Sukkot: Rootless

The hut

Any makeshift shelter is called a sukkah in the Hebrew Bible. When Jacob settles for a while somewhere between the Yabok River and the city of Shekhem, he throws together makeshift shelters for his animals:

… he built a house for himself and he made sukkot for his livestock; therefore the name of the place is called Sukkot. (Genesis 33:17)

sukkah (סֻכָּה) = hut, shack, “booth”; temporary shelter. (Plural: sukkot, סֻכּוֹת.)

Jonah, after he has finally delivered God’s prophecy to Nineveh, makes a hasty sukkah for himself on a vantage point east of the city so he can sit and see whether God destroys it or not.¹ A flimsy shelter for harvesters in the field, or for a watchman guarding a ripening crop, was also called a sukkah.²

In biblical poetry, God makes sukkot out of thunderclouds, which are also temporary and flimsy. Dark and dense at first, they evaporate when the storm is over.³

from Sukkot Customs, English woodcut, 1662

The holiday

Sukkot is also the name of a seven-day harvest holiday that Jews still celebrate today; this year it begins at sunset on September 29. The Torah readings for the first day of Sukkot are Leviticus 22:26-23:44 and Numbers 29:12-16. The festival is also mandated in Deuteronomy 16:13-17. But the three passages in the Torah do not agree on where Sukkot should be celebrated.⁴

In Numbers and Deuteronomy, Sukkot is one of the three annual pilgrimage festivals in which all men (often accompanied by their families) must come to Jerusalem and make offerings at the temple.⁵

The reading from Leviticus initially requires people to refrain from working at their jobs on the first day, and to bring offerings to God on all seven days.⁶ Next comes a two-verse conclusion to the list of holy days in the year, followed by an extra passage about Sukkot which was probably inserted later by a redactor.

In this insertion, God mandates a harvest celebration ritual suitable to conduct at home.

And on the first day you must take for yourselves fruit of the citrus tree, open hands [palm-branches] of date-palms, and branches of the myrtle tree, and willows of the creek. And you must rejoice before God, your God, seven days. (Leviticus/Vayikra 23:40)⁷

The flexible branches from the three kinds of trees (date palm, myrtle, and willow) are bound together into a lulav, which is shaken to encourage the rainy season to begin. Shaking a lulav makes a sound like rain.

Then the God in Leviticus issues a further order:

In sukkot you must dwell seven days; all the natives in Israel must dwell in sukkot, so that your generations will know that I made the children of Israel dwell in sukkot when I brought them out from the land of Egypt. (Leviticus 23:42-43)

Leviticus does not tell Israelites to dwell in sukkot in Jerusalem, where they are supposed to make the animal offerings. The book of Nehemiah, set in the mid-fifth century B.C.E., gives people two options for dwelling in sukkot: they can do it on their own property, or in the courtyards of the temple in Jerusalem. Nehemiah reports that the Jerusalemites went out to hills to collect branches of olive, pine, myrtle, and palm trees, as well as other leafy trees.⁸

And the people went out and brought them, and they made themselves sukkot, each man on his roof, and in their courtyards, and in the courtyards of the House of God … (Nehemiah 8:16)

Holiday huts

The tractate Sukkah in the Babylonian Talmud recommends that every household build a sukkah as a temporary residence for the seven days of Sukkot. (However, it is permissible to use someone else’s sukkah, as long as you have your own lulav.⁹) Most sukkot were built on the flat roofs of houses, but they could also be built on the ground, or even on a wagon or ship if someone was traveling.¹⁰

With a few exceptions, all men must eat meals and sleep in a sukkah; women and children are welcome, but not required, to join them. But if rains ruins the food, or prevents people from sleeping, everyone can go back into their permanent house to finish the meal or the night’s rest.¹¹ After all, sukkot is supposed to be a happy holiday.

The sukkah must be constructed expressly for the festival, not for any other use.¹² It must have two complete walls and a third wall that is at least a handbreadth wide; the fourth side of the structure can be open.¹³ The walls can be made out of almost anything, as long as the sukkah is a temporary structure; you can even use an elephant as part of a wall, as long as the elephant is securely tied!¹⁴ But the Talmud recommends beautifying the sukkah with colorful sheets and other ornaments, and using your best dishes and bedding when you eat and sleep in it.¹⁵

The roof is especially important. It must provide more shade than sunlight¹⁶, yet it must include some gaps through which you can see the sky. The roof cannot include animal skins or anything else that could become ritually impure.¹⁷ The framework of the roof can be made of boards, or even metal skewers.¹⁸

But something that grew from the ground should be laid over the roof frame.¹⁹ According to the Talmud,²⁰ the best kinds of roofing are straw from which grain was winnowed on the threshing floor, and vines from which the grapes have been stripped for the winepress—because the Torah says:

The festival of the Sukkot you must make for yourself seven days when you gather from your threshing floor and from your winepress. (Deuteronomy 16:13)

What if someone trained vines to grow over a potential sukkah frame? The Talmud answers:

If one trellised the grapevine, the gourd, or the ivy, climbing plants, over a sukkah while they are still attached to the ground, and he then added roofing atop them, the sukkah is unfit, as roofing attached to the ground is unfit. If the amount of fit roofing was greater than the plants attached to the ground, or if he cut the climbing plants so that they were no longer attached to the ground, it is fit.” (Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 9b)²¹

The roof of a sukkah includes plant material that grew from the ground, but is no longer attached to the ground. Similarly, during Sukkot we are supposed to uproot ourselves from our grounded lives, and live in temporary shelters, flimsy and impermanent.

Rootless

The Sages taught: All seven days of Sukkot, a person renders his sukkah his permanent residence and his house his temporary residence. (Sukkah 28b)²²

For seven days only, we pretend our lives are rootless and temporary. Then we move back into our “permanent” homes—if we are fortunate enough to have them.

Refugees from natural disasters, or from disastrous governments, often live in temporary housing in camps, waiting for months or years for their own homes. When I leave my comfortable apartment and walk down the street, I see homeless people living in pup tents with makeshift awnings, which they set up in parking strips or under bridges—until they are ordered to move on.

A sukkah roof that looks green on the first day of Sukkot is often withered and brown by the seventh day. Can rootless human beings sustain life any better than rootless plants?

And can those of us blessed with rooted lives remember that nothing lasts forever, and our lives are temporary, too?

Jonah 4:5.
Isaiah 1:8, Job 27:18.
2 Samuel 22:11, Psalm 18:12, Job 36:29.
Scholars do not agree on when these three books were written, but a common theory is that Numbers and much of Deuteronomy date to around 600 BCE, while Leviticus was written later, from roughly 550 to 350 BCE.
The other two pilgrimage festivals are Pesach (Passover) and Shavuot.
Leviticus 23:35.
Instead of “the citrus tree”, the Hebrew says a tree of hadar (הָדָר) = splendor, beauty. The Talmud determined that meant a tree bearing a citrus fruit called an etrog (Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 31a, 36a). Instead of “the myrtle tree”, the Hebrew says a tree of avot (עָבֺת) = thick foliage. The Talmud determined that this meant the myrtle tree (Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 12a, 32b).
Nehemiah 8:13-15.
Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 27b.
Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 22b.
Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 29a.
Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 9b.
Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 4b, 7b.
Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 23a.
Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 28b.
Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 4a, 22b.
Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 11a.
Boards less than four handbreadths wide are acceptable in the roof, as long as the gaps between them are as wide as the boards—and partially filled in with vegetation (Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 15a). Sukkah 15a also permits metal skewers.
Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 11a.
Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 12a.
William Davidson translation in www.sefaria.org.
Ibid.

Vayeilekh: Long-Term Prophecy

(I am flying cross-country to see my sister for the first time since 2019, so I will not be able to write new blog posts for the next three weeks. You can read some of my favorite earlier posts for this time of year at the following links: Ha-Azinu: Raining Wisdom; Rosh Hashanah & Yom Kippur: Our Father, Our King; Haftarot for Rosh Hashanah & Shabbat Shuvah—1 Samuel & Hosea: From Smoke to Words; Yom Kippur & Isaiah: Ending Slavery; and Jonah: Turning Around. You can also look under “Categories” on my home page to find all my previous posts.)

Most prophecies in the Hebrew Bible are short-term; they predict events during the lifetime of the prophet’s audience. They are also conditional; the prophet announces what will happen if the people, or their rulers, do not change their course of action. If they do change, like the Assyrians of Nineveh in the book of Jonah, God changes the decree.

But a prophecy containing the idiom be-acharit hayamim is about events in the distant future, not a warning to anyone alive at the time of the prophecy. Moses makes one of these long-term prophecies near the end of this week’s double Torah portion, Nitzavim and Vayeilekh (Deuteronomy 29:9-31:22), after God has told him what will happen many generations later, after the Israelites have conquered Canaan.

And God said to Moses: “Hey, you will be lying with your fathers, and this people will rise up and go whoring after the foreign gods of the land where they are coming into their midst. And they will abandon me and violate my covenant that I cut with them. And on that day my nose will heat up against them, and I will abandon them! And I will hide my face from them. And they will be [ripe] for devouring, and many bad things and troubles will find them. And on that day they will say: Isn’t it because our God is not in our midst that these evils found us?” (Deuteronomy 31:16-17)

Not only God, but also the writer of these verses knows that the Israelites will backslide again and be punished. According to some 21st-century biblical scholarship, much of the book of Deuteronomy was written in the 7^th century, but it was rewritten and expanded in the 6^th century during the Babylonian exile.¹ The rewriter made two major changes: the book was recast as a series of speeches by Moses; and “predictions” were added that Judah and its capital would be destroyed someday because the Israelites would disobey God’s primary command: do not worship any other gods.

The Babylonian army razed Jerusalem in 586 BCE, and the rewriter of Deuteronomy lived through it. According to biblical reasoning, Judah could only be conquered if God stopped protecting it; and God would only stop protecting Judah if its people persistently disobeyed God. Therefore the conquest and destruction of Judah was the people’s own fault.

Moses duly transmits God’s message to the people, saying:

For I know that after my death, you will indeed act ruinously, and you will swerve away from the path that I commanded to you, and bad things will happen to you, be-acharit hayamim. For you will do what is bad in the eyes of God, offending [God] through your handiwork. (Deuteronomy 31:29)

be-acharit (בְּאַחֲרִית) = in an end, when afterward, as an aftermath, in the future. Be (בְּ) = in, at, when, through. Acharit (אַחֲרִית) = an end, outcome, future. (From achar (אַחַר)= behind, after, afterward, following.)

hayamim (הַיָּמִים) = (literally) the days; (as an idiom) a long period of time.

be-acharit hayamim (בְּאַחֲרִית הַיָּמִים) = (literally) “at the end of days”; (as an idiom) a long time afterward, in the distant future, as a long-term outcome.

A long time from now

The phrase be-acharit hayamim appears 15 times in the Hebrew Bible, and even though it could be translated as “at the end of days”, none of these verses refer to the end of the world as we know it. They usually predict the future of the people of Israel, and describe events that had actually happened by the time the second temple was built in Jerusalem in the 5^th century BCE. (Prophecies about two neighboring kingdoms foretell events in the same time period.²)

The first appearance of be-acharit hayamim is in Jacob’s deathbed prophecies, supposedly about his twelve sons, but actually about what happens to the twelve tribes of Israel after the land of Canaan is settled.³

The second appearance is in Bilam’s introduction to the fourth prophecy he delivers to King Balak of Moab about the Israelites camped on the king’s border:

Bilam Prophesies, by James Tissot, ca. 1900

And now, here I am going [back] to my people. I will advise you what this people will do to your people be-acharit hayamim. (Numbers 24:16)

Bilam says Israel will conquer Moab and Edom; 2 Samuel 8:11-12 reports King David’s conquest of those two kingdoms. Bilam says Amalek will perish forever; 1 Samuel 7-33 reports that King Saul killed all the Amalekites (although a few of them show up later in the bible).⁴ Bilam says the Kenites (allies of the Israelites who are nomads in their territory) will be captured by Asshur (the Neo-Assyrian Empire); the Assyrians did take over the northern kingdom of Israel in the 8^th century BCE, a conquest reported in 2 Kings 17:5-6, and they attacked Judah, the southern kingdom, so they may well have captured the Kenites. Bilam’s final prediction is that enemies on ships will destroy Asshur forever; the Medes and the Babylonians did conquer the Assyrians in 614-612 BCE, but the Tigris River was too shallow for ships to reach the capital.

Some modern scholars attribute this prophetic poem to a refugee from the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel.⁵ The only event in the prophecy that had not happened by the time the refugee recorded it was the conquest of the Assyrian Empire.

The phrase be-acharit hayamim occurs twice in the book of Deuteronomy. In this week’s portion Vayeilekh, Moses tells the Israelites:

… bad things will happen to you, be-acharit hayamim. For you will do what is bad in the eyes of God, offending [God] through your handiwork. (Deuteronomy 31:29)

Sure enough, although the Israelites toe the line in the book of Joshua, they repeatedly worship foreign gods in the book of Judges and the first and second books of Kings, as well as in most of the books of the prophets. Meanwhile, the Assyrians wipe out the northern kingdom of Israel in the 8^th century BCE, and the Babylonians destroy Jerusalem in the 6^th century BCE. Thus when Deuteronomy was revised and Moses’ prophecy was recorded, it had already come true.

Earlier in Deuteronomy, Moses predicts that after the Israelites have been living in Canaan for generations, they will make and worship idols, and God will get angry and drive them out of their land into other nations. In fact, the Assyrians deported many leading citizens of Israel, and the Babylonians deported many leading citizens of Judah. Moses continues:

But if you seek there, then you will find God, your God, if you inquire with all your heart and with all your soul. When you are in distress and all these things have found you, be-acharit hayamim, then you will return to God, your god, and you will listen to [God’s] voice. (Deuteronomy 4:29-30)

It may be no accident that here Moses sounds like second Isaiah, who wrote after the Persians conquered Babylon. Second Isaiah repeatedly urges the exiles in Babylon to seek God and return to their religion and to Jerusalem.

The phrase be-acharit hayamim also appears in first Isaiah, Hosea, Micah, and Jeremiah, in predictions that are so vague, they merely express optimism that someday the Israelites will return to their God. Ezekiel uses be-acharit hayamim in two expressions of pessimism over the long-term future of the Israelites, when he invents a foreign king called Gog who will overrun the land. Although none of these predictions from the Prophets refer to specific events in the future, they do all refer to a distant future in historical time, in this world.⁶

Not the end of the world

The phrase be-acharit hayamim appears twice in the book of Daniel, but neither time does it refer to the End of Days. First Daniel uses the Aramaic version be-acharit hayamim when he interprets King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream about a statue made of different materials, from a gold head down to feet of iron and clay.⁷ It is not an apocalyptic image, but merely foretells a succession of kingdoms ruling Mesopotamia. The second time the phrase appears in Daniel, an angel proceeds to tell him the future of the Persian Empire.⁸ In both cases, a better translation of be-acharit hayamim would be “in the distant future”.

The verse that does mean “the End of Days” comes at the end of the book of Daniel, when an angel tells him:

“But you go to the keitz. And you will rest [in the grave]; then you will stand up for your destiny at keitz hayamim.” (Daniel 12:13)

keitz (קֵץ) = end (of someone’s existence), limit, boundary, extremity.

keitz hayamim (קֵץ הַיָּמִים) = the end of days; the limit of time.

Acharit means an outcome sometime in the future, after which history will continue. But keitz is an absolute end. The verse at the end of Daniel is is the only occurrence in the Hebrew bible of the phrase keitz hayamim—and the book of Daniel is the only book that seriously proposes the resurrection of the dead at the end of the world as we know it. Although the Daniel story begins during the 6^th-century CE Babylonian Exile, the book was written in the 2^nd century CE, well after all the other books of the Hebrew Bible. The starting point for Jewish and Christian eschatology⁹ is the final chapter of Daniel, which includes not only the phrase “the end of days”, but also the concept of resurrection of the dead—the righteous to “everlasting life” and others to “everlasting shame”.

Some people hope for a life after death; others believe this world is the only one we get, and humans only live once. Some people believe the ethical level of humanity will continue to improve, rapidly enough so we will save ourselves and our polluted earth; others believe we will not get our act together in time.

Will we win the human race, or self-destruct? Will humankind learn how to manage without war? How bad will the damage be from our degradation of the planet, and when will it stabilize? And what about my own nation, my own religion, my own people? Will we ever get it right?

We might want to know the short-term future for selfish reasons: so that we can make choices that will improve our own lot, or our family’s. But we want to know long-term future because we care about the fate of human beings who come after us, even those we will never meet.

I pray that enough people find enlightenment, dedicate their lives to doing no harm, and repair what they are able to repair. I am not interested in an End of Days, but I pray for a better future for this world, be-acharit hayamim.

See Eckart Otto, www.thetorah.com/article/deuteronomy-rewritten-to-reflect-on-the-exile-and-future-redemption.
Jeremiah 48:47 and 49:39.
See my post Vayechi & 1 Kings: Deathbed Prophecies.
Amalekites appear in 1 Samuel 30:1-2 and 2 Samuel 1:5-10.
The “E” or Elohist source.
Isaiah 2:2; Jeremiah 23:20, 30:24, 48:47, 49:39; Hosea 3:5; Micah 4:1; Ezekiel 38:8, 38:16.
Daniel 2:28.
Daniel 10:14.
The orthodox Christian tradition is that the “The End of Days” or “The End Times” will be a world-wide apocalypse, as described in the Book of Revelation, followed by the Second Coming of Jesus and the Last Judgment, when life on earth will become obsolete. Jewish eschatology is moderate by comparison. The orthodox Jewish tradition, established as a subject for argument in the Talmud before 500 CE, is that in some distant future there will be a happy olam haba (world-to-come) here on earth. There will be a new king (moshiach, מַשִׁיַח = “anointed one”) who is a descendant of King David; the Jews in the diaspora will return to the land that was once David’s kingdom; and righteous people who have died over the centuries will be resurrected bodily.

Ki Tavo & 2 Isaiah: Enlightenment

Enlightenment is a theme in both this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tavo (Deuteronomy 26:1-29:8) and this week’s haftarah reading (Isaiah 60:1-22). At any other time of year, this synchrony would be no accident. When the rabbis of the second century C.E. paired haftarah readings from the prophets with the weekly readings from the Torah proper (Genesis through Deuteronomy), they picked haftarot that had related themes—at least most of the year.

But during seven weeks in late summer, between Tisha B’Av¹ and Rosh Hashanah², the Torah readings continue working through the book of Deuteronomy, while the haftarot all explore the same theme in second Isaiah—an unknown prophet recorded in chapters 40-66 of the book of Isaiah. Second Isaiah addresses the Israelites who were deported to Babylon when King Nebuchadnezzar captured and razed Jerusalem.³

March of the Prisoners from Jerusalem, by James Tissot, 1896

The prophet promises the exiles that if they return, God will forgive them for their past disobediences, and their ruined city will become glorious. This week we read the Sixth Haftarah of Consolation, which describes how God will make Jerusalem shine like a beacon to other nations.

Ki Tavo: Enlightenment

At Mount Sinai, when Moses led the Israelites through a formal covenant ritual with God (including splashing blood on the altar and the people),

Moses came and recounted to the people all God’s words and the laws, and all the people answered with one voice, and they said: “All the things that God has spoken, we will do!” (Exodus 24:3)

In this week’s Torah portion, Moses gives instructions for conducting another covenant ritual once the Israelites have entered Canaan.⁴ But first he declares:

Today you have affirmed God to be your god, and to walk on [God’s] paths, and to keep [God’s] decrees and commands and laws, and to pay attention to [God’s] voice. (Deuteronomy 26:17)

The Israelites do not shout out their agreement in the book of Deuteronomy, the way they did in the book of Exodus, but neither do they grumble. Moses continues as if everyone agrees.

And God has affirmed to you today that you are [God’s] treasured people, as [God] spoke to you, and keeping all [God’s] commands. And [God will] set you high above all the nations that [God] made, in praise and in reputation and in splendor. And you will become a holy people to God, as [God] spoke.⁵ (Deuteronomy 26:18-19)

Moses is describing a covenant, originating at Sinai and affirmed on the east bank of Jordan River where the people can see Canaan. The Israelites as a people promise to single out God as their only god, and to obey God. God promises to single out the Israelites as God’s unique treasure, and to elevate them relative to other nations.

Including the phrase “and keeping all [God’s] commands” makes the statement of God’s side of the covenant awkward reading. Probably it means that God promises to give the Israelites special treatment only if they keep their promise to obey all of God’s commands. But the commentary includes alternate interpretations. One is that God gives all the rules to the people Israel, and only some of them to the other, lesser nations.⁶ Another is that God will act to help the Israelites achieve the difficult task of keeping all God’s laws and decrees.⁷

Next Moses recites the blessings God will give those who obey God’s rules, and the curses God will inflict on those who disobey. Then he says:

You have seen all that God did before your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his attendants and to all his land—the great trials that your eyes saw, the great signs and marvels. Yet God has not given you a leiv for da-at, or eyes for seeing, or ears for listening, until this day. (Deuteronomy 29:1-3)

leiv (לֵב) or leivav (לֵבָב) = the heart; the seat of both thinking and feeling, therefore the conscious mind.

da-at (דַעַת) = knowledge; intimate acquaintance, insight, understanding. (From the root verb yada, יָדַע = notice, find out, recognize, become acquainted, know, understand.)

In Egypt, the Israelite slaves witnessed the trials of Pharaoh and his advisors when God afflicted Egypt with ten miraculous plagues. Forty years later, the next generation of Israelites includes many who were children in Egypt and can vouch for God’s miracles.

But during the Israelites’ long journey through the wilderness, they often complained about God and said they were better off as slaves in Egypt. In the last of the forty years, many of the men went to Moabite feasts and worshiped Ba-al Pe-or, disobeying their own God’s repeated command that they must not worship other gods.⁸

They heard, but did not have “ears for listening” to God’s words as transmitted by Moses. They saw more divine miracles on their journey, but did not have “eyes for seeing” that God was still taking care of them, leading the way with the pillar of cloud and fire, and providing water to drink and manna to eat. They did not use their leiv to think about the evidence of their senses, and so they did not reach any understanding about God’s long-term plan. They did not find any enlightenment.

The Torah switches briefly to God’s point of view⁹:

And I brought you up, all of you, for forty years in the wilderness. Your cloak did not wear out from upon you, and your sandal did not wear out from on your foot. You did not eat bread or drink wine or liquor—in order that teide-u that I am God, your God. (Deuteronomy 29:4-5)

teide-u (תֵּדְעוּ) = you would know, you would understand. (Also from the root verb yada.)

But God’s demonstration did not result in any enlightenment. As Moses has just said, “Yet God has not given you a leiv for da-at, or eyes for seeing, or ears for listening, until this day.”

What has changed now that the Israelites are about to cross the Jordan into Canaan? The answer in this week’s Torah portion is not that Moses’ long oration has enlightened them. Moses hints at a different answer when he concludes:

And you came up to this place. And Sichon, king of Cheshbon, and Og, king of the Bashan, went out to meet us in battle, but we struck them down. And we took their land and gave it as hereditary property to the Reubenites and to the Gadites and to half of the tribe of Menashe. So you must keep the words of this covenant and you must do them, in order that taskilu everything that you do. (Deuteronomy 29:6-8)

taskilu (תַּשְׂכִּילוּ) = you (plural) will succeed; understand; act with religious insight. (A form of the verb sakhal, שָׂכַל; its meaning overlaps but does not coincide with yada.)

In this context, taskilu means “you will succeed”. Yet the success depends on the understanding and religious insight that would motivate the Israelites to keep the covenant and obey God.

When the Israelites defeat the armies of kings Sichon and Og and take their lands, they learn in the most direct way that God’s pledge to give them the much larger land of Canaan is not an empty promise. They could actually do it!—with God’s help. There is nothing like an exciting experience to change your thinking. Now, at last, they see the light.

And for a while, at least through the whole book of Joshua, they enthusiastically obey God’s rules.

Second Isaiah: Illumination

In the chapter of Isaiah before the sixth haftarah of consolation, the prophet repeats his or her message that the people of Judah were defeated and exiled because they disobeyed God; but now God will forgive and redeem all of them who repent and head back to Jerusalem.¹⁰

From Jerusalem, by John Singer Sargent, 1905-6

This week’s haftarah then opens with imagery of light:

Arise! Brighten! For your light is coming,

And the glory of God shines on you.

Because hey! The darkness will cover the land,

And thick fog, the peoples.

But upon you God will shine

And [God’s] glory will be seen upon you. (Isaiah 60:1-2)

We can see sources of light, such as stars, and every material thing that light shines on. But without light, we are blind. No wonder cultures around the world associate light with knowledge. No wonder the English language calls understanding “enlightenment”.

Many cultures also associate light with good behavior, and darkness with bad behavior. The book of Proverbs says:

The route of the righteous is like radiant light,

Going on and brightening until the day is established.

The path of the wicked is like darkness;

They do not know what they stumble on. (Proverbs 4:18-19)

The wicked—which in the bible means not only those who wrong their fellow humans, but all those who disobey God—stumble and fall in the darkness. But the righteous, who can see everything in front of them, know how to avoid tripping.

Furthermore, when the righteous settle in Jerusalem, God will shine light on the city, and the people of other nations will notice it. Second Isaiah continues:

And nations will walk by your light,

And kings, by the radiance of your shining. (Isaiah 60:3)

Ibn Ezra commented: “He who is in darkness usually sees those that are dwelling in light.”¹¹ Naturally they are drawn to the clarity and well-being that light provides.

According to second Isaiah, peace and prosperity will govern Jerusalem, and riches will flow into the city from places as far away as Sheba and Tarshish.

Because God will be your light forever,

And your days of mourning will be done.

And your people, all of them righteous,

Will possess the land forever. (Isaiah 60:20-21)

According to Ibn Ezra, “The mourner sits, as it were, in darkness.” Death is associated with darkness, and a good life with light.

This week’s Torah portion, Ki Tavo, points out that despite all of God’s efforts at enlightening the Israelites in the wilderness, they do not fully throw in their lot with God until they win a couple of battles and camp across the Jordan River from Canaan. Only then do they understand God’s plan; only then do their minds open to illumination. Only then do they settle into obeying God. On the other hand, this week’s haftarah, Isaiah chapter 60, declares that the reward of obeying God’s commands is illumination.

Today we no longer receive signs from the God-character in the bible. We must make do with telling coincidences and unforeseen results that are enlightening in retrospect. Individuals stumble along in the darkness, making mistake after mistake. Nations are governed by politicians who cannot agree on, or even see, a path to peace and prosperity. And world-wide climate change is accelerating because we humans have fouled our own nest and failed to cooperate enough to clean it.

What would a Moses or a second Isaiah say to us? What would make us stop and reconsider? How do get enough illumination to see the right path and redeem ourselves?

Tisha B-Av is the annual day of mourning for the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. See my post: Lamentations: Seeking Comfort.
Rosh Hashanah is the first day of the Jewish year. See my post: Rosh Hashanah: Remembering.
The Babylonian campaign to eliminate rebellion in their vassal state of Judah included deporting all of its leading citizens to Babylon in two waves, after each of Nebuchadnezzar’s successful sieges of Jerusalem in 597 and 587 B.C.E.
On two hills in front of the Canaanite town of Shekhem. See my posts: Ki Tavo: Making It Clear, and Ki Tavo: Cursing Yourself.
Moses is alluding to God’s statement at Mount Sinai: And now, if you really pay attention to my voice and keep my covenant, then you will be my treasure among all the peoples. For all the earth is mine, but you will be my kingdom of priests and a holy nation. (Exodus 19:5-6)
See Ovadiah Sforno (16^th century) on Deuteronomy 26:18.
See Or HaChayim (18^th century) on Deuteronomy 26:18
Numbers 25:1-9.
Probably because of an error in editing when a 6^th-century BCE redactor revised an older text to frame it as part of Moses’ oration.
Isaiah 59:9-21.
12^th century rabbi Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra, translation in www.sefaria.org.

Shoftim: Is Magic Abominable? Part 2

(If you would like to read one of my posts on this week’s Torah portion, click on “Categories” in the sidebar, then select “Deuteronomy” and “Ki Teitzei”.)

In last week’s Torah portion, Shoftim, Moses warns the Israelites:

When you enter the land that God, your god, is giving to you, you must not learn to act according to the to-avot of those nations. (Deuteronomy/Devarim 18:9)

to-avot (תּוֹעֲבֺת) = plural of to-eivah (תּוֹעֵבָה) = taboo; an abomination, a foreign perversion, a custom in one culture that is prohibited in another culture.

Then Moses lists nine abominable occult practices:

There shall not be found among you one who makes his son or his daughter go across through the fire; a koseim kesomim, a meonein, or a menacheish; a mekhasheif or a choveir chaver,or one who inquires of ov or yidoni, or one who seeks the dead. Because anyone who does these things is to-avot; and on account of these to-avot, God, your god, is dispossessing them [the Canaanite nations] before you. (Deuteronomy 18:10-12)

What are all these procedures?

I examined the first four practices in last week’s post, Shoftim: Is Magic Abominable? Part 1, and concluded that the first, making offspring cross the fire, is to-eivah because it involves worshiping a foreign god; and the next three, which all types of divining, are to-avot because they are not sanctioned ways to get information from God. Divining itself is acceptable, as long as the diviner consults the God of Israel (usually through casting lots).

This week we will look at the remaining five kinds of forbidden magic: two types of sorcery, and three ways to get information from people who have died.

A sorcerer: Mekhasheif

A mekhasheif (מְכַשֵּׁף) is someone who does sorcery or witchcraft: khisheif (כִּשֵּׁף) = practice sorcery. The Hebrew Bible does not specify what actions a mekhasheif performs, but in related Semitic languages the root of the word refers to cutting off, or to praying by cutting one’s skin.¹ No one called a mekhasheif is included in any biblical story. Instead, the word usually appears in lists with other types of occult practitioners, as in the Torah portion Shoftim.²

One notable exception is the bald statement in the book of Exodus:

You must not let a mekhasheifah live. (Exodus 22:17)

(Mekhasheifah, מְכַשֵׁפָה, is the feminine form of the word, corresponding to the English “sorceress”.)

This injunction appears between a law giving the financial penalty for seducing a virgin, and a law giving the death penalty to anyone who lies with a beast. Perhaps a female’s sorcery also had a sexual element, but there is no corroboration elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible.

The bible mentions four people by name who employ a mekhasheif. One is the idol-worshiper King Menashe of Judah.³The other three are thoroughly reviled foreigners: a pharaoh, Queen Jezebel, and Nebuchadnezzar.⁴ Perhaps a mekhasheif or mekhasheifah is taboo, to-eivah, because the profession is associated with foreign religions.

A sorcerer: : Choveir chaver

Both choveir and chaver come from the root verb chaver (חָבַר) = join. Normally, a choveir (חֺבֵר) is “one who joins”, and a chaver (חָבֶר) or chever (חֶבֶר) is a group of comrades, a company, a band, or a gang.

But lexicons give alternate meanings for words from that root when the context indicates magic, suggesting that the magic involves conjuring, or tying knots, or chanting spells, or charming animals who act as familiars. Only one biblical passage provides more definite information:

The Snake Charmer, by Charles Wilda, 1883

The wicked are alienated from the womb;

The liars go astray from birth.

They have venom like the venom of a snake,

Like a deaf cobra who closes its ears

So it will not hear the voice of a whisperer,

An expert choveir chavarim. (Psalm 58:4-5)

In this simile, a choveir is a snake charmer who fails—because the snake is so fixated on biting its victim that it turns a deaf ear to the spells the charmer is whispering. Wicked people, particularly liars, also turn a deaf ear to any instruction.

Why would snake charmers be taboo in Deuteronomy? Maybe they were associated with the snake in the Garden of Eden, who encourages the first woman to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Or maybe the problem was that other religions in the Ancient near East had snake-gods and religious symbols of snakes. Or maybe the bible discourages consulting any animal, because only humans are made in the image of God.

A necromancer: One who inquires of an ov or yidoni, or seeks the dead

The terms ov (אוֹב) and yidoni (יִדְּעֺנִי) usually appear together as synonyms.⁶ Both mean either a spirit of a dead person, or a necromancer who summons that spirit. The word yidoni comes from the verb yada (יָדַע) = know; and a dead spirit is assumed to know things that the living do not. The three references to ghosts in Leviticus are revealing.

Do not turn to the ovot or to the yidonim; do not seek them out, to become impure; I am God, your God. (Leviticus 19:31)

ovot (אוֹבוֹת) = plural of ov. Yidonim (יִדְּעֺנִים) = plural of yidoni.

Thus summoning a ghost makes people ritually impure, unable to serve God until they have been purified.

And the soul who turns to the ovot or to the yidonim to have illicit intercourse with them: I [God] will set my face against that soul and I will cut it off from among its people. (Leviticus 20:6)

The Hebrew Bible often calls worshiping other gods a act of prostitution, being unfaithful to the God of Israel. In this verse, consulting a ghost is also an act of infidelity.

And a man or a woman who has an ov or a yidoni must definitely be put to death by stoning; their bloodguilt is upon them. (Leviticus 20:27)

This sounds like a medium who calls up the same ghost repeatedly.

But in the one biblical story about someone who summons an ov, the identity of the ghost depends not on the medium, but on her employer.

And [the prophet] Samuel had died, and all Israel mourned for him, and he was buried in Ramah in his own town. And Saul had banished the ovot and the yidonim from the land. (1 Samuel 28:3)

When King Saul is facing a major battle with the Philistines, he sees the size of the Philistine camp and becomes afraid. At first he sticks to God’s rules, and asks for information only from God-approved sources.

Witch of Endor, by Adam Elsheimer, 17th c.

And Saul put a question to God, but God did not answer him, either by dreams or by the [high priest’s] oracular device or by prophets. Then Saul said to his attendants: “Seek out for me a woman who is a master of ov, and I will go to her and I will inquire through her.” And his attendants said to him: “Hey! A woman who is a master of ov is in Eyn Dor.” Then Saul disguised himself and put on different clothes, and he went, together with two men, and they came to the woman by night. And he said: “Please divine for me through an ov, and bring up for me the one whom I will say to you.” (1 Samuel 28:6-8)

The woman reminds him that King Saul made divination through an ov illegal. The disguised king reassures her. She asks him who to bring up from the dead, and he asks for Samuel.

Then the woman saw Samuel, and she shrieked in a loud voice and … said: “Why did you deceive me? You are Saul!” And the king said to her: “Do not be afraid. But what do you see?” And the woman said to Saul: “I see a god coming up from the ground.” Then he said to her: “What does he look like?” And she said: “An old man is rising up, and he is wrapped in a robe.” Then Saul knew that it was Samuel, and he bowed down to the ground and made obeisance. Then Samuel said to Saul: “Why have you bothered me, bringing me up?” (1 Samuel 28:12-15)

Saul explains. Then Samuel’s ghost says that God is giving the kingship to David, and Saul’s army will lose the battle. He blames Saul’s past disobedience in the war with Amalek for this outcome, and adds:

“And tomorrow you and your sons will be with me!” (1 Samuel 29:19)

In other words, they will be dead in Sheol underground, like Samuel.

Everything Samuel predicts comes true. But we do not know whether that is because he was God’s favorite prophet when he was alive, or because ghosts have secret knowledge.

The list of taboo occult practices in the book of Deuteronomy ends: “or one who seeks the dead”, but that description would cover necromancers who summon ovot or yidonim. Maybe the list ends that way to indicate that divination by speaking to the spirits of dead people is the ultimate insult to God.

Moses concludes:

Because anyone who does these things is to-avot; and on account of these to-avot, God, your god, is dispossessing them [the Canaanites] before you. You must be wholehearted with God, your god. Because these nations that you are taking possession of, they paid attention to meoneinim and to kesomim; but God, your god, did not set this out for you. God, your god, will establish for you a prophet from your midst, from your brothers, like myself. To him you should listen! (Deuteronomy 18:12-15)

To be “wholehearted with God”, the Israelites must avoid worshiping any other gods or engaging in Canaanite magic practices. They must not try to get foreknowledge through any divining practice that does not consult God, or through the familiars of animal charmers, or through consulting the spirits of the dead. If God will not tell you, through a prophet or a dream or a God-dependent oracular practice, then you should not seek to know. Because adopting a foreign occult practice is tantamount to adopting a foreign religious practice. And any substitute for God is taboo, to-eivah.

Humans are by nature anxious about the future. We want to know what will happen so we can make choices that turn out well for us. (Meanwhile, other people are making choices that change the future, but few people think of that.)

What we learn by observation and reason, and what we are told by experts or authority figures, is not enough to satisfy many of us. We want inside information.

Some people today still try to get inside information through magic. The craze for Ouija boards has faded, but there are still mediums for the dead, palm readers, and tarot card readers. Some still look for omens in tea leaves and crystal balls.

Is there any harm in these practices? Perhaps not, if we use them once in a while for entertainment. But if we believe we can use occult practices to manipulate our own futures, we distract ourselves from what we should really be doing with our lives. When we spend time and energy on indirect means to selfish ends, we have less time for the truly good things in life: enjoying creation, being kind to other humans, and improving our world.

The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon.
Other examples include Exodus 7:11, Isaiah 47:9-13, Jeremiah 27:9, and Daniel 2:2.
2 Chronicles 33:6.
Pharaoh in Exodus 7:11, Queen Jezebel in 2 Kings 9:22, and King Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 2:2.
The snake “Python” in made oracular pronouncements in ancient Greek mythology. In Egyptian religion, the uraeus, a winged cobra, protects the pharaoh; but the giant snake Apophis attacks the sun-god every night as he sails underground to rise again in the east. And archaeologists have found artifacts suggesting religious roles for snakes and snake-gods throughout Mesopotamia and the region known as Canaan.
The only exception is one reference in Job 32:19 to an ov as a wineskin.

Shoftim: Is Magic Abominable?— Part 1

Humans have always wanted to improve their odds for a good future. In biblical times, people stored extra grain in case next year’s crop was bad; today we can put part of our paycheck into savings. In biblical times, people followed religious rules so God would not smite them with disease; today we can get vaccinations.

And some people have always tried to beat the odds with occult practices, practices that others believe are either ridiculous acts or religious violations.

This week’s Torah portion, Shoftim (Deuteronomy 16:18-21:9), includes an instruction that denounces nine occult practices, five of which were performed in order to divine the future. That passage begins:

When you enter the land that God, your god, is giving to you, you must not learn to act according to the to-avot of those nations. (Deuteronomy/Devarim 18:9)

to-avot (תּוֹעֲבֺת) = plural of to-eivah (תּוֹעֵבָה) = taboo; an abomination, a foreign perversion, a custom in one culture that is prohibited in another culture.

Biblical Hebrew uses the word to-eivah almost like the English word “taboo” (which comes from the Tongan word tabu = set apart, forbidden). Actions (or topics of conversation) that are to-eivah in the bible and taboo in English usage are prohibited because they violate social, moral, or religious norms. These violations incite strong negative emotional reactions. In the bible either God, or people belonging to a certain religious or ethnic group might react with visceral repugnance. (See my post Shoftim: Abominable.)

Moses uses the word to-eivah sixteen times in the book of Deuteronomy, as he forbids a variety of activities that violate Israelite cultural, moral, or religious norms. Half of these verses explicitly refer to worshiping Canaanite gods, including two verses in the Torah portion Shoftim.¹ This week’s Torah portion also calls sacrificing a defective animal to the God of Israel to-eivah.²

Then there are two verses in the portion Shoftim that forbid the Israelites to copy the to-avot of the Canaanites in the land they are about to conquer.³ These two verses bracket a list of nine types of practitioners of abhorrent magic:

Since many of the Hebrew words are almost untranslatable, we will consider one category at a time. Part 1 this week will examine making your offspring cross the fire, then three different types of divination. Part 2 next week will examine the sorcery of a mekhasheif and a choveir, then three types of necromancy.

One who makes his son or daughter cross the fire

Offering to Molech, Bible Pictures by Charles Foster, 1897

The first to-eivah practice is making your son or daughter “go across through the fire”. According to the books of Leviticus, 1 Kings, Jeremiah, and 2 Chronicles, some Israelites gave their offspring to an Ammonite god called Milkom or Molekh in a ritual that included crossing through fire. This took place in the Valley of Ben-Hinom, just outside the southern wall of the city of Jerusalem.⁴

It is not clear whether this ritual was a dramatic initiation ceremony, an ordeal by fire that could be survived, or a form of human sacrifice. Whatever happened, making your offspring pass through the fire would be to-eivah on religious grounds, since God prohibits the worship of idols and/or other gods throughout the bible, comparing it to prostitution and finding it abominable.

A diviner: Koseim

Next Moses lists three types of people who are to-eivah because they engage in divination. The first is a:

koseim kesomim (קֺסֵם קְסָמִים) = diviner of divinations. (The root verb is kasam, קָסַם = practice divination.)

What type of divinations are kesomim? Although words from the root kasam appear 33 times in the Hebrew Bible, there is only one verse that offers any clues about how it is done. In this verse, God describes the king of Babylon wondering whether to send his army to conquer the city of Rabah in Ammon, or the city of Jerusalem in Judah. God tells the prophet Ezekiel:

For the king of Babylon stood at a fork in the road, at the starting point of the two roads, liksam kesem; he shook arrows, he inquired of figurines, he looked into a liver [the organ in an animal]. (Ezekiel 21:26)

liksam (לִקְסָם) = to divine.

kesem (קֶסֶם) = a divination (singular of kesomim).

When Moses refers to kesomim in this week’s Torah portion, the divination technique might be any of these three.

A diviner: Meonein

Meonein (מְעוֹנֵן) = diviner. The verb is onein (עוֹנֵן) = cause something to appear, conjure up a spirit, practice magic. This verb is closely related to the noun anan (עָנָן) = cloud. Did a meonein divine the future by reading clouds? Or by conjuring spirits?

The only hint in the bible is that first Isaiah denounces the Israelites for practicing magic including “onenim like the Philistines”. (Isaiah 2:6)

onenim (עֺנְנִים) = making things appear. (A plural participle form of onein.)

But we do not know what sort of things the Philistines made appear, or how they did it.

A diviner: Menacheish

Egyptian Drinking Cup, 15th century B.C.E.

Menacheish (מְנַחֵשׁ) = diviner. The verb is nachash (נַחַשׁ) = practice divination. This verb is closely related to the noun nachash (נָחַשׁ) = snake. In ancient Greece, female diviners went into trances with the help of snake venom. We do not know if there was a similar practice in Canaan.

When Joseph is a viceroy of Egypt in the book of Genesis, he pretends to his brothers that he uses a silver goblet for divination, using the phrase nacheish yenacheish (נַחֵשׁ יְנַחֵשׁ) = “he definitely does divination”.⁵ This could mean that a menacheish did divination by reading the dregs in a cup—if it does not mean divination by drinking something hallucinogenic.

Not all divination is to-eivah

Although these three forms of divination are to-avot, the Hebrew Bible does not object to divination per se. Casting lots and answering yes-or-no questions using two objects in a priest’s vestments both win the bible’s wholehearted approval—when they are done under the right circumstances. For example, on Yom Kippur, the high priest is required to place lots on the heads two identical goats in the temple courtyard.

And Aaron must place goralot on the two hairy goats, one goral marked for God, and one goral for Azazeil. (Leviticus 16:8)

goralot (גֺּרָלוֹת) = plural of goral (גּוֹרָל) = a lot, something drawn from a container or tossed onto a marked surface in order to determine a decision; an allotted portion.

According to the Talmud, the two goralot used on Yom Kippur were made out of boxwood at first, then of gold.⁶ One was engraved with the name of God, and one with the name Azazeil. The high priest drew them out of an urn and placed one on each goat’s head. The goat that got the goral with God’s name on it was slaughtered, and its blood sprinkled in the Holy of Holies. The goat that got the goral with Azazeil on it was sent off into the wilderness after the high priest had transferred the sins of the Israelites to the “scapegoat”.⁷

After the Israelites conquer much of Canaan in the book of Joshua, Joshua casts lots to allocate territories to the seven tribes that have not yet claimed land, and parcels of land to the clans within each tribe.⁸ The word for “lot” is goral here, as well. The goralot are cast to match the tribes or clans to written descriptions of the lands.

Whether goralot were gold tokens or pebbles, what mattered was that no human being could determine the outcome of drawing or throwing lots. An outcome that many modern people would call random was, in the Hebrew Bible, a clear sign of God’s choice.

Another biblically approved method of divination was consulting the urim and tumim in the inside pocket of the high priest’s breast-piece, a key item in his elaborate vestments. These two mysterious objects are introduced in the book of Exodus, when God describes the vestments to Moses.

And you must place in the breast-piece of the rulings the urim and the tumim, and they will be over Aaron’s heart when he comes before God. (Exodus 28:29-30)

urim (אוּרִים) = an item in the pocket of the breast-piece. All we know is that is was small enough to fit, and that the word urim may—or may not—be related to the verb or (אוֹר) = become bright, illuminate.

tumim (תֻּמִּים) = an item in the pocket of the breast-piece. All we know is that is was small enough to fit, and that the word tumim may—or may not—be related to the adjective tamim (תָּמִם) = whole, complete, intact, unblemished, honest, perfect.

There are no clues in the Hebrew Bible about what the urim or the tumim look like, or how the high priest used them.

The book of Numbers says that when Joshua leads the Israelites to conquer Canaan, the high priest Elazar should consult the urim and tumim in front of God, and tell Joshua when to go out to battle and when to return.⁹ God will communicate through these objects.

In the first book of Samuel, King Saul tries, and fails, to get an answer from the urim about his upcoming battle against the Philistines.

And Saul saw the camp of the Philistines, and he was afraid and his heart trembled very much. Then Saul inquired of God, but God did not answer, either through dreams, or through the urim, or through prophets. (1 Samuel 28:5-6)

These inquiries are perfectly acceptable ways to ask God about the future. Saul’s unacceptable behavior is when he sneaks off to the “witch of Endor”, a woman who inquires of the dead, and asks her to raise the ghost of the deceased prophet Samuel. We will look into that story next week, in Shoftim: Is Magic Abominable?—Part 2, when we consider the last five kinds of magic in Moses’ list of occult practices that are to-avot.

In the portion Shoftim: Deuteronomy 17:4 and 20:18. In other portions of the book: Deuteronomy 7:25, 7:26, 12:31 (including offering children in fire to other gods), 13:15, 27:15, and 32:16.
Deuteronomy 17:1.
Deuteronomy 18:9 (above) and Deuteronomy 18:12.
Leviticus 18:21, 20:2; 1 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 7:30-31, 32:34-35; 2 Chronicles 28:1-3, 33:5-6. See my post Acharey Mot & Kedoshim: Fire of the Molekh.
Genesis 44:5 and 44:15.
Talmud Yerushalmi, Yoma 3:7.
Leviticus 16:5-10; . See my post Acharey Mot: Azazeil.
Joshua 18:6-20:51.
Numbers 27:21.

Re-eih & Isaiah: Rights of the Poor

Let the poor glean the leftovers from your harvest. If a debtor pawns their only cloak to you, return it at night so they can sleep. That’s the way the books of Exodus and Leviticus address poverty.¹

But what if scraps are not enough?

Two laws given in this week’s Torah portion, Rei-eh (Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17), treat the rights of the poor with new seriousness. This serious approach becomes impassioned in second Isaiah—not in this week’s Haftarah of Consolation (the third in the series of seven readings from Isaiah), but in the haftarah for Yom Kippur six weeks from now.

Re-eih: Debt relief

Yet there will not be among you an evyon, because God will definitely bless you in the land that God, your God, is giving to you to hold as a possession—if only you really listen to the voice of God, your God, and take care to do all these commands that I command today. (Deuteronomy 15:4-5)

evyon (אֶבְיוֹן) = pauper, needy person, impoverished person.

What if people who suffer a run of bad luck become so poor they cannot even make payments on their debts?

A modern solution is to convict and imprison them—not just in Britain during the time of Charles Dickens, but in the United States today. When these debtors they have served their prison term, they are released—with no job, no new skills, and no money or property to make a fresh start. Unless someone helps them privately, they are likely to end up in debtor’s prison again.

The Torah portion Rei-eh has two more permanent solutions to the problem. The first is a time limit on indebtedness.

At the end of every seven years you must do shmitah. And this is the procedure of the shmitah: every owner of a loan in his hand, which he has loaned to his fellow, shamot. He must not press his fellow or his kinsman [for payment], since the shmitah of God has been proclaimed. (Deuteronomy 15:1-2)

shmitah (שְׁמִטָּה) = remission (cancellation) of debts. (From the root verb shamat, שָׁמַט = drop, let fall, release.)

shamot (שָׁמוֹט) = he must drop, let fall, release, remit.

In other words, every seventh year, the shmitah year, all debts are canceled. A business arrangement that includes repayment of a loan is written to take this seven-year pattern into account. But those who incurred debts because of poverty, and have not been able to pay off their debts in seven years, get relief.

In the books of Exodus and Leviticus, the seventh year is merely when farmland must lie fallow and rest for a year. During that year, paupers as well as the owner’s household may eat whatever food the land produces without cultivation; but no debts are remitted.² Leviticus also provides a form of relief from poverty every fiftieth year, with a rule that families who had to sell their ancestral land get it back without payment.³ Then, with luck, they can make a living by farming their land again.

But these approaches only nibble around the edge of the problem of poverty. Deuteronomy takes a big step forward with its seven-year limit on debt.

Re-eih: Debt slavery

The second solution to chronic poverty in the portion Rei-eh concerns the institution of debt slavery.

Exodus declares that a male debt slave—a man who sold himself because he could not pay his debt any other way—must be freed after six years of service (unless the slave himself then signs up for life). But if a man sells his daughter as a slave, she is not freed unless a judge rules that her owner deprived her of food, clothing, or sex. Debt slaves of both genders are freed if their owner hits them and ruins an eye or knocks out a tooth.⁴

Leviticus adds that those who make loans to poor citizens may not charge interest. If impoverished borrowers cannot pay off their debts they can be taken as debt slaves, but they must be treated like employees, as well as being given room and board. However, debt slaves and their children must be freed only in the fiftieth year (if they live that long), the yoveil or “jubilee” year when all lands revert to the families of their original owners at the founding of the kingdom of Israel.⁵

These partial solutions are not enough, according to Deuteronomy. This week’s Torah portion imagines two scenarios in which these rules in Exodus and Leviticus do not help the poor at all.

For one thing, if the shmittah year is coming right up, lenders might refuse to make any further loans, and the poor might starve. So the portion Re-eih says:

If there is an evyon among you … you must not harden your heart and you must not draw shut your hand against your brother the evyon. Instead you must definitely open your hand to him and you must definitely pledge to him enough [to make up for] his lack that he lacks. Watch yourself, lest you have a wicked thought saying “The seventh year, the year of the shmitah, is approaching,” and you are bad to your poor, the evyon among your brothers, and do not give to him! (Deuteronomy 15:7-9)

Another problem is that if a debt slave is freed in the seventh year of service, he will be like American debtors today who finish their prison terms but have no job nor money nor property to make a fresh start. So this week’s Torah portion decrees:

When your brother is sold to you, a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, then he will serve you six years, and in the seventh year you must send him out free from beside you. And when you send him out free from beside you, you must not send him out empty-handed. You must definitely outfit him from your flock and from your threshing floor and from your wine-vat, your blessing which God, your God, has given you. (Deuteronomy 15:12-14)

This is an improvement over Exodus, since women must also be freed, and an improvement over Leviticus, since nobody has to be a debt slave for more than seven years. And the provision in this week’s portion of Deuteronomy also provides the freed slaves with products to sell or eat until they find employment.

Second Isaiah: Doing more

At first the desperately poor are mentioned in second Isaiah only in a promise that God will take care of them.

The poor and the evyonim

Are seeking water, and there is none.

Their tongue is dry with thirst.

I, God will answer them.

The God of Israeli will not forsake them.

I will open up streams on bare hills … (Isaiah 41:17-18)

evyonim (אֶבְיוֹנִים) = plural of evyon.

This week’s haftarah of Consolation, Isaiah 54:1-55:5, returns to second Isaiah’s continuing focus on motivating the Israelites in Babylon to go back to Jerusalem. But the prophet bursts into a rousing call for rescuing and embracing the poor in the haftarah for fast day of Yom Kippur.

Is the fast I prefer like this:

A day of mortifying a human’s appetite?

Is it to bow one’s head like a reed,

And go out in sackcloth and ashes?

Is it this you call a fast,

A day pleasing to Y-H-V-H?

Isn’t this is the fast I prefer:

Opening the shackles of wickedness,

Untying the bonds of the yoke,

And sending out the downtrodden free,

And breaking off every yoke?

Isn’t it offering your bread to the hungry,

And bringing the homeless poor into your house?

When you see the naked, then clothe him,

And do not ignore your own flesh!

That is when your light will break forth like the dawn …

That is when you call and Y-H-V-H will answer. (Isaiah 58:5-9)

The laws in this week’s Torah portion, Re-eih, cancel all debts at the end of seven years, free all debt slaves, and require the lender-owner to send them off with a grubstake. This is an improvement over the laws in Exodus, Leviticus, and the United States.

Then Isaiah 58 urges people to go beyond the law, and do even more to rescue the impoverished: feed them, clothe them, let them sleep in your own house! And stop treating your slaves or employees like dirt instead of human beings!

It is a tall order for private individuals, and we can only do so much. But in a modern democracy, we can also campaign and vote to help the poverty-stricken, instead of pretending that all their woes are their own fault and they deserve to die. We can reform our government and dedicate our joint resources to preventing sudden misfortune from driving people into unpayable debts, to habilitating those who resort to drugs in despair, to making sure every human being has food and health care.

The Torah portion Re-eih says:

However, there should be no evyon among you, since Y-H-V-H will certainly bless you in the land that Y-H-V-H, your God, is giving to you. (Deuteronomy 15:4)

We, too, live in a land of plenty; there should be no evyon among us.

Exodus 22:24, 23:6, 23:11; Leviticus 19:10, 23:22.
Exodus 23:10-11 and Leviticus 25:2-7.
Leviticus 25:8-24.
Exodus 21:2-11, 21:26-27.
Leviticus 25:35-43.

Haftarat Eikev—Isaiah: Homesick or Scared

My lord God opened my ears,
          And I, I did not rebel;
          I did not shrink back.
I gave my back to floggers,
          And my cheeks to [beard-] pullers.
I did not hide my face
          From shaming and spittle. (Isaiah 50:5-6)

Isaiah Accepts Mockery Because of His Faith, by Augustin Hirschvogel, 1549

Many prophets in the Hebrew Bible report being abused because people do not want to hear their message—usually that if they don’t stop worshiping idols and cheating the poor, God will punish them. The unnamed prophet known as “second Isaiah” has a different message, but it, too, is unpopular.

This prophet probably wrote Isaiah chapters 40-66 after the Persian emperor Cyrus took Babylonia in 539 B.C.E., which was about 47 years after the Babylonians burned down Jerusalem and finished deporting the survivors to their own capital. Cyrus instituted a policy allowing his new subjects to return to their homelands, rebuild their temples, and engage in local self-rule. Some of the exiles from Jerusalem did return, under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah. But many more remained in Babylon, where life was not bad under the Persians.

Second Isaiah tries to persuade all the exiles to return—especially in the passages known as the seven “Haftarot of Consolation”, which Jews read at Shabbat services between Tisha Be-Av (the annual day of mourning for the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in in 586 B.C.E.) and Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish new year).

This week’s haftarah, Isaiah 49:14-51:3, is the second “Haftarah of Consolation”. Second Isaiah offers two different reasons why the people from Judah should abandon their new lives in Babylon and return to Jerusalem—and then he reports that his audience is abusing him.

First reason to return: Homesickness

At the beginning of the second Haftarah of Consolation, second Isaiah personifies “Zion”: the name of a hill in Jerusalem that is often used poetically to refer to the whole city, or even all of Judah. He depicts Zion as the mother of the Judahites in Babylon, forlorn because she has lost her children. She is also forlorn because she thinks she has lost her God. Zion says:

"God has forsaken me,
          My lord shekheichani!" (Isaiah 49:14)

shekheichani (שְׁכֵחָנִי) = has wiped out all memory of me. (A piel form of the verb shakhach, שָׁכַח = forget.)

God replies to Zion:

"Does a woman tishkach the baby she bore,
          Lose compassion for the child of her womb?
Even if tishkachnah,
          I myself, lo eshkacheikh.
Hey, I have engraved you on my own palms.
          Your walls are always in front of me.
Your children hasten.
          Those who ravaged and ruined you will leave." (Isaiah 49:15-19)

tishkach (תִשְׁכַּח) = she forgets. (A kal form of shakhach.)

tishkachnah (תִשְׁכָּחְנָה) = she would forget her. (A kal form of shakhach.)

lo eshkacheikh (לֺא אֶשְׁכָּחֵךְ) = I would not forget you. (lo = not + a kal form of shakhach.)

When Zion’s children arrive, God says, she will be crowded with settlers. Furthermore, her children will be tended and returned by the kings of foreign nations—an allusion to the rulers of the new Persian empire.

"And they will bring your sons in their bosoms,
          And your daughters they will carry on their shoulders.
Kings will be your babysitters,
          And their princesses will be your wet-nurses." (Isaiah 49:22-23)

Picturing the land of Zion as a mother longing for her missing children might soften the hearts of the exiles living in Babylon. (See my post: Haftarat Eikev—Isaiah: Abandonment or Yearning?) If they believe their country misses them, they might discover they miss their country. And homesickness can be a strong motivator.

Then second Isaiah’s focus shifts to the estrangement between Zion and God.

Second reason to return: Safety in obedience

Addressing the Judahite expatriates, the children of Zion, second Isaiah reports:

Thus said God:
"Where is the divorce document of your mother, whom I sent away?
          And to which of my creditors did I sell you?
Hey, you were sold because of your sins,
          And your mother was sent away because of your revolts." (Isaiah 50:1)

Several prophets compare the relationship between God and the Israelites to a marriage in which the wife (Israel) cheats on her husband (God). They imagine God divorcing Israel by sending her out of the house, then welcoming her back later.¹ Sometimes the unfaithful wife stands for the Israelites; sometimes the Israelites are called the children of the unfaithful wife.

In second Isaiah’s iteration of this analogy, being “sent away” expresses both the metaphorical divorce and the actual relocation of the Israelites from Judah to Babylon.

Many prophets in the Hebrew Bible predict that if the Israelites persist in worshiping other gods and/or being unethical to the poor, God will punish them by granting foreign armies victory in battle. Here, second Isaiah reports that God carried out that punishment—and then some. After the Babylonian army devasted Judah, God divorced Israel and sold her into slavery.

There is no divorce document, and God has no creditors to pay off by selling a family member as a slave. God simply reacted to the sins and revolts of the Judahites, which were so bad they deserved two more punishments after military defeat: exile and slavery under the Babylonians.

But now things have changed; the Persians have taken over the empire, and the people deported from Judah are no longer slaves. The punishment has ended, and God wants them back. God asks:

"Why, when I came, was nobody there?
          I called, and nobody answered!" (Isaiah 50:2)

If second Isaiah had stopped there, perhaps the Judahite expatriates would have wondered if their God loved them after all. After all, children who are punished need to believe that Daddy still loves them.

Instead, the prophet returns to the theory in the first Haftarah of Consolation that the Israelites are reluctant to return to Jerusalem because they doubt God is powerful enough to rescue them and restore Jerusalem. (See my post: Haftarat Va-etchanan—Isaiah: Faith in the Creator.) God demands:

"Is my hand really too short to redeem?
          And is there no power in it to rescue?
Hey, when I rebuke, I dry up the sea!
          I turn rivers into desert!
The fish stink where there is no water,
          And they are dead of thirst.
I clothe the skies in black,
          And turn their robes to sackcloth!" (Isaiah 50:2-3)

Uh-oh. The ancient Israelites enjoyed images of God destroying their enemies in various gory ways, judging by other poetry in the Hebrew Bible.³ But images of God drying up rivers and turning the sky into black sackcloth are not so thrilling. What kind of God destroys nature? Is it the same kind of God who destroyed God’s own people in Jerusalem?

According to second Isaiah and Jeremiah, it was all God’s punishment: that the common people starved to death during the two-year siege; that the Babylonians burned down the temple, the palace, and every house in Jerusalem; that the remaining residents (those who had not died of starvation or been deported to Babylon during previous siege) were killed or marched off into exile, leaving only the poorest to work as field hands; and that the Judahites in Babylon were treated like slaves.² Did they really deserve all that? Or was it a divine overreaction?

Even if God does want them back now, how could they be sure God would not destroy them again?

Children whose father had starved them, destroyed all their belongings, and sold them as slaves, might console themselves with the belief that the punishment was all their own fault, and their father really loved them underneath. Psychologically, it is easier for the powerless to blame themselves than to blame the ruler of their universe. But if a different adult liberated those children and took them into a benign household, the way the Persians did to the Judahites in Babylon, the children might arrive at a different opinion.

Then they would not want to go back God’s house. It would be safer to stay in Babylon under the Persians.

Back to the first reason: Homesickness

Right after second Isaiah delivers God’s disturbing rant about power, he switches to the aside in which he declares he is true to God’s message even though the Judahite expatriates are flogging and spitting on him. It does not occur to the prophet that their abuse might be a reaction to being urged to return to a God of desertification and mourning. Instead he tells them to fear and trust God in the darkness, instead of trying to see by kindling their own lights.⁴

The haftarah ends with a positive image, one that returns to the draw of homesickness and the personification of the land of Zion as a woman feeling forsaken by her children.

For God has comforted Zion,
          Comforted all her ruins.
And [God] has made her wilderness like Eden,
          And her desert like the garden of God.
          Thanksgiving and the sound of singing! (Isaiah 51:3)

However God treated the people of Jerusalem, God cannot forget the city. So God uses God’s vast power not for destruction, but to turn the wasteland into a garden. And, the prophet’s listeners would remember, Zion cannot forget her missing children. When Jerusalem is like the Garden of Eden, those who return to her will be glad and thankful.

Going home to Jerusalem sounds better now.

Hosea 2, Jeremiah 3:1-10, and Ezekiel 16.
According to 2 Kings 25:1-21.
And by God’s promise to Zion in this haftarah: “I myself will contend with your contender/And I myself will rescue your children./And I will make your oppressors eat their own flesh/And like grape juice their own blood will make them drunk.” (Isaiah 49:25-26)
Isaiah 50:10-11.

Haftarat Va-etchanan—Isaiah: Faith in the Creator

After grief, consolation. Every year, on the day of Tisha Be-Av, Jews engage in ritual mourning for the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. The shabbat after Tisha Be-Av, the haftarah reading from the Prophets (Isaiah 40:1-26) begins:

“Comfort, comfort my people,”

Says your God. (Isaiah 40:1)

These are the words of “second Isaiah”, the unknown prophet whose words begin with chapter 40 in the book of Isaiah.¹ He (or she) offers comfort by promising that God will rescue the Israelites deported to Babylonia, return them to their own land, and make Jerusalem glorious again.² Then second Isaiah reminds the exiles that their God is powerful enough to do the job.

The Tent-Maker

Do you not know?

Have you not listened?

Creation, doors of The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Heironymus Bosch, 15th century

Have you not been told from the beginning?

Have you not discerned the earth’s foundation?

[By] the one who sits enthroned above the disk of the earth,

And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;

The one who spreads out shamayim like gauze,

And stretches them out like a tent to dwell in. (Isaiah 40:21-22)

shamayim (שָׁמַיִם) = heavens, skies, firmament. (Always in the plural form, indicated by the suffix -im, or perhaps in the duplex form, in which the suffix -ayim indicates a pair.)

Let us take these metaphors one line at a time.

[By] the one who sits enthroned above the disk of the earth

When God is not in the sanctuary the Israelites built for God on earth, God is often described as enthroned in the shamayim, the heavens. From a vantage point that includes most of the horizon, the earth does look like a circular disk, and the sky looks like a dome.

And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers

To someone sitting at the top of the sky, human beings down on earth would indeed look tiny. The scouts in the book of Numbers use the same word for grasshoppers, chagavim (חֲגָבִים), to describe how they thought they looked to the giant people in Canaan.³ The grasshopper simile is an exaggeration for giants, who would be no more than twice as tall as the scouts. But it is an understatement for God, who looks down from the clouds and stars.

The one who spreads out shamayim like gauze

Clouds do look like gauze. The skies cannot be made entirely out of clouds, since there are also clear days. But poetry does not have to be technically accurate.

And stretches them out like a tent to dwell in

On a cloudy day the dome of the sky might look like the inside of a gigantic tent—which is a type of home. The description of God in a tent of sky is similar to Psalm 104, which begins:

May my soul bless God!

God, my god, you are very great.

You are clothed in majesty and splendor,

Wrapped in light like a robe,

Spreading out shamayim like tent-fabric. (Psalm 104:1-2)

The Master Gardener

After second Isaiah shows us God enthroned high in the sky—which God created in the first place—the prophet points out that compared to God, even the most powerful human beings are less important than grasshoppers. God is:

The one who appoints princes to nothingness,

Who makes judges of the earth tohu … (Isaiah 40:24)

tohu (תֺהוּ) = unreality; emptiness; chaos, confusion; worthlessness.

Here tohu means as insignificant as a “nothing”.

The word tohu appears 20 times in the Hebrew Bible. The most well-known appearance is in the first sentence of the first creation story in Genesis:

In a beginning, God created the shamayim and the earth, and the earth was tohu vavohu … (Genesis 1:1-2)

vavohu (וָבֺהוּ) = a rhyming addition to tohu used for emphasis. (It never appears except in “tohu vavohu”, and it does not add another shade of meaning.)

Before God begins creating the world (the heavens and earth) by saying “Let light be!”, there is tohu: a confused chaos without reality. God finds the state of tohu worthless, and therefore introduces order into the world.

Although the word tohu is a synonym for “nothingness” in Isaiah 40:24: “The one who appoints princes to nothingness, Who makes judges of the earth tohu”, the prophet’s audience would also remember the word tohu in Genesis, and think of those dignitaries as confused and worthless, as well as nothing compared to God.

After saying that God makes the princes and judges of the world mere tohu, the prophet finishes verse 4:24 with a metaphor from the plant world:

Job’s Tears (millet), by Leonardo da Vinci, 15th century

Hardly are they planted,

Hardly are they sown

Hardly have they rooted in the earth,

When [God] blows on them and they wither,

And the gale carries them off like chaff. (Isaiah 40:24)

From God’s point of view, a century is less than a month. But when God notices that a noxious empire has sprouted on earth, God pulls it out like a weed and it vanishes, carried off in the wind like chaff.

The Shepherd

The haftarah ends by declaring that God is so powerful, God even controls the “host” in the heavens.

“Then to whom can you liken me, so I can be compared?”

Says the Holy One.

Raise your eyes high and see:

Who created these?

The one who is mustering tzeva-am by number,

Who calls each by name.

Through [God’s] abundant power and might,

Not one is missing. (Isaiah 40:25)

tzeva-am (צְבָאָם) their “host”; tzava (צָבָא) = army, host, large organized force. (The tzeva of God in the Hebrew Bible seems to be either the stars and other heavenly bodies, or a group of lesser gods under God’s command, or both.)

Surely a God powerful enough to create the stars—or subordinate gods—will have no trouble returning the exiled Israelites to Jerusalem, and making their city flourish again.

And if God keeps track of every star in the sky, so not one is missing, perhaps God also keeps track of us grasshoppers down on earth.

The purpose of second Isaiah’s exhortation in this week’s haftarah is to encourage the exiled Israelites to return to Jerusalem after the fall of the Babylonian Empire. The Persian emperor Cyrus took Babylon in 539 B.C.E., only 47 years after the fall of Jerusalem, and instituted a policy allowing deportees to return to their homelands, rebuild their temples, and engage in local self-rule.

Why would the exiles need second Isaiah’s encouragement to return to Jerusalem, in these circumstances?

One answer is that they no longer believe their God is both powerful and on their side. After all, they or their parents remember when the Babylonian Army conquered all of Judah, burned down Jerusalem and its temple, deported their leading citizens, and left the rest (except for a puppet government) to starve. And their God did not lift a finger against their enemy.

During the siege of Jerusalem, the prophet Jeremiah insisted that God was collectively punishing the Israelites because too many of them they were unethical and worshiped other gods. Probably some Israelites considered the punishment out of proportion compared to the crime.

All the prophets promised that God would rescue and reward them if they worshiped only their own God, and refrained from unethical deeds such as cheating, stealing, bribing, and oppressing the poor. But could the Israelites reform enough to satisfy God? And could they count on their neighbors and leaders to do the same?

Life in Babylonia was not that bad, especially after the reasonable Persians took over. Why risk returning to Jerusalem? Even if they believe God has the power to reward them, why depend on such a touchy God?

“First Isaiah”, Isaiah son of Amotz in Isaiah chapters 1-39, lived in the 8^th century B.C.E. during the Assyrian attack on Jerusalem. “Second Isaiah” lived in the 6^th century B.C.E. during the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the subsequent exile of its citizens in Babylonia.
See my blog post: Haftarat Va-etchannan—Isaiah: How to Comfort Yourself.
Numbers 13:33. See my post: Shelach Lekha: Who Is Stronger.

Haftarat Devarim—Isaiah: Unconsidered Power

How do you mourn a national disaster? Do you weep? Do you ask why it happened? Do you find someone to blame?

Next week Jews will observe Tisha Be-Av, the annual day of mourning for the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Babylonian army in 586 B.C.E.¹ On Tisha Be-Av we read the book of Lamentations/Eykhah, five poems that grieve over Jerusalem. The book begins:

Weeping Woman with Baskets, by Vincent van Gogh

Eykhah! She sits alone,

The city once great with people.

She is like a widow … (Lamentations 1:1)

The cry eykhah, “Oh, how can it be?”, also appears in both readings on the shabbat before Tisha Be-Av: the Torah portion Devarim, which opens the book of Deuteronomy, and the haftarah from the Prophets, Isaiah 1:1-27. (See my post: Devarim, Isaiah, & Lamentations: Desperation.) Both the beginning of Isaiah and the book of Lamentations express desperate amazement that the city of Jerusalem could be destroyed.

How could it be? Why would it happen? Who is to blame?

Isaiah’s poetic prophecy warns the men of Judah that if they do not reform, the Assyrians who have been destroying the countryside will destroy the capital itself. In fact, the army of King Sennacherib of Assyria did besiege Jerusalem in 701 B.C.E., but withdrew without taking the city.) The book of Lamentations is set shortly after the army of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia burned down Jerusalem in in 586 B.C.E. Yet for both Isaiah and Lamentations, the enemy army is only the immediate cause of the destruction. The proximate cause is that God arranged it all as a punishment because the Israelites in power persisted in disobeying God. And in this week’s haftarah, Isaiah states what kind of disobedience deserves such severe punishment.

The first message from God that Isaiah communicates compares the people of Judah to children who refuse to heed their parents.

Listen, heavens, and use [your] ears, earth,

Because God has spoken:

“I raised children, and I elevated them;

          And they? They rebel against me!

An ox knows his owner,

And a donkey the feeding-trough of his master.

Israel does not know;

My people have not hitbonan.” (Isaiah 1:2-3)

hitbonan (הִתְבּוֹנָן)= paid attention, considered, had insight. (A form of the root verb bin, בִּין = notice, heed, consider, understand.)

The ox is the most knowledgeable animal in these verses because it recognizes its owner. Next comes the donkey, which at least recognizes the place where its owner provides nourishment. Last come the Israelites, who do not even recognize that someone has been taking care of them. The only reason for their ignorance is that they have not bothered to pay attention.

The widely-quoted commentator Rashi imagined God thinking: “Even after I took them out of Egypt and fed them the manna and called them ‘My people, the children of Israel,’ they did not consider even as a donkey [does]!”²

In the book of Genesis, God elevates human beings above other animals by endowing us with the intelligence to consider, analyze, and understand, as well as the desire to distinguish between good and bad. Thus, like all humans, the Israelites of Judah have the God-given ability to figure out that God is their owner, sustainer, and parent. But they do not take the trouble to think about it.

Isaiah says God views this willful ignorance as rebellion, not laziness. The Judahites “heavy with iniquity” and scorn God.³ The only thing that keeps Judah from being like Sodom and Gomorrah, Isaiah reports, is that God has not completed the destruction. Although the rest of Judah has become a wasteland, Jerusalem remains intact—so far.

Next Isaiah addresses the guilty Judahites as “chieftains of Sodom” and “people of Gomorrah”, and tells them what they have been doing wrong.

“Why do I need all your slaughter-offerings?”

Says God.

“I am sated with burnt offerings of rams

And the fat of fattened cattle;

And the blood of bulls and lambs and goats

I do not desire. (Isaiah 1:11)

What? Slaughter-offerings, especially burnt offerings, are essential rituals for serving God throughout the Torah, as essential as prayers are in services today. Moses is always quoting God’s orders for various animal sacrifices. Why would God suddenly tell the prophet Isaiah that they are no longer wanted?

Rashi explained that God only rejects these sacrifices if they are made by wicked people, citing Proverbs:

The slaughter-offering of the wicked one is abominable,

Even more because he brings it with cunning intent. (Proverbs 21:27)

Isaiah adds that God does not even want oblations, incense, or observances for the shabbat or for holy days from these people.⁴ Even prayers are unacceptable:

Spreading palms: Hezekiah’s Prayer, by Rodoph Schofer, 1929

“And when you spread out your palms,

I avert my eyes from you.

Even if you pray at length

I am not listening.

Your hands are full of bloodshed! (Isaiah 1:15)

In other words, God does not listen to the prayers of murderers. In the next two verses, we learn about some other crimes that God finds revolting.

Wash, cleanse yourselves!

Take away your evil deeds from in front of my eyes.

Stop doing evil!

Learn to do good.

Seek just laws.

Bring good fortune to the oppressed.

Defend the fatherless child.

Argue the case of the widow. (Isaiah 1:16-17)

We can assume that God is not disgusted with the prayers or the small burnt offerings of the oppressed, the fatherless child, or the widow. The evildoers whom God despises are those who pervert justice and oppress the powerless. These selfish and powerful people have not considered (hitbonan) what God really wants from them. They believe they can satisfy God by going through the prescribed rituals, regardless of how they treat their fellow Judahites. They do not bother to think about right and wrong.

Isaiah informs them that no show of piety can compensate for unethical behavior. After declaring that Jerusalem has become a city of murderers, Isaiah elaborates on God’s condemnation:

Your rulers are rogues

And companions to thieves.

All of them loving bribes

And pursuing gifts.

They do not judge the case of the fatherless child

Nor argue for the widow; [her cause] never reaches them.

Therefore, thus says the lord God of Armies, the Mighty One of Israel:

“Oh! I will console myself over my enemies

And I will take vengeance on my foes.

I will turn my hand against you!” (Isaiah 1:23-25)

The Assyrian army is merely God’s tool for vengeance against God’s true enemies: all the unethical rulers and powerful men of Jerusalem, who refuse to repent and reform.

We have all observed powerful people paying lip service to religion, the rule of law, or the ideals of a nation—while taking bribes, oppressing the disadvantaged, and not caring whether anyone dies in the process.

The viewpoint of the powerful Jerusalemites in Isaiah’s time was easily updated by a 21^st-century Yeshiva University professor, who wrote: “They could certainly claim that they had upheld ‘traditional, conservative values.’ They could have called Isaiah a ‘socialist’ or a ‘bleeding heart liberal.’”⁵

If God punishes societies whose leaders pervert justice and oppress the poor, as the biblical prophets claim, then the powerful people in Jerusalem must have reformed just enough by 701 B.C.E. to inspire God to stop the Assyrian siege before Jerusalem succumbed. A hundred years later, the prophet Jeremiah preached the same warning as Isaiah, but the Babylonian siege succeeded and Jerusalem was burned down in 586 B.C.E. According to the theology of the prophets, that meant the king of Judah and his cronies did not reform.

And what about the fate of the oppressed citizens of Jerusalem is when their city is destroyed? This is not a separate subject of concern in either Isaiah or Lamentations. Punishment of the guilty matters more than rescuing innocent individuals. Perhaps Isaiah hopes that if the powerful believe that God will arrange for enemies to seize and destroy their home county, they will stop and reconsider their actions.

Yet it strains belief. The theological stand that God arranges the destruction of countries whose leading citizens are unethical is not borne out by history—unless the timeline is stretched to allow many generations of unjust leaders before the disaster hits.

For example, Frederick Douglas quoted Isaiah 1:13-17 in his 1852 speech in Rochester, New York, urging an end to American slavery—a paradigm of oppression. Europeans had owned African slaves in what is now the United States of America since the 1500’s, and slavery was not abolished nationwide until the 13^th amendment in 1865. Other forms of oppression and discrimination against Americans with African ancestry have continued into the 21^st century. Yet all this time, the United States has not been conquered or destroyed.

However, sometimes when the powerful have not hitbonan, the punishment of the whole population is built in. For example, the destruction of many parts of the world through global climate change has already begun, and although some might call it an “act of God”, it is happening because people with political and economic power around the world have failed to consider the environment during the pursuit of profit over the past hundred years. And as in Isaiah’s time, the powerless suffer because the powerful are unethical.

Oh, how could it be?

Over time, Jews added mourning the Roman destruction of the second temple in 70 C.E. and various other disasters to the day of Tisha Be-Av (usually transliterate Tisha B’Av), the 9^th of the month of Av in the Hebrew calendar.
Rashi (11^th century rabbi Shlomoh Yitzchaki) on Isaiah 1:3, translation in www.sefaria.org.
Isaiah 1:4.
Isaiah 1:13-14.
Yaakov Elman, in From Within the Tent (Mitokh Ha-Ohel): The Haftarot, Yeshiva University, 2011.

Masey: Tribal Loyalty, Part 2

When a man dies with no sons, his daughters inherit his land, according to the new law God delivers in one of last week’s Torah portions, Pinchas. At the end of this week’s double portion, the men protest and win an amendment in the divine decision.

Once the Israelites have conquered Canaan, Moses says in Pinchas, a lottery will divide up all the land by tribe, clan, and household. Every male head of household will get a parcel of equal value, and his descendants will inherit that land down through the generations. (See my post: Pinchas: Tribal Loyalty, Part 1.)

The five daughters of Tzelofechad request a parcel of land in their deceased father’s name, since they have no brother to serve as the male head of household. Moses checks with God, who approves, and declares a general law:

“If a man dies and has no son, then you shall make his hereditary property pass over to his daughters.” (Numbers 27:8)

This ruling promotes women from chattels to second-class citizens who can inherit land—but only if their father dies without sons. If a daughter inherited and remained unmarried, she would have financial independence that no other women in society possessed.

But the male relatives of the daughters of Tzelofechad assume that all women want to marry and have sons. At the end of the book of Numbers/Bemidbar, in the Torah portion Masey (Numbers 33:1-36:13) there is a mass gathering of all the Israelites who are male heads of household. And the men of Tzelofechad’s clan—the clan of Gilad son of Makhir son of Menasheh son of Joseph—present their case to Moses.

First the men of Gilad summarize the new reality:

And they said: “God commanded my lord to give the land as hereditary property, by lottery, to the children of Israel. And my lord was commanded by God to give the hereditary property of Tzelofechad, our brother, to his daughters.” (Numbers 36:2)

But then who inherits the land from the daughters? Their sons, if they have any. But any son an Israelite woman has after marriage automatically belong to the tribe and clan of his father, not his mother. And if a woman who owns land dies without a son, but her husband is still alive, he inherits her land. Either way, the land now belongs to a different tribe, the male relatives of Tzelofechad point out.

“And if they become wives to any of the sons of the [other] tribes of the children of Israel, then their allotted hereditary property will be subtracted from the property of our fathers, and it will be added onto the property of the tribe that they will belong to. And so it will be subtracted from our allotted property!” (Numbers 36:3)

These men identify strongly with their own tribe, Menasheh, and with the Gilad branch of that tribe. Any reduction in the amount of land under the control of the Gilad clans of Menasheh seems like a personal loss to them.

To complete their case, the men point out that if land is sold outside the clan, the sale is only good until the next yoveil (“jubilee”), an event that happens every 50 years. In the yoveil year, every plot of land in the country is returned to the family of its original owners.¹ But once a plot of land has been legally inherited by the son of a man from a different tribe, it will forever remain in his family line—in his tribe rather than his mother’s tribe. So they say:

“And if it is the yoveil for the children of Israel, then their hereditary property will be added onto the hereditary property of the tribe that they marry into. And the hereditary property of the tribe of their fathers will be subtracted from our tribe!” (Numbers 36:4)

Moses figures out a solution that will let daughters inherit their father’s land when he has no son or grandson to inherit, but also take care of the tribal loyalty of men. He answers Tzelofechad’s kinsmen in God’s name:

“This is the word that God commanded for the daughters of Tzelofechad, saying: They may become wives to whomever is good in their eyes; yet they shall become wives only within the clan of the tribe of their father.” (Numbers 26:6)

Then Moses makes it a general rule:

“And hereditary property must not go around for the children of Israel from tribe to tribe, because yidbeku, every man, the hereditary property of the tribe of his fathers. And every daughter coming into possession of hereditary property from the tribes of the children of Israel, she shall become a wife to someone from the clan of the tribe of her father, so that each of the sons of Israel shall possess the hereditary property of his fathers.” (Numbers 36:7-8)

yidbeku (יְִבְּחוּ)= they will/should/must cling to, stick to, be attached to. (A form of the verb davak, דָּבַק = clung to, stuck to, was attached to, fastened oneself to.)

But what if a male landowner dies without a son, and his daughter is already married to a man from another clan, or even another tribe? The Torah does not answer this question, but two medieval commentators insisted that in this case, the land would be inherited by the woman’s closest male relative, not by her son or husband.²

Nabot Stoned in Front of his Vineyard, Prague, 14th century

Inheriting land through the father’s line is so important in the Torah that the land cannot be truly sold, only leased until the yoveil year, when it returns to the original family. And the first book of Kings provides the example of Nabot, who refuses to sell his vineyard to King Ahab of Israel for any amount of silver, saying: “God forbid my giving the inheritance of my fathers to you!”³

The idea of clinging to your ancestral land is so important that Moses repeats it in this week’s Torah portion, Masey.

The hereditary property will not go around from one tribe to another tribe, because yidbeku, every man, his hereditary property in the tribes of the children of Israel. (Numbers 36:9)

Why should a man cling to tribal property?

One medieval commentator, Rabbeinu Bachya, offered a mystical explanation:

“At that time the twelve tribes of the Israelites on terrestrial earth corresponded to their exact counterparts in the celestial spheres (Zohar Bamidbar 118). If one tribe would have sold part of its ancestral territory to another, the result would have been an imbalance of the forces representing the tribes in the celestial regions.”⁴

A more down-to-earth 19^th-century commentator argued that the tribes needed to stay separate at first so that each one could develop its own subculture:

“This promotes the fulfillment of the nation’s one common calling in all the diversity of the unique characteristics of each tribe, and toward this end each tribe must be allowed to develop properly in the territory of its portion. … In all subsequent times, the tribes are not prohibited by the Torah to intermingle and to intermarry.”⁵

But is it a good idea to develop so many subcultures? Conquering Canaan could, theoretically, be an opportunity for the tribes of Israel to unite and become truly one people.⁶ Nevertheless, Moses tells the Israelite men to cling to the property that they inherit from their fathers so it will remain in their own tribe and clan. Perhaps the Torah views tribal loyalty as good practice for national loyalty, rather than a threat to it. Maybe the more you cling to one group, the more you become able to cling to a larger group.

Another reason to keep inheritance in the male line might be so t6hat tribes and clans will live together in contiguous areas. But excluding any heirs from another tribe resembles enforcing racially discrete neighborhoods through redlining. If your neighborhood of Menashites were interrupted by a farm owned by Danites, you might have to—well, learn tolerance and cooperation with an extended family from a different subculture.

But it is also possible that the ruling at the end of the book of Numbers reflects the reality that many people enjoy the ease and solidarity of belonging to an established group, and they identify with their group so much that when they believe the group was cheated, they feel personally outraged. In the Torah, those groups are clans, tribes, and “peoples”. In the west today, many identify with sports teams, religious sects, political factions, and nations. And whenever our own group is diminished, we feel outraged.

And Machlah, Tirtzah, and Chaglah, and Milkah, and Noah, the daughters of Tzelafechad, became wives to the sons of their uncles. From the clans of the children of Menasheh son of Joseph they became wives, and their hereditary possession became onto the tribe of the clans of their fathers. (Numbers 36:11-12)

Instead of insisting on marrying any men to whom they felt attached, or whom they wanted to fasten themselves to, the five women limited their choices to their first cousins. In the 19^th century, Hirsch responded:

“They, however, chose in consideration of the national interest, and this was reckoned to their credit.”⁷

Which kind of attachment is the most important? Clinging to one’s marriage partner and nuclear family? Clinging to one’s heritage and tribal loyalties? Or clinging to a more abstract ethical or national ideal?

Leviticus 25:8-16. See my post: Behar: Owning Land.
Commentary by Ramban (Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, 1194–1270), and Tur HaAroch (written by Rabbi Jacob ben Asher, c. 1269-1343).
I Kings 21:1-4.
Rabbi Bachya ben Asher, 1255-1340, translation in http://www.sefaria.org.
Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Hirsch Chumash: Sefer Bemidbar, translated by Daniel Haberman, Feldheim Publishers, p. 707.
Or is such a union possible? This ideal was only partially realized when the thirteen colonies became the United States of America.
Hirsch, p. 709.