderness to the people notice God’s daily generosity.

The portrayal of God’s character must be taken with a grain of salt. The Torah sometimes portrays God as a patient parent, sometimes as an angry mass murderer. This is the result of trying to explain everything in terms of an anthropomorphic god.

Yet the passage at the end of Ki Tavo does offer insight into the character of human beings. Human nature takes good situations for granted—until we are deprived of them, or until we grow wise enough to see how fragile our lives are. To find that wisdom—a mind to know, eyes to see, ears to hear—might take 40 years. And we cannot force ourselves to become wise. It comes as a gift.

—

She emerges, dons a youth’s raiment, puts a k[nife] in her sheath. A sword she puts in her scabbard, and over all dons woman’s garb. (“The Tale of Aqhat”, The Ancient Near East, Vol. 1, by James B. Pritchard, Princeton Univ. Press, 1958, p. 132)
And he smashed the houses of the male religious prostitutes that were inside the house of God, where the women wove fabrics for Asherah. (2 Kings 23:7). The book of Deuteronomy was probably written during the reign of King Josiah (640-609 B.C.E.), and encouraged his campaign to wipe out the practice of other religions in Judah.
Victor H. Matthews & Don C. Benjamin, Social world of Ancient Israel 1250-587 BCE, Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, Mass., 1993, p. 127-128.
But if this charge is true, evidence of the girl’s virginity was not found, then they shall bring the girl out to the entrance of her father’s house, and the men of the town shall stone her with stones. And she will die because she did a serious offense in Israel, fornicating in the house of her father. (Deuteronomy 22:20-21)
Deuteronomy 8:2-6 and Nehemiah 9:20-21 report similar miracles. (See my post Eikev: Not by Bread Alone.)
Exodus 35:20-29.

1 Samuel: How to Stop a Plague, Part 4

One mageifah is upon all [of you]and your princes! (1 Samuel 6:4)

mageifah (מַגֵפָה) = plague, epidemic, pestilence. (Plural = mageifot.)

Angry gods cause epidemics. This was the obvious to writers in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan several thousand years ago, long before the germ theory of disease. The best way to stop a plague or epidemic was to determine which god was responsible, and then appease that god.

Pinchas Impales Zimri & Cozbi, by J.C. Weigel

My last three posts on “How to Stop a Plague”¹ concern an epidemic caused by the jealous rage of the God of Israel when “His” people are unfaithful to “Him” and worship a god named Baal Peor. The plague kills 24,000 Israelites before Pinchas halts it with an act that shocks the God-character out of “His” uncontrolled anger.² This plague begins in the Torah portion Balak, but the repercussions continue through this week’s portion, Va-etchannan.

The God-character also kills thousands of Israelites with plagues after they worship the Golden Calf³, after they complain about the food God provided⁴, after they complain that God killed the 250 rebels led by Korach⁵, and after God becomes angry with the Israelites for some unreported reason and tells King David to order a census.⁶ In all of these cases, the plague is a direct result of God’s rage.

However, when the God of Israel afflicts other peoples with epidemics, God is offended, but calm. The God-character uses plagues to make the foreigners acknowledge the superior power of God and do the Israelites a favor. Once those objectives have been met, God simply stops the plague.

In the book of Exodus/Shemot, God creates ten miraculous disasters in Egypt, two of which are infectious plagues.⁷Yet the Pharaoh keeps refusing to do what the God of Israel wants. After the second epidemic, God orders Moses to tell the Pharaoh:

…Thus says God, God of the Hebrews: Let My people go so they may serve Me. Because this time I am sending all My mageifot to you and to your courtiers and to your people, so that you shall know that there is none like Me in all the world. (Exodus/Shemot 9:13-14)

Only after the tenth miracle, the overnight death of the firstborn, does the Pharaoh admit God’s superior power and free the Israelite slaves.

The Philistines are more rational when the God of Israel afflicts them with a plague.

The problem begins when the Philistines take God’s most sacred object, the ark of the covenant. Israelite soldiers in the first book of Samuel unwisely bring the ark with them from the sanctuary at Shiloh onto the battleground at Even Ha-eizer, hoping that the magic of its presence will give them victory. It does not; God wants “His” ark in a sanctuary, not on a battlefield.

And the Philistines took the ark of God, and they brought it from Even Ha-eizer to Ashdod. And the Philistines took the ark of God and they brought it into the House of Dagon, and they placed it beside Dagon. (1 Samuel 5:1-2)

The next morning, the priests of Ashdod discover that the statue of their own chief god, Dagon, has fallen face-down in front of the ark. The second morning, the statue of Dagon has fallen again, and its head and hands are cut off. Naturally, the shocked Philistines move the ark out of the sanctuary and into a field.

Then the hand of God was heavy on the Ashdodites, and He devastated them, and He struck down Ashdod and her territory with ofalim. (1 Samuel 5:6)

ofalim (עֳפָלִים) = probably buboes—lymph nodes swollen to the size of chicken eggs due to the bubonic plague—in the groin area. (According to the Masoretic text, when this chapter is read out loud, the word ofalim is replaced with techorim (טְחֺררִים) = hemorrhoids or anal abscesses. Techorim was considered a more polite word to say in public.)

The people of Ashdod send the ark off to another Philistine city, Geit.

The ark journeys from Shiloh to Beit Shemesh in six stages

…and the hand of God was on the city, a very great panic, and the people of the town from young to old had ofalim in their secret parts. So they sent the ark of God to Ekron… (1 Samuel 5:9-10)

The people of Ekron protest even before they start dying of the bubonic plague, and the princes of all five Philistine city-states meet there to decide what to do. Philistine priests and diviners urge them to send the ark back to Israelite territory, along with a guilt-offering, in the hope that then the God of Israel will stop the plague and heal the survivors.

And they [the princes and the Ekronites] said: “What is the guilt-offering that we should send back to Him?” And they [the priests] said: “The number of princes of Philistine is five. Five golden ofalim and five golden rats—for one mageifah is upon all [of you]and your princes! So you must make images of your ofalim and images of your rats that are destroying the land, and you must give honor to the God of Israel. Perhaps them He will lighten His hand from upon you and from upon your gods and from upon your land.” (1 Samuel 6:4-5.)

The Philistines probably noticed a plethora of dying rats in same areas where humans were afflicted. Today we know that bubonic plague is carried by fleas that bite both rats and humans.

Perhaps the Philistine rulers hesitated to send the golden ark and ten gold statuettes to their enemies the Israelites, because the Philistine priests add:

Why should you harden your heart as Egypt and Pharaoh hardened their heart? Did He not make a fool of them, so they let [the Israelites] go, and off they went? (1 Samuel 6:6)

The five Philistine princes, unlike the Pharaoh, are willing to do whatever will end the plague. Their priests then give instructions that will prove whether the God of Israel is responsible for it. The Philistines must load a cart with the ark and also a box containing the ten gold images. Then they must take two milk cows that have never pulled a plow and separate them from their nursing calves. They must shut up the calves inside, and harness the cows to the cart.

Then you will see: If it [the ark] goes up on the road to its own territory, toward Beit Shemesh, He made this great evil for us. But if not, then we will know that His hand has not touched us; by happenstance it happened to us. (1 Samuel 6:9)

Normally, the two cows would refuse to pull the cart, since they have never been harnessed before. Furthermore, they would try to get back to their calves as soon as their udders were full. Only a divine miracle would make the cows pull the cart to the nearest town in Israelite territory.

And the cows went straight on the road, on the road to Beit Shemesh. On a single highway they kept walking, lowing as they walked, and they veered neither right nor left. And the Philistine princes were walking behind them as far as the border of Beit Shemesh. (1 Samuel 6:12)

The action then switches to the arrival of the cart in Beit Shemesh, but we can assume that God responds by halting the bubonic plague in Philistine. The Bible does not mention it again.

Today the prompt administration of antibiotics can cure people of even the bubonic plague. But humans still experience a psychological kind of plague when panic spreads because our neighbors seem like enemies. In the United States today, people have become deeply divided by their anger and fear over the perceived political and moral differences between the left and the right. On each side, we are afraid that our own compatriots will force us to change our way of life, or even let us die.

And on each side, we want to take away things that are sacred to the other side. Unlike the Philistines appropriating the ark, we may not even realize what our “enemies” on the left or right consider sacred.

The people of Ekron get upset when the people of Geit send the ark to their city, yet they neither pick a fight nor pass the ark on to the next city. They call a meeting, get expert advice, and save all the surviving Philistine people by sending off the cart, even though it means giving up some wealth and honor. The five Philistine city-states not only cooperate with each other, but also honor the sacred object of the Israelites, and make a peace offering to the God of their enemies.

May we all become realistic and flexible like the Philistines, rather than hard-hearted like the Pharaoh. May we determine the causes of our own country’s plague, and may we all find the strength to do what we must in order to bring health and peace to all people.

1. Balak & Pinchas: How to Stop a Plague, Part 1; Mattot, Judges, & Joshua: How to Stop a Plague, Part 2; and Mattot, Va-etchannan, & Isaiah: How to Stop a Plague, Part 3.

2. Numbers 25:6-8.

3. Exodus 32:35.

4. Numbers 11:31-35.

5. Numbers 17:6-15.

6. This story is included in the second book of Samuel, although its language and themes do not fit the rest of the book. After King David has followed God’s instructions to order a census of all Israelite men of fighting age, God makes him choose one out of three punishments for doing so. David chooses the plague, which kills 70,000 Israelites before David stops it with an animal offering (2 Samuel chapter 24).

7. Ten according to Exodus; see my post Va-eira & Bo; Psalm 78 & Psalm 105: Responding to Miracles. The two plagues are livestock pestilence (dever) and an inflammation with boils (shechin).

Beha-alotkha: Father-in-Law

When the Israelites strike camp at the end of almost a year at Mount Sinai¹, we discover that a Midianite named Chovav has been camping with them. This week’s Torah portion, Beha-alotkha (“When you bring up”), says:

And Moses said to Chovav, the son of Reueil the Midianite, the father-in-law of Moses: “We are journeying to the place of which God said: I will give it to you. Go with us, and we will do good for you, because God has spoken of [doing] good for Israel.” (Numbers/Bemidbar 10:29)

Chovav (חֺבָב) = One who loves. (From the verb choveiv (חֺבֵב) = loving.)

Reu-eil (רְעוּאֵל) = Friend of God. Rei-eh (רֵעֶה) = friend + Eil (אֵל) = God.

The syntax is ambiguous in the original Hebrew, as it is in the English translation. Is Moses’ father-in-law Chovav or Reu-eil?

The name “Chovav” appears only in one other place in the Hebrew Bible:

And Chever the Kenite had separated from the Kenites, from the descendants of Chovav, the father-in-law of Moses, and he pitched his tent as far as the great tree in Tzaananim… (Judges 4:11)

This verse clearly identifies Chovav as Moses’ father-in-law. Yet when Moses gets married in the book of Exodus/Shemot, his father-in-law seems to be Reu-eil.

The Midianite priest,
Bible Moralisee, 13th century

A priest of Midian had seven daughters, and they came [to the well] and drew and filled the watering-troughs to water their father’s flock. Then the shepherds came and drove them away. And Moses stood up and saved them and watered their flock. And they came back to Reueil, their father … (Exodus/Shemot 2:16-18)

Medieval commentators and modern scholars have generated many explanations for this discrepancy.² I believe the difference between “Reu-eil” in Exodus and “son of Reu-eil” in Numbers is a scribal error.

Both early commentators and modern scholars identify Chovav as another name for Yitro, who is called Moses’ father-in-law ten times in the book of Exodus. But if Chovav is Moses’ father-in-law, what motivates Moses to invite him to journey with the Israelites to Canaan?

Moses meets his future father-in-law when he is a young man fleeing Egypt. He stops to rest by a well in Midian territory, and comes to the aid of the seven daughters of the priest of Midian called Reu-eil. The young women tell their father what happened, and he invites Moses to dinner.

And Moses agreed to stay with the man, and he gave his daughter Tzipporah to Moses. (Exodus/
Shemot 2:21)

The purpose of the marriage seems to be to tie Moses to the family as the priest’s son-in-law. Moses shepherds for him, and gives him two grandsons. The Midianite priest apparently has no sons of his own, since they do not help with the flock.

In the next story in the book of Exodus, Moses’ father-in-law is named Yitro.

And Moses was tending the flock of Yitro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he guided the flock behind the wilderness and came to the mountain of God… (Exodus 3:1)

Yitro (יִתְרוֹ) = his yeter (יֶתֶר) = remainder, surplus. (Yitro is usually translated in English as Jethro.)

Moses has a long conversation with God at the burning bush, then asks his father-in-law for permission to go back to Egypt to see how his relatives are doing there. Yitro wisely tells him to “go in peace”.³ Moses takes his wife and children, then sends them back to Yitro before he reaches Egypt. (See my post Yitro: Degrees of Separation.)

After the exodus from Egypt, as soon as Moses and the Israelites arrive at Mount Sinai, Yitro stages a family reunion.

And Yitro, the father-in-law of Moses …said to Moses: “I, your father-in-law Yitro, am coming to you, and your wife and her two sons with her.” And Moses went to meet his father-in-law, and he bowed down and he kissed him, and each man asked about his fellow’s well-being, and they entered the tent. (18:5-7)

Yitro Advises Moses,
Figures de la Bible,1728

Moses completely ignores his wife and children, but he welcomes his father-in-law. Yitro says the God of Israel is the greatest of all gods, and burns an animal offering for God.⁴ The next morning, Yitro tells Moses how to delegate his workload and set up a judicial system for the Israelites.

Then Moses sent off his father-in-law, and he went away to his [own] land. (Exodus 18:27)

Moses and Yitro part on good terms, but Moses does not press his father-in-law to stay. Yitro leaves Moses’s wife and sons behind.

Over the next eleven months at Mount Sinai, Moses receives the Ten Commandments (twice) as well as many more laws. He has people killed for worshiping the Golden Calf, and he supervises the creation of the portable tent-sanctuary and the holy items in it.

Finally, in this week’s Torah portion, everything is organized for the journey to the border of Canaan. Then Moses suddenly asks Chovav to come with them. Apparently his father-in-law returned to Mount Sinai for another visit; it was not a long journey from his home.

He [Chovav] said to him: “I will not go, because I would go to my land, to my kindred.”(Numbers 10:30)

Then he [Moses] said: “Please do not forsake us, because you know how we camp in the wilderness, and you can be eyes for us. And if you go with us, then by that goodness with which God does for us, we will be good to you.” (Numbers 10:31-32)

Moses gives Chovav two reasons to travel with the Israelites: to help them navigate the wilderness, and to receive a share of the land that God promised to give them in Canaan.

What kind of help do the Israelites need? “You can be eyes for us” might be a request for Chovav to scout ahead for the best routes and camping places. But then the Torah says the ark itself is their scout.

And they set out from the mountain of God on a journey of three days, and the ark of the covenant of God set out in front of them on a journey of three days to scout out a resting place for them. And the cloud of God was over them by day, when they set out from the camp. (Numbers 10:33-34)

Earlier in this week’s Torah portion, we get a preview of the Israelites’ departure.

…the cloud was taken up from over the Dwelling Place of the testimony, so the Israelites set out for their journeys away from the wilderness of Sinai. And the cloud stopped in the wilderness of Paran. (Numbers 10:11-12)

This cloud hovers over the Tent of Meeting when the ark is in residence.⁵ Now we learn that when the Israelites travel, the cloud travels with them. It may even lead them, as God’s pillar of cloud and fire did when they traveled from Egypt to Mount Sinai.

Whether the cloud or the ark is doing the scouting, the Israelites do not seem to need Chovav as a guide. Rashi⁶ proposed an alternate meaning of “you know how we camp in the wilderness, and you can be eyes for us”. If anything occurs that Moses and the elders do not understand, Chovav could enlighten them. In that case, perhaps Moses begs his father-in-law to go with him because he remembers how the man enlightened him about delegating judicial authority. Since then, the incident of the Golden Calf might have made Moses even less confident that he could handle everything himself.

There is no transition between Moses’ second plea to Chovav (Numbers 10:31-32) and the announcement that the Israelites set out with guidance from the ark and the cloud (Numbers 10:33-34). The Torah does not tell us whether Chovav changes his mind and accompanies his son-in-law and the Israelites after all. I imagine he is torn between his duties as a father and a priest of Midian, and his deep affection for his son-in-law.

Yitro adopts Moses into his family when he is homeless. When Moses arrives at Mount Sinai with thousands of Israelites, his father-in-law comes, embraces him, and gives him good advice. When Moses leaves for Canaan, he begs his father-in-law to come with him.

Perhaps it is Moses who gives Yitro the name Chovav, “one who loves”. He has cherished his father-in-law’s love, and wants it to continue.

—

¹ The Israelites and their fellow-travelers arrive at Mount Sinai in the third month after leaving Egypt (Exodus 19:1-2) and leave Mount Sinai for Canaan on the twentieth day of the second month of the second year after leaving Egypt (Numbers 10:11-12).

² Rashi (11^th-century rabbi Shlomoh Yitzchaki), Ibn Ezra (12^th-century rabbi Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra), and Ramban (13^th-century rabbi Moses ben Nachman, a.k.a. Nachmanides), explained that Moses’ father-in-law was called Yitro until he decided to worship only the God of Israel⁴, and then his name was changed to Chovav—according to Ramban³, because he “loved” God’s teaching. Reueil was actually Yitro’s father, but Tzipporah and her sisters also called their grandfather “Father”.

A common modern theory is that the story of Moses’ marriage in Exodus 2:16-21 was written by the “J” source, someone from the southern kingdom of Judah, who thought of Moses’ father-in-law as Reueil. The other three stories in Exodus that include Moses’ father-in-law were written by the “E” source, someone from the northern kingdom of Israel, who thought of the man as Yitro. The redactor who compiled the book of Exodus from these two sources left in both names. (See Richard Elliott Friedman, The Bible with Sources Revealed, HarperCollins, San Francisco, 2003.)

³ Exodus 4:18.

⁴ The classic commentators cite Exodus 18:11-12 as proof of Yitro’s “conversion”. I suspect that the Midianite priest was already familiar with the God of Israel, and may have pointed out Mount Sinai to Moses, since it was in Yitro’s territory.

⁵ Exodus 40:36-37.

⁶ Rashi is the acronym for 11^th-century rabbi Shlomoh Yitzchaki.

Vaykheil & Psalm 18: Wings for Chariots

(This is the last of a series of posts comparing ideas in the book of Exodus/Shemot with related ideas in the book of Psalms. Next week I will begin revisiting some sparks in the ancient priestly religion described in the book of Leviticus/Vayikra.)

Skilled artisans among the Israelites make all the items for the portable tent that is to be a dwelling-place¹ for God in the Torah portion Vayakheil. Moses then assembles the new Tent of Meeting, the divine fiery cloud covers it, and the glory of God fills the inside in the next Torah portion, Pekudei. The golden calf was a mistake, but this time the Israelites got it right! The success in this week’s double portion, Vayakheil-Pekudei, completes the book of Exodus/Shemot.

The focal point for God’s presence is the empty space above the ark inside the inner chamber of the tent. The ark is a gold-plated wooden box holding the second pair of tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. The master-artisan Betzaleil hammers out a solid gold lid for the ark—not just a slab of gold but a sculpture, with two winged creatures rising from the lid in one continuous piece of gold.

And he made two keruvim; of gold hammered work he made them, from two edges of the lid: one keruv from this edges and one keruv from that edges. From the lid he made the keruvim, from its edges. And the keruvim were spreading out wings above, shielding the lid with their wings. And each one faced its brother, and the faces of the keruvim were toward the lid. (Exodus/Shemot 37:76-9)

keruv (כּרוּב) = a hybrid creature with wings and a human face. Plural: keruvim (כְּרוֻבִים or כְּרוּוִים). (The English word “cherub” is derived from the Hebrew keruv, but a keruv in the Bible does not look like a chubby baby with stubby white wings.)

Keruvim and ark in First Temple (one interpretation)

When King Solomon builds the first temple in Jerusalem, its back room, the Holy of Holies, contains two free-standing gold-plated sculptures representing keruvim. Each is 10 cubits tall (15 to 20 feet) and has a 10-cubit wingspan. Solomon has the ark carried in and placed under their wings. (See my post Pekudei & 1 Kings: A Throne for the Divine.)

The Hebrew word keruv may come from the Akkadian word kuribu, “blessed ones”, their name for the colossal statues of hybrid winged beasts guarding doorways and gates. Commentators have speculated that keruvim might have the bodies of bulls (like Assyrian shedu) or lions (like Egyptian sphinxes or Phoenician lammasu) or humans. Raanan Eichler has made a good argument that the keruvim spreading their wings over the ark must have stood upright on two legs, and therefore probably had human bodies.

Hybrid beings with wings and human faces appear in many Ancient Near Eastern sculptures. When they are not demons battling heroes, they are either guardians of gates, or servants transporting a god. Keruvim in the Hebrew Bible are never demons, but they do appear as both guardians and transportation.

Guardians

Assyrians placed sculptures of shedu, winged bulls, as guardians at either side of a gateway into a city or palace. Another guardian figure, called Gud-alim by Sumerians and Kusarikku by later Mesopotamians, represented a door-keeper who protected a house from intruders. He stood upright and looked fairly human, except that he often had wings, horns, or a bull’s legs. In some depictions he carries a bucket.

Phoenician artworks from coastal cities west of ancient Israel and Judah also feature a pair of hybrid winged creatures on either side of a tree of life. Their tree of life is a composite of a lotus and a papyrus (borrowed from Egyptian art) and sometimes a palm tree.

Similarly, the decorations carved in the walls of King Solomon’s temple—by artisans from the Phoenician city-state of Tyre—featured keruvim and palm trees.²

In the book of Genesis/Bereishit, two keruvim serve as guardians of the way back into the Garden of Eden, where the Tree of Life remains untasted.³

One of Ezekiel’s prophesies compares the king of Tyre with a keruv that is supposed to protect its city.⁴ In an earlier post, Terumah: Cherubs Are Not for Valentine’s Day, I suggested that since God speaks to Moses from the empty space above the ark,⁵ the two keruvim are also guardians of an entrance: a portal to the invisible God.

Divine Transportation

The gods of other religions in the ancient Near East rarely rode on the backs of winged creatures; instead they used these creatures to pull their chariots. Tarhunz, the high god of the Luwian people living north of Canaan, was in charge of weather and war. He used lightning as a weapon, and rode in a chariot pulled by winged horses. South of the Luwians and north of Israel, the Canaanites of Ugarit worshiped Baal Hadad (“Master of Thunder”), a weather and war god who also wielded lightning. The Ugarit writings call this Baal “Rider of Clouds”.

The God of Israel also seems to have a chariot of clouds, in the poetry of Jeremiah and Psalm 104.⁶

God’s cloud chariot is pulled by keruvim in a poem that appears twice in the Bible, once as chapter 22 in the second book of Samuel, and later (with only slight changes) as Psalm 18. The speaker, King David, faces death at the hands of an enemy army, and calls on God for help. God descends from the heavens.

Smoke went up from His nostrils

And fire from His mouth devours.

Embers blazed from Him.

He tilted the heavens and descended,

And a thundercloud was beneath His feet.

And He drove a keruv and flew,

And He soared on the wings of the wind. (Psalm 18:9-11)

I use the pronoun “He” in this translation because God is presented as if “He” were Baal Hadad from the Canaanite pantheon of male and female gods. Psalm 18 continues with imagery of dark clouds, hail, thunder, and arrows of lightning. God then stages a dramatic rescue, and David wins the battle.

A Chariot Throne

The ark with its two keruvim is often considered God’s throne in the Bible—the authoritative location where God sits like a king. But sometimes this throne is movable, like a chariot.

Before David conquers Jerusalem, when the ark is housed in a temple at Shiloh, the Israelite army decides to carry it with them into battle against the Philistines, hoping that God will fight for them.

And they took away from there the ark of the covenant of God of Armies Sitting on the Keruvim … (1 Samuel 4:4)

Although the Israelite forces carry God’s throne, they lose the battle. The Philistines capture the ark, then later abandon it in Israelite territory. When King David retrieves it for his new capital in Jerusalem, it is called

… the ark of the god whose name was invoked, the name of God of Armies Sitting upon the Keruvim. (2 Samuel 6:2)

The title is also used in psalms 80 and 99.

Listen, Shepherd of Israel, You who lead Joseph like a flock!

Sitter on the keruvim, shine forth! (Psalm 80:2-3)

God, King, the peoples will tremble!

Sitter on the keruvim, You will shake the earth! (Psalm 99:1)

The Babylonian army razed the first temple in Jerusalem in 579 B.C.E., burning it to the ground. The army carried off some of its gold items as booty, but the ark and its keruvim disappeared from history. When some of the Israelites returned to Jerusalem under Persian rule and built a second temple, they left the Holy of Holies empty.

Ever since the destruction of the first temple with its ark and gold keruvim, God’s throne could only be an abstraction or a vision. The prophet Ezekiel reports two mystical visions of hybrid winged creatures during the exile in Babylon (Ezekiel 1:4-28; Ezekiel 10:1-22 and 11:22-23). In his second vision he identifies these creatures as keruvim.

Ezekiel’s Vision, by Matthuas Merian 1670 (some assembly required)

In both visions, the glory of God (not God Itself) appears as a fiery figure on a throne that looks like sapphire, suspended above four keruvim, each of which is accompanied by an interlocking wheel covered with eyes. Each keruv has a single leg ending in a calf’s hoof, a human body, four wings, a human hand below each wing, and a head with four faces: one human, one lion, one eagle, and one that is called the face of an ox in the first vision and the face of a keruv in the second vision.

The keruvim and their wheels move up and down as well as in all four directions, and the throne suspended above them moves along with them. Although Ezekiel does not call this arrangement a chariot, subsequent Jewish writers developed a school of mysticism based on the merkavah (מֶרְכָּבָה = chariot) in the book of Ezekiel.

Even without a temple, even without keruvim, the human mind needs poetic images to think about God. Today many of us no longer need to assign God a face, a hand, or a body in robes; we can handle the paradox of God as both invisible and manifest in everything we see. Yet poetic images still well up around the notion of God: clouds, beams of light, opalescent radiance, perhaps even wings. They are not God, yet God is in the imagery.

When God Itself seems too abstract, perhaps we can think of something like a keruv, a creation that pulls the presence of God toward us when we need rescue, and that stands at our gateways when we need a guardian.

—

¹ (See my post Terumah & Psalm 74: Second Home.)

² In the first (Israelite) temple in Jerusalem, keruvim and palms are carved in relief on the wooden walls and two sets of double doors (1 Kings 6:29, 32, 34). Keruvim, palms, and lions are engraved on the stands for ten bronze wash-basins (1 Kings 7:36).

³ Genesis 3:24.

⁴ Ezekiel 28:14, 16.

⁵ Exodus 25:22, Numbers 7:89.

⁶ Hey! Like clouds it ascends;

Like a whirlwind is [God’s] chariot;

Lighter than eagles are His horses. (Jeremiah 4:13)

In Psalm 104, God’s cloud chariot is pulled by the wind:

Setting beams for [God’s] roof chambers in the waters [above the sky],

Making the clouds His chariot,

He goes on the wings of the wind. (Psalm 104:3)

Ki Tissa & Psalms 109 & 69: Wiped Off the List

(One of a series of posts comparing ideas in the book of Exodus/Shemot with related ideas in the book of Psalms.)

Of course God is angry about the golden calf. “You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above or what is on the earth below.” (Exodus/Shemot 20:4) It’s right there in the Ten Commandments. Why can’t these Israelites follow simple directions?

Moses is about to walk back down Mt. Sinai with the two stone tablets in this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tissa, when God warns him that the Israelites below have cast a golden calf and are worshiping it. (See my blog post Ki Tissa: Heard and Not Seen.)

And God said to Moses: “I have observed this people, and hey, it is a stiff-necked people! So now let Me be, and My anger will blaze over them and I will consume them, and I will make you into a great nation.” (Exodus 32:9-10)

Moses talks God out of this idea. Then he walks down the mountain, smashes the two stone tablets, and gets the Levites to kill the 3,000 worst offenders.

Moses Breaking the Tablets, by Rembrandt, 1659

The next day he climbs back up Mt. Sinai to ask God to forgive the surviving Israelites.

“And now, if you will only lift their guilt! But if not, please mecheini from your book that you have written.” But God said to Moses: “Whoever sinned against Me, emechenu from My book. Now go lead the people to [the place] that I have spoken of to you.” (Exodus 32:32-33)

mecheini (מְחֵנִי) = wipe me away, erase me. (A form of the verb machah, מָחָה = wiped out, wiped off, destroyed, blotted out.¹)

emechenu (אֶמְחֶנּוּ) = I will wipe them off, I will erase them. (Another form of the verb machah.)

In other words, Moses insists that his personal fate must not be separated from that of the Israelites. If God erases them from the book, God must erase him, too. God replies that guilty individuals will erased, but the people of Israel as a whole will continue their journey under Moses’s leadership.

When the story is retold in the book of Deuteronomy/Devarim, God says to Moses:

“Hey! This is a stiff-necked people. Leave me alone, and I will exterminate them, and emecheh their name from under the heavens, and I will make you a nation greater than they.” (Deuteronomy 9:13-14)

emecheh (אֶמְחֶה) = I will wipe it out, I will erase it. (Another form of the verb machah.)

The Hebrew word for “name”, sheim (שֵׁם), means not only an appellation, but also someone’s reputation, standing, or renown (as in the English “making a name for herself”).

God’s book appears to be a list of names recorded at birth. Female names are not mentioned (the Bible reflects the male-centered, patriarchal society of its time), so we do not know if the list is comprehensive.

What happens when someone’s name is machah from the divine list?

One clue appears later in Deuteronomy. Lineage is important in the Bible; for a man to die without any male heirs is a terrible fate. So if a married man died without issue, his brother was obligated to impregnate the widow. If she bore a son, he would become the dead man’s heir.

And the firstborn that she bears shall be established on the name of his dead brother, and his name will not yimacheh from Israel. (Deuteronomy 25:6)

yimacheh (יִמָּחֶה) = be wiped out, be erased. (Another form of the verb machah.)

Similarly, a name is erased from God’s book if God decrees that the man will pass out of collective memory—perhaps by his own early death, or perhaps by dying without heirs to carry on his lineage.

Two of the psalms include pleas for God to punish enemies by erasing their names from the divine book. Psalm 109 opens with a complaint that certain people are lying about the psalmist, accusing him without cause. Verses 6-19 ask God to punish a personal enemy. These verses include separate requests for the man to be convicted of a crime, lose his job, and become impoverished while alive; for him to die before his time; for his children and his parents to suffer; and for his lineage to be exterminated.

May no one extend kindness to him;

And may no one be gracious to his orphans.

May his posterity be cut off;

In the next generation, may their names yimach. (Psalm 109:12-13)

yimach (יִמַּח) = be blotted out, erased. (Another form of the verb machah.)

In Psalm 69, the speaker feels as though he is drowning, and asks God to rescue him from being shamed and abused. Then he asks God to punish all his enemies. This middle section concludes with:

Place guilt upon their guilt,

and do not let them come into Your righteous deliverance.

Yismachu from the book of life,

And among the righteous do not record them. (Psalm 69:28-29)

yimachu (יִמַּחְוּ) = May they be blotted out, erased. (Another form of the verb machah.)

This passage alludes to two divine lists: a “book of life” or “book of the living” (seifer chayim, סֵפֶר חַיִּים), and a record of the righteous, which may or may not be the same scroll. When the psalmist asks for the names of his tormentors to be erased from the book of life, he may be asking God to deprive them of heirs, or he may be asking God to make them die soon.

The Hebrew Bible refers to God’s list of names as a “book of life” only in Psalm 69, which was written around 500 B.C.E. Almost a thousand years later, the Babylonian Talmud (tractate Rosh Hashanah 16b) cited Psalm 69:29 as support for the idea that God keeps three books of names. According to this tractate, on the first day of each new year, Rosh Hashanah, God writes down the names of the righteous in one book and the names of the wicked in another. People whose deeds are partly good and partly bad are listed in the third book until Yom Kippur, nine days later, when God decides which of these intermediate people to record in the book of the righteous and which in the book of the wicked.

What happens to the people listed in these books? The Talmud says that according to school of Shammai, those in the book of the righteous are rewarded with everlasting life, while those in the book of the wicked go to Gehinnom after death.²

But by the Rosh Hashanah liturgy, codified in the 9^th century C.E., says simply that God writes down who will live and who will die that year; any possibility of life after death is omitted.³ Neither does the liturgy mention wiping out any names that were written earlier.

The image of God erasing names from a book expresses a biblical hope that people will be punished for bad deeds, either by untimely death or by the end of their lineage—equally bad fates from an ancient Israelite point of view.

Few people today believe God punishes miscreants in this way. Some folks still cling to the idea of reward or punishment after death. I prefer the idea that virtue is its own reward, and I believe that people who enjoy being mean never get to experience the best things in life, such as true friendship and love.

Today the image of God keeping a book, or books, of names is still used in Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services as a metaphor for the idea that God only knows when a person will die. The liturgy pleading to be written into this year’s “book of life” provides emotional reinforcement for the knowledge that the time of our death is unknown—and therefore it behooves us to use our present lives well.

May all human beings, whatever their past deeds and attitudes have been, wake up with new insight into the shortness of life and the value of goodness. And may we all realize, like Moses in this week’s Torah portion, that there is no point in having our own names written in the book of life unless our fellow human beings are also listed there.

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¹ The Bible uses various forms of the verb machah not only for wiping away or erasing names, but also for wiping away tears, wiping a dish clean, or wiping out (killing) an entire population. God tells the Israelites to wipe out the memory of an enemy tribe called Amaleik; several Israelite leaders beg God not to wipe out, i.e. forget, someone’s good or bad deeds. When a husband accused his wife of adultery, a priest wrote a curse on a scroll, then machah it in water and made the woman drink it; the results determined her guilt or innocence (Numbers/Bemidbar 5:23-24).

² Talmud Bavli, Rosh Hashanah 16b. There is also a Christian tradition about a “book of life” that is a divine record of who will “go to heaven” after death.

³ Prayers for God to “inscribe us in the book of life” were added to the Amidah sections of Rosh Hashanah liturgy by the Babylonian Geonim in the 9th century C.E. The “Unetaneh Tokef” prayer, an earlier addition to the liturgy, states that every year God decrees who will die, and by what means, during the coming year.

Ramban (13^th century Rabbi Moses ben Nahman, known as Nachmanides) explained that the book of the righteous is the book of life, and the book of the wicked is the book of death. Everyone whose name is written in the book of life merits life until the following Rosh Hashanah, and everyone whose name is written in the book of death will die that year.