Human-Divine Interactions in the Hebrew Scriptures (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Biblical Criticism) [1 ed.] 9781032504018, 9781032539287, 9781003414346, 1032504013

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Human-Divine Interactions in the Hebrew Scriptures

This book addresses central theological issues and biblical narratives in terms of a bold thesis regarding relations between God and humans: that the actions of God and the actions of humans are informed by independently valid moral viewpoints which do not entirely overlap. The author suggests that God’s plans and actions reflect the interests and obligations appropriate to His goal of creating a worthy world, but not necessarily our world. In contrast, humans must attend to special obligations grounded in their dependence on their existing created world and in their particular places in the human family. However, in acts of grace, God voluntarily takes on special obligations toward the created world by entering covenants with its inhabitants. When the covenant involves reciprocal obligations, as in the case of God’s covenant with Israel, it also recruits human beings to play conscious roles in God’s larger plans. These covenants frame the moral parameters of human-divine interaction and cooperation in which each party strains to negotiate conflicts between its original duties and the new obligations generated by covenants. The interpretive discussions in this book involve close readings of the Hebrew text and are also informed by rabbinic tradition and Western philosophy. They address major issues that are of relevance to scholars of the bible, theology, and philosophy of religion, including the relationship between divine commands and morality, God’s responsibility for human sufering, God’s role in history and the intersection between politics and religion. Berel Dov Lerner received his PhD in philosophy from Tel Aviv University. He is an associate professor at Western Galilee College in Israel.

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Biblical Criticism

Thinking Sex with the Great Whore Deviant Sexualities and Empire in the Book of Revelation Luis Menéndez-Antuña A Philosophical Theology of the Old Testament A historical, experimental, comparative and analytic perspective Jaco Gericke Human Agency and Divine Will The Book of Genesis Charlotte Katzof Paul and Diversity A New Perspective on Σάρξ and Resilience in Galatians Linda Joelsson A Prototype Approach to Hate and Anger in the Hebrew Bible Conceiving Emotions Deena Grant Metaphor, Ritual, and Order in John 12–13 Judas and the Prince Todd E. Klutz Luke and the Jewish Other Politics of Identity in the Third Gospel David Andrew Smith Human-Divine Interactions in the Hebrew Scriptures Covenants and Cross-Purposes Berel Dov Lerner For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/RoutledgeInterdisciplinary-Perspectives-on-Biblical-Criticism/book-series/RIPBC

Human-Divine Interactions in the Hebrew Scriptures Covenants and Cross-Purposes

Berel Dov Lerner

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Berel Dov Lerner The right of Berel Dov Lerner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-50401-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-53928-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-41434-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003414346 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Batsheva and the kids and their kids

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: About This Book and How to Read It

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1 The Creator God and Humans in Cooperation and at Cross-Purposes: The Flood, Sodom and Imitatio Dei

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2 Human Participation in Divine Plans: Eden, Divine Punishment and the Betrothal of Rebekah

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3 Responsible Rebels: Saul, Jonah and Abraham Contend with God’s Requests

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4 God’s Conversation with Satan Is More Telling Than His Answer From the Whirlwind in the Book of Job

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5 Nations as Moral Communities: Why Babel Was Dispersed and Israel Created

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6 The Covenant of the Pieces and Its Epistemological Implications for Biblical Historiography

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7 Obscure Dreams and the Hiddenness of the Tetragrammaton Mark Divine Manipulation and the Loss of Human Knowledge as the Patriarchs Give Way to Joseph and His Brothers

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8 Joseph the False Patriarch Executes Economic Policies That Set the Stage for the Israelites’ Enslavement in Egypt

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9 “Harsh Work”: Israelite Enslavement and the Loss of Temporality and Agency as Pharaoh’s Failed Method of Population Control

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10 The Paschal Sacrifice and the Sabbath Restore Israelite Temporality and Agency

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11 The Battle at Refidim and How the Miraculous Foundations of Moses’ Prophetic Authority Invited Idolatry and Required His Replacement by Joshua

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12 Esther, Ruth and Human-Divine Cooperation in a World Bereft of Miracles

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Index

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Acknowledgments

Since this book discusses texts I have been reading for a very long time, I should begin these acknowledgments by mentioning my father, Joseph Lerner of blessed memory, who, when I was a very small child, insisted on being the first to introduce me to the Hebrew alphabet and set me on my way toward being a native reader of Biblical Hebrew. He enjoyed creating wildly speculative readings of biblical texts. My mother, Sue Lerner of blessed memory, even well into her nineties, continued to fret over the motivations of biblical figures (especially King David) and sought to uncover the point of their stories for herself. I imagine that readers of this book may conclude that I inherited these exegetical tendencies. Indeed, while I most certainly appreciate my interactions with the various colleagues listed in the following, I have, for better or worse, usually taken their encouragement more to heart than their criticisms. Many of the ideas presented in this book began as talks I gave on various occasions to the members of my community, Kibbutz Shluhot, and I must mention my fellow kibbutz-member, Moshe Weiss of blessed memory, a Judaic scholar and central figure in Israel’s Religious Kibbutz Movement, who for many years served as my go-to expert for help deciphering difcult passages from rabbinic texts. I owe a special thanks to Yoram Hazony for creating forums such as the series of conferences on the Philosophical Investigation of the Hebrew Scriptures, Talmud and Midrash, which ofered me opportunities to present my ideas to an international academic audience. He also founded the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, which, in cooperation with the John Templeton Foundation, supported some of the research for this book by granting me a fellowship in the Jewish Philosophical Theology project. I benefited from interaction with the other fellows: Josh Amaru, James Arcadi, Craig Bartholomew, James A. Diamond, Melis Erdur, Lenn Goodman, Alan Mittleman, Alex Sztuden, Shmuel Trigano, Shira Weiss, Jacob L. Wright and Joshua Weinstein, who also served as co-director of the John Templeton Foundation’s project in Jewish Philosophical Theology. I also appreciate Dru Johnson’s work as associate director of the project; as a co-editor of the Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Biblical Criticism monograph series, he served as my

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first point of contact with Routledge for the present book. Some of the ideas in this book were presented at the 2018 Haifa Conference on the Philosophy of Religion and at the 2022 Annual Conference of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion. I also thank Menachem Kellner for his wise counsel regarding all matters academic, and Jerome (Yehuda) Gellman and Charlotte Katzof for their encouragement and discussion of some of the ideas in this book. I thank Julia Schwartzmann; we serve as each other’s audience to share complaints and victories in our academic lives. Philip Sumpter has repeatedly enlightened me with his thoughtful Christian counterpoints to my Jewish readings of scripture. John Goldingay gracefully responded to my queries when I was first attempting to make inroads into academic bible research. Finally, I think I simply would not have survived to complete the seemingly never-ending project of this slim volume without the support of my wife Batsheva. She also takes the lion’s share of credit for making our own family one in which the bible and other Jewish texts continue to be topics of conversation, where she bears the mantle of expert in Jewish law while I focus on less crucial matters of theology and biblical exegesis. This book is dedicated to her and our children, Tzvi Elchanan, Yehonadav, Gavriel, Hillel Nachum, Tiferet Chaya, their spouses and children. Various parts of the book borrow from my earlier publications: Introduction “God the Walker.” In The Question of God’s Perfection: Jewish and Christian Essays on the God of the Bible and Talmud, edited by Y. Hazony and Dru Johnson, 27–42. Leiden: Brill, 2019. “Two Questions about Judaism with Answers for Christians.” Theology Today 80, no. 2 (July 2013): 121–130. Chapter 2 “Interfering with Divinely Imposed Sufering.” Religious Studies 36, no. 1 (March 2000): 95–102. (Reprinted with permission, copyright Cambridge University Press). “And He Shall Rule Over Thee.” Judaism 37, no. 4 (Fall 1988): 446–9. Chapter 3 “Saving the Akedah from the Philosophers.” The Jewish Bible Quarterly 27, no. 3 (July-September 1999): 167–73. “Saul and Genocide.” Jewish Bible Quarterly 42, no. 1 (January-March 2014): 39–44.

Acknowledgments

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Chapter 6 “God the Walker.” In On God’s Perfection, edited by Y. Hazony and Dru Johnson, 27–42. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Chapter 8 “Joseph the Unrighteous.” Judaism 38, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 278–81. Chapter 11 “Could Moses’ Hands Make War?” The Jewish Bible Quarterly, 19, no. 2 (Winter 1990/1991): 114–19. Chapter 12 “No Happy Ending for Esther.” Jewish Bible Quarterly 29, no. 1 (JanuaryMarch 2001): 4–12. “The challenge of Ruth.” Jerusalem Post, May 30, 2006. www.jpost.com/ israel/the-challenge-of-ruth Biblical translations are from the New Jewish Publication Society of America Tanakh with occasional changes for accuracy or emphasis. Unless otherwise noted, all rabbinic texts are my translations of versions found in the DBS Master Library software package.

Introduction About This Book and How to Read It

In this book, I present some of the ideas I have developed over the past four decades of my life regarding the Hebrew Scriptures and their message. They reflect my somewhat peculiar background and interests, including a basic classical Jewish education, a modest career in academic philosophy and membership in a religious kibbutz. I have organized these ideas around a central thesis regarding the duties and legitimate interests of God and humans as depicted in scripture, and how they overlap and conflict with each other in the context of covenantal relationships between God and humans. Students of biblical exegesis will likely be acquainted with Paul Ricoeur’s notion of the “second naiveté”1 of the sophisticated reader who returns to the biblical text after ingesting and dealing with all the critiques it has been subjected to since the dawn of the European Enlightenment. I’m not sure how to characterize my own exegetical attitude: naiveté 1.5? 2.3? 0.8? I have some limited knowledge of source criticism and the findings of what used to be called “biblical archaeology,” but I lack both the erudition and inclination to make use of them. Since ancient times, religious readers have employed allegory and other methods of esoteric and non-literal interpretation to make scripture compatible with their world views. I have tried to resist such apologetic strategies and, I hope, have not strayed outrageously from a reasonably plain reading of the traditional Hebrew Masoretic texts. I find some of the ideas I draw from scripture less than completely attractive, but what can I do? I am trying to make sense of those texts. In this book, I have tried to work out the implications of one way of thinking about the relationship between God and humans and I recognize the value of alternative and perhaps more mainstream readings which can also claim some basis in scripture. It is no accident that I have not attempted to apply the theology developed herein to the Book of Psalms! This volume is concerned in part with understanding God’s nature and motivations. I must admit that the whole endeavor worries me. The rabbinic homiletic or midrashic literature often depicts God through theologically daring parables. Crucially, such parables also assume a dose of epistemic modesty. They are all prefaced explicitly or implicitly with the Hebrew word DOI: 10.4324/9781003414346-1

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Introduction

kivyakhol2 – “as if it could be” – a term which I believe reminds us of the incapacity of human thought and language to fully penetrate the nature of the divine. I would like to bracket my entire project in a big kivyakhol. It seems wise to maintain a default option of negative theology – the idea that we are not really capable of making any strictly true positive assertions about God Himself – as a kind of escape hatch from difculties associated with discussions of God’s nature. My at least partial embrace of negative theology is not motivated by high-flying philosophical theorizing or mystical enlightenment, rather it reflects the simple-minded idea that it would be ridiculous of me to presume that I could understand the Creator and Master of the universe. Writing from a Jewish perspective, I need not claim my answers precisely represent some kind of established Jewish doctrine or potential final word on these matters. As Menachem Kellner explains in his aptly titled book, Must a Jew Believe Anything?, the demand for doctrinal systematicity and orthodoxy is very weak in the Jewish tradition and only appears sporadically and in response to external challenges. Kellner explains3: The Torah understands emunah, faith or belief, less in terms of propositions afrmed or denied by the believer (“belief that”) and more in terms of the relationship (primarily of trust) between the believer and God (“belief in”). This faith expresses itself in terms of behavior, rather than in terms of systematic theology. I would expand on Kellner’s point by comparing the relationship of the Jewish People or the individual to God to the relationship between spouses. People do not have to solve the mysteries of human nature to love each other. One need not crack the philosophical puzzles of free will and the mind-body problem to have a happy marriage. While it may occasionally be useful to think about such relationships with the aid of theoretical psychologies, marital success or failure is not dependent on one’s having arrived at an absolutely correct theory of marital love. All the more so in our relationship with a God whose nature certainly surpasses our understanding. This is not to say that doctrinally speaking “anything goes” in Judaism or that every imaginable worldview can be supported by scripture, but rather that the compass of legitimate beliefs is as wide and fuzzy as the category of proper ways to think about one’s spouse and marriage.4 Certainly, one’s relationship with God is not contingent upon having a precisely correct answer to some theological “trick question.” Having presented many of the ideas and readings assembled here in various forums across the years, I have found them to generate varying combinations of excitement, annoyance and disinterest, depending on the particular audience or individual responding to them. My plea to all readers is that each should bring a charitable attitude to the book; some may like the exegesis but disagree with the theology and vice versa. Dear reader, please take on board whatever pleases you, try to be challenged by what annoys you, and forget about the rest!

Introduction

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Notes 1 See the concluding chapter of Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. by Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 2 For an extended discussion of the uses of kivyakhol in rabbinic literature, see Michael Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 325–401. 3 Menachem Kellner, Must a Jew Believe Anything? (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1999), 43. 4 Here I must criticize the oft-expressed notion that since the Talmud is in great part a record of disagreements over points of law and belief, everything is up for grabs in Judaism. Anyone who has actually studied the Talmud will understand that an unspoken consensus grounds each Talmudic debate. For example, while there can be disagreement over whether a particular action performed in particular circumstances constitutes a form of work prohibited on the Sabbath, there is no question about whether the Sabbath must be observed as a day of rest.

References Fishbane, Michael. Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Kellner, Menachem. Must a Jew Believe Anything? London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1999. Ricoeur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. Translated by Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

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The Creator God and Humans in Cooperation and at Cross-Purposes The Flood, Sodom and Imitatio Dei

From Creation to Covenant The great 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously concluded his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with the words, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,”1 but that was only after spending the whole rest of the book speaking of the unspeakable. The bible makes its most profound theological statement in the silence preceding the first chapter of Genesis. It simply skips over those aspects of God’s nature which completely transcend the limits of human language and begins with something we can begin to comprehend: the creation of the world of which we are a part. Unlike other great creation narratives of the ancient world such as Hesiod’s Theogony, the first chapter of Genesis has nothing to tell us of the Creator’s origins and biography. Any speculation on such matters is relegated to the abyss of the missing text of Genesis’s chapter zero. The nature of God before and beyond His relationship to creation is passed over in silence.2 We must take care to remember the lesson of that silence when trying to understand the bible’s depiction of God as Creator. The God of Creation is the same God of whom the bible would not speak before Creation, and awareness of His radical otherness from us, His creatures, must temper our hopes to fathom His motivations for creating us and our world. “For My plans are not your plans, nor are My ways your ways” – declares the Lord. “But as the heavens are high above the earth, so are My ways high above your ways and My plans above your plans” (Isaiah 55:8–9). We must not assume that we will be able to fully identify with or understand God’s purposes. Traditionally, Jewish thinkers have explained that God created the world in order to have something to love, or in order to establish a kingdom over which to display His kingship and so on. I will suggest an alternative idea. How is the silence of Genesis chapter zero broken? Abruptly, God appears on the scene, creating in six days the various elements – cosmic, geographical, botanical, zoological and human – of our world. Each step of creation is followed by a divine judgment: God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. God saw that the light was good (Gen. 1:3–4). God said, “Let the water below the sky be gathered into one area, that the dry land may DOI: 10.4324/9781003414346-2

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appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of waters He called seas. And God saw that this was good (Gen. 1:9–10). And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation: seedbearing plants, fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: seed-bearing plants of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that this was good (Gen. 1:11–12). And so on through the six days, until just before the first sabbath day of rest, God saw all that He had made, and found it very good (Gen. 1:31). After each step in the world’s creation, we are informed that God saw it was good. What is the point of these seemingly cheery pronouncements? Several chapters later, the story of Noah and the Flood clarifies matters. There we read: When God saw how corrupt the earth was, for all flesh had corrupted its ways on earth, God said to Noah, “I have decided to put an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with lawlessness because of them: I am about to destroy them with the earth.” (Gen. 6:12–13) Now we can begin to understand: God is in the business of making a world worthy of existence, and if the created world does not meet His expectations, He will destroy it without compunction and continue with a fresh canvas. The sunny pronouncements of the first chapter of Genesis – and the Lord saw it was good – take on a darker aspect. During the course of creation, God periodically checks His handiwork and decides: Yes, it is good. No need to return the world to primordial chaos and begin the process anew. As Rabbi Avihu (3rd century, Galilee) states3: “He would create worlds and destroy them, until He created these.” In other words, in principle God at first bears no particular loyalty toward any particular world, including our own. Rather, He is solely invested in the larger project of creating a worthy world, and He is always ready to abandon an attempt and start anew, like an author throwing out a failed draft. Such is God’s primordial relationship with His Creation. Our human predicament is essentially diferent from that of God. We have been placed in this particular world to make something of it, to humanize it: And God said, “Let us make the human in our image, after our likeness. They shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on earth.” And God created the human in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth.” (Gen. 1:26–8)

6 The Creator God and Humans Even if we serve as God’s junior partners in creating our world and take upon ourselves the stewardship of nature, we do not enjoy the luxury of being able to “create worlds and destroy them.” We are wholly of this world and if it flounders, we must go down with it. Scripture delineates an essential diference that even we mere mortals can understand between the human predicament and the life of God: we are irrevocably tied to this particular world, while God, at least at first, only views it as a disposable experiment. After all, in the Flood, He did dispose of it. Let us further examine Scripture’s report of God’s latest rejection of a failed world. The infantilization of the Flood narrative through its association with toys and children’s books depicting cute animals aboard the ark has thoroughly dulled our appreciation of its sheer horror. It is the record of a global catastrophe in which the Creator God has become a Destroyer God, acting beyond those human standards of good and evil which prevent us from ever acquiescing to the obliteration of our world.4 In the story of the Flood, a world proves unworthy and humans are to blame: The Lord saw how great was the human’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time. And the Lord regretted that He had made humans on earth, and His heart was saddened. The Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the humans whom I created–humans together with beasts, creeping things, and birds of the sky; for I regret that I made them.” (Gen. 6:5–7) Rabbi Avihu thought the cycle of creation and destruction ended with the creation of a world that God found to be good. The story of the Flood indicates a diferent conclusion. There was no guaranty that the world of Genesis 1 would survive nor that our world, which arose from its water-logged ruins, would prove eternally worthy of existence. Scripture never even informs us that God saw that the post-diluvian world, whose human population consisted of the righteous Noah and his immediate family, was good. Instead, the promised preservation of this world was born of a step-by-step interaction between God and Noah, combining the former’s overwhelming power with the latter’s active engagement. At the brink of the catastrophe, God evinces readiness to consider a new kind of relation to the post-diluvian world in which His drive toward producing a worthy Creation will be tempered by covenantal bonds. First, we learn that despite the failings of humanity in his day, Noah was a righteous man; he was blameless in his age; Noah walked with God (Gen. 6:9). This was why Noah found favor with the Lord (Gen. 6:8), making him with his family good candidates to populate the new world which would follow the Flood. God’s selection of Noah takes the form of a covenant: I am about to bring the flood–waters upon the earth–to destroy all flesh under the

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sky in which there is breath of life; everything on earth shall perish. But I will establish My covenant with you, and you shall enter the ark, with your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives (Gen. 6:17–18). However, the covenant’s realization is efectually dependent on Noah doing the hard work of building a vast ark, gathering food for all the animals and taking them on board. So far God’s covenant ofers Noah and his family a chance to survive the Flood, but it does not rule out the possibility of God’s destroying the forthcoming iteration of creation if it too should prove unworthy. God’s eventual promise to never destroy the new world is prompted by Noah’s sacrifice following the Flood5: Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking of every clean animal and of every clean bird, he ofered burnt oferings on the altar. The Lord smelled the pleasing odor, and the Lord said to Himself: “Never again will I doom the earth because of man, since the devisings of man’s mind are evil from his youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living being, as I have done. So long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease.” (Gen. 8:20–2) Noah’s ritual act of sacrificial worship invites divine favor. In an act of grace, in what the rabbis might have called the introduction of the divine Attribute of Mercy into a process of creation first solely governed by the Attribute of Judgement, God decides to declare His loyalty to our particular world.6 On closer inspection of the text, we discover that even before the Flood, God Himself prepared the ground for Noah to ofer the sacrifice in its wake. When first instructing Noah to build the ark, God tells him, Make yourself an ark of gopher wood; make it an ark with compartments, and cover it inside and out with pitch (Gen. 6:14) and continues with further details of its construction. Then God reveals His full intentions to Noah: For My part, I am about to bring the Flood–waters upon the earth-to destroy all flesh under the sky in which there is breath of life; everything on earth shall perish. But I will establish My covenant with you, and you shall enter the ark, with your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives. And of all that lives, of all flesh, you shall take two of each into the ark to keep alive with you; they shall be male and female. (Gen. 6:17–19) The next verse makes it clear that while Noah is expected to eventually take the various animals onto the ark, it is not his responsibility to actually seek them out, rather, they would arrive in good time of their own accord: From birds of every kind, cattle of every kind, every kind of creeping thing on earth, two of each shall come to you to stay alive (Gen. 6:20). Meanwhile, Noah is charged only with constructing the ark and preparing its

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provisions: For your part, take of everything that is eaten and store it away, to serve as food for you and for them (Gen. 6:21). We are immediately told that, having completed these preparations, Noah has successfully fulfilled his covenantal duties preceding the Flood: Noah did so; just as God commanded him, so he did (Gen. 6:22). The covenantal dance between God and humans has begun: God ofers a saving covenant to Noah, and the latter responds positively by keeping his part of the bargain. Now God responds to Noah’s piety by creating the possibility for a further extension of the covenant. Originally, as we have seen, only two of each species were to enter the ark, but after all of Noah’s preparations, there is a slight change of plan. Now God commands him, Of every clean animal you shall take seven pairs, males and their mates, and of every animal that is not clean, two, a male and its mate; of the birds of the sky also, seven pairs, male and female, to keep seed alive upon all the earth (Gen. 7:2–3). Why must Noah take in more birds and clean animals? God tells Noah to take an extra number of ritually clean animals aboard the ark in order to grant him an option to sacrifice them later. As we have seen, after the Flood, Noah made burnt oferings to God from every clean animal and of every clean bird (Gen. 8:20), and it is that sacrifice that spurs God to promise there will be no further world-destroying floods. In this complicated dance of human-divine interaction, each party creates the circumstances allowing for the other’s next move. Noah’s commitment to ethical living presents God with a human who can justifiably survive the Flood and serve as a good candidate to oversee the world’s repopulation. God ofers Noah a covenant of survival which depends upon his performing certain deeds. Noah demonstrates his fidelity to God’s covenant by undertaking the hard work of building the ark and gathering its provisions. God responds by commanding Noah to take additional members of the clean species of animals, thus allowing Noah to sacrifice those ritually appropriate animals without causing their extinction. That sacrifice invites God’s graceful promise to never repeat the global flood. God guaranties His future goodwill toward our world by entering a covenant that can supersede or at least ameliorate the demands of His primordial transcendent duty and goal to create and preserve a genuinely worthy world. The covenant transforms what might have been a fleeting and beneficent thought of undeserved mercy into a binding moral commitment. And so, God explicitly explains that the point of His new covenant is to oblige Him not to destroy the world again in the future: And God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “I now establish My covenant with you and your ofspring to come, and with every living thing that is with you birds, cattle, and every wild beast as well-all that have come out of the ark, every living thing on earth. I will maintain My covenant with you: never again shall all flesh be cut of by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” (Gen. 9:8–11)7

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Just in case humanity again falls to a state unworthy of preservation, God creates a sign to remind Him of His promise: God further said, “This is the sign that I set for the covenant between Me and you, and every living creature with you, for all ages to come. I have set My bow in the clouds, and it shall serve as a sign of the covenant between Me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth, and the bow appears in the clouds, I will remember My covenant between Me and you and every living creature among all flesh, so that the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures, all flesh that is on earth. That, “God said to Noah, “shall be the sign of the covenant that I have established between Me and all flesh that is on earth.” (Gen. 9:12–17) Covenants are God’s instruments for turning His supererogatory grace toward the world and its inhabitants into binding moral commitments. God’s omnipotence is only limited by His goodness, and while refusal to destroy our world come-what-may was not a duty corollary to God’s original goals, by promising to spare our world God has deliberately taken on a new moral duty that will prohibit Him from engaging in the world’s destruction. God has tied His own hands. God’s covenants do not, however, completely nullify His original Godly obligation to create a good world; the Attribute of Judgement is tempered, but not completely vitiated, by the Attribute of Mercy. The Hebrew Scriptures disclose the story of God’s purposeful yet merciful interaction with His Creation and with the human beings who, while serving to some extent as His partners, continue to respect their own peculiarly human obligations and limitations. This book will investigate the interaction of divine and human purposes through careful readings of several important biblical narratives. Handing Over Responsibility for Punishment If the covenant requires God to take notice of the human concerns and obligations of His human partners, it also requires humans to take God’s macrolevel world-plans into account. Fortunately, divine and human values often coincide. One major element of the kind of worthy world sought by God is that its human inhabitants fulfill their human duties and obligations. This alignment of divine and human morality is clearly on view in the story of the Flood. In Genesis 6:13, God tells Noah that He has decided to put an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with lawlessness because of them: I am about to destroy them with the earth. The Hebrew word hamas is here translated as lawlessness. Other biblical passages connect hamas with crimes against persons, especially murder, as when Abimelekh’s murder of his 70 brothers

10 The Creator God and Humans is called the hamas committed against the seventy sons of Jerubbaal (Judges 9:24) and when Ezekiel (7:23) complains that the land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of hamas. The upshot is that God destroys the world in the Flood because hamas – the breakdown of basic human morality – rendered it unworthy of survival. Human beings as human beings are committed to the survival of humanity. The fundamental value of human solidarity leaves the destruction of the human race beyond the pale of ethically viable human action. Not so for God the Creator before He made the post-diluvian covenantal promise to disavow any plans of a future flood. The Flood was God’s response to the human crimes of human beings against each other, but those crimes prompted an act of utter global destruction that could never be permitted to humans themselves. With His covenantal promise, God freely takes on the peculiarly human absolute prohibition against destroying humanity. God punishes the widespread crimes of hamas with the Flood, but how would such behavior be dealt with after God promises in covenant not to destroy the world again? God solves this problem with His post-Flood covenant, one essential element of which calls for human beings to take responsibility for enforcing justice over themselves. To understand this transfer of authority, we must begin by examining the nature of justice and punishment in human society before the Flood. Earlier in Genesis, we read the details of only two human crimes: Cain’s infamous murder of his brother Abel, and Lamech’s less-known confession. I have slain a man for wounding me, and a lad for bruising me (Gen. 4:23). Neither crime is met with human justice or punishment. After God informs Cain of the divine punishment he is to receive – you shall be cursed from the soil, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. If you till the soil, it shall no longer yield its strength to you. You shall become a ceaseless wanderer on earth (Gen. 4:11–12), Cain laments, Since You have banished me this day from the soil, and I must avoid Your presence and become a restless wanderer on earth-anyone who meets me may kill me! (Gen. 4:14). God calms Cain’s fears of human retribution by announcing the threat I promise, if anyone kills Cain, sevenfold vengeance shall be taken on him (Gen. 4:15) and brands him with the famous mark of Cain to warn of potential avengers of Abel’s murder. God has expressly prohibited human beings from dispensing justice in the first case of a crime committed by one human against another. Similarly, we never read of Lamech facing human justice, and he likewise claims divine protection from retribution at the hands of mortals: If Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-sevenfold (Gen. 4:24). Furthermore, while the chapter describing the crimes of Cain and Lamech lists the invention of central human institutions, including nomadic herding, instrumental music and metalworking, there is no mention of the founding of a human system of courts or punishments. Scripture goes out of its way to let us know that it is not describing life in some primitive “state of nature” where humans lived as solitaries or in isolated families lacking the need for

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an organized judicial system, rather, Cain himself founded a city, and named the city after his son Enoch (Gen. 4:17). Even so, God twice warns humans not to inflict criminal punishment on each other. In these early stories, God is completely in charge of dispensing justice to humans, and, when human morality steadily degenerates and the world is no longer a viable divine project, God’s justice takes the form of the total annihilation of creation in the Flood. This makes perfect sense in terms of God’s original single-minded intention to create a worthy world; God sees His attempt has failed and shuts it down to start the project anew. Things get complicated when in the post-Flood covenant, God promises not to destroy the world again. The macro-level justice of the Creator is no longer appropriate for dealing with the crimes and misdemeanors endemic to human societies in a world that cannot be discarded. Instead of standing by to see if the world becomes undeserving of survival, God now requires that human beings check its decline by policing it for Him. Immediately before announcing the covenant promising never to destroy the world again in a flood, God proclaims: But for your own lifeblood I will require a reckoning: I will require it of every beast; of man, too, will I require a reckoning for human life, of every man for that of his fellow man! Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in His image Did God make man (Gen. 9:5–6).8 Humans, created in the Divine image, must take over from God the dispensation of justice and must see to it that whoever sheds human blood will be dealt with by other humans. The Puzzle of Sodom and Gomorrah This background helps to explain perhaps the most anomalous episode in the entire Book of Genesis: the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. The event of their destruction is completely out of step with the overall tone of the stories of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Leah and Rachel. In those stories, God enters gently into human afairs, either through prophetic visions or by controlling human fertility. Occasional famines might also be attributed to God, but they are hardly supernatural events. Even in the pre-Abrahamic post-Flood narratives, the closest thing we find to God’s massive direct interference in history occurs in the story of the Tower of Babel. But there the confounding of the people’s speech and their being scattered across the earth might have been experienced as a natural process of societal disintegration rather than as a manifestly miraculous event (more on Babel later). In the midst of Genesis’s essentially naturalistic narrative framework, we suddenly find God bursting into history, raining sulfurous fire from the Lord out of heaven (Gen. 19:24) upon the region of Sodom and Gomorrah, which had been previously described as like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt (Gen. 13:10), annihilating those cities and the entire plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities and the vegetation of the ground (Gen. 19:25). How are we to understand this discordant bit of apocalyptic divine action?

12 The Creator God and Humans The solution to this conundrum can be teased out from the story of the angels’ visit to Sodom. Readers should recall that two angels visit Sodom on the eve of its destruction. Earlier, a quarrel had erupted between Abraham’s herdsmen and those of his nephew Lot, who consequently left his uncle to take up residence in Sodom so that his flocks could graze the then-lush foliage of the Dead Sea region (Gen. 13). The angels arrive in Sodom and Lot insists they enjoy the hospitality (and as becomes evident, the protection) of his home. The angels enter Lot’s house, which is soon surrounded by the men of Sodom, young and old-all the people to the last man (Gen. 19:4) who were intent on knowing (Gen. 19:5), that is to say, raping Lot’s guests.9 If this is not sufcient to make plain Sodom’s moral condition, its people make it explicit when they grumble that Lot came here as a resident alien and would judge as a judge (Gen. 19:9). The worst accusation they can throw at Lot is that he meant to serve as their judge. Sodom is a community that would do without judges, a community of would-be rapists who are – quite naturally – completely uninterested in the administration of justice. Having thrown of their human responsibility for punishing evil, God is left to do the work from His macro-perspective. The complete destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is a replay in miniature of God’s earlier destruction of the entire world in the Flood, a world that, I have argued, was devoid of human judicial institutions. In the following section, I will consider a famous encounter preceding the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah that invites a fuller appreciation of human-divine interactions in the Hebrew Scriptures. The 11th Trial of Abraham? Human Duties and Divine Justice at Sodom and Gomorrah According to rabbinic tradition, Abraham was tested by God on ten separate occasions.10 The most famous instance (and the only one explicitly described by scripture with a cognate of the Hebrew nisayon, a trial or test) is the Akedah or “Binding of Isaac,” when God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah, only for the boy to be spared by an angel at the last moment. Various post-biblical texts count other episodes among the remaining tests, such as the divine call to Abraham to leave his father’s house, the command to send away his son Ishmael and the covenant of circumcision. There is one incident from Abraham’s life, which, to my best knowledge, is never included in the traditional lists of his trials; I am referring to Abraham’s haggling with God over the fate of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham and Sarah, advanced of age, have just been visited by three angels who informed them of her forthcoming miraculous pregnancy, which will result in the birth of Isaac, the long-awaited heir to the covenant. Now God decides to alert Abraham of His intention to deal with the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham refuses to automatically acquiesce to God’s handling of the situation and begins to wrangle, asking if the presence of successively smaller minimum numbers of just inhabitants would sufce to

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spare the cities from potential destruction. This story demands close reading, so I shall quote it at length: Now the Lord had said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? since Abraham is to become a great and populous nation and all the nations of the earth are to bless themselves by him? For I have singled him out, that he may instruct his children and his posterity to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is just and right, in order that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what He has promised him.” Then the Lord said, “The outrage of Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin so grave! I will go down to see whether they have acted altogether according to the outcry that has reached Me; if not, I will take note.” The men went on from there to Sodom, while Abraham remained standing before the Lord. Abraham came forward and said, “Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty? What if there should be fifty innocents within the city; will You then wipe out the place and not forgive it for the sake of the innocent fifty who are in it? Far be it from You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that innocent and guilty fare alike. Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” And the Lord answered, “If I find within the city of Sodom fifty innocent ones, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.” Abraham spoke up, saying, “Here I venture to speak to my Lord, I who am but dust and ashes: What if the fifty innocent should lack five? Will You destroy the whole city for want of the five?” And He answered, “I will not destroy if I find forty-five there.” But he spoke to Him again, and said, “What if forty should be found there?” And He answered, “I will not do it, for the sake of the forty.” And he said, “Let not my Lord be angry if I go on: What if thirty should be found there?” And He answered, “I will not do it if I find thirty there.” And he said, “I venture again to speak to my Lord: What if twenty should be found there?” And He answered, “I will not destroy, for the sake of the twenty.” And he said, “Let not my Lord be angry if I speak but this last time: What if ten should be found there?” And He answered, “I will not destroy, for the sake of the ten.” (Gen. 18:17–32) The story invites a veritable flood of questions, including: Why does God feel obligated to inform Abraham of His exasperation with Sodom and Gomorrah? Does Abraham actually believe God is in need of his moral instruction? What is the logic behind Abraham’s demands? How does God respond to them in practice? Contrary to midrashic tradition, some later thinkers seem to assume that by advising Abraham of His concerns regarding Sodom and Gomorrah, God is calling upon him to take part in a test.11 God wants to see how Abraham will react to His announcement. Some writers have proposed that Abraham

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fails the test. They complain that the extended negotiations over Sodom’s fate stand in sharp contrast to Abraham’s pious acquiescence to the divine command to sacrifice his son Isaac in the great test of faith known as the Akedah: Some time afterward, God put Abraham to the test. He said to him, “Abraham,” and he said, “Here I am.” And he said, “Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and ofer him there as a burnt ofering on one of the heights that I will point out to you.” So early next morning, Abraham saddled his ass and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. (Gen. 22:1–3) One might argue that from a strictly theological standpoint, Abraham did well not to presume to question the justice of God’s command to sacrifice Isaac. How could it make sense for a mere human being to oppose God’s will and wisdom? In that case, shouldn’t Abraham’s haggling with God over the destruction of Sodom appear equally ridiculous? While Abraham holds his tongue regarding the mysterious command to sacrifice Isaac, he bargains shamelessly to temper the judgment of Sodom, an infamously corrupt town. What was the point of arguing over God’s plans to punish such a blatantly evil community? How preposterous of Abraham to think that God needs his help in passing fair judgment! Abraham has failed this test, or at least so thinks the ethicist James Rachels,12 who finds Abraham’s behavior inconsistent: . . . he [Abraham when asked to sacrifice Isaac] subordinated himself, his own desires and judgments, to God’s command, even when the temptation to do otherwise was strongest. Abraham’s record in this respect was not perfect. We . . . have the story of him bargaining with God over the conditions for saving Sodom and Gomorrah from destruction. God said that he would destroy those cities because they were so wicked; but Abraham gets God to agree that if fifty righteous men can be found there, then the cities will be spared. Then he persuades God to lower the number to forty-five, then forty, then thirty, then twenty, and finally ten. Here we have a diferent Abraham, not servile and obedient, but willing to challenge God and bargain with him. However, even as he bargains with God, Abraham realizes that there is something radically inappropriate about it: he says, behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes . . . Oh let not the Lord be angry (Gen. 18:27, 30). Is Abraham’s defense of Sodom and Gomorrah indefensible? Did he fail the test? In answering this question, we must first attend to the crucial diferences between the Akedah and the punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the case of the Akedah, Abraham is straightforwardly asked by God to do

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something, that is, to sacrifice Isaac. In the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham is not told to do anything by God; he is merely informed of God’s intentions. In fact, despite the popular assumption shared by Rachels, I contend that God does not actually tell Abraham that He will “destroy those cities because they were so wicked,” rather He is in the process of judging the situation and determining what to do about it: I will go down to see whether they have acted altogether [Hebrew: kalla] according to the outcry that has reached Me; if not, I will take note (Gen. 18:21).13 Abraham is not directly disapproving a verdict already reached by God, rather he is intervening in God’s ongoing decision-making process. In fact, God has explicitly expressed interest in Abraham’s input by first asking Himself, Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? If the Akedah were genuinely comparable to the Sodom story, we would find God revealing to Abraham that He is thinking about asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, rather than God directly asking Abraham to sacrifice his son. Nevertheless, we might still wonder about the point of the whole encounter. Does God really need Abraham’s advice on how to rule His world? Well, that depends on how you understand the test, if it is indeed a test. My own impression is that the great tests of Scripture are concerned with character rather than theological or philosophical acumen. When Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce their servant Joseph (Gen. 39), the latter was not confronted with a deep moral dilemma; everyone knows it’s wrong to have sex with the boss’s wife. But consider Joseph’s situation; he was deserted in a pit by his own brothers and has been living for years as a despised and lonely Hebrew slave in an aristocratic Egyptian household, with no prospects of love or marriage. Now he finds himself alone with a woman who repeatedly throws herself at him: After a time, his master’s wife cast her eyes upon Joseph and said, “Lie with me.” . . . And much as she coaxed Joseph day after day, he did not yield to her request to lie beside her, to be with her. One such day, he came into the house to do his work. None of the household being there inside, she caught hold of him by his garment and said, “Lie with me!” (Gen. 39:7, 10–12) Joseph’s struggle of conscience is not intellectual and philosophical, but rather emotional and quite physical, and he passes the test: But he left his garment in her hand and got away and fled outside (Gen. 19:12). Similarly, Abraham is made aware that whole cities are being judged. He does not grapple with theories of divine justice and the limitations of human understanding, but rather rushes in headlong to recklessly protect human lives. If he had hesitated in order to ponder the theological implications of ofering God moral advice, Abraham would have entertained what Bernard Williams’ famously called “one thought too many.”14 I will set aside these considerations and ask whether Abraham’s intervention on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah was not only laudable in emotional

16 The Creator God and Humans and psychological terms but also defensible in strictly philosophical terms. Even if it would have been “one thought too many” on Abraham’s part to ponder the theological justification of his intervention on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah, would that superfluous yet rigorous bit of cerebration ultimately endorse Abraham’s reaction? Could there be a legitimate role for human input in divine decision-making? Human and Divine Moral Obligations Here we return to the central philosophical thesis of this book. Readers may recall the old Jewish joke known around the world from its retelling in the musical Fiddler on a Roof: the village rabbi agrees first with one party to a dispute and then, immediately, he turns and agrees with the opposing party. A third man complains to the rabbi about the logical incoherence of his agreeing with both disputants, and the rabbi tells him, “You’re also right.” In short, I argue that humans and God can hold incompatible yet mutually justified positions on moral questions and, accordingly, that Abraham can justifiably disagree with God without implying that God is in the wrong. Furthermore, since God has entered a special covenant with Abraham – for I have singled him out – He is required to take notice of Abraham’s divergent moral point of view. In order to understand how this could be, first consider a moral disagreement between human parties that was the subject of much debate some years ago in Israel. On the 25th of June 2006, an Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit was taken hostage by Hamas fighters who had reached his post through tunnels passing under the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip. Shalit’s parents called upon the Israeli government to secure his release “at any price.”15 Prime Minister Netanyahu stated that Israel was willing to pay a heavy price for the release of Shalit, but not “at any price.”16 I have no intention of revisiting here the painful political debate that divided Israelis over the handling of negotiations for Shalit’s release, but rather mean to illustrate a philosophical point. Few people would condemn the Shalit parents for demanding that any price be paid for the release of their son. After all, they are his parents, and parents are expected to fight fiercely for the wellbeing of their children. A prime minister has other responsibilities. He or she is specifically charged with promoting the public good of the country and must think in terms of a “bigger picture” that cannot be sacrificed for the sake of a single captured soldier. A more complicated version of this kind of clash of duties was depicted in the fictional world of the popular television series The West Wing. When the fictional President Bartlett’s daughter Zoe is kidnapped by terrorists, he temporarily transfers his political authority to the Speaker of the House of Representatives in order to avoid a conflict of interest between his duties to the nation and his duties to his daughter. What I am suggesting here is that Bartlett’s decision was not motivated merely by fear that emotion might cloud his good judgment, but rather that he was

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trying to avoid being placed in a moral dilemma where wholly legitimate moral considerations  – those appropriate to an American president and those appropriate to a father – might pull him in opposite directions. While the foundations of “special duties” such as those of parents toward their children are a subject of philosophical debate, they also belong to the basic set of moral intuitions that must be recognized by any viable ethical theory. As ethicist Bernard Rollins has written: [N]o theory can override the (perhaps biologically based) intuition that we favor those made close to us by bonds of blood, friendship, or love. Indeed, a person who regularly acted on Kantian theory and hurt people’s feelings rather than told white lies in family, friendship, or loved one situations would be seen as a monster.17 What is the relevance of all this to the issue of how human beings should relate to divine plans? I would like to suggest that just as the demand that Gilad Shalit be released at any price was ethically legitimate – perhaps even admirable or required – when voiced by his parents but would have been completely irresponsible if honored by the prime minister, so too human beings may be legitimately guided in their actions by certain special duties which should not carry decisive weight in God’s own unfathomably broad calculations. British philosopher Bernard Williams made a similar point in a lecture he delivered not long before his death.18 In that address, he proposed a thought experiment in which highly advanced alien beings from outer space had reached a thoroughly fair, informed and farsighted decision regarding the future of the human race: “Things will never be better in this part of the universe until we [humans] are removed.” He dismisses the idea of allowing the aliens’ moral calculations (however abstractly correct) to trump our special predilection for human survival: “At this point there seems to be only one question left to ask: Which side are you on?”19 This, on a smaller scale, is the situation confronting Abraham. In the Hebrew Scriptures, God is depicted as interfering in human history at a grand level, wiping out practically everyone in the Flood, and while afterward He is obligated by a covenant not to completely destroy the world, His interventions in history are largely aimed toward accomplishing His modified Creator’s goal (as qualified and served by covenants) of making the world as worthy as possible. The bible depicts God hammering away at the Egyptian state with Ten Plagues, and raising up and casting down great empires to suit His purposes. God works at a macro level to achieve very broad and substantial goals, and, as far as we humans can understand the processes post-hoc, He appears to freely sacrifice justice toward individuals in order to pursue justice toward nations.20 As the Talmud states: “Once permission is granted to the destroyer, he does not distinguish between the righteous and the wicked.”21 Like Lenin, God is willing to “break a few eggs to make an omelet.” The diference is that when the human Lenin freely sacrificed

18 The Creator God and Humans human life in imagined certainty of his absolute grasp of the logic of history, he was a human megalomaniac playing God. Contrastingly, God is the Creator of the world rather than its most powerful inhabitant, creator of humanity rather than a member of humanity. God really does know the recipe to “make the omelet,” which requires the breaking of “a few eggs.” He also possesses powers that allow Him to take radical decisions which would be catastrophically reckless for a human leader. God can safely take hundreds of thousands of newly freed slaves into the wilderness, because He can solve their impossible logistical situation by miraculously bringing them water from a rock and feeding them manna from heaven. When the Creator decides to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, He is not playing God – He is God, and quite legitimately takes a God’s eye view of the situation.22 Abraham, however, must view these events in a diferent, human, light. He marshals an argument insisting that God act in accordance with the demands of human justice and asks Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty? – as if the biblical God were ever portrayed as worrying over the “collateral damage” of His great interventions in history! Rifng on the characteristically creative reading ofered by the great Rabbi Meir Simhah of Dvinsk,23 I would suggest that the Hebrew of the verse usually translated as Abraham’s plea, Far be it from You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that innocent and guilty fare alike. Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” could be rendered as ending with the demand that the Judge of all the earth should not dispense justice! Abraham knows of God in His role as Judge of all the earth, the Creator who once pronounced all the earth unworthy of existence and washed it away in the Flood. Abraham does not want God to work in that mode while deciding Sodom’s fate! At a more personal level, Abraham’s intercession on behalf of Sodom might be motivated by concern for his nephew Lot. Earlier in chapter fourteen of Genesis, we read how Lot, who had taken up residence in Sodom, was taken captive in a war together with many other fellow residents of that town. Abraham then gathered his men and went on the attack, freeing the captive Sodomites and the booty plundered from Sodom. While the King of Sodom was thrilled over this turn of events, it is clear throughout the story that Abraham was interested solely in freeing his nephew: When Abram heard that his kinsman had been taken captive, he mustered his retainers, born into his household, numbering three hundred and eighteen, and went in pursuit as far as Dan (Gen. 14:14). Now that Lot’s adopted town is under threat of annihilation by God, perhaps Abraham is once again coming to his nephew’s rescue by trying to save the entire city. After all, the fates of both Sodom and Gomorrah hang in the balance, yet in his pleas for divine mercy, Abraham consistently refers to one city in the singular, and in verse 26, God makes it clear that their discussion concerns Sodom in particular.24 If Abraham was chiefly concerned with protecting his nephew Lot, we can understand why he excludes Gomorrah from his bargaining with God.

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Even accepting Abraham’s ungodly human moral viewpoint, his argument remains puzzling. Why should an entire community be spared for the sake of a just minority? Wouldn’t it make more sense to simply ask that God see to the protection of the innocent while punishing the guilty? One possible answer is that Abraham’s human solidarity drives him to plead for all the inhabitants of Sodom, including the immoral majority, and he tries to leverage the merit of the righteous to gain a reprieve for the wicked as well. Another possibility is that Abraham is cognizant of divine providence’s standard modus operandi and assumes that God will choose between completely destroying the city and sparing it entirely, leaving the possibility of micro-managed halfway measures – punishing the wicked and exempting the just – completely of the table. Appropriately, he asks that the town’s entire population be spared in order to save the righteous minority. In any event, we find Abraham worried about specifically human matters; he is either maintaining solidarity with other human beings (or, perhaps, more particularly, with fellow residents of Canaan) or he is looking out for the wellbeing of the righteous few (in particular, his nephew Lot).25 Strikingly, God ends up taking the option left unmentioned by Abraham: He destroys the wicked and saves Lot’s isolated just family. When the angels reach Sodom and are treated to Lot’s hospitality, the townspeople, the men of Sodom, young and old – all the people to the last man – gathered about the house (Gen. 19:4) and soon express their demand to rape the visitors. We need not be troubled by the prospect of the innocents of Sodom sufering divine punishment; Lot and his family aside, they are all, every one of them, wicked.26 The minimum ten righteous persons for whose sake God promised to spare the city are not to be found and He abandons His macro-level view entirely and deigns to save a smaller number of individuals, the immediate members of Lot’s family.27 And lest we mistakenly assume that God has actually been convinced by the sheer moral logic of Abraham’s reproach Far be it from You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that innocent and guilty fare alike to save Lot, Scripture explicitly explains that it was for Abraham’s sake that God spared Lot, rather than out of respect for abstract moral principle: Thus it was that, when God destroyed the cities of the Plain and annihilated the cities where Lot dwelt, God was mindful of Abraham and removed Lot from the midst of the upheaval (Gen. 19:29). It is the covenant with Abraham rather than a general principle appropriate to human morality, which motivates God’s benevolence toward Lot.28 A Limited Role for Imitatio Dei Some readers might complain that by distinguishing between divine moral obligations and those relevant to humanity, I have undermined God’s role as a moral paragon appropriate for human emulation. If the actions of God and humanity must conform to somewhat difering sets of values, what are we to

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make of Leviticus 19:2, You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy, the verse commonly understood to charge us with the command of imitatio Dei, the imitation of God? Much has been written on the role of imitatio Dei in Judaism and the Hebrew Scriptures as well as in religion more generally. I will make somewhat short shrift of this issue, denying that imitatio Dei strictly taken is philosophically credible or of great importance for the Hebrew Scriptures. By imitatio Dei strictly taken, I refer to the idea that moral attributes and modes of action attributed to God have direct application to the way humans should live. A quick consideration of the realities of existence in a world said to be governed by God and of the biblical record of divine action should immediately dissuade us from adopting the principle of imitatio Dei strictly taken. As John Stuart Mill wrote in his essay on Theism29: Pious men and women have gone on ascribing to God particular acts and a general course of will and conduct incompatible with even the most ordinary and limited conception of moral goodness, and have had their own ideas of morality, in many important particulars, totally warped and distorted, and notwithstanding this have continued to conceive their God as clothed with all the attributes of the highest ideal goodness which their state of mind enabled them to conceive, and have had their aspirations towards goodness stimulated and encouraged by that conception. Every reasonably intelligent human being is aware of the presence of profound sufering in our world, be it of human or natural origin. Too much is wrong in the world to make the manner of its administration defensible in terms of human standards of morality. Much ink has been spilled through the ages in various attempts to formulate theodicies – justifications of God’s ways to humans – by people of faith struggling with the question of why God allows (and in some cases, perhaps causes) such sufering to take place. I have no quarrel with the idea of theodicy, but I would insist that while many more or less profound explanations may be ofered of why God allows, for instance, children to be born with terrible birth defects, we would not condone the decision of a human being to stand idly by while she could easily correct the genetic errors that lead to such sufering, or, worse yet, to deliberately arrange for such a defect to occur. While reasonable people of faith might accept, say, the philosopher John Hick’s “vale of soul-making” theodicy,30 according to which God spurs on the spiritual and moral development of the human race by confronting us with heart-breaking tragedies of this sort, we would condemn as a monster any human being who resorted to such educational techniques. To repeat a refrain of this book: it’s one thing for God to act that way, but when a person does such things, they have committed the sin of playing God. It would be catastrophically wrong for a human being to imitate God’s acquiescence to the sufering and death of an innocent child.

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They would have adopted a mode of action which runs counter to the moral virtues and obligations befitting human beings. The same is true of God’s moral character as described in scripture. I devote a later portion of this book to explicating scripture’s depictions of how God cooperated with humans but also manipulated and aficted them in the process of creating the covenantal nation of Israel in accordance with His plan to make our world more worthy. I do not read those narratives as an instruction manual for revolutionary leaders and would-be engineers of a new humanity. On the contrary, God’s providence ofers clear examples of what should remain beyond the pale of human policy and beyond appropriate ways for humans to order their afairs. God, scripture tells us, is responsible for terrible plagues. He lures or commands human political actors to carry out His plans for seemingly unnecessary wars and arranges the exile or annihilation of entire peoples. Here I will just mention the “educational” methods adopted by God to gain the Israelites’ fidelity and obedience during their forty-year trek from Egypt to the Land of Canaan. When the rifraf complain that they are tired of eating manna from heaven, that they want to eat meat and remember the fish and vegetables available in Egypt (Num. 11:4–6), God provides them with a huge quantity of quail, but soon: The meat was still between their teeth, nor yet chewed, when the anger of the Lord blazed forth against the people and the Lord struck the people with a very severe plague. That place was named Kibrothhattaavah, because the people who had the craving were buried there. (Num. 11:33–4) Similarly, when, after Korah challenged the authority of Moses and Aaron, the Israelites complain that too many people were killed in quelling the rebellion, God unleashes a plague upon them, killing 14,700 of their number (Num. 17:14). And so on. I can understand that God may have His godly reasons to cause such calamities; however, I also submit that such mass-killings can play no legitimate role as a tool of human political and military policy. No imitatio Dei for the justification of crimes against humanity!31 Jewish tradition has always been at least implicitly aware of these difculties. As the Hebrew University’s first professor of philosophy, Leon Roth, wrote32: [M]any a scholar has endeavored to discover, from Talmudic literature, the consequences of emulation, or, to use the conventional term, imitation, of God. But, as one of them has observed, the rabbis did not call upon people to imitate all the divine characteristics as they are described in the Hebrew Bible: and, from the philosophical point of view, this is the heart of the matter. We find no such summons as “just as I am jealous and vengeful [cf. Nahum 1:2] so be you likewise

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The Creator God and Humans jealous and vengeful.” Here is proof that the essence of the whole concept, even when propounded according to the foregoing formula, is not simply imitation. There is a selectivity of the appropriate characteristics for emulation; and once this is granted, imitation, as such, is not the touchstone.

A wonderful example of this self-censoring can be found in Moses Cordovero’s (16th century, Safed) classic work of kabbalistic ethics, Tomer Devora (The Palm Tree of Deborah).33 While that work explicitly adopts imitatio Dei as its theoretical framework, Cordovero is careful to avoid modeling human ethics on Judaism’s traditional “thirteen attributes” of God found in Exodus 34:6–7, which describes God as compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin but continues with visiting the iniquity of parents upon children and children’s children, upon the third and fourth generations. Instead, Cordovero builds his ethics around the completely benevolent “thirteen highest attributes of mercy” listed in Micah 7:18–2034: Who is a God like You, forgiving iniquity and remitting transgression; Who has not maintained His wrath forever against the remnant of His own people, because He loves graciousness! He will take us back in love; He will cover up our iniquities, You will hurl all our sins into the depths of the sea. You will keep faith with Jacob, loyalty to Abraham, as You promised on oath to our fathers in days gone by. Having demoted the standing of imitatio Dei, I must put in a parting good word on its behalf. While the God of scripture is described as acting in ways inappropriate for humans, at least He does demonstrate concern for the problems of this world. Importantly, scripture allows us to confront the human connoisseur of spirituality who cannot trouble himself with the problems of mundane reality and say: these earthly matters are beneath you, but your God remains sufciently “unadvanced” to concern Himself with the state of this world. Finally, what do I make of Leviticus 19:2, You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy, the scriptural locus classicus of imitatio Dei? I think it must be understood in terms of one of the broadest concerns of the Pentateuch; the question of how Israel can safely endure the perilous honor of God’s presence dwelling in their midst. This challenge is so difcult that at one point, we find the Israelites in the wilderness crying out to Moses in exasperation: “Lo, we perish! We are lost, all of us lost! Everyone who so much as ventures near the Lord’s Tabernacle must die. Alas, we are doomed to perish!” (Num. 17:28). This concern motivates, among other things, the consecration of a professional class of priests trained to carefully undertake the Tabernacle’s rituals. Against this context, I understand the verse not as

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meaning, “I am holy, take Me as your model and also be holy,” but rather, “I am holy, so if I am going to dwell amongst you, you had better prepare yourselves by being holy as well.” Having set out the diferences between divine and human moral duties and how they are bridged through covenants, the following chapter will consider how some human figures in scripture address the challenge of being invited to play a part in God’s larger plans. Notes 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 2001), 89. 2 See Nahum M. Sarna, Understanding Genesis (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1966), 10–11. 3 Bereishit Rabbah 3:7. 4 The Israeli heavy metal band “Orphaned Land” produced an album called Mabool based on the story of the Flood. In the title song, the lead singer recites in Hebrew several biblical verses describing the deluge, and then suddenly continues in the infamous “death metal” style of rasping voice. I found it quite appropriate to the narrative. 5 I am indebted to Philip Sumpter for reminding me of Noah’s role in prompting God’s grace toward humanity and the world. 6 Perhaps it would not be too much of a stretch to view the midrashic image of God creating and destroying worlds as similar to the modern philosophical conceit of God rummaging through the collection of all possible worlds in search of the best one to realize in actuality. It is not clear whether speaking of “a best of all possible worlds” makes any more sense than talking about “the largest of all possible natural numbers,” thus leaving God with the choice between gracefully creating a sub-optimum world or creating no world at all. For a good introduction to these issues, see William Rowe, Can God Be Free? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), chapters five and six. 7 Readers may be surprised that I consider the Flood rather than the sin of Adam and Eve, to mark the breaking point where divine mercy must come into play to preserve the world. I treat the Eden narrative below, but for the moment I will simply point out that I am being true to scripture. God did tweak the original human condition by expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden, but, unlike the Flood narrative, the Eden story never has God judging the world in general and humanity in particular as unworthy of existence. 8 Here I break with mainstream rabbinic tradition, which claims that Adam was commanded by God to create a judicial system (along with several fundamental prohibitions, including murder and theft) in the Garden of Eden. See Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 56b and, on a diferent scriptural basis, Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah Hilkhot Melakhim 9:1. 9 Here I must point out that while Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 do prohibit male homosexual intercourse, it seems clear to me that it is the Sodomites’ intent to commit mass-rape rather than the rape’s homosexual character which is being condemned in the story. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures, (Isaiah 1:10, Ezekiel 16:49), Sodom is charged with the sin of neglecting the weaker members of society and treating them unjustly. In Rabbinic literature, Sodom became identified with a flagrant egotism which rejects sharing and beneficence toward others, even when it is costless or even beneficial to the person called upon to participate (See Mishnah Avot 5:10 and the plethora of commentary upon it).

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10 Mishnah Avot 5:3. 11 I am thinking in particular of James Rachels; see the next footnote. 12 James Rachels, “God and Human Attitudes,” in Divine Commands and Morality, ed. Paul Helm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 42. 13 Many classical Jewish exegetes (Rashi. Abraham Ibn Ezra, etc.) interpret the word kalla in this verse to imply that God says He will annihilate the people of the towns if they are found to be as bad as the outcry has it. I quote here the JPS translation, which follows other authorities (Saadia Gaon, Ovadia Sforno, etc.) to say that kalla denotes the possibility that the people are completely evil. 14 Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 18. 15 Harriet Sherwood, “Tens of Thousands Attend Rally in Jerusalem after 12-Day March across Israel for Soldier Held by Palestinian Militants since 2006,” The Guardian, July 3, 2010, www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/08/gilad-shalitsupporters-rally. 16 Haaretz Service and Reuters, “Israel Willing to Pay Heavy Price to Free Gilad Shalit: But Not Any Price,” Haaretz, July 1, 2010, www.haaretz.com/2010-0701/ty-article/israel-willing-to-pay-heavy-price-to-free-gilad-shalit-but-not-anyprice/0000017f-db09-df62-a9f-dfdf12400000. 17 Bernard E. Rollin, “Reasonable Partiality and Animal Ethics,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8, nos. 1–2 (April 2005): 110. 18 Bernard Williams, “The Human Prejudice,” in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, ed. A. W. Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 135–52. 19 Williams, “The Human Prejudice,” 152. 20 The rationale for God’s focus on the macro-level of history is explained in Chapter 4. 21 Babylonian Talmud Bava Kama 60a. 22 I am not suggesting that the macro/micro distinction completely describes the gulf between human and divine morality, rather, it is a kind of short-hand indication of how humans might begin to experience and understand that gulf. Interestingly, something (very) roughly corresponding to this micro/macro binary is present in Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 442 (3:12): “However, if man considered and represented to himself that which exists and knew the smallness of his part in it, the truth would become clear and manifest to him. For this extensive raving entertained by men with regard to the multitude of evils in the world is not said by them to hold good with regard to the angels or with regard to the spheres and the stars or with regard to the elements and the minerals and the plants composed of them or with regard to the various species of animals, but their whole thought only goes out to some individuals belonging to the human species.” I develop additional clues toward understanding the gulf between human and divine morality later in this chapter. 23 R. Meir Simhah of Dvinsk (Eastern Europe, d. 1926) in his commentary on Pentateuch, Meshekh Hokhma. Meir Simhah understands Abraham as insisting that God be merciful toward Sodom and Gomorrah by not judging them by ethical standards relevant to normal human communities – not to judge them as He would other communities of the whole earth. 24 Another possibility: Abraham limits the discussion to Sodom because God may be swayed by considerations of the relative proportion of righteous people in the community. Abraham knows that Lot resides in Sodom, increasing the chances that that particular city enjoys the minimum proportion of just people for its survival, especially if Lot has positively influenced his family and neighbors. However, if Abraham bargains for all the towns involved together, Lot’s proportional significance is seriously diminished, and none may be saved.

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25 An apology for Abraham’s being motivated by a particular interest in Lot’s wellbeing may be found in Yoram Hazony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 113–14. Some classical Jewish exegetes suggest another take on the story which explains Abraham’s concern for the entire city. All the area under threat of destruction has been promised by God’s covenant to Abraham’s descendants. This explains why God needs to consult Abraham as a stakeholder in the real estate (so to speak) whose destruction is under consideration! See the comments of RaShBaM (R. Samuel ben Meir) on Gen. 18:17. 26 Or, at least, all the men of Sodom are wicked. 27 The angels warn Lot “Whom else have you here? Sons-in-law, your sons and daughters, or anyone else that you have in the city-bring them out of the place” (Gen. 19:12), which would seem to leave the possibility that Lot’s own family numbers more than the minimum ten needed to save the city. However, we have no reason to believe that they were all righteous, as his sons-in-law refusal to listen to him (Gen. 19:14) and his later rape by his daughters (Gen. 19:31–5) seem to disconfirm. I should mention that I have argued elsewhere that Lot was personally responsible for being raped by his daughters. Had he the courage to remain in Zoar, which had been spared at his request (Gen. 19:20–2), his daughters would not have reached the conclusion that there is not a man on earth to consort with us and that they must therefore maintain life through our father (Gen. 19:31). See Berel Dov Lerner, “Lot’s Failed Test,” The Jewish Bible Quarterly 37, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 153–6. 28 Mired in self-deception, Lot believes that his own merit had earned his rescue and says to God that he has found favor in Your eyes (Gen. 19:19), using the same phrase employed by Scripture to describe God’s recognition of Noah’s unique righteousness (Gen. 6:8). 29 John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Religion, ed. Louis J. Matz (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2009), 212–13. Later in that essay, Mill suggests that Christianity ofers a much more suitable object for imitation: Above all, the most valuable part of the efect on the character which Christianity has produced by holding up in a Divine Person a standard of excellence and a model for imitation, is available even to the absolute unbeliever and can never more be lost to humanity. For it is Christ, rather than God, whom Christianity has held up to believers as the pattern of perfection for humanity. It is the God incarnate, more than the God of the Jews or of Nature, who being idealized has taken so great and salutary a hold on the modern mind. (213) Dare I point out that since Jesus is depicted in the Gospels as, in Mill’s words, “a man charged with a special, express and unique commission from God” (215), his life does not supply much in the way of specific examples for imitation by those living less “special” and “unique” lives, who must make a living, raise families, and so on. 30 See John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 31 Given the difculties with imitation Dei I have mentioned here, it is hardly surprising that Moses Maimonides decided to base his version of the doctrine on God’s providence in nature, rather than on human history or the biblical narrative. 32 Leon Roth, Is There a Jewish Philosophy?: Rethinking Fundamentals (Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1999), 22. I have not succeeded in identifying the scholar mentioned in this passage.

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33 Available in English as Moses Cordovero, The Palm Tree of Deborah, trans. Louis Jacobs (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1960). 34 Note that the benevolent “thirteen highest attributes of mercy” underline the role of covenants in describing God’s mercy: You will keep faith with Jacob, loyalty to Abraham, as You promised on oath to our fathers in days gone by.

References Cordovero, Moses. The Palm Tree of Deborah. Translated by Louis Jacobs. New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1960. Haaretz Service and Reuters. “Israel Willing to Pay Heavy Price to Free Gilad Shalit: But Not Any Price.” Haaretz, July 1, 2010. www.haaretz.com/2010-0701/ty-article/israel-willing-to-pay-heavy-price-to-free-gilad-shalit-but-not-anyprice/0000017f-db09-df62-a9f-dfdf12400000 Hazony, Yoram. The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love. 2nd Edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Lerner, Berel Dov. “Lot’s Failed Test.” The Jewish Bible Quarterly 37, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 153–6. Maimonides, Moses. The Guide of the Perplexed. Translated by Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Mill, John Stuart. Three Essays on Religion. Edited by Louis J. Matz. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2009. Rachels, James. “God and Human Attitudes.” In Divine Commands and Morality, edited by Paul Helm, 34–48. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Rollin, Bernard E. “Reasonable Partiality and Animal Ethics.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8, (2005): 105–21. Roth, Leon. Is there a Jewish Philosophy?: Rethinking Fundamentals. Portland, Or.: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1999. Rowe, William. Can God be Free? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Sarna, Nahum M. Understanding Genesis. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1966. Sherwood, Harriet. “Tens of Thousands Attend Rally in Jerusalem after 12-Day March across Israel for Soldier Held by Palestinian Militants since 2006.” The Guardian, July 3, 2010. www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/08/gilad-shalit-supporters-rally Williams, Bernard. Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge, 2001.

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Human Participation in Divine Plans Eden, Divine Punishment and the Betrothal of Rebekah

Some Ground Rules Before considering several case-studies of various situations in which humans must decide how and whether to accommodate God’s plans in their own behavior, I will suggest several ground rules that seem to delimit appropriate human responses to divine agendas, rules that are both supported by and helpful for the analysis of the case-studies to follow. The rules are as follows: 1) Awareness of a divine plan does not require human cooperation with the plan; on the contrary, authentic human duties can require humans to work against God’s plans. 2) If someone is explicitly commanded by God to play some role in a divine plan, they are duty-bound to play that role. 3) God generally avoids commanding people to consciously participate in His plans in ways that undermine their legitimate human interests and duties. 4) God (or the biblical narrator) displays a degree of toleration toward failures to execute His commands when these conflict with legitimate human interests and duties. The Eden Story Famously, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden plays a fundamental role in the theologies of many readers of the bible. While I find that story fascinating, I also take it to be less significant than those (mostly Christian) readers who view humanity as having fallen catastrophically with Adam and Eve’s sin in a way requiring an equally dramatic remedy. I place more emphasis on the Flood story since, after all, there is no indication that God found the world unworthy of preservation after Adam and Eve sinned, but He does announce precisely such existential dissatisfaction before the Flood and, appropriately, He returns the world to a watery chaos. I will gingerly avoid the exegetical mysteries surrounding the forbidden tree of the garden and the knowledge its fruit imparted to humanity. Instead, I will focus on the DOI: 10.4324/9781003414346-3

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curses dispensed to the snake, the woman and the man with the latter two’s expulsion from Eden. Back to the beginning – in the Garden of Eden. The first human couple is living an idyllic life in an earthly paradise, when the serpent tempts the woman to transgress God’s only prohibition by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The man soon follows her lead and eats the fruit himself. Things rapidly fall apart as they try to hide from God and completely fail to demonstrate remorse, accept responsibility, or make any other gesture toward repentance.1 Worst of all, when speaking to God, the man unceremoniously lays blame for his sin upon the love of his life, the woman whom he had previously called bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh (Gen. 2:23), but whom he now refers to as the woman You put at my side (Gen. 3:12). In this, he commits the first act of inter-human treachery, and a particularly foul one at that. Less deplorably, the woman blames the snake. God meets out to each party their due: Then the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you did this, more cursed shall you be than all cattle and all the wild beasts: On your belly shall you crawl, and dirt shall you eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your ofspring and hers; they shall strike at your head, and you shall strike at their heel.” And to the woman He said, “I will make most severe your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bear children. Yet your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” To Adam He said, “Because you did as your wife said and ate of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed be the ground because of you; by toil shall you eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you. But your food shall be the grasses of the field; by the sweat of your brow shall you get bread to eat, until you return to the ground – for from it you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you shall return.” (Gen. 3:14–19) It is worth reading these sentences of judgment in the light of earlier verses in the opening chapters of Genesis. In each case, a basic activity of life (eating, reproducing and working) that had first been mentioned in a positive context is now distorted and made difcult by God’s intervention. Originally, the snake, like all other animals, enjoyed God’s gift of green plants for food (Gen. 1:30), but now, On your belly shall you crawl, and dirt shall you eat all the days of your life (Gen. 3: 14). The blessing of human fecundity – Be fertile and increase (Gen. 1:28) – becomes a source of pain and danger for women: I will make most severe your pangs in childbearing; In pain shall you bear children (Gen. 3:16). Adam had been placed in Eden to till and tend (Gen.

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2:15) its fertile soil, but now work has been transformed into a bitter struggle for survival: Cursed be the ground because of you; by toil shall you eat of it all the days of your life: thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you. But your food shall be the grasses of the field; By the sweat of your brow Shall you get bread to eat (Gen. 3:17–19). While God’s curses distort the activities of eating, reproduction and work, Scripture maintains their basic positive value. Thus, God is praised for supplying all creatures with food (Ps. 136:25;145:16, etc.). Throughout Scripture, children are counted as a much sought-after blessing and the desire of biblical heroines such as Sarah, Rebekah, Leah, Rachel and Hannah to become mothers drives much of the action in the biblical narrative. Unlike the well-documented disparaging attitudes that are voiced in classical Greek sources, Jewish Scripture and tradition accord honor to productive labor.2 When you enjoy the fruit of your labors; you shall be happy and you shall prosper (Ps. 128:2). Thus, the role of God’s curses is somewhat paradoxical. The activities targeted by God’s curses had been blessed and integral parts of the idyllic life before the sin and they remain valuable even when deformed by God. Having dealt with the three activities tainted by God’s curses, I now turn to the two basic relationships afected by the divine punishments. The first is humanity’s relationship with the snake, which can be taken as reflecting humanity’s relationship with nature in general. As originally depicted, the human’s relationship with nature is that of straightforward sovereignty: replenish the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth (Gen. 1:28). Following the commission of the sin, human dominion breaks down and is replaced by continuous struggle: And I will put enmity between thee [the snake] and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel (Gen. 3:15). The earth, which humans were supposed to replenish and subdue, becomes cursed . . . for thy sake (Gen. 3:17). Originally designated to rule nature, humanity must forever do battle with it. I come now to the most controversial aspect of the Eden story: the second relationship afected by God’s curses, that between man and woman. We must apply to this case the principles developed in the examination of the punishments of the snake and of Adam. As in those cases, here, too, we are dealing with a valuable aspect of life that has been distorted. Indeed, the value and original nature of the man/woman relationship is clearly depicted in Genesis. In the opening chapter of Genesis, men and women are depicted in quite egalitarian terms and gender is mentioned almost as an afterthought: So God created Mankind in His own image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them (Gen. 1:27). The blessings that they received, including dominion over the earth and the charge to subdue it, are all addressed in the plural, indicating that men and women would share them jointly.

30 Human Participation in Divine Plans The detailed account of woman’s creation in chapter two of Genesis might be construed as indicating feminine inferiority, as in Paul’s declaration: A woman ought not to speak, because Adam was formed first and she afterwards (1 Timothy 2:13).3 Yet, a careful reading of Genesis will reveal an insistence upon the importance of Adam and Eve’s relationship and her equality within it. Allow me to explain. I have already discussed how throughout the creation narrative, we read of God declaring things good. God saw the light, that it was good (Gen. 1:4). So, too, the separation of water and land was good (Gen. 1:10) as was the creation of vegetation (Gen. 1:12), the heavenly bodies (Gen. 1:18), creatures of the seas and the air (Gen. 1:21), and of the land (Gen. 1:25). All were declared good. The first chapter of Genesis ends with the verse: And God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good (Gen. 1:31). After such a persistent afrmation of creation’s goodness, any hint of defect in God’s world takes on a special salience. All the more so when God, Himself, bluntly states the problem: It is not good that the human should be alone (Gen. 2:18). The solution to the problem is obvious: I will make a help to match him (Gen. 2:18). (Or, in one plausible alternative translation: a helper equal to him.4) Strangely, the biblical narrative does not proceed directly with Eve’s creation, but, rather, tells of how God created specimens of all the living creatures and brought them before Adam so that he might name them. The purpose of this interruption in the narrative becomes clear when we read its concluding verse: And man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for the man there was not found a help to match him [a helper equal to him] (Gen. 2:20). Adam needed the companionship of an equal. God shows Adam all of the creatures over which he was meant to rule (Gen. 1:26), so that he might understand that his loneliness could never be dispelled by a being subservient to him. Finally, when presented with Eve, Adam declares with relief: This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh (Gen. 2:23). He has finally discovered the partner with whom he can share the privileges and purpose given to him by God – a partner who is excluded from the class of beings over whom humans are meant to rule.5 As in the case of man’s relationship to nature, man’s relationship to woman is also damaged by God’s punishment. We read: Unto the woman he said . . . he [man] shall rule over you (Gen. 3:16). The proper order of things has been completely overturned. Nature, which was created to serve mankind, rebels against man’s authority. Woman, who was to be man’s equal, becomes subservient to him.6 Thus, Genesis instructs us that, while initially posited in ideal terms, four central aspects of human existence (i.e., reproduction, work, the relationship of humankind to nature and the relationship between man and woman) were negatively altered and distorted as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve.7

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What is the meaning of these punishments for later generations? They certainly appear to constitute some kind of divine plan or intention. God says He will make birth painful, that people will have to work hard to make a living, and that women will be subservient to men. History has thoroughly proven God to be good on His word on all counts. But what should humans do about it? God has plainly announced how life will proceed in the post-Edenic age. The bible knows of no Eastern laws of automatic karma and the world created by the God of the Hebrews is not ruled by Hellenic decrees of fate. This seismic change in the character of human reality can only be viewed as a deliberate act of God; God has decided to disrupt His creation. However, human beings have not been commanded by God to enforce these curses and the human imperative to advance human flourishing requires that they work to ameliorate them. The fact that God merely makes known the future evils to be sufered by humanity without commanding anyone to enforce them creates a space for legitimate resistance. Ever since ancient times, midwives have struggled to reduce the danger and discomfort of childbirth and we find no biblical condemnation of their eforts.8 Instead, the midwives Shifra and Puah are hailed as the earliest heroes of the Exodus narrative (Ex. 1:15–21). This line of interpretation is supported by rabbinic sources. Far from rejecting eforts to ease childbirth, the Talmud9 rules that Sabbath prohibitions may be transgressed in order to ensure that a midwife will be present at a birth. Similarly, the Midrash10 states that it was the righteous Noah who moderated God’s curse upon agriculture by inventing the basic tools of farming. It is hardly surprising that some men have clung to the woman’s curse, and he shall rule over you (Gen. 3:16) as legitimizing male control over women; yet, of course, they would chase anyone out of their fields who tried to enforce the verse thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you (Gen. 3: 18). To sum things up: as far as Scripture and Jewish tradition are concerned, the curses of Adam and Eve have no prescriptive pretensions. Far from describing how human beings should live their lives, they set forth the unfortunate circumstances against which humanity must struggle.11 Resisting Divine Punishments I have tried to demonstrate that Jewish tradition allows people to struggle against divinely imposed curses and punishments, but could we be positively obligated to try to stymie God’s will, as it were? While presenting his celebrated “Vale of Soul-Making” theodicy, philosopher John Hick states that “We do not acknowledge a moral call to sacrificial measures to save a criminal from receiving his just punishment”12 and extends that claim to include cases in which people are clearly sufering the efects of deserved divine punishment. On this basis, he argues that our world must contain sufering that

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does not make educational or retributive sense so that we may develop our moral characters by righteously taking extreme measures to alleviate it. I reject this claim. We must distinguish between the case of a criminal, who, having been justly tried by a human court, is sentenced to punishment at the hands of his fellow humans, and the case of a sinner whose misdeeds are known to God and who sufers divine punishment. When people interfere with the just punishment of criminals by the legitimate human authorities, they may dangerously undermine governmental functions which are necessary for the preservation of civil society. As I argued earlier, Scripture views the punishment of human crimes by human authorities to be integrally connected to God’s promise never to destroy the world again in a flood. Such considerations cannot enter our judgment of those who would mitigate divinely imposed punishments; the functioning of an omnipotent God is not endangered by human meddling. I would go so far as to say that while as members of a well-ordered society we are required not to interfere with the human punishment of criminals, the enforcement of divine punishment is solely God’s own business. All things being equal, the fact that someone’s sufering is an instance of divinely executed punishment need not nullify our prima facie duty to come to the aid of the suferer qua fellow human being. Consider two examples of this drawn from the Jewish tradition. Deuteronomy 22:8 relates the safety regulation requiring (apparently flat) roofs to be enclosed by a railing or parapet: When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof, so that you do not bring bloodguilt on your house if anyone should fall from it. A stylistic anomaly of the original Hebrew is lost in translation. The phrase if anyone should fall from it (ki yipol hanofel mimenu) could be rendered literally as if he who falls should fall from it. Who is this he who falls? The Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 32a) explains: The House of Rabbi Yishmael taught: if he who falls should fall from it: This one was supposed to fall already from the six days of creation, for he did not [yet] fall, but Scripture calls him he who falls. Rather, merit is brought about through the agency of the meritorious and guilt [is punished] though the agency of the guilty. According to the House of Yishmael, the potential victim of falling deserves to die, and such is, no doubt, God’s will. Nonetheless, the righteous are expected to take steps to prevent the sinner’s death. If the sinner must sufer, let it be at the hands of the wicked! My second example touches directly on the issue of our duty to relieve the suferings of those who have been justly punished by God. An old tradition has it that the inhabitants of Gehenna are freed from their suferings for the duration of the Sabbath. This creates an interesting possibility. The Sabbath ends with the (Saturday) evening prayer service, which is usually held just after nightfall. However, an individual or community may choose to extend the

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Sabbath by delaying or lengthening the evening service. Established custom has it that the concluding verses of the service should be “sung in a pleasant voice, so that they [i.e. the time required for their recitation] should be somewhat lengthened, and [thus] delay the return of the wicked to Gehenna.”13 In other words, this custom is specifically intended to interfere with the execution of justified divine punishment; worshippers help sinners escape the fires of hell (if only for a few fleeting moments)! Hick would probably find my arguments thus far unconvincing. Even if people have no responsibility to promote the execution of divine punishments and even if Judaism ofers examples of our being required to avoid becoming the instruments of divine justice (and even expects us to attempt to thwart God’s punishments), how could such human interventions really make any sense? If God’s plans reflect His perfect justice, what good could we possibly achieve by thwarting them? Furthermore, if God is omnipotent, wouldn’t any attempt to thwart His plans be doomed from the start? The problem with these criticisms is that they do not recognize the possibility of a conflict between divine and human moral imperatives. They also reflect the related assumption that, even from the standpoint of legitimate human concerns, God’s plans are immutable.14 Instead of viewing human actions as the inconsequential raw material that is manipulated willy-nilly to fit into God’s predetermined schemes, we can understand human and divine agency as engaged in a kind of dialogue in which the decisions of each side creates or limits the possibilities of the other, as I have demonstrated earlier in connection to Noah and the Flood. This interactive quality of Providence is reflected in biblical prophecy. God has Jonah baldly declare, forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown (Jonah 3:4), but as that story makes clear, the announcement of the city’s forthcoming destruction is not meant to merely inform its inhabitants of their impending doom; rather it ofers them an opportunity to change God’s intention for them by repenting. This interactive model of human and divine agency opens the way toward understanding the rationality of human attempts to thwart God’s plans. Imagine a situation in which I knew that God’s justice required that a certain person die in a fire. Given that person’s past actions, her death may well be justified. However, by risking my own life to save hers, I may set into motion a whole series of positive consequences (including, perhaps, the woman’s own repentance) that would not be otherwise achievable. My action creates new opportunities for God’s action, including, possibly, new and preferable schemes in which the woman will survive. As usual, I remain ignorant of God’s plans and I cannot pretend to know whether, thanks to some serendipitous harmony between my actions and the alternatives it opens for God, He will allow me to thwart His punishments. However, that possibility can give me hope that my attempts to help those targeted for divine punishments may achieve their desired efect. My struggle against divine punishments need not be gallant but practically useless gestures. But haven’t I overstated the efcacy of human agency? My example involved repentance, and perhaps repentance

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should be treated as a special case. In efect, it merely involves people getting a bit side-tracked before doing as God wishes they would. Do people really enjoy the freedom to upset God’s plans in a more general sense? A scriptural answer may be found in the story of Rebekah’s betrothal. Rebekah or the Girl Who Could Say “No” ...freedom, according to which the act as well as its opposite must be within the power of the subject at the time of its taking place. – Immanuel Kant15

If someone were asked to name the greatest existential heroes of the bible, Abraham would probably top the list. After all, it was Abraham who was subject to an explicit test of faith when he was asked by God to sacrifice Isaac and it was Abraham who became the subject of one of the founding works of religious existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.16 The essential requirement for being an authentic existential hero – whether you are Abraham on Mount Moriah or Sartre’s student who had to choose between caring for his mother and joining the Free French Forces17 – is that you must be faced with a set of genuine alternatives from which you can freely choose. If remaining at home with Sarah was simply not an option for Abraham and he had no choice but to take Isaac to be sacrificed, no one would find Abraham’s behavior especially impressive.18 The interesting thing about Abraham’s story, however, is that, unlike Sartre’s description of his student, scripture’s depiction of Abraham’s predicament never mentions any alternative options as open to him. We must engage our imaginations or turn to extra-biblical sources in order to witness Abraham grappling with his decision. It is only when the sacrifice of Isaac is cancelled that the angel first mentions the very possibility of Abraham disregarding God’s request: Because you have done this thing and have not withheld your son (Gen. 22:16), implying, after the fact, that Abraham could have withheld his son. Perhaps none of this should surprise us; is there any reason to expect Scripture to mention the possibility of Abraham not heeding God’s word? After all, any suggestion that Abraham might actually skip out on the ordeal at Mount Moriah could have created the un-heroic impression that he sufered from a lack of resolve. Be that as it may, there is an important character in Genesis whose future decision is a source of great anxiety for the biblical narrative. Other biblical figures openly agonize over the possibility of that person making a choice, which would confound God’s own larger plans for Abraham’s posterity. Who is this great existential hero whose fateful decision is awaited with bated breath? None less than Abraham’s daughter-in-law, Rebekah. Before anyone can even name Rebekah as a prospective match for Isaac, people are already discussing the possibility that she will refuse to come to live in Canaan and marry him. In Genesis 24, we find Abraham instructing

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his faithful servant to visit his birthplace Aram-Naharaim in order to find Isaac a wife. Abraham insists that his son must not marry a local Canaanite woman. Immediately, his servant asks: What if the woman does not consent to follow me to this land, shall I then take your son back to the land from which you came? (Gen. 24:5). It seems that the whole plan of the divine covenant with Abraham is in danger of being derailed. God had repeatedly promised (Gen. 17:19, 21; 21:12) that Isaac will be the one to inherit the covenant. It is assumed that Isaac’s proper match is waiting for him back in Aram-Naharaim, but the servant is worried she might not agree. The idea of Isaac’s marrying a local Canaanite woman is out of the question, since such a marriage would lead to the assimilation of Abraham’s family into idolatrous Canaanite society, as Deuteronomy (7:3–4) would later warn: You shall not intermarry with them: do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons. For they will turn your children away from Me to worship other gods. But if Isaac does not marry and beget children, what will become of God’s promises to Abraham? Who will inherit the Land of Canaan in Abraham’s name? Abraham responds to this difcult possibility by making one of the oddest speeches in all of Scripture. He begins with a powerful message of reassurance: God will see to the success of the servant’s mission: The Lord, God of heaven, who took me from my father’s house and from my native land, who promised me on oath, saying, “I will assign this land to your ofspring” – He will send His angel before you, and you will get a wife for my son from there. (Gen. 24:7) Then, despite his invocation of both God’s oath and the help of an interceding angel, Abraham immediately entertains the possibility of failure as a contingency that must be addressed: And if the woman does not consent to follow you, you shall then be clear of this oath to me; but do not take my son back there (Gen. 24:8). Apparently, divine promises and supernatural beings are no match for the freedom of Rebekah’s will. No matter what anyone else – including the One – wants, she can say no to the divine plan. If Rebekah, Isaac’s predestined wife, refuses to leave for Canaan to marry him, and Isaac can neither leave Canaan to marry her nor may he marry a local Canaanite woman, the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham for it is through Isaac that ofspring shall be continued for you (Gen. 21:12) could soon run into a brick wall. This tension between God’s plans and Rebekah’s freedom to decide becomes a recurring theme in the story of her betrothal. On the one hand, we

36 Human Participation in Divine Plans are repeatedly reminded that Rebecca and Isaac are a match made in heaven. Abraham’s servant asks God to give him a sign to identify Isaac’s future wife: And he said, “O Lord, God of my master Abraham, grant me good fortune this day, and deal graciously with my master Abraham: Here I stand by the spring as the daughters of the townspeople come out to draw water; let the maiden to whom I say, ‘Please, lower your jar that I may drink,’ and who replies, ‘Drink, and I will also water your camels’ – let her be the one whom You have decreed for Your servant Isaac. Thereby shall I know that You have dealt graciously with my master.” (Gen. 24:12–14) Rebekah passes the test with flying colors, surpassing his expectations by referring to him as my lord, saying she will water the camels until they finish drinking, and running to quickly fulfill her tasks: “Drink, my lord,” she said, and she quickly lowered her jar upon her hand and let him drink. When she had let him drink his fill, she said, “I will also draw for your camels, until they finish drinking.” Quickly emptying her jar into the trough, she ran back to the well to draw, and she drew for all his camels. (Gen. 24:18–20) The servant is convinced of his good fortune and thanks God for having led him to the right woman: Blessed be the Lord, the God of my master Abraham, who has not withheld His steadfast faithfulness from my master. For I have been guided on my errand by the Lord, to the house of my master’s kinsmen (Gen. 24:27). When retelling the story to Rebekah’s family, he again emphasizes the divine sign (Gen. 24:42–4), its realization in Rebekah (Gen. 24:45–6), and his homage to God’s guidance in the matter (Gen. 24:48). While the servant does ask for the family’s permission to take Rebekah (Gen. 24:49), her brother Laban and father Bethuel fatalistically accept God’s decree of her marriage to Isaac: The matter was decreed by the Lord; we cannot speak to you bad or good. Here is Rebekah before you; take her and go, and let her be a wife to your master’s son, as the Lord has spoken (Gen. 24:50–1). But then, at the last moment and despite so much talk about divine providence, the possibility of Rebecca’s refusing to go along with God’s plan reemerges. When the servant retells his story to Rebekah’s family, he describes at length his anxious discussion with Abraham about the possibility of Rebekah’s refusal (Gen. 24:39–41). Most crucially, in the final exchange between the servant and Rebekah’s family (who only a moment before had said the entire matter had already been settled by God), the latter suddenly reassert her freedom and insist that her assent must be obtained: He said to them, “Do not delay me, now that the Lord has made my errand successful. Give me leave that I may go to my master.” And they

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said, “Let us call the girl and ask for her reply.” They called Rebekah and said to her, “Will you go with this man?” and she said, “I will.” (Gen. 24:56–8) Once again, Rebekah’s momentous decision is spoken of at once both as a matter of divine providence and as something to be decided by her own free choice. Furthermore, while everyone involved is certain that God intends for Rebekah to marry Isaac, no one exerts any kind of pressure on her to acquiesce to God’s matchmaking. In order to proceed toward some understanding of the surprising mix of divine providence and human freedom found in Rebekah’s story, we must first make clear the precise theological situation in which she makes her decision. The most important fact about Rebekah’s predicament is that while it appears that God clearly intends for her to move to Canaan and marry Isaac, He never actually commands or even asks her to do so. This stands in stark contrast to Abraham’s various trials. Abraham is explicitly commanded by God, Go forth from your native land . . . to the land that I will show you (Gen. 12:1); and later, you shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin (Gen. 17:11). God tells him to obey Sarah regarding the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael (Gen. 21:12), and most famously, God tells Abraham, Take your son . . . and ofer him up as a burnt ofering (Gen. 22:2). While everyone in the present story is absolutely convinced that God wants Rebekah to leave for Canaan with Abraham’s servant, God never actually communicates this wish to her directly, and she certainly is not commanded by God to marry Isaac. As I have already suggested in my “ground rules” for divine/human relations, the mere fact that God plans on something happening does not imply that human beings are obligated to see it through.19 Rebekah may marry or not marry Isaac as she pleases. The surprising thing is that while in the cases I discussed earlier, human beings are shown to have license to try to ameliorate divinely imposed sufering, in Rebekah’s case we find that she remains free to refuse to take up a central positive role in God’s plan for human history. Rebekah marks the extremely wide end of the wedge separating human responsibility from divine will.20 Since she was not commanded by God to marry Isaac, it is not so surprising that Rebekah could have declined to participate in God’s plans. In the next chapter, we will consider two biblical heroes who blatantly refused to follow a divine order. Notes 1 I commend Rashi’s very Jewish reading of the human-divine encounter following the sin. Instead of viewing the sin as having instantly and catastrophically distanced humans from God, Rashi implies that God asks Adam “Where are you?” (Gen. 3:9) and “Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat of the tree from which I had forbidden you to eat?” (Gen. 3:11) in order to give him an opportunity to confess his sin, repent, and avoid punishment. Such a reading also avoids the risible deduction that God was genuinely unaware of Adam’s whereabouts and activities.

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2 A. Shapira, “Work (‫)הדובע‬,” in Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, ed. A. A. Cohen and P. Mendes-Flohr (New York: Free Press, 1988), 1055–67. 3 Paul’s comment is puzzling, since the process of creation depicted in the first chapter of Genesis seems to be organized by the principle that the later a being appears the more noble its status, with humans created last to rule over all those whose appearance preceded theirs. Why would Eve’s having been created after Adam speak against her status relative to him? 4 Michael L. Rosenzweig, “A Helper Equal to Him,” Judaism 35, no. 3 (Summer 1986): 277–80. 5 The interpretation of this section largely follows U. Cassuto, From Adam to Noah (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1986), 83–90 (in Hebrew). 6 Midrashic exegesis uncover ten curses in the verses relating to woman’s fate, including forced domesticity, lack of economic independence, and other classic feminist complaints. Elsewhere I argue that by creating these lists the rabbis demonstrate their awareness of the oppression of women in (and by) traditional Jewish society. See Berel Dov Lerner, “The Ten Curses of Eve,” Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary E-Journal 15 (March 2018), https://wjudaism.library.utoronto. ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/32359. 7 And eating for the snake. 8 It has been claimed that some Christian groups opposed the use of anesthesia in childbirth on the grounds that it interfered with God’s curse. However, see Ingrid Kristensen, “The Curses of Eve and the Advent of Anesthesia,” in The Proceedings of the 12th Annual History of Medicine Days, ed. W. A. Whitelaw (Calgary: Faculty of Medicine, the University of Calgary, 2003), 52–7. On Jewish attitudes on apparent human interference in divinely ordained medical problems, see Noam J. Zohar, Alternatives in Jewish Bioethics (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), 19–36. 9 Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 128b. 10 Tanhuma Bereishit 11. See also Rashi on Genesis 5:29. 11 In his less read First Treatise of Government, John Locke argues for a similar line of exegesis in his attempt to undermine scripturally based arguments for the divine rights of kings. There he writes: [T]hese words here of Gen. 3:16 . . . were not spoken to Adam, neither indeed was there any grant in them made to Adam, but a punishment laid upon Eve: and if we will take them as they were directed in particular to her, or in her, as their representative, to all other women, they will at most concern the female sex only, and import no more, but that subjection they should ordinarily be in to their husbands: but there is here no more law to oblige a woman to such subjection, if the circumstances either of her condition, or contract with her husband, should exempt her from it, than there is, that she should bring forth her children in sorrow and pain, if there could be found a remedy for it, which is also a part of the same curse upon her. From John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 32. 12 John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London: Macmillan, 1974), 324. 13 My translation of Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan, Mishnah Breura Orah Hayyim 295:2. 14 Here I will leave aside the perennial theological morass surrounding the question of whether God’s will is eternally unchanging in some ultimate, transcendent sense. Rather, I am concerned with how human beings should think about God’s will in the context of producing and executing their own human plans and actions.

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15 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson (Chicago: Open Court, 1934), 45, footnote. 16 See my critique of Kierkegaard’s reading of Abraham later in this chapter. 17 See Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 18 Contemporary philosophers, especially Harry G. Frankfurt, have argued that sometimes people can be held responsible for their behavior even when they lack alternative possible courses of action. See Harry Frankfurt, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” Journal of Philosophy 6, no. 23 (December 4, 1969): 829–39. Consideration of such views is beyond the scope of the present discussion. 19 God’s reluctance to force Rebekah’s hand might also be seen as involving another ground-rule of divine/human relations: “God generally avoids commanding people to consciously participate in His plans in ways that undermine their legitimate human interests and duties.” Especially in the ancient Near East, a woman’s decision to marry a certain man was so momentous for the course of her life that God would not force her hand in that matter! 20 Appropriately, as I discuss in Chapter 7, it will be Rebekah, the biblical figure whose entry into the divine drama is most markedly autonomous, who takes matters into her own hands and keeps God’s plan on track by tricking her husband Isaac into giving his blessing to his proper successor, Jacob (Gen. 27).

References Cassuto, Umberto. From Adam to Noah [In Hebrew]. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1986. Frankfurt, Harry G. “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.” Journal of Philosophy 6, no. 23 (December 4, 1969): 829–39. Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love. London: Macmillan, 1974. Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Translated by T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson. Chicago: Open Court, 1934. Kristensen, Ingrid. “The Curses of Eve and the Advent of Anesthesia.” In The Proceedings of the 12th Annual History of Medicine Days, edited by W. A. Whitelaw, 52–7, Calgary: Faculty of Medicine, the University of Calgary, 2003. Lerner, Berel Dov. “The Ten Curses of Eve.” Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary E-Journal, 15, no. 1 (March 2019). https://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/index. php/wjudaism/article/view/32359 Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration. Edited by Ian Shapiro. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Rosenzweig, Michael L. “A Helper Equal to Him.” Judaism 35, no. 3 (Summer 1986): 277–80. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007 (1946). Shapira, Amnon. “Work (‫)עבודה‬.” In Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, edited by A. A. Cohen and P. Mendes-Flohr, 1055–67. New York: Free Press, 1988. Zohar, Noam J. Alternatives in Jewish Bioethics. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997.

3

Responsible Rebels Saul, Jonah and Abraham Contend with God’s Requests

Among the “ground rules” for human-divine interactions listed in Chapter 2, I included: “God (and/or the biblical narrator) displays a degree of toleration towards failures to execute His commands when these conflict with legitimate human interests and duties.” In this chapter, I will examine two such cases of God’s toleration of human unwillingness to fulfill His commands; it concludes with a reading of the story of the Binding of Isaac that clarifies why Abraham did not refuse God’s command to sacrifice his son. Saul and Genocide God’s biblical command to wipe out the memory of the Amalekites (Deut. 25:19) has long been a source of consternation for Jewish thinkers. Michael J. Harris’s book Divine Command Ethics: Jewish and Christian Perspectives1 devotes an entire chapter to the issue. Critics of religion have, for their part, focused on the Amalekite “genocide” as an easy point of attack against biblical morality. The British Guardian newspaper ran an item by Katherine Stewart entitled, “How Christian fundamentalists plan to teach genocide to schoolchildren.”2 That article discusses the story of King Saul’s battle against the Amalekites, and cites Philip Jenkins, a prominent American academic historian, as claiming that the story has been used to justify acts of genocide perpetrated by white settlers against Native Americans, Catholics against Protestants, Protestants against Catholics and even Rwandan Hutus against their Tutsi compatriots. In recounting the passage from Samuel, Stewart first quotes the command to wipe out the Amalekites that Saul received from Samuel (I Sam. 15:3) and then summarizes the rest of the story as follows: “Saul dutifully exterminated the women, the children, the babies and all of the men – but then he spared the king. He also saved some of the tastier looking calves and lambs. God was furious with him for his failure to finish the job.” One can hardly blame Stewart for her interpretation of the biblical passage; as far as I know, it is universally accepted by bible-believers and bible-critics alike. A close reading of the actual text of Samuel, however, reveals a very diferent story, which once again marks a break between human obligations and God’s plans and commandments. DOI: 10.4324/9781003414346-4

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Amalek takes on the role of the bible’s arch villain when, completely oblivious to God’s miraculous defeat of the ancient Egyptian superpower, it has the gall to attack the Israelites in the wilderness immediately after the Exodus and the splitting of the Red Sea (Exod. 17). The ensuing battle will be of central interest for a later chapter, but sufce it to say that God expressly announces His intention to include the struggle against Amalek as a continuing element of His plans: Then the Lord said to Moses, “Inscribe this in a document as a reminder, and read it aloud to Joshua: I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven!“ And Moses built a n altar and named it Adonai-nissi. He said, “It means, ‘Hand upon the throne of the Lord!’ The Lord will be at war with Amalek throughout the ages.” (Exod. 17:14–16) Later, just before they enter Canaan, Moses informs the Israelites that they themselves will be held responsible to execute God’s plan for Amalek described in the Book of Exodus: Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt – how, undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear. Therefore, when the Lord your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget! (Deut. 25:17–19) Fast forward to Saul’s battle. The preconditions listed in Deuteronomy have been accomplished; the Israelites settled in their hereditary portion centuries earlier and Saul, the recently anointed king, has disposed of their enemies in a series of victorious military campaigns. Now all is set for the prophet Samuel to remind the valiant monarch of his duties regarding Amalek: Samuel said to Saul, “I am the one the Lord sent to anoint you king over His people Israel. Therefore, listen to the Lord’s command! “Thus said the Lord of Hosts: I am exacting the penalty for what Amalek did to Israel, for the assault he made upon them on the road, on their way up from Egypt. Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!” (1 Sam. 15: 1–3) I will not attempt to formulate a God’s eye view of the moral justification for Amalek’s annihilation. It is much easier to explain why Saul might find

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a genocidal war against Amalek in conflict with his own ethical duties, both as a human being and as an Israelite king. There is no practical political advantage to be gained from Amalek’s destruction. As Deuteronomy expressly explains, the Amalekites are to be attacked only after all the nation’s security needs have been met, when the Lord your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you. Apparently, God does not count Amalek among Israel’s enemies! Why should Saul risk the lives of his soldiers and invite unforeseeable diplomatic consequences in an unnecessary war? Furthermore, simple human solidarity obviously weighs heavily against such massive slaughter. Indeed, the story of Saul and Amalek can be read in a way which brings these issues to light and which, in fact, respects Saul’s legitimate human obligations. In order to arrive at an interpretation which will clarify the story’s resolution of Saul’s conflicting duties, it must be dissected into its relevant sections. These are: (1) Samuel’s command to Saul (1 Sam. 15:1–3), (2) Saul’s execution of the command (1 Sam. 15:4–9), (3) God’s complaint to Samuel and the latter’s reaction to it (1 Sam. 15:10–12) and (4) Samuel’s condemnation of Saul (1 Sam. 15:13–30). As we have seen. the verse recording Samuel’s command is categorical and chillingly straight-forward: attack Amalek and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill all alike. men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses (1 Sam. 15:3). Saul’s actual execution of the command is more nuanced. Saul assembles his troops, approaches the Amalekite city and warns the Kenites, who were Israel’s allies, to stay clear of the fighting. Finally, we have arrived at Saul’s attack, which is described as follows: Saul destroyed Amalek from Havilah all the way to Shur, which is close to Egypt, and he captured King Agag of Amalek alive. He proscribed all the people, putting them to the sword (1 Sam. 15:7–8). Take note that these verses are written in the third person singular. What does this signify? Certainly we are not expected to believe that Saul vanquished the Amalekites single-handedly; rather, we are to understand that in fighting, the Amalekites Saul’s troops served as instruments of his will. Saul alone decided what was to be done and his men simply followed his orders. At this point, however, the biblical narrator expands the compass of volition to include Saul’s troops, and abruptly adopts the third-person plural: But Saul and his troops spared Agag and the best of the sheep, the oxen, the second-born, the lambs, and all else that was of value. They would not proscribe them; they proscribed only what was cheap and worthless (1 Sam. 15:9). Apparently, Saul has now abandoned his role as sole decision-maker and has allowed his troops to have their say in how things will be done. How does all of this relate to the prophetic critique of Saul’s behavior? Samuel explicitly condemns Saul for not killing the animals – is this the bleating of sheep in my ears? (1 Sam. 15:14).3 We should remember that Saul shared the decision to spare those animals with his troops; ungraciously, Saul even tries to pin all of the responsibility for that misstep on his men and explains to Samuel: the troops spared the choicest of the sheep and oxen

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for sacrificing to the Lord your God, and we proscribed the rest (1 Sam. 15:15). Saul is claiming that the troops sinned (third-person plural) by sparing the animals of their own prerogative; for his part, he was only personally involved in the proscription (first-person plural) of the remaining livestock. Saul later confesses that he had been culpably weak in his leadership: I did wrong to transgress the Lord’s command and your instruction, but I was afraid of the troops and I yielded to them (1 Sam. 15:24). It seems clear that Saul’s wrong doing involved his (passive?) participation in actions that reflected the will of his troops, that is, the sparing of King Agag and of some Amalekite livestock. The background developed earlier hardly contradicts conventional wisdom; now it is time to lower the exegetical boom. I have so far abstained from pointing out a further and more significant gap between Samuel’s command and Saul’s execution of it; a gap that is not explicitly mentioned in the biblical text. The prophet Samuel tacitly ofers the first clue toward this new element of Saul’s insubordination. Recall that, having been spared by Saul, the Amalekite king Agag is brought before Samuel, who promptly executes him, but not before uttering this harsh goodbye: “As your sword has bereaved women, so shall your mother be bereaved among women” (1 Sam. 15:33). Do you see the problem? If Saul has killed all the Amalekite women, Agag’s mother should be long dead, but if Agag’s mother is dead, what sense is there in saying that she will be bereaved!? Apparently, some of the women – at least Agag’s own mother – must have survived Saul’s onslaught. Actually, for those who have read beyond the story of Saul’s battle there is no need for pedantic demonstrations that some Amalekites survived the war. After all, just 12 chapters later (1 Sam. 27:8), we find David attacking the Amalekites, who later return the favor: By the time David and his men arrived in Ziklag, on the third day, the Amalekites had made a raid into the Negev and against Ziklag and burned it down. They had taken the women in it captive, lowborn and high-born alike (1 Sam. 30:1–2). If Saul had exterminated all of the Amalekites, who was left to fight against David? Now look carefully at how the bible relates the events of Saul’s battle with the Amalekites. While Samuel spares no words listing every section of the Amalekite population which must be destroyed, the verse describing Saul’s execution of the command simply states He proscribed all the people, putting them to the sword (1 Sam. 15:8). Standard English usage would lead us to believe that the phrase all the people is just a briefer way of saying men and women, infants and sucklings. But is it? In our passage, the New Jewish Publication Society translation (from which I quote) uses the word “people” to translate the Hebrew word am. In Modern Hebrew, the word am has come to denote solely the concept of a “people” in the sense of a large ethnic community, and it is in this sense that Saul’s destruction of the Amalekite am can be seen as an ancient instance of genocide. However, while scripture does sometimes use am in this way, the word often carries another meaning. Consider Genesis 14:16, which reports

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how Abraham and his men recovered captives taken in war: he also brought back his kinsman Lot and his possessions, and the women and the am. Whatever is meant here by am, it certainly does not include women! Later we read of Pharaoh setting of to chase the escaping Israelites: He ordered his chariot and took his am with him (Exod. 14:6). Presumably, Pharaoh did not muster the women and children to do battle, but rather the word am refers to the six hundred of his picked chariots, and the rest of the chariots of Egypt, with officers in all of them mentioned in the next verse. As soon as one starts looking for such instances, it becomes clear that scripture is full of verses in which the word am refers to a military force. The Book of Samuel itself uses am in this sense, as, for example, in the verse Saul divided the am into three columns; at the morning watch they entered the camp and struck down the Ammonites (1 Sam. 11.11). Even the story of Saul’s battle against Amalek ofers clear instances of this additional usage. In the JPS version, the word consistently translated as “troops” (i.e., Saul’s troops) is, in fact, am! The explications just made point to the validity of a rather unconventional interpretation of our story. Saul did in fact kill all of the Amalekite am, that is to say, he put the Amalekite warriors to the sword, but he spared the non-combatants.4 It is no longer surprising that Agag’s mother would live to mourn his death or that within a few years the Amalekite boys who were too young to fight Saul would grow up to do battle against David. Interestingly, this interpretation helps clarify a well-known midrash. According to the Babylonian Talmud (Yoma 22b), when Saul received the divine command to destroy the entire population of Amalek and its animals, he began questioning its morality and asks: “And if human beings sinned, what has the cattle committed; and if the adults have sinned, what have the little ones done?” A divine voice is said to have replied with a quote from Ecclesiastes 7:16: Don’t overdo goodness. The midrash does not quite make sense, given the standard understanding of the war against Amalek. We can understand why Saul is depicted as questioning the order to kill the cattle since, after all, cattle were in fact spared. But why would the author of the midrash think that Saul was bothered by the idea of having to kill children? Given my interpretation, the midrash becomes more understandable; Saul spared both the cattle and the children and, appropriately, the midrash suggests that those decisions reflected his qualms about killing members of either category. All of this leaves us with a tricky theological problem. Saul had been commanded by God to kill every Amalekite man, woman and child, and yet he only killed the warriors. One would think that this merciful bit of improvisation would have drawn down at least as much divine wrath as did the sparing of mere animals. Samuel, however, makes no mention of this lapse of obedience; he (and, presumably, God Himself) seems completely unbothered by it. What then is the nature of the sin which causes Saul to lose the crown? As became clear earlier, Saul sins by giving in to his troop’s desire to spare Agag and the livestock. The verse describing how the am was killed – and, by implication, not the women and children – is written purely in terms of Saul’s

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own (third person singular) agency. Saul, however, is blamed only for bending to his troops’ will in defiance of God’s command. Appropriately, Samuel chides him, You may look small to yourself, but you are the head of the tribes of Israel (1 Sam. 15:17). When God in pursuit of a thoroughly unhuman aspect of His plans commands a human king to commit a genocide, a genocide which lacks any intelligible rationale even in terms of the crassest realpolitik, He respects the monarch’s prerogative to refuse. God is sensitive to the moral predicament of a human leader who is called upon to play God and cast aside profound human concerns for the sake of an unintelligible divine moral purpose. Thus, God relays through Samuel no complaint about Saul’s unwillingness to kill women and children, but He will not condone a weak king who simply yields to his troops’ wishes when – without any real ethical qualms explaining their behavior – they want to save animals for a barbeque in express defiance of God’s command. God realizes that His command to destroy Amalek lies at the limits of the cooperation to be expected from human beings and is tolerant of Saul’s refusal. I shall conclude my discussion of Saul with a brief consideration of how my interpretation relates to a recent discussion of the war with Amalek. In his book, In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible,5 political philosopher Michael Walzer uses the Amalek episode to illustrate one of his central theses, that is, that in the bible, “God’s interests are represented by His prophets, while the full and often contradictory set of human interests – personal, dynastic and national – is represented by the king.”6 Walzer compares Saul’s reluctance to kill Agag with King Ahab’s statesmanlike decision to spare the people of Aram and their king in order to achieve a negotiated peace (1 Kings 20:34), a bit of human wisdom which was also condemned by a prophet (1 Kings 20:42). My conclusion is perhaps more discriminating. Indeed, God’s plan as voiced through prophecy calls for the total annihilation of the Amalekites and their animals, while Saul seems to have other issues in mind. However, Walzer may have been too quick to completely identify God’s interests with the prophetic voice. By the end of the story, both the Israelite prophet and the Israelite king have given ground to each other’s position. While Saul agrees that it was wrong to spare Agag and the animals, Samuel makes no complaint about Saul’s decision to spare the non-combatants. It appears that scripture’s ultimate judgment (as expressed by the outcome of whole narrative rather than by any single voice within it) recognizes the legitimacy of both strict commands of prophecy and the wisdom of human statecraft. Unfortunately, by not killing Agag and the animals, Saul failed on both accounts. Not only did he disobey God’s command, but he did so in a demonstration of weak leadership by giving into the narrow momentary interests of his troops. It was this double failure – both of piety and statesmanship – that doomed Saul’s reign. Perhaps these further considerations can help complete our reading of the aforementioned midrash. When God scolds Saul for his qualms, it is as if God tells him, “Right, don’t kill the children. But must you spare the animals as well!? Don’t overdo goodness!“

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Next, we will consider a more purely principled refusal to follow God’s command, a case in which a human’s loyalty to human values remains unsullied of the all-too-human weaknesses that undermined King Saul’s fitness to rule. Jonah at Nineveh The Book of Jonah ofers a complex example of a confrontation between a human being’s special duties and God’s broader ethical considerations. Jonah, an Israelite prophet, is called upon to travel to the great city of Nineveh and warn its inhabitants that God will soon destroy the town. Jonah refuses the mission and instead runs of to Jafa and takes to sea on a hired boat. A great storm arises and eventually, the sailors heed Jonah’s request to throw him overboard to calm the waters. He is then swallowed by the famous great fish, which eventually spits him out onto the shore. Later, Jonah is again called upon to warn the Ninevites; this time he carries out his mission and to his chagrin, the people repent, and God chooses to spare them. What is the point of this story? Any interpretation of the book will hinge upon the explanation of why at first Jonah rejects God’s call. Some commentators claim he is afraid of facing the Ninevites. Others say he is afraid that his reputation as a prophet will sufer if God has mercy on the Ninevites after announcing their doom. Others suggest that, in a manner reminiscent of Abraham’s bargaining over Sodom and Gomorrah, Jonah did not want to have any part in a process that could lead to the destruction of many fellow human beings.7 While this last option could be said to reflect a conflict between Jonah’s narrow concern for his fellow humans and God’s broader take on the moral situation, I much prefer a reading of Jonah presented in Norman Fredman’s article, “Jonah and Nineveh: The Tragedy of Jonah.”8 Fredman points out that the Jonah ben Amitai appears in scripture not only as the protagonist of his eponymous book, but also as the Israelite prophet who predicts that the Northern Israelite kingdom will regain the territory of Israel from Lebohamath to the sea (2 Kings 14:25). Jonah’s connection with the Northern Kingdom places the story of his book in an entirely new light. Now we have God asking Jonah, a prophet of the Northern Kingdom, to warn the people of Nineveh of God’s impending punishment so that they might repent and be spared. But Nineveh was the prophet Nahum’s (3:1) city of crime, utterly treacherous, full of violence, where killing never stops, the capital city of the infamous Assyrian Empire, which was to later destroy the Northern Kingdom and exile Jonah’s compatriots – the fabled lost Ten Tribes – never to return. I should point out that Assyria was not merely a future foe of Israel. Even in Jonah’s day, it had gained a reputation for profound cruelty unmatched in the ancient Near East. Historian Mario Liverani tells us how the Assyrian royal inscriptions describing conquest often use the recurrent phrase appul aqqur ašrup “I razed, I destroyed, I burnt.” Every campaign report is a narrative of destruction, slaughters and

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sadistic cruelty. Control over foreigners was based mainly on terror, as properly stated by Sargon II: “I established the power of Assur for all days to come; I left for the future a fear of him (= Assur), never to be forgotten.”9 These additional facts strengthen Fredman’s comparison of Jonah’s plight upon receiving the divine call to prophesize to the Ninevites to a classic dilemma of modern science fiction: The salvation of Nineveh is of this world. It might be best understood by putting yourself in the position of a surgeon in a German hospital, November 1918, with a young and wounded Adolph Hitler on the operating table in front of you. Only you can save his life, yet through prophecy (secular Hollywood might prefer a time machine) you know exactly what Hitler will do if he lives. Remember, you are not being asked to kill Hitler. You are being asked, would you save Hitler’s life or would you walk away and let him drop dead?10 Poor Jonah must choose between heeding God’s call, thus inviting the Ninevites to repent and live another day, and leaving the Ninevites to pay for their sins, forestalling their role in the destruction of the Northern Kingdom. Jonah’s quandary is all the greater because the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom is not merely a matter of historical happenstance; it is straightforwardly described in scripture as an element in the divine plan. In Isaiah 10:5, God speaks of punishing the Israelites with Assyria, rod of My anger, in whose hand, as a staf, is My fury! Torn between his obligations to God and his obligations to his people, Jonah favors his people and refuses to have any part in securing the survival of their future destroyers, or as the midrash states, “Jonah put his loyalty to the son [Israel] above his loyalty to the Father.”11 I find this explanation of Jonah’s initial refusal much more appealing than the theories mentioned previously; it would be too degrading to think Jonah was so egocentric that he would sacrifice an entire city just to protect his prophetic reputation in case they repented and were spared. Similarly, if Jonah really thought of his warning to Nineveh as collaboration in its destruction rather than as throwing them a lifeline for their salvation, we could only conclude that he was profoundly confused – unreasonably confused – about the nature of his prophetic vocation. Now we can also understand the Book of Jonah’s cryptic conclusion.12 Ordered by their king, the people of Nineveh undergo a forced and dubious process of repentance during which, comically, even their animals (!!) are required to fast and wear sackcloth (Jon. 3:7–8). God accepts their change of heart and Jonah is furious at the success of his prophetic mission and at God’s mercifulness and exclaims: 0 Lord! Isn’t this just what I said when I was still in my own country? That is why I fled beforehand to Tarshish. For I know that You are a

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Now we read of a strange turn of events: Now Jonah had left the city and found a place east of the city. He made a booth there and sat under it in the shade, until he should see what happened to the city. The Lord God provided a ricinus plant, which grew up over Jonah, to provide shade for his head and save him from discomfort. Jonah was very happy about the plant. But the next day at dawn God provided a worm, which attacked the plant so that it withered. And when the sun rose, God provided a sultry east wind; the sun beat down on Jonah’s head, and he became faint. He begged for death, saying, “I would rather die than live.” Then God said to Jonah, “Are you so deeply grieved about the plant?” “Yes,” he replied, “so deeply that I want to die.” (Jon. 4:5–9) What are we to make of Jonah’s despair over the ricinus plant? Was it really worth dying over? The key to understanding this passage lies in the narrator’s explanation of why Jonah set up camp outside the city. He had complained to God about Nineveh avoiding ruin and only received the evasive response. “Are you that deeply grieved?” (Jon. 4:4), leaving Jonah with some hope that despite the city’s initial reprieve it might yet be destroyed, saving the Northern Kingdom from future destruction. With that expectation in mind, Jonah made a booth there and sat under it in the shade, until he should see what happened to the city (Jon. 4:5). By miraculously providing Jonah with shade, God encourages him to believe that he will soon witness Nineveh’s destruction from the comfort of a divinely provided box-seat. All of this implies that the later destruction of the plant is not merely a cause of physical discomfort for Jonah, rather it communicates God’s unwillingness to punish Nineveh and save the Northern Kingdom. Nineveh is spared and it is pointless for Jonah to watch in hope of further developments. Finding himself complicit in the preservation of the Assyrian Empire and the future destruction of his own people, Jonah seeks death. God, however, invites him – in a passage not lacking in irony – to consider taking something more like a divine view of the situation: Then the Lord said: “You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow, which appeared overnight and perished overnight. And should not I care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and many beasts as well!” (Jon. 4:10–11)

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The plant has come to represent Jonah’s hopes for the Northern Kingdom. God reminds Jonah that while he takes such great interest in the fate of the Northern Kingdom, he has no proprietary rights over it and neither did he bring it into existence. On the contrary, we know that it was God who created both the plant and the kingdom, granting Him a kind of right to determine their fates that is without human parallel. However, the relationship of Creator to creation exists not only between God and Israel, but also between God and Assyria. This remains true even if the Assyrian empire is legendary for its cruelty and the inhabitants of its great capitol are spiritual ignoramuses who do not13 know their right hand from their left. (God makes a somewhat snarky mention here of the city’s many beasts as well, which, farcically, were also dressed in sackcloth to participate in Nineveh’s clumsy attempt at repentance.) Furthermore, even if God rightly preserves the Assyrians in order for them to mete out Israel’s deserved punishment, that does not imply that Jonah must happily approve of the plan. I don’t think God expects Jonah to accept the divine point of view – the Creator’s ethic – for his own, but rather, in some small way, to understand it. Jonah is justifiably anxious for the wellbeing of the plant, or in decoded language, for the well-being of the nation which has protected and nurtured him, and to which he belongs. God, however, is the Creator of all nations and therefore takes a broader approach. Jonah, for his part, is not only an Israelite, but also a prophet of God, and thus bears an additional special obligation to serve as His messenger. The ironic tone of God’s final response to Jonah’s dismay demonstrates His appreciation of the prophet’s difcult moral predicament. Unlike Saul, Jonah sufers no further punishment for his morally understandable disobedience of the divine command. The Rational Akedah Before ending this chapter and applying its lessons to the great narrative arc of the rise of Israel in the next, I must address the biblical story which seems least compatible with my account of the relations between God and humans. Earlier I formulated the principle that “God generally avoids commanding people to consciously participate in His plans in ways that undermine their legitimate human interests and duties.” That rule seems completely at odds with the most famous incident of Abraham’s life. Genesis 22 tells us how God calls upon Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on a mountaintop in the land of Moriah. Abraham dutifully goes about executing the divine request. He sets of with Isaac for the appropriate spot, builds an altar, binds Isaac up as a sacrificial victim and draws his knife to slay the boy. At the last possible moment, an angelic voice from heaven calls of the slaughter. Abraham replaces Isaac with a ram for sacrifice, and the angel announces the blessings which God bestows upon Abraham in recognition of his faithfulness. This astonishing series of events is usually referred to as the binding of Isaac, or in Hebrew, the Akedah.

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Few stories in the Torah have aroused as much philosophical interest as the Akedah. Philosophers usually discuss it under the disciplinary rubric of “Divine Commands and Morality.” Their reading of the story is seemingly straightforward: God has commanded Abraham to murder Isaac, but murder (and especially murder of one’s own child) is obviously immoral. Therefore. the Akedah story ofers the classic example of a clash between the demands of God and those of human morality. Which of these deserves our ultimate allegiance? The great philosopher Immanuel Kant suggested a solution which reflects his typically Enlightenment willingness to question the authority of Scripture: Abraham should have replied to this putative divine voice: “That I may not kill my good son is absolutely certain. But that you who appear to me are God is not certain and cannot become certain, even though the voice were to sound from the very heavens” . . . [For] that a voice which one seems to hear cannot be divine one can be certain of . . . in case what is commanded is contrary to moral law. However majestic or supernatural it may appear to be, one must regard it as a deception.14 Like other issues brought up by philosophers and theologians in connection with the Akedah, Kant’s point has its own intrinsic interest. However, it is my contention that his association of these issues with the Akedah is based on a complete misunderstanding of the biblical story itself. Kant’s interpretation of the Akedah takes into account only two of the factors which Abraham had to consider before taking the knife to Isaac: God’s putative command15 and the moral prohibition of murder. The philosopher forgets a third all-important element, God’s promise to Abraham that Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall name him Isaac; and I will maintain My covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his ofspring to come (Gen. 17:19). If Abraham had put a permanent end to Isaac’s life, God’s word would have been broken. One might say that while God’s command tested Abraham’s obedience, Abraham’s obedience tested God’s faithfulness to the covenant. On Mount Moriah, both God and Abraham proved their devotion to the fulfillment of the divine word. Given the promised covenant with Isaac, how was Abraham to understand his situation at the Akedah? On the one hand, Abraham’s faith demanded that he obey God’s command to slaughter Isaac. On the other hand, his faith equally demanded that he believe God would keep his covenant with Isaac. Abraham knew that he must do what he must do, but he also knew that somehow Isaac would live to inherit his blessings none the less. Abraham’s faith in the divine promise must modify our appraisal of the moral implications of his unblinking readiness to fulfill God’s request. Since the fulfillment of the covenant required that no evil befall Isaac, Abraham had no need to fear that in obeying God his son would be injured. Even if he had slit Isaac’s throat, he would not invite moral reproach. Every day surgeons

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cut open the bodies of their patients and there is nothing wrong with that. Similarly, there is nothing morally reprehensible about a father slitting the throat of his son if he knows for a certainty that this could not possibly injure the child in any way. Given God’s absolute guarantee of Isaac’s safety, Abraham’s predicament is of no particular interest for ethics. Foremost among the Akedah’s philosophical interpreters is Soren Kierkegaard in his classic treatise, Fear and Trembling.16 In contrast to Kant, Kierkegaard is well aware of the importance of God’s promised covenant with Isaac for the understanding of Abraham’s predicament. He explicitly mentions that “Abraham believed . . . that he was to grow old in the land, honored by the people, blessed in his generation, remembered forever in Isaac, his dearest thing in life.”17 While Kierkegaard is aware of God’s promise, this does not save him from misinterpreting the Akedah. In his eagerness to make Scripture speak to moderns, Kierkegaard refuses to take seriously the possibility of the miraculous. While Abraham may have believed that things would work out for the best, Kierkegaard calls this belief “preposterous.”18 Such irrational faith certainly cannot solve the Akedah’s challenge to morality. Abraham’s trust in God was too absurd to excuse his behavior before the tribunal of rational ethics. Kierkegaard is left with no choice but to understand the Akedah in terms of “the teleological suspension of the ethical.” From the viewpoint of Biblical Judaism, there was nothing “preposterous” about divine intervention in earthly events. Today’s “New Atheists” may brand Abraham a psychotic child abuser who thinks he is receiving messages from God. However, the biblical Abraham is a character in a narrative in which God’s revelation and miraculous involvement in human afairs is taken for granted. Abraham had witnessed the miraculous annihilation of Sodom and Gomorrah and at the age of one hundred he impregnated ninety-year-old Sarah, as God had promised (Gen. 17:17). He had every reason to believe that God could intervene, even in the worst possible situation, to save Isaac. Kierkegaard wrote ironically of a reader of the Akedah narrative that, “had [he] known Hebrew, he perhaps would [have] easily understood the story and Abraham.”19 Indeed, if he had only understood the ancient Hebrew mentality, Kierkegaard may have easily understood the story himself. By now, many readers will be exasperated. I have, it would seem, too “easily understood” the Akedah. Abraham knew that no harm would come Isaac’s way, so he could cheerfully climb the heights of Moriah without a second thought. The great test of faith appears trivial. This reaction reveals how thoroughly ensnared we have become in the philosopher’s reading of the Akedah. All we look for is the conceptual puzzle, the theological paradox. We read the story as if it were a thought-experiment from a textbook on ethics, and we are disappointed by its lack of intellectual interest. Often, what is trivial in theory is profound in practice.20 Had Abraham been asked to “solve” the problem of the Akedah in a philosophy examination essay, there would be nothing impressive about the story. However,

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Abraham was called upon to take not merely a pencil to a sheet of paper but rather a knife to his son’s throat. His faith in the covenant was so great that he was actually prepared to perform the terrible deed, knowing that God would somehow spare Isaac. The Akedah did not test Abraham’s grasp of existential theology, but rather the true mettle of his obedience to God’s command and his trust in God’s promise. A test of trust need not strain reason. Consider the “trust fall,” an exercise popularized by team-building consultants in which one participant is asked to fall straight back into their friend’s waiting arms.21 If their friend does not catch them, they may be seriously injured. They know their friend realizes this and would never allow such a thing to happen. In principle, they should be prepared to participate in the exercise without hesitation. However, at the moment of truth, their trust may easily fail them. While the conscious regions of their mind command that they fall, their very body resists. Their entirely rational trust in their friend has not penetrated into their muscles and bones. Yet Abraham’s hand did clutch the knife. The Akedah teaches us that absolute trust in God had permeated every aspect and level of Abraham’s existence. That Abraham had no reason to question his faith on intellectual grounds makes his adherence to it in practice no less impressive. There was no reason for Abraham to deny God’s request, but he did have powerful instinctual and emotional obstacles to overcome. Notes 1 M. J. Harris, Divine Command Ethics: Jewish and Christian Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge-Curzon, 2003), 134–50. 2 K. Stewart, “How Christian Fundamentalists Plan to Teach Genocide to Schoolchildren,” The Guardian, May 30, 2012, www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/ may/30/christian-fundamentalists-plan-teach-genocide. 3 Samuel’s accusatory question makes ironic use of the most wonderful instance of onomatopoeia in the Hebrew Scriptures. Literally translated, the verse reads, What is this sound of sheep in my ears? The phrase rendered what is this is the simple word meh – which sounds just like the bleating of sheep and goats! 4 Of the more serious translations, only Mark Strauss, The Expanded Bible (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011) renders am in 1 Samuel 15:8 along the lines I propose. 5 Michael Walzer, In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). 6 Walzer, God’s Shadow, 67. 7 In this case, the sailors’ reluctance to participate in God’s action against Jonah might be seen as paralleling Jonah’s own reluctance to participate in God’s plan to destroy Nineveh. In any event, the sailors may be seen as demonstrating a laudable unwillingness to serve as instruments of divine punishment. 8 Norman Fredman, “Jonah and Nineveh: The Tragedy of Jonah,” Dor le Dor 12, no. 1 (Fall 1983): 4–14. Fredman’s basic line of interpretation can also be found in the commentary of the classic Jewish biblical exegete, Don Isaac Abravanel, on the Book of Jonah. 9 Mario Liverani, “Thoughts on the Assyrian Empire and Assyrian Kingship,” in A Companion to Assyria, ed. Eckart Frahm (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 540.

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Fredman, “Jonah,” 7–8. Mehilta 28. Here I begin to stray from Fredman’s article. The New JPS translation speculatively adds the word “yet” here to render the phrase who do not yet know, to imply that it refers to children. I reject this reading. From Kant’s Streit der Fakultaten as translated in Emil Fackenheim, Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken, 1973), 34. More accurately, not God’s command but rather His request, as marked by the Hebrew word na [please] in the relevant verse Gen. 22:2. The JPS translations render the phrase take your son when it should be please take your son. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941). Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 35. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 35. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 26. Recall my earlier take on Joseph’s predicament in the house of Potiphar. It does not require great philosophical acumen to understand that it is wrong to sleep with the boss’s wife. Actually resisting her advances is an entirely diferent story. See David Priestly, “What Is Trust Fall? Everything You Need to Know,” Venture Team Building, https://ventureteambuilding.co.uk/trust-fall/#.Yb8yM2gzY2w.

References Fackenheim, Emile. Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought. New York: Schocken, 1973. Fredman, Norman. “Jonah and Nineveh: The Tragedy of Jonah.” Dor le Dor 12, no. 1 (Fall 1983): 4–14. Harris, M. J. Divine Command Ethics: Jewish and Christian Perspectives. London & New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death. Translated by Walter Lowrie. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941. Liverani, Mario. “Thoughts on the Assyrian Empire and Assyrian Kingship.” In A Companion to Assyria, edited by Eckart Frahm, 534–46. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2017. Priestly, David. “What Is Trust Fall? Everything You Need to Know.” Venture Team Building, September 16, 2021. https://ventureteambuilding.co.uk/trust-fall/#. Yb8yM2gzY2w Stewart, Katherine. “How Christian Fundamentalists Plan to Teach Genocide to Schoolchildren.” The Guardian, May 30, 2012. www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ 2012/may/30/christian-fundamentalists-plan-teach-genocide Strauss, Mark. The Expanded Bible. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011. Walzer, Michael. In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.

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God’s Conversation with Satan Is More Telling Than His Answer From the Whirlwind in the Book of Job

The Book of Job occupies a unique place in the Hebrew scriptural canon. Its narrative framework is completely disconnected from covenantal history1 and it largely consists of a series of speeches ofered by human characters who mostly lack even any pretense of prophetic inspiration.2 Jews rarely study Job; no midrash has been written on it, it is never read in synagogue services, and few of its verses have found their way into the liturgy. Western critics have been enthralled with the book’s literary quality. Thomas Carlyle called Job [O]ne of the grandest things ever written with a pen. . . . Sublime sorrow, sublime reconciliation; oldest choral melody as of the heart of mankind; – so soft, and great; as the summer midnight, as the world with its seas and stars! There is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out of it, of equal literary merit.3 Tennyson is famously quoted as anointing Job “the greatest poem, whether of ancient or modern literature”4 and Victor Hugo is reported to have gushed, “Tomorrow, if all literature was to be destroyed and it was left to me to retain one work only, I should save Job.”5 Hebrew readers know that much of Job is indecipherable. The great 12th-century exegete Abraham Ibn Ezra went so far as to propose that “the book [of Job] is translated [from some language other than Hebrew], therefor it is difcult to interpret, as with all translated books.”6 A recent English translator quipped, “In the book of Psalms there is no connection between one chapter and the next; in the book of Proverbs there is no connection between one verse and the next; in the book of Job there is no connection between one word and the next.”7 Nevertheless, I will attempt to present a way of reading the Book of Job that should shed some additional light on the themes of my present book. The Book of Job opens with a description of its eponymous hero, a man from the land of Uz who was blameless and upright and feared God and shunned evil (Job 1:1). He had seven sons and three daughters (Job 1:2) and was also enormously wealthy with livestock, wealthier than anyone in the DOI: 10.4324/9781003414346-5

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East (Job 1:3). Next the book takes us to the assembly of the divine beings appearing before God, during which Satan, here a kind of accuser-angel, suggests that Job’s righteousness would not survive the downfall of his estate and family. God permits Satan to do his worst against Job, but not to physically hurt him. Job’s livestock is carried away and his children killed,8 but even in mourning he remains steadfast in his piety. Next Satan tells God that physical sufering would break Job. Again, God permits Satan to do his worst while stopping short of killing his victim. Job, now aficted from head to toe, refuses to curse God. Hearing of his troubles, three of Job’s friends arrive to console him. After sitting together in silence for seven days and nights, Job finally speaks bitterly of his situation, questioning God’s justice in so aficting him. The friends also speak, and much of the rest of the book is devoted to these speeches, in which the friends, eventually joined by a younger man named Elihu, speak by turns, addressing Job’s predicament. Job intermittently ofers his own orations, defending his innocence and questioning divine justice. Eventually, God Himself appears, speaking out of the whirlwind and describing His wisdom and power in creating the natural world and orchestrating its processes. Job accedes to God’s show of majesty, and God, for His part, proclaims that Job spoke better than his friends,9 and restores Job to his previous status. Various attempts have been made across the millennia to distill some coherent message from the book.10 Christians have emphasized Job’s patient faith, Medieval Jewish writers identified the book’s speakers with diferent philosophical schools, and some more recent authors stress the concluding encounter with God as ofering an experiential rather than theological response to Job’s futile demand to understand divine justice. I think all these attempts have overlooked a key element in interpreting the story. At the risk of oversimplification, I find the Book of Job depicting five different viewpoints on the events it describes: 1) Job is bewildered by his fate yet holds back from actually cursing God. Instead, he questions God’s justice and demands an explanation for his sufering: I say to God, “Do not condemn me; let me know what You charge me with” (Job 10:2). 2) Job’s friends assume that God’s justice makes some kind of straightforward sense. They accuse Job of presumptuousness in questioning God’s justice and advise him to own up to whatever sins must have brought these punishments upon him: If there is iniquity with you, remove it, and do not let injustice reside in your tent. Then, free of blemish, you will hold your head high. (Job 11:14–15). 3) God answers Job from the whirlwind.11 God responds to Job’s complaints by ridiculing human ambitions to judge His actions: Who is this who darkens counsel, speaking without knowledge? (Job 38:22).12 God establishes the unfathomability of his wisdom by challenging Job to match his knowledge of and providence over nature in a breath-taking tour-de-force

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God’s Conversation with Satan description of the earth’s creation, of sea, of the sky, weather phenomena, lions, wild goats, the great behemoth and much more. In this long speech (briefly interrupted by Job’s first submissive response), God hardly mentions human beings, merely implying His ability to see every proud man and bring him low. See every proud man and humble him, and bring them down where they stand. Bury them all in the earth; hide their faces in obscurity (Job 40:11–13). In a torrent of powerful and concrete evocations of nature, these relatively dull verses are the only ones to directly address the issue at hand: the apparently unjust treatment of the human Job. They also miss the mark; Job may have been proud, but he was also exceptionally righteous. We can appreciate Job being overwhelmed by God’s revelation of majesty, power and knowledge, but how is God’s shaping the cosmos and lording over great beasts and proud men supposed to justify anything? One is reminded of Wittgenstein’s remark, “If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.”13 The book’s prologue in heaven seems only makes things worse for God’s speech. Job may be appeased by God’s eloquence, but we readers know the rationale behind Job’s sufering; he was the object of a kind of wager between God and Satan. And while Job ultimately declares his human inability to understand God’s ways, we know his complaints were closer to the truth than were his friends’ theodicies, since, The Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “I am incensed at you and your two friends, for you have not spoken the truth about Me as did My servant Job” (Job 42:7).

It is worth taking notice of the mode of revelation through which God speaks to Job. God’s communication with humans is not a simple afair, and it takes many forms. Usually, prophecy comes in a kind of dream (Num. 12:6). Famously, God first speaks to Moses from a burning bush (Ex. 3:4). Elijah encountered a number of impressive natural phenomena before encountering God in a small still voice: There was a great and mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rocks by the power of the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind-an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake-fire; but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire-a small still voice. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his mantle about his face and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then a voice addressed him: “Why are you here, Elijah?” (1 Kings 19:11–13)14 It is crucial to take note that God’s answer to Job was from the whirlwind, which did not contain God’s presence for Elijah. In fact, we have encountered this strong wind earlier in Job’s story. His children were killed by a powerful and mysterious wind, as he was told: “Your sons and daughters

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were eating and drinking wine in the house of their eldest brother when suddenly a mighty wind came from the wilderness. It struck the four corners of the house so that it collapsed upon the young people and they died; I alone have escaped to tell you” (Job 1:18–19). God speaking from the whirlwind is not God simpliciter, but rather God revealed to humans in a particular way. Job encounters God as speaking from the whirlwind, God revealing Himself as the master of nature with its terrors for humans, God from the mighty wind, which killed Job’s children. This is God unrestrained by covenantal duties; His interventions in human afairs seem amoral and limited to being able to see every proud man and bring him low (Job 40:11). Dominion over puny humans is hardly worth mentioning and is covered in three and a half verses (Job 40:11–14), while the God-of-the-whirlwind’s mastery of the great Behemoth (Job 40:15–24) and Leviathan (Job 40:25–41:26), king over all proud beasts (Job 41:26) are described with much greater detail and panache. Job and his challenges to divine justice are silenced by this revelation of God’s sheer power. However, his challenges struck closer to the truth than did his friends’ simplistic notions of divine rewards and punishments. Even so, neither the questioning Job nor the God-of-the-whirlwind reveal the higher divine perspective which is found in the book’s narrative introduction. I have made short shrift of God’s dealings with Satan, the accusing angel, or as the Jewish Publication Society translation has it, the Adversary. Now let us consider it in detail: One day the divine beings presented themselves before the Lord, and the Adversary came along with them. The Lord said to the Adversary, “Where have you been?” The Adversary answered the Lord, “I have been roaming all over the earth.” The Lord said to the Adversary, “Have you noticed My servant Job? There is no one like him on earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and shuns evil!” The Adversary answered the Lord, “Does Job not have good reason to fear God? Why, it is You who have fenced him round, him and his household and all that he has. You have blessed his eforts so that his possessions spread out in the land. But lay Your hand upon all that he has and he will surely blaspheme You to Your face.” The Lord replied to the Adversary, “See, all that he has is in your power; only do not lay a hand on him.” The Adversary departed from the presence of the Lord. (Job 1:6–12) Before ever getting to the speeches of Job, of his friends, and of the God-ofthe-whirlwind, before we even read of Job’s afictions, the book’s frame-story informs us of the latter’s rationale. Satan wants to prove to God that Job’s piety cannot endure grave misfortune. However, Satan’s scheme is only devised in response to God’s own unprompted declaration. And what a declaration!

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Here we have God speaking, not as the God-of-the-whirlwind, not God as experienced by humans as the unfathomable master of nature and its terrors. He is not the God of Elijah, speaking in a small still voice, not even God-ofthe-Covenant revealing Himself to the Israelites at Sinai. This is not God addressing a human audience or human prophets. Somehow, we mere mortals find ourselves privy to God speaking before the assembly of divine beings! Here we get a more genuinely God’s eye view of things, unadulterated by any consideration for the limits of human sensibilities and comprehension. When God speaks before the divine beings, he spares them the descriptions of His majesty and power, which would later bowl over poor Job. Talk of the great Behemoth and Leviathan aren’t worth God’s divine breath. Most crucially, He is not boasting about His power over humans. Instead, God enthuses: “Have you noticed My servant Job? There is no one like him on earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and shuns evil!” Immanuel Kant famously proclaimed his admiration for “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”15 When speaking to the divine beings, God leaves aside the starry heavens and gushes over the morals and piety of the human Job. God’s appreciation of Job points to a kind of divine humanism, which places human beings at the center of God’s interests. This jibes well with the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis. God creates a vast world populated with myriad plants and animals, but on the ultimate sixth day of the process, he creates humans who are to rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on earth (Gen. 1:26); humanity must surely play a central and unique role in making the world worthy of survival.16 However, God’s humanism as portrayed in the book of Job is quite inhuman. Prompted by Satan, God is willing to have Job pushed to the brink, his wealth, health and family destroyed, in order to squeeze out yet more evidence of human excellence and dignity in the face of catastrophe. Job is a good man and his goodness serves God’s primordial goal of creating a worthy world, but he can contribute even more to the divine project when sorely tested. The Book of Job exhibits the break between divine and human purposes in its most extreme form. It would be criminal for a human ruler to emulate God’s acquiescence to Satan’s challenges for the mere sake of afording some righteous victim the chance to achieve greatness by enduring otherwise pointless sufering. God, however, is God. Any human being privy to God’s conversations with Satan would be duty bound to warn Job, his children and his servants of the coming catastrophes and to help them prepare to weather them as best they could. The divine beings (whatever they are) attending God’s council do not discharge that human duty. As a theodicy, a book justifying the ways of God to humans, the Book of Job does not ofer a justification of the sufering of good people in terms compatible with human justice; rather, it ofers a glimpse of God’s justice. Justice, but not the kind we can live by.

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Notes 1 In Chapter 6 of this book, I argue that biblical narratives reciting covenantal history were written with the expectation that they be read as describing actual events. Since the story of Job takes place outside the covenantal framework, traditional readers are more open to the possibility of its being purely fictional. The idea that Job is a long parable is mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud (Bava Batra 15a) and considered legitimate by Maimonides in his Guide III:22. 2 Any attempt at ofering a comprehensive reading of Job must contend with the issue of why so much of the book is given up to the speeches of Job’s friends, which, God informs us, were of the mark theologically compared to the words of Job himself (Job 42:7). 3 From Thomas Carlyle, “The Hero as Prophet,” in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 2nd ed. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1842), 76. 4 I have found it impossible to hunt down the original source for this oft-quoted statement. 5 Once again, I find this statement endlessly quoted without its source ever being cited. 6 Abraham Ibn Ezra, Commentary on Job 2:11. Interestingly, Carlyle (loc. Cit.) also seems to entertain this possibility due to the book’s universalism: “One feels, indeed, as if it were not Hebrew; such a noble universality, diferent from noble patriotism or sectarianism, reigns in it.” While I could not find the source for Tennyson’s praise for Job, I have found that his colleague James Spedding once described Job’s unintelligibility in a letter: Some years ago, when you were in want of a subject, I recommended Job. The argument of Job, to be treated as you treat the legends of Arthur, as freely and with as much light of modern thought as you find fit. As we know it now, it is only half intelligible, and must be full of blunders and passages misunderstood. Probably also the peculiar character of the oriental style would at any rate stand in the way and prevent it from producing its proper efect upon the modern and western mind. Yet we can see through all the confusion what a great argument it is, and I think it was never more wanted than now. If you would take it in hand, and tell it in verse in your own way, without any scruples about improving on Scripture, I believe it would be the greatest poem in the language. See: W. Aldis Wright, “James Spedding,” in Tennyson and His Friends, ed. Hallam, Lord Tennyson (London: MacMillan and Co., 1911), 431–2, www.gutenberg. org/files/38420/38420-h/38420-h.htm#fna_107. 7 Edward L. Greenstein, Job: A New Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), ix. 8 Traditional Jewish exegesis of Job entertains the interesting possibility that Job’s children did not actually die, thus skirting the thorny corollary problem of the justification of their deaths. The calamities befalling Job are presented in the manner of classic Greek tragedy: they occur “ofstage.” They are not described in direct narration, rather we are only privy to the scenes of Job’s receiving reports of the incidents. While Job mourns his children’s deaths, we are never told of their burials, presumably because the bodies could not be recovered from the rubble of the house that fell on them (Job 1:19). For a classic presentation of this line of interpretation, see Moses Nachmanides, Kitvei Rabbeinu Moshe ben Nahman, vol. 1, ed. Charles Chavel (Jerusalem: Mossad HaRav Kook, 1963), 127–8. 9 The verse reads, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “I am incensed at you and your two friends, for you have not spoken the truth about Me as did My servant Job.” (Job 42:7), leaving us wondering why so much of the book is taken up with

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God’s Conversation with Satan the inferior opinions of Job’s three friends and unsure of God’s thoughts on the speech of Elihu. Readers may consult Mark Larrimore, The Book of Job: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013) for details. I read Elihu’s speech as an inferior foreshadowing of God’s answer from the whirlwind. Reading Job in Hebrew, I wonder if this first verse is an instance of the Book of Job engaging in a self-referential literary critique. Reading the Hebrew, I find God’s response to Job to be simply much better written than most passages from the book’s human orators, whom God accuses of speaking without knowledge – could this mean “speaking without knowledge of rhetoric and poetics”? Maurice O’Connor Drury, The Selected Writings of Maurice O’Connor Drury: On Wittgenstein, Philosophy, Religion and Psychiatry (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 100. Eliphaz the Temanite claims to have experienced a rather tepid version of Elijah’s theophany: A word came to me in stealth; My ear caught a whisper of it. In thought-filled visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on men, fear and trembling came upon me, causing all my bones to quake with fright. A wind passed by me, making the hair of my flesh bristle. It halted; its appearance was strange to me; A form loomed before my eyes; I heard a stillness, a voice (Job 4:12–16). However, as we have seen, God explicitly reproves Eliphaz for having not spoken the truth about Me as did My servant Job (Job 42:7). Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 129. As a negative consequence, human failure robbed the world of its worthiness, bringing its destruction in the Flood: The Lord saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time. And the Lord regretted that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened. The Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the men whom I createdmen together with beasts, creeping things, and birds of the sky; for I regret that I made them” (Gen. 6:5–7).

References Carlyle, Thomas. “The Hero as Prophet.” In On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. 2nd Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1842. Drury, Maurice O’Connor. The Selected Writings of Maurice O’Connor Drury: On Wittgenstein, Philosophy, Religion and Psychiatry. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Greenstein, Edward L. Job: A New Translation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Larrimore, Mark. The Book of Job: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Nachmanides, Moses., Kitvei Rabbeinu Moshe ben Nahman. Edited by Charles Chavel. Jerusalem: Mossad HaRav Kook, 1963. Wright, W. Aldis. “James Spedding.” In Tennyson and His Friends, edited by Hallam, Lord Tennyson, 391–437. London: MacMillan and Co., 1911. www.gutenberg. org/files/38420/38420-h/38420-h.htm#fna_107.

5

Nations as Moral Communities Why Babel Was Dispersed and Israel Created

With this chapter, I begin a sustained reading of the birth of the Israelite nation in the light of the ideas about human-divine interactions developed in earlier chapters. Our story begins, of course, with Abraham, the first of Israel’s three ancestral patriarchs. The Bible’s description of God’s abrupt first contact with Abraham leaves the rationale for his election by God to found the new nation notoriously opaque: The Lord said to Abram, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse him that curses you; And all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you.” (Gen. 12:1–3) Why Abraham? What is the point of Abraham founding a great nation? Jewish tradition (and Islam in its wake) devised traditions of Abraham’s autonomous discovery of monotheism and his rebellion against the polytheism of his native Mesopotamia to explain why God chose him. A more strictly scriptural explanation might have it that God already recognized Abraham’s strength of character which is later immediately evidenced to readers by his expeditiously carrying out God’s difcult command of migration. But why does God need to found a new nation at all? It is only six chapters later that scripture first hints at the point of God’s call and promise to Abraham. In Genesis 18:19 we overhear God talking to Himself about Abraham before consulting with him about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah: I have singled him out, that he may instruct his children and his posterity to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is just and right, in order that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what He has promised him. Abraham’s mission is educational: to raise a family that will keep the way of the Lord by doing what is just and right and which will be appropriately rewarded as God had promised. But what is the appropriate social unit in which this moral education must take place? DOI: 10.4324/9781003414346-6

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Thanks to Hillary Clinton, everyone these days is acquainted with the allegedly African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.”1 The educational doctrine of the Hebrew Scriptures can be summed-up in a variant proverb, “It takes a nation to raise a child.” Or, perhaps more accurately, keeping the way of the Lord by doing what is just and right cannot be achieved by an individual family or village; it is in large part a political and social goal which can only be fully achieved by an entire nation. At Sinai, God will ultimately ofer the Israelites to enter a covenant according to which they will endeavor to be such a nation: Now then, if you will obey Me faithfully and keep My covenant, you shall be My treasured possession among all the peoples. Indeed, all the earth is Mine, but you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Ex. 19:6). Biblically speaking, there is nothing surprising in the idea that a nation must be created to realize Abraham’s moral mission. Following the story of the Flood, much of the biblical narrative is predicated on the idea that nations can be just or unjust, and that insofar as humans can understand divine providence, God’s interventions in human afairs are typically seen as rewards or punishments meted out to entire nations in accordance with their moral condition at the group level. Thus, Leviticus 18:24 states that the nations that I am casting out before you with the Israelite conquest of Canaan would be dispossessed because they had defiled themselves with sexual immorality. Even though the prophets blame the destruction of the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel on the mistreatment of poor and powerless Israelites by rich and powerful Israelites, it is the entire national community – the weak and the strong together – which sufers. This is the macro-level God’s eye view of human guilt and merit against which Abraham contended when defending Sodom. The first chapters of Amos are devoted to listing the sins of various peoples and city-states: Thus said the Lord: For three transgressions of Damascus, for four, I will not revoke it (Amos 1:3); Thus said the Lord: For three transgressions of Gaza, for four, I will not revoke it (Amos 1:6) Thus said the Lord: For three transgressions of Tyre, for four, I will not revoke it (Amos 1:9). And so on. Scripture certainly realizes that individuals can be righteous or wicked, but justice and injustice, kindness and cruelty, piety and impiety find their full expression in the functioning of societies, of nations, and in the Hebrew Scriptures, the national unit is the primary object of moral scrutiny.2 The Point of Dispersing Babel Given this insistence on the primacy of national communities as the loci of moral vice and virtue, the seemingly opaque rationale of the story of the Tower of Babel becomes quite clear. It is worth remembering the actual text of the story. Soon after the story of the Flood, we read: Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a valley in the land of

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Shinar and settled there. They said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and burn them hard.” Brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar. And they said, “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.” The Lord came down to look at the city and tower that man had built, and the Lord said, “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. Let us, then, go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not understand one another’s speech.” Thus the Lord scattered them from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel because there the Lord confounded the speech of the whole earth; and from there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth. (Gen. 11:1–9) The great enigma of this story is the question that launched a thousand exegetical speculations: why was God troubled by the building of the city and the tower of Babel? Was it an act of sedition against God, a tower from which to storm heaven? Was it a blasphemous monument to human pride? Did the builders’ resistance to being scattered all over the world constitute rejection of God’s blessing to humanity that it fill the earth and master it (Gen. 1:28), by instead concentrating everyone in a single urban center? Once we keep in mind scripture’s tendency to think about virtue in terms of moral national communities, the answer becomes clear. In Babel, humanity planned to live together in one single community unified by a common language and geographical location, one super-nation. What would be the moral character of this all-encompassing nation? Would it be fundamentally just, or would its norms, institutions and attitudes be shot through with cruelty and corruption? Even if its history began with admirable motivations and even the admirable realization of those motivations, was there any guaranty against some future decline? If this nation proved morally unsustainable, providence would be placed in an impossible situation. All the world would be a Sodom deserving destruction or an Israel deserving exile. But God promised in covenant not to destroy humanity again and if everyone is in Babel there is no foreign empire available into which Babel’s residents can be driven into exile. God must solve this dilemma. At Babel, God divides humanity into a multitude of linguistic communities scattered . . . over the face of the whole earth in order to forestall the possibility of a monolithic human community descending into evil in the absence of any alternative national communities to carry on the banner of hope. In this pessimistic variety of pluralism, a thousand gardens must bloom in order to avoid the flowers of evil becoming the world’s monocultured crop. Now God choses a new path toward achieving a more worthy world. He will create a nation that will make His presence known to

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humanity, which will serve as His agent in history and will exemplify a way of life through which human excellence can make its proper contribution to the worthiness of the world. Notes 1 The phrase inspired the title of Hillary Clinton’s book on education, It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, c1996). Doubts about the provenance of the saying are discussed in Joel Goldberg, “It Takes a Village to Determine the Origins of an African Proverb,” NPR, July 30, 2016, www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/07/30/487925796/it-takes-avillage-to-determine-the-origins-of-an-african-proverb. 2 The notion that moral value is largely instantiated in national communities and not only in individuals resonates with contemporary discourse theories of “structural” injustice. Structural injustices are not thought to reside in the intentions and conscious acts of individuals but are rather intrinsic to the workings and hierarchies of large, often national, societies.

References Clinton, Hillary. It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Goldberg, Joel. “It Takes a Village to Determine the Origins of an African Proverb.” NPR, July 30, 2016. www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/07/30/487925796/ it-takes-a-village-to-determine-the-origins-of-an-african-proverb

6

The Covenant of the Pieces and Its Epistemological Implications for Biblical Historiography

Creating the Nation of Abraham Starting with Abraham, the biblical narrative focuses on the process of creating the Israelite nation and on that nation’s fortunes in realizing the way of the Lord (Gen. 18:19). The story of God’s interaction with Abraham and his descendants will involve strategies running the full gamut from consensual cooperation to carefully orchestrated bamboozlement. Consider God’s predicament. He establishes lasting ties with humans and human groups through the instrument of covenants. A covenant can only be legitimate when all parties join into it consensually. God’s intermediate-term goal is to create from Abrahams’s progeny a nation that will freely consent to enter a covenant with Him to keep His ways by doing what is just and right (Gen. 18:19). Diferent stages of God’s creation of this new nation will allow for varying degrees of autonomous cooperation on the part of the human beings involved. The following summary of the process should help readers make sense of the coming pages of this book: 1) The Age of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs. The three generations of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah and Rachel, are marked by a high level of communication and cooperation between God and humans. The main goal of each generation is to produce a successor who will inherit Abraham’s covenant with God and not assimilate into the surrounding Canaanite culture. This is achieved by having the successor marry a member of Abraham’s family in Mesopotamia rather than a local woman. Besides revelation, God influences human afairs through His control of fertility and rain. Through the former, God arranges the preconditions for Jacob’s sons’ misguidedly aggressive envy of their brother Joseph. 2) Jacob’s children. As a first step toward expanding the covenantal lineage to encompass an entire nation, all of Jacob’s children inherit the covenant. It is not feasible for all 12 sons to seek wives back in Mesopotamia and a more drastic tact must be taken to ensure that the growing community will not assimilate into Canaanite society via intermarriage. God’s strategy DOI: 10.4324/9781003414346-7

66 The Covenant of the Pieces is to send Jacob’s family down to Egypt, where they can achieve the numbers of a national community while living as an unassimilable oppressed minority. Since God cannot expect humans to cooperate in their own descent into persecution, He allows for a break-down of conscious human participation in His plans and instead instigates the descent to Egypt by fomenting confused jealousy between Joseph and his brothers. 3) Egyptian enslavement. This period is marked by rapid population growth of the nascent Israelite nation and the dismantling of Israelite agency through its being stripped of any control or ownership of time and space. 4) Redemption. God restores both Israelite agency and open human-divine cooperation, creating the conditions for the Israelite’s autonomous entry into a national covenant with God. God’s Plan Revealed: The Covenant of the Pieces Early in Abraham’s story, after migrating to Canaan (Gen. 12:4–5), taking refuge from a famine in Egypt (Gen. 12:10–20), and winning a battle to rescue his captured nephew, Lot (Gen. 14), Abraham undergoes an extraordinary encounter with God, in which the outlines of the next few centuries of his progeny’s history is revealed to him (Gen. 15). This episode, known in reference to its remarkable ritual element as brit bein habetarim – the Covenant of the Pieces – marks a high point in the sharing of information between God and humans that will only be matched (and superseded) with Moses’ rise to prophecy. The incident begins with God promising Abraham (then still called “Abram”) the vague reassurance, “Fear not, Abram, I am a shield to you; Your reward shall be very great” (Gen. 15:1). Abram is not satisfied with this vague reassurance; he has no children and seemingly his chief servant, Dammesek Eliezer, will stand in as his heir. God responds, declaring that Abraham’s natural child will inherit his legacy, and that his progeny will be as innumerable as the stars. Abram trusts in the Lord’s promises and (as we are told in a highly ambiguous and theologically charged verse) He reckoned it to his merit (Gen. 15:6).1 God then reafrms that Abraham will possess the Land of Canaan. Surprisingly, this time Abram is less trusting and asks, “0 Lord God, how shall I know that I am to possess it?” (Gen. 15:8). God’s response to Abram’s question is so odd that it deserves to be quoted in full: He answered, “Bring Me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old shegoat, a three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young bird.” He brought Him all these and cut them in two, placing each half opposite the other; but he did not cut up the bird. Birds of prey came down upon the carcasses, and Abram drove them away. As the sun was about to set, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a great dark dread descended upon him. And He said to Abram, “Know well that your ofspring shall be

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strangers in a land not theirs, and they shall be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years; but I will execute judgment on the nation they shall serve, and in the end they shall go free with great wealth. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried at a ripe old age. And they shall return here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.” When the sun set and it was very dark, there appeared a smoking oven, and a flaming torch which passed between those pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your ofspring I assign this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates: the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.” (Gen. 15:9–21) Before addressing the strange ritual aspect of God’s response, I will propose an explanation of how God’s revelation of the future enslavement of Abram’s progeny serves to answer the latter’s question, how shall I know that I am to possess it? In this revelation, Abram is promised two blessings: abundance of progeny and possession of the land. In the biblical context, it is a given that people wish for abundant progeny. It doesn’t matter where or how a person lives, it is always a blessing and an advantage to have many children to boost one’s status, family workforce and security. As the Psalmist (127:3–5) writes, Sons are the provision of the Lord; the fruit of the womb, His reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are sons born to a man in his youth. Happy is the man who fills his quiver with them; they shall not be put to shame when they contend with the enemy in the gate. Inheriting the land is a diferent story. Life may well be easier elsewhere. The Promised Land had no prominent river to sustain it like the great empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia, which would always be vying for control of the Levant. Abraham had himself earlier fled Canaan to Egypt to escape famine (Gen. 12:10–20). Wouldn’t it be more reasonable for Abraham’s progeny to find their place in a powerful empire instead of taking on the burdens and dangers of the national autonomy required to fulfill their destiny as a unique moral community? Furthermore, if Abraham’s progeny were merely to remain in Canaan and grow in numbers there, what would keep them from assimilating into the existing local communities instead of forming a new and identifiable great nation (Gen. 12:2) as originally promised to Abraham? Given all these difculties, Abram understandably asks how he can be sure his progeny will agree to possess the land and possess it as an Abrahamic nation. We might expand his query to ask why Abraham should believe that his progeny will fulfil his historical destiny by entering a covenant with God. After all, a covenant must be entered freely, and given that freedom, they could also decline to enter the covenant. In response, God informs Abraham that his ofspring shall be strangers in a land not theirs, and they shall be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years. During that period they will

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become a large and identifiable nation, distinct from their oppressors. After centuries of sufering and homelessness, they will certainly be prepared to fight for a land of their own which God has promised them.2 Furthermore, after God frees them, executing judgment on the nation they shall serve and seeing to it that they shall go free with great wealth (Gen. 15:14), Abrahams progeny should be fully primed to consent to a covenant with the God who had just saved them from slavery. Now let us turn to the ritual element of Abram’s encounter with God. What are we to make of these strange proceedings in which animals are cut in half? While this whole performance may bewilder today’s lay readers, there is little doubt about its significance. It has direct parallels both in extra-biblical texts from the ancient Near East, as well as in the Hebrew Scriptures themselves. Jeremiah 34 describes a similar ritual used for making a covenant concerning the freeing of slaves in which the princes of Judah and the princes of Jerusalem, the ofcers and the priests, and all the people of the land . . . passed between the parts of the calf (Jer. 34:19). God warns that if the covenant is not kept, I will deliver them into the hand[s] of their enemies and into the hand[s] of those who seek their lives, and their dead bodies shall become food for the birds of the heavens and for the beasts of the earth (Jer. 34:20). The ritual signifies that whoever walks between the pieces swears that if they do not abide by the covenant, they shall be punished by being cut up into pieces like the calves, only to be eaten by birds and wild beasts. In extra-biblical sources, we find the ceremony being used to establish a pact between a vassal, who walks between the pieces, and his superior, the suzerain.3 The odd thing about our story is that a flaming torch – apparently, the symbol of God’s presence – passes between the pieces. Commentators of all stripes view this detail as implying that this covenant (unlike later biblical covenants) is unilateral: God unconditionally promises the Land to Abraham’s progeny without demanding any commitments on his part. However, the commentators shy away from an obvious corollary: that God is here announcing that His breach of the covenant would spell the end of His unity and, in fact, His death. If God fails to keep his promise to Abraham, He will be torn asunder like the carcasses of the animals! What could be the point of this dramatized oath? God’s Gamble on Israel In order to make sense of the Covenant of the Pieces, I must again diferentiate between God as Creator, who, as I explained earlier in this book, is largely beyond human comprehension, and God of the covenants. who is at least partially available to human experience. Here the Torah speaks of an apparition of a torch, a representation of God made present to Abraham. The death of God threatened by His pact with Abraham is the same death of God proclaimed by Nietzsche’s madman. It is, as Richard Schacht explains, “the demise of belief in the existence of God, as a cultural event of profound

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significance for people who from time immemorial have been accustomed to thinking in terms of a theocentric interpretation of themselves, their lives, values, and reality.”4 It is, in other words, the death of God as He exists for humans. By making His covenant with Abraham, God has staked His existence for human beings upon the fulfillment of that covenant within human history.5 Everyone will know that God is said to have made the promise to Abraham, and if the promise is not kept, God will be found out to be a fraud. It is precisely on this basis that the Psalmist (115:2) makes his plea: Let the nations not say, “Where, now, is their God?” God’s covenantal tie to Israel limits His options in punishing them. By sending the Judeans into exile in Babylon, God risks ruining His own reputation among human beings. Appropriately, Ezekiel writes that He must return them to their land to restore His own reputation: Say to the House of Israel: Thus said the Lord God: Not for your sake will I act, 0 House of Israel, but for My holy name, which you have caused to be profaned among the nations to which you have come. I will sanctify My great name which has been profaned among the nations among whom you have caused it to be profaned. And the nations shall know that I am the Lord-declares the Lord God-when I manifest My holiness before their eyes through you. I will take you from among the nations and gather you from all the countries, and I will bring you back to your own land. (Ezekiel 36:22–4) Recognition of the way God endangered Himself by entering a fateful pact with Abraham might help us more fully understand a seemingly brazen passage from the Babylonian Talmud (Berakhot 6a): R. Nahman b. Isaac said to R. Hiyya b. Abin: “The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Israel: ‘You have made me a unique/unified entity in the world, and I shall make you a unique/ unified entity in the world. You have made me a unique/unified entity in the world’, as it is said: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one (Deut. 6:4). And I shall make you a unique entity in the world, as it is said: And who is like Your people Israel, a nation one in the earth (2 Sam. 7:23 and 1 Chron. 17:21). The midrash seems to be saying that if it weren’t for Israel (and thus, Israel’s existence and well-being) God would lose His unity, he would be “cut up into pieces” as far as the human world is concerned. In other words, God’s known presence in the world (His presence as known to human beings) depends upon the People Israel, who declare His presence and unity to humanity, and whose history gives witness to God’s presence in the world. Their fates are bound together, and the destruction of the one would imply the destruction of the Other. God in this world has made Himself vulnerable indeed – unless He keeps His promise. Such is God’s desperate deal with Abraham. Inescapably loyal by covenant to humanity and its particular world, God wants to see them fulfil, to the

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extent possible, His primordial goal of creating a world worthy of existence. To forward this aim, He will create a moral national community from Abraham’s progeny and through His covenantal connection with that community, He will become known to all humankind. The formation of that community and the saga of its covenantal relationship with God is the central theme of the Hebrew Scriptures.6 Elijah and Scriptural Epistemology The God of the bible has staked His reputation, His very claim to exist, on openly acting in history to fulfill His covenant with Israel. This bold move creates a new, empirical criterion of religious truth that allows biblical authors to scof at the inactivity of other alleged gods and demand they prove their existence through similar interactions with the human world. Scripture’s epistemology of religion is blatantly positivist: religious claims must find their proof in publicly observable historical events. Appropriately, the Psalmist complains that while the foreign gods may be represented or incarnated in statuary forbidden the Israelites, those idols have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see; they have ears, but cannot hear, noses, but cannot smell; they have hands, but cannot touch, feet, but cannot walk; they can make no sound in their throats. Those who fashion them, all who trust in them, shall become like them. (Ps. 115:5–8) This critique of foreign gods finds its boldest expression in the story of Elijah at Mount Carmel. Chapter 18 of the First Book of Kings tells of a dark time in which the evil Israelite King Ahab, influenced by his nefarious wife Queen Jezebel, hunts down the prophets of God while promoting those of the Canaanite god Baal. The Prophet Elijah, who tops Ahab’s most-wanted list, openly encounters the king and tells him to summon all Israel to Mount Carmel to witness his theological show-down with the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and the four hundred prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel’s table (1 Kings 18:19). Each party will prepare a bull for sacrifice, and whichever god supplies miraculous fire to consume his sacrifice should be followed by the people. The Israelites agree, and the prophets of Baal and Asherah begin with their arduous rituals, but to no avail. At first they call out to Baal and dance (1 Kings 18:26). When that proves unproductive, Elijah openly humiliates them, sounding very much to modern ears like some crass Enlightenment anticleric or one of today’s New Atheists, mocking the beliefs of popular religion: “Shout louder! After all, he is a god. But he may be in conversation, he may be detained, or he may be on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and will wake up” (1 Kings 18:27).7 The prophets of Baal move on to more extreme measures: So they shouted louder, and gashed themselves with knives and

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spears, according to their practice, until the blood streamed over them. When noon passed, they kept raving until the hour of presenting the meal ofering. Still there was no sound, and none who responded or heeded (1 Kings 18: 28–9). Finally, Elijah takes his turn, he repairs God’s damaged altar, digs a trench around it, fills the ditch with water, and douses the ofering and firewood three times with yet more water (1 Kings 18:34). Having prepared his audience for the likely falsification8 of his theological hypothesis, he calls out to God, who responds by sending down fire which consumed the burnt ofering, the wood, the stones, and the earth; and it licked up the water that was in the trench. When they saw this, all the people flung themselves on their faces and cried out: “The Lord alone is God, The Lord alone is God!” (1 Kings 18: 38–9). The story continues with the people arresting the prophets of Baal at Elijah’s command, who then summarily executes them. Elijah undertakes what may be described as a crassly empirical test of religious claims. It is difcult to assign a metaphorical or symbolic significance to the story. It says that Elijah proved the existence of the God of Israel and disproved the existence of the Baal by getting God to miraculously send down fire from heaven. If none of this actually occurred, then no fire, no proof, and thus no point to the story. It seems to me that this is largely true of the Hebrew Scriptures in general, especially as read by their original intended audience, the ancient Israelites and their descendants. The Hebrew Scriptures tell us that God made covenants with the biblical patriarchs and their progeny, and they go on to tell the details of how each party kept its side of the agreements. While it might be argued that we should not expect biblical narratives to be historically accurate because the very notion of historiographic accuracy and factuality had yet to develop at the time of their composition, certainly the legal notion of truth was already available. Allow me to further explain this point. Diferent cultural practices involve diferent kinds of evidence and arguments to demonstrate that a statement is true or, at least, sufciently warranted. Arguments between physicists and historians will likely end in a clash of epistemological expectations rooted in the diferent training in research methods and theory-building associated with their diferent disciplines. Members of a pre-scientific culture will take no care to hold their beliefs about the natural world to the standards of modern science, and those belonging to a culture lacking the practice of critical historical research should not be expected to care whether their tales of the days of old relay some historically accurate account of past events. Lacking these disciplinary practices, they simply do not possess their associated notions of truth. It would be as pointless to hold texts belonging to those cultures to modern scientific or historical notions of objective truth as it would be to expect meter and rhyme in a software technical manual. However, while many cultures do not engage in historical and scientific research, the administration of justice is much more functionally necessary for a society of any appreciable size. As soon as people start arguing about who started a fight or whose ox gored whose cow, they will soon resort to critical methods of gathering evidence

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and interrogating witnesses to produce a kind of objective knowledge – legally valid knowledge – to resolve these conflicts. Its standards of evidence do not spring from a concern with producing true theories about the world and its past, but rather from the practical need to preserve societal harmony, and yet, these legal proceedings are themselves an epistemic practice which we can easily appreciate – the search for the truth of the courtroom.9 While the Hebrew Scriptures were produced by or for (depending on one’s theological proclivities) people who had no thought for scientific or historical truth, they did belong to people possessing the notion of legal truth. Biblical historiography is fundamentally concerned with explaining a matter of law; how the People Israel came to enter a covenant with God and how each party to that covenant fulfilled or neglected the duties imposed by that covenant. Thus, biblical historiography is, so to speak, expecting us to hold it to the standards of objectivity expected in the courtroom. That is why Isaiah could present God’s complaint against Israel as a suit for breach of contract: Now, then, Dwellers of Jerusalem and men of Judah, you be the judges between Me and My vineyard: What more could have been done for My vineyard that I failed to do in it? Why, when I hoped it would yield grapes, did it yield wild grapes? (Is. 5:3–4) The Israelites were to observe God’s Torah and God was to protect and nurture them in the Land of Israel. The Israelites often failed at this, so God exiled them from the land without forsaking His eternal promise of their eventual redemption. Some of them returned to start anew and, post-biblically, they even regained national independence, but again lost it and the Jewish presence in the Land dwindled once more. Those who inherited this contractual arrangement would want to know how in fact (and not in metaphor) things worked out to place them in this predicament, which is relevant to the lives of Jews down to our day. Jon Levenson describes the covenantal situation in terms of the marriage analogy (again, a relationship informed by a legally binding covenant) often used by biblical authors to describes the relationship between the People Israel and the God of Israel: The love, then, between the divine husband and the nation who is his wife is real but only in the past and in the future. The present is grim: the marriage is not terminated, to be sure, but it is, as it were, suspended. The couple has separated, but the power of the love that brought them together in the first place – the power of the Lord’s ardent passion for Israel – prevents that separation from ever becoming amicable, or, more important, permanent. Only reunion can bring the current miserable moment to an end. The marriage is an ideal recollected from the idyllic past and a possibility promised for the restored future. It is not the current reality, but reality it surely is and shall be again.10

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The believing Jewish reader cannot read scripture merely as a philosophically deep or emotionally engaging fiction. There is a great diference between reading a novel about some family which owed a great debt and reading the story of how your own family owed a great debt and that the collector was looking for you. While the epistemology of critical history is founded on a diferent social practice than is the epistemology of the courtroom, they do overlap. The results of historical research do have some weight as legal evidence. The covenantal basis of biblical historiography leaves the biblical God and biblically based religions susceptible to historical critique. Rejection of the historicity of the Exodus or of the revelation of the covenant makes the prospect of a sincere and biblically rooted Judaism bleak indeed.11 Notes 1 The original Hebrew of the phrase contains no personal nouns and should be literally translated as he reckoned it to his merit and thus ofers little guidance as to whether the verse should be understood as saying that God reckoned it to Abram’s merit or that Abram reckoned it to God’s merit. The former rendering of the verse has played a central role in Christian theology as a proof text for the doctrine of “justification through faith.” For a discussion of controversies over the verse’s theological implications, see Jon D. Levenson, Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 26–35. 2 This line of interpretation is inspired by Ben-Zion Firer, Panim Hadashot BaTorah (vol. 1: Bereishit) (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1975), 64–5. 3 Discussion of these issues can be found in many scholarly commentaries on the relevant verses, such as Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis Chapters 1–17 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990). 4 Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 119–20. 5 This kind of choseness by God need not imply that the Israelites enjoyed some kind of essential superiority over other human groups. Jerome Gellman, God’s Kindness Has Overwhelmed Us: A Contemporary Doctrine of the Jews as the Chosen People (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013) is relevant to this issue. 6 As I have argued, the Covenant of the Pieces is entirely one-sided; it consists entirely of promises made to Abraham by God without Abraham taking on any reciprocal duties. Why doesn’t God stipulate conditions for its fulfilment? Perhaps this reflects Abraham’s thorny predicament; in human terms, would the promise of his progeny eventually inheriting Canaan really justify the price of their being enslaved and oppressed four hundred years . . . in a land not theirs? Would it have made sense for Abraham to have agreed to submitting his progeny to such a fate? Appropriately, Abraham is not asked to take an active part in the covenant. He is simply informed that his progeny will sufer a terrible catastrophe, which will be followed by a wonderful redemption. An apt analogy might be made to a muchcited statement by the late Yehudah Amital, a leading Israeli rabbi: No worldly attainment can compensate for the murder of those millions. All the claims about the establishment of the State of Israel serving as compensation for the Holocaust are hollow. Neither the State of Israel that exists in reality, that fights bloody wars for its existence from time to time, nor the ideal State of Israel, as in the vision of every man under his vine and under his fig tree (Micah 4:4), can justify even partially what the nation of Israel went through during the Holocaust years.

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As quoted in Moshe Mayah, A World Built, Destroyed and Rebuilt: Rabbi Yehudah Amital’s Confrontation with the Memory of the Holocaust, trans. Kaeran Fish (New York: KTAV, 2005), 74. 7 The famous passage from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josephine Nauckhof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 120 announcing the “death of God” seems to borrow from Elijah’s mocking rhetoric: Haven’t you heard of that madman who in the bright morning lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly, ‘I’m looking for God! I’m looking for God! Since many of those who did not believe in God were standing around together just then, he caused great laughter. Has he been lost, then? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone to sea? Emigrated? – Thus they shouted and laughed, one interrupting the other. 8 The term falsification is here deliberately borrowed from the great philosopher of science, Karl Popper in his classic work, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1959). Popper would appreciate the way Elijah poured water all over the sacrifice and altar to make the event a more severe test of the God-of-Israel hypothesis. 9 Joshua Berman argues that the formats of biblical covenant texts are based on ancient Near Eastern vassal treaties, and that the historiographical sections of such treaties did not respect very high standards of factual accuracy and consistency. This would suggest that we should expect a lower standard of factual accuracy than is associated with the courtroom. I would counter that (1) even those ancient vassal treaties were expected to exclude outright fabricated events and (2) much of biblical historiography appears outside of covenantal documents, but rather records how each party fulfilled the stipulations set out in the covenant. See: Joshua Berman, Ani Maamin: Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth, and the Thirteen Principles of Faith (Jerusalem: Koren, 2020), 77–107. 10 Jon Douglas Levenson, The Love of God: Divine Gift, Human Gratitude, and Mutual Faithfulness in Judaism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 114. 11 While the centrality of covenant leaves Judaism exposed to threat of historical critique, the natural sciences pose much less of a danger. The Hebrew Scriptures were composed by or for a society lacking any critical or scientific study of astronomy, cosmology, or biology, so it would be anachronistic to read those texts as intending to provide scientifically factual information relating to those fields. The details of the creation and biblical cosmology have no relevance for the covenant and thus are not subject to the epistemology of the courtroom. That is why since ancient times, the Rabbis have been ready to distance themselves from a plain reading of the opening chapter of Genesis. Thus, we read in the Mishnah Hagigah 2:1 that the “work of creation” may only be taught to one student at a time, implying that its esoteric meaning is very diferent from the plain meaning taught to children.

References Berman, Joshua. Ani Maamin: Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth, and the Thirteen Principles of Faith. Jerusalem: Koren, 2020. Firer, Be-Zion. Panim Hadashot BaTorah. Vol. 1: Bereishit. Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1975. Gellman, Jerome. God’s Kindness Has Overwhelmed Us: A Contemporary Doctrine of the Jews as the Chosen People. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013.

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Hamilton, Victor P. The Book of Genesis Chapters 1–17. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990. Levenson, Jon Douglas. Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Levenson, Jon Douglas. The Love of God: Divine Gift, Human Gratitude, and Mutual Faithfulness in Judaism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Mayah, Moshe. A World Built, Destroyed and Rebuilt: Rabbi Yehudah Amital’s Confrontation with the Memory of the Holocaust. Translated by Kaeran Fish. New York: KTAV, 2005. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Josephine Nauckhof. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Popper, Karl. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1959. Schacht, Richard. Nietzsche. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

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Obscure Dreams and the Hiddenness of the Tetragrammaton Mark Divine Manipulation and the Loss of Human Knowledge as the Patriarchs Give Way to Joseph and His Brothers

Covenantal Cooperation in the Age of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs Generally speaking, the Patriarchs and Matriarchs were well-informed of their roles in the divine plan. From their first encounter, God reveals His every move to Abraham. And so we read, The Lord said to Abram, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing” (Gen. 12:1–2). As I mentioned earlier, Abraham, at the Covenant of the Pieces, is forewarned of his descendants future travails in Egypt (Gen. 15:13–16), and while the human drama of the Patriarchal narrative is largely fueled by questions of primogeniture and patriarchal succession, God always keeps Abraham a step ahead of the game, informing him that his successor will be born of Sarah rather than Hagar (Gen. 17:19) and eventually giving him a year’s advance notice of Isaac’s birth (Gen. 18:14). Things are a little less clear for Abraham’s son Isaac, but divine revelation ofers plenty of information to help guide his afairs. When there is a famine in Canaan, God warns Isaac Do not go down to Egypt; stay in the land which I point out to you (Gen. 26:2) and later ofers him encouragement at Beer Sheva: I am the God of your father Abraham. Fear not, for I am with you, and I will bless you and increase your ofspring for the sake of My servant Abraham (Gen. 26:24). Isaac’s son Jacob repeatedly receives divine instruction at the crucial junctures of his life. God’s angel tells him when the time arrives to leave Laban’s house and return to Canaan (Gen. 31:13). God tells Jacob to flee to Beit El after his sons infuriate the locals by massacring the people of Shechem (Gen. 35:1). And when Jacob has to make the fateful move to Egypt, God reassures him, Fear not to go down to Egypt, for I will make you there into a great nation (Gen. 46:3). Nevertheless, each generation sufers a kind of epistemic decline, a loss of understanding sliding toward the precipitous lapse into ignorance and confusion characteristic of Jacob’s sons and the nascent Israelite nation. The DOI: 10.4324/9781003414346-8

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Patriarch’s epistemic decline is best illustrated by how each one relates to their crucial historical task: each set of Patriarchs and Matriarchs must select and groom a worthy successor patriarch to inherit God’s blessing and covenant. Abraham is acutely aware of the problem; we have already seen how at the Covenant of the Pieces he openly broaches the issue with God: 0 Lord God, what can You give me, seeing that I shall die childless, and the one in charge of my household is Dammesek Eliezer! (Gen. 15:2). Abraham’s wife Sarah gives him her maidservant Hagar as a wife, and the latter gives birth to Ishmael. Years later, Abraham openly suggests to God that Ishmael should succeed him, but God insists that the aged Sarah will bear Abraham the son who will inherit his blessings (Gen. 17:15–22). I have already mentioned the story of Rebekah’s engagement, in which Abraham displays awareness of how assimilation into Canaanite society would endanger Isaac’s role as inheritor of the covenant and appropriately makes his chief servant swear he will not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites among whom I dwell, but will go to the land of my birth and get a wife for my son Isaac (Gen. 24:2–4). By the time Isaac and Rebekah have to groom a successor, things have become murkier. During her pregnancy, Rebekah does inquire of the Lord (Gen. 25:22) and receives the oracular response Two nations are in your womb, two separate peoples shall issue from your body; One people shall be mightier than the other, and the older shall serve the younger (Gen. 25:23). God’s response is somewhat ambiguous, the Hebrew phrase verav ya’avod tza’ir could also be plausibly rendered and the older shall be served by the younger. Later, notoriously, Isaac favors Esau over Jacob because the former supplied him with game meat, while Rebekah favors Jacob (Gen. 25:28). Even after Esau proves his unfitness to inherit the covenant by marrying a Hittite woman to his parent’s consternation (Gen. 26:35), Isaac is still planning to declare Esau his heir and it is only through Rebekah’s clever intervention that Jacob gains the birthright. Throughout the story, both Isaac and Rebekah are aware of the danger of their heir marrying a local woman, but Isaac appears to be completely confused as to his role in selecting his heir and God does not ofer guidance at that crucial juncture. Once again it is Rebekah, who had earlier volunteered to save God’s plans by moving to Canaan to marry Isaac, who now saves the day by pro-actively interfering with the course of events to make sure that Jacob, the worthier son, is heir to Abraham’s blessings. She famously sets covenantal history back on track by sending Jacob, disguised as Esau, to receive Isaac’s blessing (Gen. 27). This is perhaps scripture’s most remarkable instance of a human being freely exercising their agency to promote divine interests without explicit instruction from God. When the spotlight of the biblical narrative moves on to Jacob, we find him receiving divine guidance via prophecy at the crucial junctures in his life mentioned earlier, but he is left in the dark concerning his heir. He has 12 sons from his two wives and their handmaids. Joseph, the first born of the more beloved Rachel would seem the logical candidate to inherit the

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covenant. Appropriately, we read that Israel [a.k.a. Jacob] loved Joseph best of all his sons, for he was the child of his old age; and he had made him an ornamented tunic (Gen. 37:3) – the famous “coat of many colors.” From here on none of the people involved will fully realize that the age of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs is ending and with it will end the selection of a single child to continue their covenantal story. No one fully understands that all Jacob’s sons will share Abraham’s legacy until it is too late and the process of Israel’s descent into Egyptian slavery is well on its way. Meanwhile, we are told that Judah, the natural leader among Jacob’s sons, has broken with family tradition by marrying a Canaanite woman (Gen. 38:2). The old solution to avoid assimilation by sending sons back to Mesopotamia to find a wife is impractical for the many brothers. Earlier, Jacob’s troubled relationship with his father in law Laban ended in a kind of pact of mutual non-aggression1 rather than true reconciliation, completely cutting of ties between Abraham’s descendants and the relatives left back in the “old country.” Intermarriage with the Canaanites will dissolve the unique nascent Israelite nation, and now Jacob’s large and growing clan can only preserve its unique identity by becoming a persecuted minority in Egypt, where its numbers will grow until it is ready for nationhood. Before delving into the details of this historical process, I shall say something about how God set up the preconditions for its unfolding. Providence, Fertility and Famine Fertility is a central human concern in the Hebrew Scriptures, and the desire for progeny motivates much of the action in its stories. Several factors grant fertility its special status in the biblical worldview. Fertility is recognized by scripture as a fundamental, universal and unquestioned human good; it is an unqualified blessing. The first humans are blessed by God, Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it (Gen. 1:28). God tells Abraham Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them . . . So shall your ofspring be (Gen. 15:5). The angel promises Hagar I will greatly increase your ofspring, and they shall be too many to count (Gen. 16:10), and Rebecca is sent of by her family to join her betrothed Isaac with the blessing 0 sister! May you grow into thousands of myriads; may your ofspring seize the gates of their foes (Gen. 24:60). The heroes of Scripture either have children or want children. Women must have children to fulfill their social roles as wives and mothers and to produce sons who will represent their interests in a patriarchal society. Men need children to preserve their family line and name; otherwise they will be left to rely on the good will of others to perpetuate the name of the deceased upon his estate (Ruth 4:10). Koheleth bemoans the futile existence of one who amasses wealth without limit (Eccles. 4:8) yet lacks an inheritor to whom it may be bequeathed. For the bible, the value of fertility runs even deeper than these peculiarly human and social concerns. Even non-human animals have a stake in fertility

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and fecundity is a blessing for them as well. And so we read that God blessed them [the creatures of the water] saying, “Be fertile and increase, fill the waters in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth” (Gen. 1:22). All biological organisms have a stake or interest in achieving reproduction. It is no wonder that God is frequently invoked as bestowing the blessing of fertility, since in the bible, fertility is directly controlled by God. It is assumed that humans will marry and copulate as a matter of course, but whether they will produce children is entirely up to the Deity. Thus, when Rachel demands of Jacob Give me children, or I shall die (Gen. 30:1), he coolly retorts Can I take the place of God, who has denied you fruit of the womb? (Gen. 30:2). In the Book of Genesis, God makes special use of His control over fertility to intervene in human afairs.2 When King Abimelech of Gerar takes Sarah captive, God specifically punishes him with a plague of infertility: the Lord had closed fast every womb of the household of Abimelech because of Sarah (Gen. 20:18). Control of fertility is also used by God to achieve more fine-tuned manipulations of events in the lives of Abraham and his descendants. Sarah was barren throughout the years of normal female fertility. Her astonishingly late pregnancy at age 90 was explicitly promised by God to Abraham, making her son Isaac a literal miracle baby whose very existence was a sign of his being chosen by God. Rebekah was also barren and her pregnancy came in response to Isaac’s prayers (Gen. 25:21). As twin sons of Isaac, Esau and Jacob were obviously predisposed by God to compete for their father’s birthright, and escape from that dangerous rivalry would ultimately motivate Jacob’s flight to Mesopotamia where he married Leah and Rachel. The rivalry between Esau and Jacob would underline the cruel fate of the unchosen son and serve as a precedent for the brothers’ fateful envy of Joseph. The enmity between Joseph and his brothers was also carefully orchestrated through divine control of fertility. While Rachel was Jacob’s true love, the Lord saw that Leah was unloved and he opened her womb; but Rachel was barren (Gen. 29:31). Only after Leah had given birth to six boys and a girl, her maidservant Zilpah had birthed another two sons, and Rachel’s maidservant Bilhah produced yet another two sons do we finally read that God remembered Rachel; God heeded her and opened her womb (Gen. 30:22). Everything is set for terrible envy to develop between Joseph and his brothers. Joseph enjoys three usually incompatible advantages in becoming his father’s favorite. On the one hand, he is a darling young son: Now Israel loved Joseph best of all his sons, for he was the child of his old age (Gen. 37:3). However, thanks to Rachel’s long stretch of infertility, he is also the firstborn son of Jacob’s favorite wife, granting his potential selection as heir a degree of legitimacy both as a firstborn son and as the son of the favored mother, just as Isaac was chosen over Ishmael since he was Sarah’s son. Later in Genesis we also learn that Joseph was well built and handsome (Gen. 39:6), another accident of birth which would seem to mark him for greatness. All of these consequences of God’s micro-management of the Patriarchs

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and Matriarch’s fertility and His explicit interference in the selection of heirs were ultimately aimed at producing two false impressions: first, that, as had been the case with the sons of Abraham and Isaac, only one son would be chosen as Jacob’s successor in the covenant with God, and second, that Joseph was that chosen successor. The brothers’ intense envy of Joseph was not garden-variety sibling rivalry or competition for their father’s afection, rather, their extreme action against Joseph was motivated by their fear of sharing the fates of the unchosen sons of their grandparents and great grandparents. Joseph’s presence threatened them with exile and exclusion from God’s covenant and blessings. Joseph as a Figure of Epistemic Decline As soon as Jacob’s sons step into the limelight of the concluding chapters of Genesis, we witness a complete breakdown of human understanding of God’s plans and of consciously willed participation in those plans. Once again, questions of Patriarchal succession drive much of the narrative plot. In past generations, Isaac was chosen over Ishmael to succeed Abraham, and Jacob was chosen over Esau to succeed Isaac. Now the biblical characters worry over who will succeed Jacob. No overt divine guidance is ofered to resolve that issue. In fact, the very question of succession bespeaks a profound misunderstanding of the situation. Asking which individual will replace Jacob is akin to asking today who will be the next king of France. Jacob will have no unique successor because he is the last of the Patriarchs and all of his progeny will share in Abraham’s blessings. Nevertheless, we have seen why Joseph, the firstborn son of Jacob’s favorite wife, Rachel, seems to be a natural candidate to serve as fourth patriarch, a future role that Joseph appears to anticipate with relish. Jacob himself seems to share in this tragic misunderstanding and favors Joseph with the gift of a ketonet passim, the so-called coat of many colors (Gen. 37:3), which appears later in the bible as the uniform of the royal family (2 Sam. 13:18). Joseph worsens matters by recounting dreams to his brothers seemingly portending his mastery over them (Gen. 37:5-10). Other stories in the final chapters of Genesis follow this motif of human beings unconsciously furthering providence’s inscrutable goals by acting upon their own confused and all-too-human motives. For instance, we find that what Judah thought was a chance encounter with a prostitute would set the foundations for the Davidic royal house (Gen. 38).3 This disconnect between human and divine intentions is well-expressed by a famous midrashic comment: The tribes were busy selling Joseph, Reuben was busy with his sackcloth and fasting, and Judah went down to find himself a woman. And the Holy One blessed be He was bringing the light of the Messiah.4 Before discussing Joseph’s life story in further detail, I would first like to bolster my claim that the Torah is telling a story of epistemic change by tracing

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the progress of two markers of epistemic decline found in the Book of Genesis. These two indicators highlight the structure of the process of decline and Joseph’s role within it. The Degeneration of Dreams The first indicator involves the changing nature of dreams. There are ten experiences recounted in Genesis that are described using the Hebrew word halom, or dream. These are: Abimelekh’s dream warning him to free Sarah (Gen. 20:3–7); Jacob’s famous dream of the ladder (Gen. 28:12–15); Jacob’s dream telling him to leave Laban’s house (Gen. 31:10–13); Laban’s dream warning him not to harm Jacob (Gen. 31:24); Joseph’s two dreams of (apparently) dominating his family (Gen. 37:7, 9); the two dreams of Joseph’s fellow inmates in the Egyptian prison (Gen. 40:5–19); and, finally, Pharaoh’s two dreams predicting the coming famine (Gen. 41:1–7). All of these dream experiences share a common feature, which may reflect a psychological tendency still in efect today; upon waking, the dreamer immediately tells his dream to others. Abimelekh reveals his dream to his servants; Jacob reveals his dream about leaving Laban to his wives Rachel and Leah; Joseph stupidly tells his dreams to his family; Joseph’s fellow inmates are eager to tell him their dreams, and Pharaoh tells his dream to anyone willing to listen. Jacob’s dream of the ladder to heaven is the exception that proves the rule. He cannot tell his dream to anyone because he is travelling alone. Instead, upon waking, he talks to himself about the dream: Jacob awoke from his sleep, and said: “Surely the Lord is present in this place and I did not know it.” Shaken, he said: “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven!” (Gen. 28:16–17). Interestingly, nighttime revelations not described as dreams are not shared with others (Gen. 26:24; 46:2–4). While all these dreams share the feature of being recounted to others, further parameters neatly divide the dreams of Genesis into two groups, Patriarchal and Post-Patriarchal. The dreams of the Patriarchal Period, that is to say, the dreams preceding Joseph’s arrival as a protagonist, are all of expressly divine origin and impart immediately comprehensible messages. When, for instance, Abimelekh is visited by God in a dream and told that You are to die because of the woman you have taken, for she is a married woman (Gen. 20:3), he instantly understands that he is in very hot water for having abducted Abraham’s wife Sarah. Similarly, when, in a dream, Jacob is told by an angel of God, Now, arise and leave this land and return to your native land (Gen. 31:13) both he and his wives immediately understand the message conveyed. The post-patriarchal dreams are quite diferent. Neither God nor His angels speak or appear in those dreams; instead of unambiguous, discursive messages we are presented with uninterpreted symbolic imagery. The dreams of Joseph’s fellow inmates and of the Pharaoh demand the services of a here-to-fore unheard-of professional; an expert dream-interpreter must

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be brought in to explain the meanings cryptically expressed through images of the crushing of grapes (Gen. 40:11), birds eating bread (Gen. 40:17) and scrawny cows (Gen. 41:3). This loss of clarity and of explicit divine authorship marks an epistemological downturn. Dreams are not what they used to be. Furthermore, the process through which dreams lose their clarity specifically marks Joseph as the ambiguous character who ushers out the patriarchal age. After all, Joseph’s own dreams seem to constitute a transitional form. On the one hand, like other post-Patriarchal dreams, they make no direct claim to divine origin and contain no explicit discursive messages. On the other hand, their meaning is (or at least seems to be) immediately intelligible. While there is no indication that Joseph’s own dreams are genuinely prophetic, no dream-interpreter is needed for people to surmise their meaning. As soon as Joseph tells his brothers how he dreamt that their sheaves bowed down before his own, they take no time to instantly retort: Do you mean to reign over us? Do you mean to rule over us? (Gen. 37:8). On the other hand, we might say that the brothers have mistakenly interpreted Joseph’s dreams as if their meaning was as obvious as that of Patriarchal dreams. Examined more carefully, the case of Joseph’s own dreams piles obscurity upon obscurity. Not only do the dreams lack an explicit divine origin and message, to make matters worse, Joseph fails to apply his celebrated skills to their interpretation. Joseph’s own successful interpretations of the dreams of the prisoners and of Pharaoh share a common key: the correlation of numbers of items in the dreams with equal numbers of units of time. The three branches of the grape vine in the dream of the imprisoned chief cup-bearer (Gen. 40:10) are interpreted by Joseph as referring to three days leading to his reprieve (Gen. 40:12), just as the three baskets in the chief baker’s dream refer to the three days leading to the latter’s execution (Gen. 40:18). In both cases, three days must pass before the dream’s prediction will be realized. Similarly, Joseph explains that the groups of seven cows and seven ears of grain in Pharaoh’s dreams refer to periods of seven years (Gen. 41:26–7). Joseph should have applied this interpretive key his own dreams. We might be unsure what to make of his first dream, which does not explicitly mention the number of sheaves involved. Do the bowing sheaves portend Joseph’s brothers bowing down to him in the future? Or, perhaps, does it merely predict Joseph’s rise to political power in general, in which case the fact that the bowing sheaves were made by the brothers was merely dictated by the contingent fact that the brothers were the only other people working in the field, a detail which may simply reflect the mundane reality of work in a society where farming is a family activity? While no numbers are mentioned in the dream of the bowing sheaves to guide us toward its proper interpretation, Joseph’s second dream explicitly refers to the sun, the moon, and eleven stars (Gen. 37:9) which bow down to him. Adding the sun and the moon to the 11 stars, we reach a total of 13 heavenly bodies bowing down to Joseph, leaving us wondering where 13

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units of time enter his story. The solution to this question is hardly esoteric. The account of Joseph’s relations with his brothers, including the episodes of the dreams, opens with a quite unusual bit of biographical chronology: At seventeen years of age, Joseph tended the flocks with his brothers (Gen. 37:2). Later, we are again privy to another unusual chronological detail when Joseph becomes viceroy of Egypt: Joseph was thirty years old when he entered the service of Pharaoh king of Egypt (Gen. 41:46). It is quite unusual for Scripture to mention someone’s age, save to record their age at death or at the birth of an eldest son. Why does Genesis so uncharacteristically mention Joseph’s age at these two moments in his life? Well, a simple operation of subtraction reveals that 13 years passed between the time when Joseph dreamt of lordship and the realization of those dreams with his appointment as viceroy of Egypt – exactly the number of heavenly bodies appearing in the dream predicting his ascension. We could imagine Joseph beginning his decoding of the dream with a statement following his usual formula: The thirteen heavenly bodies are thirteen years – but no such verse exists. This explanation of Joseph’s dream – based on the same principle which underwrote his own successful dream interpretations – suggests that all the characters involved are confused regarding its meaning. Jacob thinks the dream refers to the whole family’s prostration before Joseph (Gen. 37:10),5 and the brothers’ jealous reaction (Gen. 37:11) shows they shared his view. Even Joseph never realizes that the heavenly bodies represent years rather than members of his family; no mention is made of his recalling the dream when it is finally realized after thirteen years. Only more than seven years later, after the period of bounty had passed and the years of famine began to take their toll, when Joseph’s brothers come down to Egypt and appear before him in hope of buying grain, do we read that Joseph speaks harshly to them recalling the dreams that he had dreamed about them (Gen. 42:9). The verse deserves careful attention. The conventional translation of the verse implies that the dreams that Joseph recalls were, on the authority of the biblical narrator, about them – about the brothers, meaning that the eleven stars denoted Joseph’s eleven brothers. This would seem to contradict my claim that the stars (along with the sun and the moon) in the dream symbolized the years which would pass until Joseph’s ascension. However, the translation cited masks the awkwardness of the verse’s use of the Hebrew word lahem, which would normally be translated as something like to them rather than about them. About them would normally translate the word aleihem, as in the verse, Hezekiah heard about them (2 Kgs. 20:13). I suggest a diferent rendering of Gen. 42:9; it speaks of Joseph remembering in regard to them [the brothers] the dreams he had dreamed. In other words, the narrator tells us that Joseph’s encounter with his brothers spurs him to recall his dreams but does not imply that this reflects the dreams’ actual meaning. This construction parallels others found using the root ZKhR (“remember”), such as Leviticus 26:45, which states in connection with a generation in the distant future I will remember in their favor (vezakharti lahem) the covenant with

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the ancients. Here the covenant clearly is not originally associated with them (the sinful Israelites exiled to the enemy’s land), but rather with the ancient Patriarchs. God will, in the distant future, actively apply the covenant of the ancients to that later generation. Similarly, in a negative vein, the author of Psalm 79:8 pleads, literally, Do not remember unto us (al tizkor lanu) the first iniquities or, in other words, do not hold us presently accountable for those earlier sins. Joseph makes a similar move by presently associating his dreams to his brothers’ current situation, by presently assuming that the bowing heavenly bodies represent his prostrating brothers. This is not what the dreams were actually about; Scripture is merely reporting what Joseph incorrectly believed them to be about. Eventually, Moses’ arrival will finally dispel this confusion and will inaugurate new heights of divine communication that outstrip even that achieved by the Patriarchs. The Patriarch’s dreams were immediately intelligible and explicitly of divine origin, while the post-patriarchal dreams are metaphorical and of uncertain origin. Moses, however, possesses a degree of spiritual knowledge completely exceeding anything available through dreams altogether. The whole dream issue becomes passé. After all, in the Book of Numbers, God tells Aaron and Miriam, When a prophet of the Lord arises among you, I make Myself known to him in a vision, I speak with him in a dream. Not so with My servant Moses; he is trusted throughout My household. With him I speak mouth to mouth, plainly and not in riddles, and he beholds the likeness of the Lord (Num. 12:6–8). The epistemic descent following the Patriarchal period is a prelude to the even greater ascent achieved by Moses. The Disappearance of God’s Name The disappearance in Genesis of the Tetragrammaton, the God of Israel’s own proper four-letter name, serves as an additional indicator of the state of God’s relation with the characters of Genesis. For convenience’s sake, I shall refer to the Tetragrammaton by its traditional Hebrew substitute, Hashem or “The Name.” I should explain why scripture’s use of Hashem has epistemic importance. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to work backward from the epistemic highpoint achieved by Moses during the process of Israel’s redemption. The Book of Exodus frames the entire process of Israel’s emancipation in terms of knowledge of God as Hashem. Thus, in Moses’ first encounter with God at the burning bush, he feels compelled to ask what he should answer when the Israelites inquire as to the name of the God of their fathers Who promises to free them. God eventually tells Moses to say: Hashem, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has sent me to you (Ex. 3:15). Later, Pharaoh rejects God’s demand to let the Israelites go, formulating his dismissal of the request in epistemic terms: Who is Hashem that I should heed Him and let Israel go? I do not know Hashem, nor will I let Israel go (Ex. 5:2). Indeed, God tells Moses that

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the dual objectives of the plagues are the freeing of Israel and seeing to it that the Egyptians shall know that I am Hashem (Ex. 7:5). Moses’ era of new religious knowledge is a time when Hashem becomes known in the world, confirming the existence of God in the human world through His fulfillment of the promises given Abraham in the Covenant of the Pieces. What does it mean to know God as Hashem? The name Hashem has been understood as referring to the God of the covenant, God concerned with human morality, God active in history, God in His aspect of mercy and God as a particular encounterable personality rather than an abstract universal concept. This is God in His most approachable aspect, God whose actions are most influenced by His relationships with human beings. The importance of knowing God as Hashem is beautifully summarized in the famous passage from Hosea 2:21–2: And I will betroth you forever, and I will betroth you with righteousness and with righteousness, and with goodness and with mercy. And I will betroth you with faithfulness, and you shall know Hashem. Jeremiah has Hashem describing Himself as implementing intelligible moral ideals: Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom; Let not the strong man glory in his strength; Let not the rich man glory in his riches. But only in this should one glory: that they have the understanding to know Me.6 For I Hashem act with kindness, justice, and equity in the world; For in these I delight – declares Hashem. (Jer. 9:22–3) Deuteronomy demands that the Israelites Know, therefore, that only Hashem your God is God, the steadfast God who keeps His covenant faithfully to the thousandth generation of those who love Him and keep His commandments (Deut. 7:9). However, that passage goes on to remind us that even when explained in humanly intelligible terms, God’s actions do not always gibe with our expectations of human moral excellence: but Who instantly requites with destruction those who reject Him, never slow with those who reject Him, but requiting them instantly (Deut. 7:10). Before proceeding to an analysis of the appearance and disappearance of the word Hashem in the text of Genesis, something should be said about the presence of God as Hashem – God blatantly interceding in human history as a covenantal agent – in that book. Following Moses and Aaron’s first, unsuccessful meeting with Pharaoh, God tells him: “I am Hashem, I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by My name Hashem” (Ex. 6:2–3). This verse may puzzle readers of Genesis who know very well that the Patriarchs were aware of that name. Abraham (then still “Abram”) invoked Hashem by name (Gen. 13:4). Sarah (then still “Sarai”) tells her husband, may Hashem decide between you and me! (Gen. 16:5). Even Sarah’s handmaiden Hagar has heard of Hashem, so when the angel reassures her of her son Ishmael’s bright future, he explains,

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For Hashem has paid heed to your sufering (Gen. 16:11). I will not burden the reader with the many references to Hashem strewn throughout the Patriarchal narrative, Obviously, the Patriarchs were acquainted with God’s name Hashem. However, that is not what the statement I did not make Myself known to them by My name Hashem is really talking about. Here knowing God as Hashem means being acquainted with God as active in history. Similarly, Isaiah 19:20 speaks of a time when the Egyptians will cry out to Hashem against oppressors, He will send them a savior and champion to deliver them and as a result Hashem will make Himself known to the Egyptians (Is. 19:21). Obviously, those Egyptians will have heard of Hashem, otherwise it would not occur to them to cry out to Him. However, it is only after their salvation by Hashem that He will make Himself known to the Egyptians. In an earlier chapter I explained how during the Patriarchal period God, acting under the aspect of the name Shaddai, influences human afairs through the relatively subtle means of controlling human reproduction, with none of the kind of flashy miraculous interventions in ancient geopolitics found in the Exodus story, with its Ten Plagues and the splitting of the Red Sea which are associated with Hashem. It is in this sense that the Patriarchs knew God as El-Shaddai rather than Hashem. We have seen that knowledge of God as Hashem – a God, among other things, active in human afairs – is of crucial importance for the biblical tradition. and that restoring knowledge of God as Hashem is a central motif of the Exodus narrative. But how does the actual occurrence of the Tetragrammaton play out in the Book of Genesis? A quick textual search reveals that the Patriarch Jacob is the last character in Genesis who uses the term Hashem (Gen. 49:18) and that the narrator of Genesis stops using the name Hashem just before Joseph’s spectacular rise to power in Egypt. There it occurs in the description of how Joseph flourished during his imprisonment after having been falsely accused of attempted rape by the wife of his master Potiphar. With God’s help, Joseph has efectively taken over management of the prison, and the bible states, The chief jailer supervised nothing he was in charge of, because Hashem was with him [Joseph] and whatever he did Hashem made successful (Gen. 39:23). That verse marks both the last explicit divine intervention and (almost) the last mention of Hashem found in the bible before the beginning of the Exodus narrative.7 True, Joseph and his brothers constantly talk about how God controls the story’s events, but the biblical narrator never explicitly substantiates their claims. As we shall see in the next chapter, they all repeatedly claim that the whole migration to Egypt was simply intended to spare them from the ravages of hunger; they are clueless regarding the coming enslavement and persecution of their descendants. Appropriately, it is Joseph himself who ironically undermines their claims to having discerned providential intervention. Recall the episode in which Joseph maliciously has the silver his brothers used to pay for their grain placed back into their saddle bags. Upon discovering the silver, the brothers, afraid they will be accused of theft, come

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back to Joseph to return their payment. Then Joseph tells them, Fear not, your God and the God of your father gave you a treasure in your saddle bags; your silver is with me (Gen. 43:23). Joseph speaks as if the silver’s reappearance was an instance of miraculous divine intervention – indeed the only such intervention mentioned in the entire story. However, we know that the alleged miracle was just Joseph’s scheming. In the age of Joseph, God does not meddle so overtly in people’s lives, but humans can be easily fooled into thinking He has. I should mention that Hashem does make one final appearance in the Book of Genesis following Joseph’s rise to power, but it is an exception which proves the rule. Jacob, the last remaining representative of the patriarchal age, calls his sons together before his death to tell them what will befall you in the days to come (Gen. 49:1). Remarkably, he makes no mention of the coming drama of enslavement and redemption, thus leaving their ignorance and confusion undisturbed. However, at one point in the middle of his discourse and completely out of context, Jacob suddenly cries out, I wait for your deliverance, Hashem! (Gen. 49:18). This last flicker of patriarchal knowledge is expressed in an inchoate cry for the Hashem’s deliverance from the great future catastrophe of slavery – a catastrophe which no one else realizes is on the way. Knowledge of Hashem will only return with Moses’ arrival on the scene. Notes 1 And Laban said to Jacob, “Here is this mound and here the pillar which I have set up between you and me: this mound shall be witness and this pillar shall be witness that I am not to cross to you past this mound, and that you are not to cross to me past this mound and this pillar, with hostile intent. May the God of Abraham and the god of Nahor” – their ancestral deities – “judge between us.” And Jacob swore by the Fear of his father (Gen. 31:51–3). 2 See Norman Fredman, “The Divine Name E-l-Shaddai: He Who Created Families,” Dor Le Dor 9, no. 2 (Winter 1980–1): 72–7. Fredman argues that the divine name El-Shaddai refers to God as involved in procreation and families, and I would suggest that when God tells Moses I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, He is referring to the way God directed Patriarchal history through control of fertility. 3 Judah’s thrice-widowed daughter-in-law Tamar tricked him into impregnating her by posing as a prostitute. Peretz, one of the resulting twin sons, was King David’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather (Ruth 4:18–22). 4 Yalkut Shimoni Bereishit 35:14. 5 In his reaction to Joseph’s dream, Jacob seems aware that something is fishy about it: He [Joseph] dreamed another dream and told it to his brothers, saying, “Look, I have had another dream: And this time, the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me.” And when he told it to his father and brothers, his father berated him. “What,” he said to him, “is this dream you have dreamed? Are we to come, I and your mother and your brothers, and bow low to you to the ground?” (Gen. 37:9–10)

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Rashi, the great classic Jewish exegete, writes regarding this passage that Jacob questions how Joseph’s mother Rachel (assumedly represented in the dream by the moon) could possibly bow down to him, since she had died while giving birth to Benjamin (Gen. 35:19). To my mind, Jacob’s sharp questioning of the dream points to his superior patriarchal epistemic standing. 6 I take the translation of this phrase from the New International Version, which is here more faithful than the New JPS to Jeremiah’s Hebrew. 7 See further.

Reference Fredman, Norman. “The Divine Name E-l – Shaddai: He Who Created Families.” Dor Le Dor 9, no. 2 (Winter 1980–1): 72–7.

8

Joseph the False Patriarch Executes Economic Policies That Set the Stage for the Israelites’ Enslavement in Egypt

Joseph’s Ignorance Having treated the two indicators of epistemic decline – the degradation of dreams and the disappearance of Hashem from the biblical text – I will now focus more closely on the figure of Joseph, the leading character in the transition away from the patriarchal period. Let us look more closely at Joseph’s epistemic record. Joseph becomes famous as a prognosticator and interpreter of dreams, but his own actions flounder in ironic miscalculation. He shares his dreams of glory with his brothers, who promptly sell him into slavery. He correctly interprets the dream of the imprisoned royal cupbearer, bringing him good news of his forthcoming rehabilitation. But while Joseph begs the cupbearer to intervene on his behalf, just three days later when the cup-bearer is reinstated into royal service he promptly forgets Joseph and his woes (Gen. 40:23). When Joseph finally reveals himself to his brothers, he absolves them of guilt for having sold him into slavery, assuring them that God has sent me ahead of you to ensure your survival on earth and to save your lives in an extraordinary deliverance. So, it was not you who sent me here, but God; and He has made me a father to Pharaoh, lord of all his household, and ruler over the whole land of Egypt (Gen. 45:7–8). Of course, Joseph misses the big picture. He has no idea that the Israelite descent to Egypt will end in enslavement. He also seems to have learned nothing from his previous experiences in Egypt. Joseph is proud of Pharaoh’s trust in him, but his previous boss had also placed Joseph in charge of all his afairs and that did not keep Potiphar from eventually sending him to the dungeon. Similarly, Joseph’s good standing with Pharaoh will not ensure the future welfare of the Israelites in Egypt. Joseph Sets the Stage for Israelite Enslavement I have been quite hard on Joseph, and it would be uncharitable to leave undiscussed his most celebrated feat of dream interpretation – his dramatic revelation that the fat cows and full ears of grain and the emaciated cows and emaciated ears of grain in Pharaoh’s dreams portend, respectively, seven years of bounty and seven years of famine. Joseph instantly suggests that the DOI: 10.4324/9781003414346-9

90 Joseph the False Patriarch surplus yields of the seven fat years be stored away to feed the people during the coming years of famine, a plan which inspires Pharaoh to exclaim, Could we find another like him, a man in whom is the spirit of God? (Gen. 41:38). However, Joseph’s execution of the policy strays from his first godly pronouncement with tragic results. Consider the original policy set out by Joseph in his interpretation of the dreams: Let Pharaoh find a man of discernment and wisdom, and set him over the Land of Egypt. And let Pharaoh take steps to appoint overseers over the land, and organize the land of Egypt in the seven years of plenty. Let all the food of these good years that are coming be gathered, and let the grain be collected under Pharaoh’s authority as food to be stored in the cities. Let that food be a reserve for the land for the seven years of famine which will come upon the land of Egypt, so that the land may not perish in the famine. (Gen. 41:33–6) We see that the plan, as originally set out by Joseph while interpreting Pharaoh’s dream, simply involved the gathering of surplus grain during the fat years and their redistribution during the years of famine. But consider Joseph’s implementation of the plan: Now there was no bread in all the world, for the famine was very severe; both the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan languished because of the famine. Joseph gathered in all the money that was to be found in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan, as payment for the rations that were being procured, and Joseph brought the money into Pharaoh’s palace. And when the money gave out in the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan, all the Egyptians came to Joseph and said, “Give us bread, lest we die before your very eyes, for the money is gone!” And Joseph said, “Bring your livestock, if the money is gone.” So they brought their livestock to Joseph, and Joseph gave them bread in exchange for the horses, for the stocks of sheep and cattle, and the asses; thus he provided them with bread that year in exchange for all their livestock. And when that year was ended, they came to him the next year and said to him, “We cannot hide from my lord that, with all the money and livestock consigned to my lord, nothing is left at my lord’s disposal save our persons and farmland. Let us not perish before your eyes, both we and our land. Take us and our land in exchange for bread, and we with our lands will be slaves to Pharaoh; provide the seed, that we may live and not die, and that the land not become a waste.” (Gen. 47:13–19) Joseph agrees to the Egyptian people’s desperate ofer, takes all the land for Pharaoh, and transfers the whole population to the cities. He then announces

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that the people will be able to return to work their lands, but they must handover a fifth of their yields to Pharaoh. I have pointed out elsewhere that Joseph’s implementation of the plan is ethically dubious.1 Instead of simply storing the food and redistributing it during the famine, Joseph demands that the Egyptians themselves – the very farmers who produced and harvested the food – buy back their own product. A good economist might explain that Joseph needed the money to cover storage fees and that, in any event, free distribution of the grain would promote waste. However, Joseph charges such exorbitant monopolistic prices that the Egyptians must literally sacrifice all ownership of the means of production in order to survive. Joseph exploits the years of famine to strip the Egyptian people of their wealth and liberty, leaving Pharaoh with absolute control over the country. While it would be anachronistic to apply the vocabulary of rights to ancient Egypt, I do think it would be fair to say that every society possesses some sort of political culture which places real limitations upon its rulers. In every culture, there are things which simply are not done, policy options which are excluded from the compass of the practical political imagination. Through his extreme policies, Joseph efectively destroys the political culture of ancient Egypt. When, at point of death by starvation, the entire population is dispossessed of its wealth and liberty, anything becomes possible. In such a society, the instantaneous mass enslavement of an entire ethnic minority becomes thinkable and its male babies can be murdered. Thanks to his typically limited understanding of historical processes, Joseph creates the cultural conditions that will make possible the future persecution of his own people. How could the Israelites complain about being pressed into slavery when the entire Egyptian population had told Joseph, Take us and our land in exchange for bread, and we with our lands will be slaves to Pharaoh (Gen. 47:19)? When the Israelites are left with nothing but their familial ties with the viceroy to protect them, we can understand how one short verse can set the scene for hundreds of years of sufering and persecution: There arose a new king over Egypt who did not know Joseph (Ex. 1:8). Joseph’s failure of forethought sets the stage for Israel’s eventual enslavement. Joseph’s Late Enlightenment Joseph only begins to understand the reality of his situation quite late in the game, just a little before Jacob’s death. When Jacob becomes ill in his old age, Joseph rushes in to arrange a meeting in which the dying patriarch can bless his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. Apparently, Joseph wanted Jacob to seal his status as the fourth patriarch by seeing to it that his sons would receive a special blessing from Jacob. The earlier biblical story of Jacob’s own competition with Esau for Isaac’s blessing leaves us acutely aware that the reception of the patriarch’s blessing marks its recipient as the elect figure of the next generation. Jacob, for his part, finally begins to deflate Joseph’s

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ambitions by telling him of an old prophecy in which God promised that he would become a community of peoples (Gen. 48:4), that is to say, not just the father of a single, central descendant. And if Joseph thought his sons would be granted favored status, Jacob tells him, Ephraim and Manasseh shall be no less than Reuben and Simeon (Gen. 48:5). This is hardly reassuring, given that in the very next chapter Jacob will “bless” Reuben with the verse, unstable as water, you shall excel no longer; for when you mounted your father’s bed, you brought disgrace – my couch he mounted! (Gen. 49:4), while Simeon, for his part, is cursed by Jacob for taking part in the massacre of the inhabitants of Shechem: Simeon and Levi are a pair; their weapons are tools of lawlessness. Let not my person be counted in their assembly, for when angry they slay men, and when pleased they maim oxen. Cursed be their anger so fierce, and their wrath so relentless. I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel (Gen. 49:5–7). The comparison of Ephraim and Manasseh with two of Jacob’s most problematic sons certainly does not suggest that they will be singled out for special honors. Finally, Jacob alludes to the new system of tribal political organization, saying, But the progeny born to you after them shall be for yours; they shall be recorded under the name of their brothers in their inheritance (Gen. 48:6). In other words, all of Joseph’s children will be afliated with one or the other of the two tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. By now it should finally be clear to Joseph that the patriarchal age is over and his hopes of becoming the fourth patriarch are dashed. Joseph’s eventual reconciliation with the new situation is poignantly described in the final chapters of Genesis. Jacob, before his death, insists that his body be united with those of the other patriarchs and matriarchs through burial in Hebron’s Me’arat Hamachpela. The story of Jacob’s burial in Hebron is described in great detail in a passage of 19 verses (Gen. 49:29–50:14). The biblical text now signals the conclusion of the comic-tragedy of errors which was the story of Joseph and his brothers. In their final encounter following Jacob’s death, the brothers, fearful of Joseph’s revenge, flung themselves before him, and said, “We are prepared to be your slaves” (Gen. 50:18). But Joseph said to them, “Have no fear! Am I a substitute for God?” (Gen. 50:19). That expression, am I a substitute for God? (Hebrew: ha-tahat Elohim anokhi?) makes exactly one additional appearance in all of Hebrew Scripture. When Rachel, envious of her sister Leah’s fecundity, comes to Jacob demanding he give her a child, her husband replies, “Can I take the place of God [Hebrew: ha-tahat Elohim anokhi], who has denied you fruit of the womb?” (Gen. 30:2). The story of fateful jealousy, which began with Jacob cruelly dismissing his wife’s grief through allusion to Providence, ends with Joseph employing the same allusion to Providence to calm his brothers’ fears and finally end the saga of jealousy and distrust. No less importantly, Joseph finally makes a public disavowal of his suspected patriarchal status. While the story of Jacob’s burial in Hebron has just been told at length, Joseph explicitly announces that his place is with the new national group rather than with

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his patriarchal forebears. He does not ask to be buried in Hebron, but rather makes his brothers take an oath that When God comes to your aid, you shall carry my bones from here (Gen. 50:25). Joseph now realizes that he is an equal among equals; his body cannot be returned to Canaan as befits a patriarch, rather it must wait to return with the rest of the Israelite nation.2 When God comes to your aid: Joseph has also begun to grasp the dark side of Israelite life in Egypt. He finally realizes that the land of Egypt is not only a haven in which to escape famine; it is also a place of danger from which God will have to rescue the Israelites. Unfortunately, by the time Joseph makes this final speech, the Israelites have fully adjusted to the erstwhile easy lives in Egypt provided them by Joseph’s personal political clout. It is too late for a decision to return to Canaan, and, in any event, the dying Joseph is in no condition to lead them home. Notes 1 See Berel Dov Lerner, “Joseph the Unjust,” Judaism 38, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 278–81. 2 This point is made more clearly when Joseph’s request is later quoted in the story of the Exodus from Egypt: And Moses took with him the bones of Joseph, who had exacted an oath from the children of Israel, saying, “God will be sure to take notice of you: then you shall carry up my bones from here with you” (Ex. 13:19). Joseph’s bones will not merely be carried (literally, raised up), they will be raised up with you, they will ascend to the Promised Land with the Israelites. In modern jargon, one might say that Joseph’s bones will “make aliyah” together with the rest of the nation.

Reference Lerner, Berel Dov. “Joseph the Unjust.” Judaism 38, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 278–81.

9

“Harsh Work” Israelite Enslavement and the Loss of Temporality and Agency as Pharaoh’s Failed Method of Population Control

The New Israelite Will Be Fickle We have reached the point in the biblical narrative where, surreptitiously led on by hidden divine manipulations, the Israelites have stumbled into the historical catastrophe of enslavement. The persecution of the Israelites in Egypt is a unique and uniquely disturbing episode in biblical historiography. All other calamities befalling the Israelites are depicted as just punishments for the nation’s sins, but the enslavement in Egypt happens because it has to happen; it was already foretold in the Covenant of the Pieces and it efects social and psychological changes upon the Israelites which will be necessary for their fulfillment of the covenant. Before delving further into the details of this grand plan of nation-building, I would like to emphasize its implications for human politics. It is the dream of every radical revolutionary to mold human beings into some new type, into persons of the future suited to life in the coming utopian society. These revolutionaries try to play God, but scripture tells us how this works out when God Himself is being, well, God. The House of Jacob will degenerate into a mass of slaves stripped of agency, all in order for their agency to be returned to them by God so that they might freely yet predictably enter His more elaborate covenant of the Law. There are many aspects to this story, but for human leaders, it is a cautionary tale. Even God Himself, pulling all the strings of nature and history, faces a daunting task in reshaping human character. First God amazes the Israelites by aficting their Egyptian masters with ten miraculous plagues, then he arranges their escape from the clutches of Pharaoh’s army by walking them through the split Red Sea. He controls their water and food supply throughout the forty years of wandering in the wilderness, and ruthlessly punishes their infractions with everything from huge man-eating sinkholes in the ground (Num. 16:32) to massive attacks by poisonous snakes to (Num. 21:6). Yet, while human revolutionaries are often confident of achieving irreversible results, God Himself is less sanguine. Following the people’s dramatic entry into the covenant at Sinai, God comments with ironic humility: Who will grant it, that this heart be theirs for all days to fear Me and observe all My commandments so they and their children’s DOI: 10.4324/9781003414346-10

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benefit forever (Deut. 5:26)?1 Even more strikingly, the Torah makes clear that despite all of God’s eforts and schemes, Israelite moral culture is bound to face terrible crises in the future. When, in the book of Deuteronomy, Joshua takes over leadership from Moses to bring the people into the Promised Land, the latter encourages him, saying Be strong and resolute: for you shall bring the Israelites into the land that I promised them on oath, and I will be with you (Deut. 31:23), but that is mentioned in the context of dismal prophecies of the Israelites’ inevitable descent into idolatry and its aftermath. Joshua even joins Moses in reciting a long poem describing these future calamities (Deut. 32:1–43), including the lines: So Jeshurun grew fat and kicked. You grew fat and gross and coarse. He forsook the God who made him and spurned the Rock of his support. They incensed Him with alien things, Vexed Him with abominations. . . . The Lord saw and was vexed and spurned His sons and His daughters. . . . I will sweep misfortunes on them, use up My arrows on them: Wasting famine, ravaging plague, deadly pestilence, and fanged beasts will I let loose against them, with venomous creepers in dust. The sword shall deal death without, as shall the terror within. .  .  . I might have reduced them to naught, made their memory cease among men, but for fear of the taunts of the foe, their enemies who might misjudge and say, “Our own hand has prevailed.” (Deut. 32:15–16;19;23–5;26–7) The message to Joshua is: “Be happy, you will lead the people in the good times immediately ahead, know that they won’t last forever, but eventually things will improve once more.” God pulls out all the stops in trying to create the New Israelite; He tears them down through enslavement and builds them up again in a spectacularly miraculous process of redemption, but the results will be fickle. The Book of Deuteronomy repeatedly predicts a great future failure only after which will the long-awaited change of heart finally take place. Thus, following the harrowing descriptions of defeat and exile found in chapters twenty-eight and twenty-nine of Deuteronomy, chapter thirty announces the ultimate success of God’s project: When all these things befall you-the blessing and the curse that I have set before you-and you take them to heart amidst the various nations to which the Lord your God has banished you, and you return to the Lord your God, and you and your children heed His command with all your heart and soul, just as I enjoin upon you this day, then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and take you back in love. He will bring you together again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you. Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the world, from there the Lord your God will gather you, from there He will fetch you. And the Lord your God will bring you to the land that your fathers

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Only then will God’s plan finally succeed in achieving a broad and permanent revolution of consciousness among the Israelites: Then the Lord your God will open up your heart and the hearts of your ofspring to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, in order that you may live (Deut. 30:6). Any truly lasting change of heart is left to the generation of returnees from some far-of future exile.2 Introducing Temporality Revolutionaries love to mark the reconstruction of society by undoing time. The National Convention of the French revolutionaries instituted a new calendar beginning with the year one. Not to be outdone and reflecting their more thoroughgoing and genocidal social revolution, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge declared the birth of a new era beginning with the year zero.3 In the story of Israel in Egypt, God also reconstructs the Israelites by overhauling their relationship to time, but, being God, He possesses the wherewithal to do so in a much more profound and lasting way. The story of Israel’s enslavement and redemption in Egypt may be read as a meditation upon temporality and human agency (I use the term agency here in the technical sense of “The capacity of an individual to actively and independently choose and to afect change; free will or self-determination”4). I hope to presently demonstrate that temporality and its connection with agency play an important role in the story of Exodus; later I will attempt to uncover a specific philosophical doctrine concerning temporality and agency in the story. First, in order to alert readers to the kind of philosophical issues we may be looking for in the biblical narrative, I will quickly set out some philosophical background before diving into the deep waters of scriptural exegesis. My brief introductory comments on the philosophy of temporality largely follow Holly Andersen’s overview of the relevant literature that recently appeared in The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Time.5 Andersen points out that our ability to represent time to ourselves – for instance, to think about some event as having happened yesterday or as likely to occur tomorrow – is crucial for human agency since “intentions are directed forward in time at some action. Forming an intention involves representing as in the future some action that one plans to execute.” Furthermore, she points out that “changing our prior intentions without any change in our reasons for having formed those intentions is a species of irrationality, distinguishable from, for instance, simultaneously holding contradictory beliefs.”6 Our ability to plan for the future and execute plans developed in the past is crucial not only for our human agency, it is also an important ingredient in the psychological “glue” which preserves an individual’s personal identity

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through time. One reason to say that I am the same person I was yesterday is that I feel constrained by projects and commitments I undertook in the past. Thus, Michael Bratman7 writes: “We see ourselves as agents who persist over time and who begin, develop, and then complete temporally extended activities and projects.” I will conclude this brief digression into the philosophical literature by mentioning an idea which I will take up later, the commonsense notion that the human mode of temporal consciousness and representation is an important factor distinguishing human psychology from that of most or perhaps all non-human animals.8 As Ludwig Wittgenstein asks in his Philosophical Investigations9: “A dog believes his master is at the door. But can he also believe his master will come the day after to-morrow?” As we shall see, there is reason to believe that the idea that diferences in time-consciousness are important for the human/non-human binary plays a role in the story of Israel’s enslavement. The Israelites Are Robbed of Temporality in Egypt I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their age as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday. . . . I was not allowed to make any inquiries of my master concerning it. He deemed all such inquiries on the part of a slave improper and impertinent, and evidence of a restless spirit. – Frederick Douglass10

As we have seen, Abraham was famously pre-informed of the coming disaster of Israelite enslavement long before its realization. During the enactment of the Covenant of Pieces God tells Abraham: Know well that your ofspring shall be strangers in a land not theirs, and they shall be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years (Gen. 15:13). The Israelite experience in Egypt will be characterized by two features: Firstly, they will dwell in a strange land and, secondly, they will endure oppressive enslavement there. To speak metaphysically, one might say that the Israelites will be robbed of two aspects of existence whose control is necessary for autonomous action; as strangers in a strange land they will lose control of space, and as oppressed slaves, they will lose control over their time, since, after all, a slave must devote his time to forwarding his master’s ends and not his own. I have briefly touched upon both incapacities elsewhere,11 but now I would like to concentrate on what it means to lose one’s control of time. The complaint of a loss of temporal autonomy is fairly common today. Feminists complain that traditional female roles force women to devote their spare time to family and household needs, leaving them unable to pursue more individual goals. Critics of capitalism complain that “wage slavery” alienates salaried workers from their own productive activities. My

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claim is that Scripture tries to frame the story of the Egyptian enslavement as a more abstract and extreme situation in which the lives of the victims are completely robbed of temporal structure, and the life of the nascent Israelite nation is completely robbed of its temporal and historical consciousness.12 If Zionism may be seen as the “Jewish return into history,”13 I claim that the enslavement in Egypt constitutes a radical exit from lived historical time and that the Exodus from Egypt constitutes an instance of return into both personal and historical time. Stripped of their temporal autonomy – that is, their ability to decide for themselves how they will spend their own time – the Israelites also lose their now-superfluous ability to think in a temporal framework, i.e., what philosophers call “temporal representation.” The Israelites do not merely lose control over their own time, they are also stripped of opportunities to see any point to the projects in which other people forced them to engage. Israelite time becomes pointless and in a way it ceases to be experienced. The story of enslavement and redemption becomes a kind of thought experiment designed to help us think about the role of temporality in human life by describing what life would be like without it altogether. While it goes without saying that the condition of slavery involves a loss of temporal autonomy, scripture ofers several clues to the Israelites’ more radical loss of time-consciousness. First, we may notice the conspicuous absence of temporal terms and frameworks in the story of the enslavement. For instance: compare the genealogies of Moses and Aaron in the Egypt story with the earlier biblical genealogies which introduce heroes into the narrative, the genealogies that constitute the chronological scafolding of the Genesis narrative. Genesis 5 gives the details of Noah’s genealogy before telling us about the flood; similarly, Genesis 11 sets out Abraham’s genealogy before describing his call from God to Go forth (Gen. 12:1) to Canaan. In Genesis 5, we read: When Adam had lived 130 years, he begot a son in his likeness after his image, and he named him Seth. After the birth of Seth, Adam lived 800 years and begot sons and daughters. All the days that Adam lived came to 930 years; then he died. When Seth had lived 105 years, he begot Enosh. After the birth of Enosh, Seth lived 807 years and begot sons and daughters. All the days of Seth came to 912 years; then he died. (Gen. 5:3–8) The rest of the list follows the same pattern. The same format appears in the genealogy leading up to Abraham in Genesis 11: This is the line of Shem. Shem was 100 years old when he begot Arpachshad, two years after the Flood. After the birth of Arpachshad, Shem lived 500 years and begot sons and daughters. When Arpachshad had lived 35 years, he begot Shelah. After the birth of Shelah, Arpachshad lived 403 years and begot sons and daughters. (Gen. 11:10–13)

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Those two genealogies from Genesis tell us not only at what age the man of each generation died, but also his age at the birth of his firstborn (or main inheritor), the next person on the list. Given that additional information, it is possible to establish a broader chronological framework for the stories of Genesis by adding up the ages of each man at the time he begot his eldest son. For example, if Adam was 130 years old when Seth was born, and Seth was 105 years old when Enosh was born, we can easily calculate that Adam was 235 years old when Enosh was born. Conveniently, the genealogy leading up to Abraham’s birth tells us that Shem begat Arpachshad two years after the flood (Gen. 11:10), allowing us to synchronize the genealogical chronology with a great world-historical event. Contrast this with the genealogy of Aaron and Moses in Exodus 6. There we learn the family background of Moses and Aaron just as they make their first appearance before Pharoah, an episode that takes place while the Israelites live under the full brunt of servitude. We read: These are the names of Levi’s sons by their lineage: Gershon, Kohath, and Merari; and the span of Levi’s life was 137 years. The sons of Gershon: Libni and Shimei, by their families. The sons of Kohath: Amram, Izhar, Hebron, and Uzziel; and the span of Kohath’s life was 133 years. The sons of Merari: Mahli and Mushi. These are the families of the Levites by their lineage. Amram took to wife his father’s sister Jochebed, and she bore him Aaron and Moses; and the span of Amram’s life was 137 years. (Ex. 6:16–20) Notice the diference from the earlier genealogies found in Genesis. Here the biblical narrator only gives the ages at which people died and tells us nothing about births. As Fredrick Douglas noted earlier, nobody seems to know exactly when slaves are born. By hiding from us the age of each man when he became a father, scripture makes it impossible for us to impose a chronological framework upon the story of Israel’s enslavement. The enslavement was a condition lacking structured time. The non-temporal nature of the Israelite’s existence under slavery is further signified by how the great political event of that period is dated – or rather not dated – by the text. I am referring to the description of Pharaoh’s death. Allow me to establish a bit of background. Much of biblical chronology is built around kings, their ages upon assuming the throne and the age at which their reigns end with death. Thus, the same formula repeats itself over and over again in the Book of Kings: Jehosaphat was thirty-five years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem for twenty-five years. (1 Kings 22:42) Ahaziah was twenty-two years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem one year. (2 Kings 8:26)

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And so on. These personal statistics can be collated to form a list of kings that can serve as a continuous historical chronology after the manner of the chronologies which we saw can be deduced from genealogies. If King X reigned for 20 years, and King Y followed him, reigning 20 years, we can calculate that King Y’s reign ended forty years after King X’s began. If you do the arithmetic for a whole list of kings you get a temporal framework spanning hundreds of years in which important historical events can be dated. Thus, we read: In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, King Shishak of Egypt marched against Jerusalem and carried of the treasures of the House of the Lord. (1 Kings 14:25) In the twenty-third year of King Jehoash, the priests had not made the repairs on the House. (2 Kings 12: 7) And so on. Without knowledge of how long each king reigned, it would be impossible for us to produce a chronology of biblical history. And what do we read in the middle of the account of the Israelite’s enslavement in Egypt? And in those many days, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned under their enslavement and cried out; and their cry for help from enslavement rose up to God. (Ex. 2:23) The Israelite slaves do not experience the Pharaoh’s death as a neatly dated historical milestone that could underpin a chronology. The Pharaohs do not even have names to distinguish one’s reign from another’s. They form one long blur of oppressive kings. We are not told how long the previous Pharaoh ruled. Rather, the death is reported within the amorphous timeframe of those many days. Day follows day without number and without distinction.14 The Israelite slaves live in a seemingly shoreless sea of time, bereft of any points of reference around which a sense of historical time might crystallize. The Hebrew expression, vayehi vayamim harabim hahem, and in those many days, hearkens back to an earlier biblical tale of work and exploitation in a foreign land. Recall the story of Jacob and Rachel. When Jacob arrives at the well outside Haran and is overcome by Rachel’s beauty – a real case of love at first sight – he ofers her father Laban seven years of labor in exchange for her hand in marriage. The deal is struck and scripture tells us: And Jacob served seven years for Rachel and they seemed to him but a few days [yamim ahadim] because of his love for her (Gen. 29:20). Jacob, subsisting in exile and working for some else’s benefit, experiences time in a completely diferent way from the Israelites in Egypt. While the Israelites experience time as an unstructured and apparently unending desperate present, Jacob’s seven

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years pass is if they were but a few days. What lies behind this profound difference in temporal consciousness? Of course, the bible makes the answer quite clear. While Jacob may have spent his time looking after another man’s flocks, he was always aware that he was working toward the attainment of an invaluable personal goal, that is, marriage with Rachel. Furthermore, he worked within what seemed at the time to be a well-established temporal framework; he would work exactly seven years. We can almost imagine him eagerly crossing of days on the calendar as his wedding approached. In stark contrast, the Israelites in Egypt were not working toward the attainment of some personal goal – they simply worked because, as slaves, they were required to work. Furthermore, the Israelites signed no contract with Pharaoh delimiting the period during which they would serve the Egyptians. The Israelites had no definable future to look forward to, and without hope the experience of time collapses. The temporally oppressive character of the Egyptian servitude is encapsulated in the term used to describe the Israelites’ labors. Exodus 1:13 tell us that the Egyptians worked the Israelites befarekh. This Hebrew term befarekh has usually been translated as “ruthlessly” (New JPS, NIV, etc.) or “with rigor” (New KJV, etc.). Work imposed befarekh is avodat parekh. Do the rabbis have anything more definite to say about the meaning of befarekh? Usually, there is little pressure within Jewish tradition to formulate canonical definitions of biblical terms appearing in a narrative context; after all, nothing much of practical importance is at stake in the interpretation of narratives. Terms appearing in a legal context are an entirely diferent afair. Good Jews want to know what the Torah expects of their behavior and the rabbis enter into serious scholarly debate in search of precise definitions of the practical obligations implied by biblical phrasing. Fortunately for us, the term befarekh, which is used to describe how the Egyptians worked the Israelites, does in fact reappear later in a legal context, lending us hope of discovering its canonical definition within Judaism. In Leviticus 25:39–46, we read: If your kinsman under you continues in straits and must give himself over to you, do not subject him to the treatment of a slave. He shall remain with you as a hired or bound laborer; he shall serve with you only until the jubilee year. Then he and his children with him shall be free of your authority; he shall go back to his family and return to his ancestral holding. For they are My servants, whom I freed from the Land of Egypt; they may not give themselves over into servitude. You shall not rule over him befarekh; you shall fear your God . . . as for your Israelite kinsmen, no one shall rule over the other the other befarekh. Here we read that special rules apply to the eved Ivri, the Hebrew slave or servant. Already we can see how the word befarekh – the term describing the proscribed condition of the eved Ivri – reflects the conditions of slavery

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in Egypt. The master is prohibited from completely robbing the slave of his temporal autonomy; the slave always knows that he will be set free on the Jubilee Year.15 Also, any Israelite who has lost possession of their ancestral home regains it in the Jubilee year.16 Thus, biblical law limits the possibility of an Israelite re-experiencing the two modes of deprivation sufered during enslavement in Egypt and first mentioned in the Covenant of the Pieces: he will not remain a slave forever, permanently losing his temporal autonomy, neither will he permanently lose ownership of his ancestral home and remain bereft of spatial autonomy. So much for the plain meaning of the text. The rabbis understand the legal definition of befarekh as having a more profound bearing upon temporal autonomy. In the midrash halakhah Sifra (Behar Sinai 6:2), we read: You shall not rule over him befarekh: That he [the master] should not tell him [the slave], “Warm this cup [of beverage]” when he [the master] has no need for it, [Similarly, he should not say] “Cool this cup [of beverage]” when he has no need for it. [Nor shall the master say to the slave] “Till beneath the grape vine until I return.” In his Code, Moses Maimonides further conceptualizes the prohibition of befarekh as follows17: What is parekh work? It is work without set limits and work which he [the master] has no need for, but rather he only intends to keep him [the servant] working in order that he not be idle. According to Maimonides, forcing someone to work befarekh is doubly alienating. Marxists can complain that wage labor under capitalism is alienated because the worker has no control over his work or his product, but at least capitalist workers can find some comfort in the thought that their work serves someone’s economic interests; at least their labor is prized by the exploiters. Avodat parekh goes a step further. Now the work serves no one’s economic interests. It is pointless make-work whose only goal is to keep the worker busy – to keep him from having any control over his own time. As Maimonides shows us, this can be achieved in two ways; either by simply forcing the slave to continue working in order to leave him without leisure or, by not telling the slave when his current task will end, thus making it impossible for him to make any plans for even the immediate future.18 Does this halakhic understanding of befarekh have any real echo in the story of the Exodus? I think it does. Remember why it was that Pharaoh enslaved the Israelites to begin with. In the first chapter of the Book of Exodus, we are privy to Pharaoh’s decision-making: A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. And he said to his people, “Look the Israelite people are much too numerous for us.

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Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase; otherwise in the event of war they may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise up from the land.” So they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built the store cities for Pharaoh: Pithom and Ramses.” (Ex. 1:8–11) According to the biblical account, Pharaoh did not enslave the Israelites in order to profit from their forced labor. He makes no mention of their work fulfilling some objective need. Rather, the point of working the Israelites hard was to reduce their numbers. The enslavement of the Israelites was not meant to serve Egypt’s economic interests, but rather its national security. Now we can see just how well the halakhic definition of befarekh jibes with the account of the Israelite enslavement. To paraphrase Maimonides, Pharaoh forced the Israelites to do work for which he had no pressing need but which was rather intended to keep their numbers from growing – a goal that would be completely irrational in a normal slave economy. The genocidal intention of the enslavement became horribly clear when it proved inefectual and was bolstered with the less subtle edict Every boy that is born you shall throw into the Nile, but let every girl live (Ex. 1:22), again, a move that would be unimaginable in a state which valued the work of its slaves. The project of building store cities seems to involve an ironic allusion to the Israelite’s past protector, Joseph. He rose to power by administering the storage of grain, but now that Joseph is out of the picture, his people can be forced into building pointless store cities in “preparation” for a famine that is already long forgotten. Pharaoh Plays God and Loses

We have seen that Pharaoh’s policy of enslaving the Israelites and thus robbing them of their temporality was actually aimed at reducing their numbers. The irony of Pharaoh’s program is that it directly trespasses on the one aspect of human life directly controlled by divine providence in the stories leading up to Israel’s descent to Egypt: human fertility and reproduction. As we have seen, after the Flood, God blessed humanity with fecundity, punished Abimelekh’s house with bareness (Gen. 20:18), repeatedly promised and delivered ofspring to the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, and, as I have demonstrated, used fine-tuning of fertility to engineer the fear and envy which motivated Joseph’s descent to Egypt. Now Pharaoh tries to usurp God’s role, not only claiming God’s chosen people as his slaves, but also trying to regulate and reduce their numbers. In one sense, the entire Exodus story becomes a farcical test of wills. On one side we have Pharaoh who schemes to undo God’s promises of fertility – I will bestow My blessing upon you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands on the seashore (Gen. 22:17) – and asks Who is the Lord that I should heed Him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, nor will I let Israel go (Ex. 5:2). Pitted against Pharaoh is God, pushing all the

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buttons of history, and Who will now step beyond His relatively unobtrusive control of human fertility and will harden Pharaoh’s heart, that I may multiply My signs and marvels in the land of Egypt . . . so that the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I stretch out My hand over Egypt and bring out the Israelites from their midst (Ex. 7:3–5). Let us return to Pharaoh’s plans. Does robbing the Israelites of temporality efectively decrease their numbers? Scripture gives us a clear answer, and that answer is “no.” To the contrary, Ex. 1:12 tells us, The more they were oppressed, the more they increased and spread out, so that [the Egyptians] came to dread the Israelites. Instead of solving the problem of burgeoning Israelite demographics, parekh work only makes it worse. Interestingly, scripture does relate another episode in which forcing work upon the Israelites is a successful tactic for achieving Pharaoh’s noneconomic ends. I am referring to Pharaoh’s initial reaction to Moses’ request that the people be sent out of Egypt. It all begins with God’s call to Moses at the burning bush. Moses is told to announce to the Israelite elders that their redemption is nigh and to ask Pharaoh to allow the Israelites to journey three days into the wilderness to worship their God. In His address to Moses, God emphasizes His own connection to temporality. God calls himself eheyeh asher eheyeh – I shall be what I shall be19 (Ex. 3:14) – thus identifying himself with the very notion of projection into an open future. Moses is instructed to plunge the Israelites back into historical time. He must give them hope for a better life in a new land; he must force them to break through the inchoate eternal present and to think constructively about their future. Armed with miraculous signs supplied by God and accompanied by his brother Aaron, Moses meets with the Israelite elders to announce their coming redemption. The meeting is a complete success; he displays the signs given him by God and the people accept his message of hope. As scripture states: And the people believed, and they heard that the Lord had taken notice of the Israelites and that He saw their plight; they bowed and prostrated themselves (Ex. 4:31). Next, Moses and Aaron20 are granted an audience with Pharaoh, who is unimpressed by their miracles, unrufed by their threats and unwilling to let the Israelites leave Egypt to serve their God. Instead, he scolds them: Moses and Aaron, why do you distract the people from their tasks? Get to your labors! (Ex. 5:4). Pharaoh moves quickly to dash the new hope instilled by Moses into the Israelites. Previously the Israelites had been supplied with the straw needed for making bricks; now Pharaoh instructs the taskmasters and foremen that the Israelites must collect the straw by themselves but not reduce their pace of brickmaking. He explains: let heavier work be laid upon the men, let them keep at it and not pay attention to deceitful promises (Ex. 5:9). Pharaoh’s plan is a complete success. The next time Moses addresses the Israelites, conveying to them God’s promise of miraculous liberation, of their being chosen as God’s own people, and of their escape to the land promised to

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the patriarchs, we are simply told that they would not listen to Moses, their spirits crushed by cruel bondage (Ex. 6:9). So: we have two episodes in which Pharaoh inflicts a regime of hard labor on the Israelites in order to achieve non-economic policy goals. The first time he uses avodat parekh as a tool of demographic control to keep down the Israelite population – and fails. The second time he uses hard work to rid the Israelites of their faith in redemption – and succeeds. Perhaps some deeper point can be drawn from a comparison of these two cases. What is the relevant diference between them? Consider the terminology used by the Book of Exodus to describe the growth of the Israelite population in Egypt: The Israelites were fertile and prolific; they multiplied and increased very greatly, so that the land was filled with them. (Ex. 1:7) Now compare this verse with the blessing of fecundity received by the first man and woman on the sixth day of creation: God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fertile and multiply, fill the earth and master it, and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on the earth. (Gen. 1:28) Both descriptions of fecundity speak of being fertile and multiplying (peru u’revu) but Exodus adds to this that the Israelites were prolific (vayishretzu) and increased very greatly (vaya’atzmu bime’od me’od). It is not difcult to understand why the second expression, vaya’amtzu bime’od me’od was added. The term otzma does not merely refer to demographic “increase” in general; more particularly, it refers to the military power of a large nation. Occasionally, it is used to refer to power without any explicit connection to numbers, as when Moses warns the Israelites not to say, My own power and the otzem [might] of my own hand have won this wealth for me (Deut. 8:17), or when Isaiah (40:29) promises that God will increase the otzma of those without strength. Thus, it makes perfect contextual sense for the biblical narrator to tell us of the Israelites in Egypt vaya’atzmu. After all, we are about to hear how Pharaoh introduced his policy of enslavement in response to the threat of growing Israelite power, as he explained to his people, Look, the Israelite people are too numerous and powerful [atzum] for us (Ex. 1:9). The first term added to the description of Israelite fecundity is more relevant to my argument. Vayishretzu is a term with a very particular connotation of its own. In the story of the creation, humans are not blessed with a cognate of vayishretzu, but God does use it in connection with the creatures of the sea (Gen. 1:20). More generally, the cognate noun of vayishretzu, namely sheretz, is used widely in scripture to denote “swarming animals”

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(e.g., Lev. 11:41). Such creatures reproduce in an especially uncontrolled and animalistic fashion, producing innumerable swarms of ofspring. The verb vesharatz is used to describe how the Nile swarmed with the frogs which plagued Egypt (Ex. 7:28). There is something ofensive about this swarming fecundity; such creatures are not categorized as beasts or birds (Gen. 7:21) and the Torah’s dietary laws forbid consumption of insects and other vermin designated as sheratzim (Lev. 11: 23). This prohibition is not a mere formality; it expresses a distinct attitude of disgust toward such lowly creatures: All the things that swarm upon the earth are an abomination; they shall not be eaten. You shall not eat, among all things that swarm upon the earth, anything that crawls on its belly, or anything that walks on fours, or anything that has many legs; for they are an abomination. You shall not draw abomination upon yourselves through anything that swarms; you shall not make yourselves unclean therewith and thus become unclean. For I the Lord am your God: you shall sanctify yourselves and be holy, for I am holy. You shall not make yourselves unclean through any swarming thing that moves upon the earth. For I the Lord am He who brought you up from the land of Egypt to be your God: you shall be holy, for I am holy. (Lev. 11:41–5)

All of this points to a particular connotation implied by the use of the term vayishretzu in describing the growth of the Israelite human population. It is a word which is otherwise associated with swarms of what we would call relatively primitive and perhaps “yucky” animals. The narrator seems to be signaling to us that there was something animalistic about the growth of the Israelite population. Another passage appears to support this idea. When the midwives have to explain to Pharaoh why they failed to execute his order to kill the newborn male Israelites, they tell him that the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; they are vigorous [Hebrew: hayyot]. Before the midwife can come to them they have already given birth (Ex. 1:19). The JPS translation renders the word hayyot as vigorous but anyone acquainted with biblical Hebrew know that hayyot usually denotes undomesticated beasts. The midwives’ alibi exploits Pharaoh’s bigoted acceptance of the ever-popular belief that ethnic minorities are animal-like and not quite human; the Israelite mothers give birth quickly and without assistance, like the beasts of the field. Israelite reproduction is untethered from the usual human cultural framework. The innumerable shratzim of the sea have no use for the learned obstetric interventions of midwives, and neither do the Israelite women whose fecundity is described with the term vayishretzu.

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What is the upshot of all this? As I mentioned earlier, we find Pharaoh twice using enforced hard labor of the Israelites (in other words, using disruption of their temporal consciousness and autonomy) as a tool for achieving policy goals. While this was an efective way to crush Israelite hopes for redemption, it was a complete failure as a strategy of demographic control. Now it is time to recall the quote from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: “A dog believes his master is at the door. But can he also believe his master will come the day after to-morrow?” Scripture concurs with Wittgenstein on the question of whether temporal consciousness is a uniquely human afair. Given Wittgenstein’s claim, we might generalize that hope for anything beyond the immediate present is dependent upon specifically human kinds of temporal representations; the ability to have faith in a process that will eventually culminate in redemption requires that the hopeful agents possess a uniquely human ability to represent the future. Now we can explain the variable success of Pharaoh’s policies. By forcing the Israelites to perform avodat parekh, Pharaoh efectively robs their lives of their human temporal dimension. However, biological reproduction – especially when described in animalistic terms and untethered from the cultural practices of midwifery – is not a peculiarly human afair. The creatures of the sea do not devise plans to be carried out, but that does not keep them from increasing their numbers. Similarly, dehumanizing the Israelites by robbing them of temporality is useless as a method of population control. The contemporary phenomenon of teen-aged mothers and fathers makes it clear that human reproduction does not require much thought for the future. Quashing the nascent Israelite faith in redemption is a quite diferent matter. Such faith is a kind of hope for the future, a uniquely human mindset involving uniquely human temporal representations. Here, the use of pointless forced labor meant to disrupt temporal consciousness is completely successful. Pharaoh succeeds in turning the people against Moses and his promises of redemption. Pharaoh’s success in disrupting Israelite psychology goes some way toward solving the ancient philosophical puzzle of God’s repeatedly “hardening” Pharaoh’s heart toward the demand to release the Israelites, allowing God to bring more and more plagues down upon his head and the heads of his people. How could it be fair for God to interfere with Pharaoh’s agency, artificially strengthening his obstinacy and then punishing him for not acquiescing to the liberation of the Israelites? Given Pharaoh’s own manipulation of the Israelites’ psyches, the hardening of his heart can be seen as a matter of poetic justice, of what the rabbis called mida keneged mida, “measure for measure.” Pharaoh acted to efectually harden the Israelites’ hearts from believing in Moses’ message of redemption, and in response God interferes with Pharaoh’s own psyche, hardening his heart and closing his mind to the growing disaster resulting from his refusal to release the Israelites.21

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Notes 1 My literal translation brings out God’s seeming admission of lack of control over the Israelites’ future behavior. 2 More radically, one might suggest that at least some voices in the Hebrew Scriptures militate against the notion of history reaching an ultimate salvatory conclusion. Perhaps the Hebrew Biblical vision of history is closer to that of books 8–9 of Plato’s Republic: a cyclical and unavoidable process of decline from the ideal state toward tyranny. While the ideal state enjoys no guarantee of permanence, that does not rob it of value. Similarly, the ideal Israelite community living in its land may be subject to inevitable (and recurring?) lapses into idolatry and eventual exile, but this does not render those periods of piety and fidelity any less precious. In her recent book, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021), Dara Horn describes her encounter with Frank Kermode’s celebrated work of criticism, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). On pages 73–74, she writes: This idea of religion imposing coherence on the world sounded absolutely nothing like the religion I knew best. Kermode’s argument is based on the idea that Western religion is all about “endings.” As he puts it, “The Bible is a familiar model of history. It begins at the beginning with the words ‘In the beginning,’ and it ends with a vision of the end, with the words, ‘Even so, come, Lord Jesus” Needless to say, this is not how the Hebrew Bible ends. The Tanakh, as Jews call the Hebrew Bible, has plenty of apocalyptic visions, but its final pages in the rather plodding Book of Chronicles don’t exactly end with a bang. Even the Torah, the part of the Hebrew Bible that Jews publicly chant aloud from start to finish every year and then begin reading again, doesn’t have much finality to it, other than the expected death of Moses. Instead, the Torah ends with a clifhanger, stopping just before the Israelites’ long-awaited arrival in the Promised Land. The characters never even make it home. It slowly dawned on me that Kermode’s idea of religion giving us an “ending” isn’t universal at all. It’s Christian. 3 In case younger readers may not be acquainted with those terrible events: “The Khmer Rouge claimed that they were creating ‘Year Zero’ through their extreme reconstruction methods. They believed that Cambodia (which was called Kampuchea from 1975–79) should be returned to an alleged ‘golden age’ when the land was cultivated by peasants and the country would be ruled for and by the poorest amongst society . . . the Khmer Rouge broke peoples’ ties to religion and family. All political and civil rights were abolished. Formal education ceased and from January 1977, all children from the age of eight were separated from their parents and placed in labour camps, which taught them that the state was their ‘true’ parents.. . . Factories, hospitals, schools and universities were shut down. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers and qualified professionals in all fields were thought to be a threat to the new regime. Religion of all kinds was banned as were music and radios. Money was abolished and all aspects of life were subject to regulation. People were not allowed to choose their own marriage partners. They could not leave their given place of work or even select the clothes that they would wear.” Holocaust Memorial Day website www.hmd.org.uk/learn-about-the-holocaustand-genocides/cambodia/khmer-rouge-ideology/. 4 I borrowed this handy definition from the online Open Education Sociology Dictionary https://sociologydictionary.org/agency/. Naturally, such a foundational concept in the social sciences and philosophy has given rise to many conflicting

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theories and definitions, see Luca Ferrero (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Agency (London: Routledge, 2022). Holly Andersen, “The Representation of Time in Agency,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Time, ed. Heather Dyke and Adrian Bardon (Malden, MA: Wily, 2013), 470–85. Anderson, “Representation,” 472. Michael Bratman, Structures of Agency: Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21. A philosophical critique of this assumption can be found in David DeGrazia, Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 167–71. For a review of research on temporal consciousness among non-human animals, see Jonathan Redshaw and Adam Bulley, “Future-Thinking in Animals: Capacities and Limits,” in The Psychology of Thinking about the Future, ed. Gabriele Oettingen et al. (New York: Guilford Press, 2018), 31–5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 174 = Part II:1. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 15. Berel Dov Lerner, “Redemption: Time and Space,” The Jewish Bible Quarterly 21, no. 3 (July 1993): 178–82. Of course, it would be impossible in practice to completely rob a living person of all control over time and space for very long. The Israelites in Egypt must have found time to pursue a bit of animal husbandry (Ex. 9:4) and Israelite families could find refuge in their own homes from the plague killing the firstborn (Ex. 12:13). However, scripture’s rhetoric is certainly underlining the theme of loss of time and space. I borrow the term from Emile Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem (New York: Schocken Books, 1978). I am reminded of the line from Janis Joplin’s song, Ball and Chain Break Down: “as we discovered on the train, tomorrow never happens, man. It’s all the same day, man.” See www.allthelyrics.com/lyrics/janis_joplin/ball_and_chain_break_ down-lyrics-503741.html. Deuteronomy 15:12 reduces the maximum years of bondage to six: If a fellow Hebrew, man or woman, is sold to you, he shall serve you six years, and in the seventh year you shall set him free. If your kinsman is in straits and has to sell part of his holding.. . . If he lacks sufficient means to recover it, what he sold shall remain with the purchaser until the jubilee; in the jubilee year it shall be released, and he shall return to his holding (Lev. 25:25,28). Hilkhot Avadim 1:6. The degradation of befarekh work finds powerful expression in Dostoevsky’ House of the Dead: The idea has occurred to me that if one wanted to crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character. Though the hard labour now enforced is uninteresting and wearisome for the prisoner, yet in itself as work it is rational; the convict makes bricks, digs, does plastering, building; there is sense and meaning in such work. The convict worker sometimes even grows keen over it, tries to work more skillfully, faster, better. But if he had to pour water from one vessel into another and back, over

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See: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead and Poor Folk, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004), 26. 19 The usual English translation, I am that I am, is quite mysterious to anyone acquainted with the Hebrew language, since eheyeh is clearly the verb of being in the first-person future. 20 Here again we find an instance of human unwillingness to take part in a divine plan. When originally speaking with Moses, God tells him to assemble the Israelite elders and tell them of the coming redemption, and says, they will listen to you; then you shall go with the elders of Israel to the king of Egypt and you shall say to him, ‘The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, manifested Himself to us. Now therefore, let us go a distance of three days into the wilderness to sacrifice to the Lord our God’ (Ex. 3:18). However, the narrative of Moses’ first encounter with Pharaoh (Ex. 5:1–5) gives no indication that the Israelite elders were present. Rashi ad loc ofers a midrashic description of how the elders first followed Moses and Aaron, but gradually dropped away one by one so that none was left with Moses and Aaron by the time they reached Pharaoh. The elders were later punished by this when they were not allowed to accompany Moses when he ascended Mount Sinai (Ex. 24:2). 21 See Berel Dov Lerner, “Pharaoh and the Freedom to Will the Good,” Le’ela (December 1999): 11–13.

References Anderson, Holly. “The Representation of Time in Agency.” In A Companion to the Philosophy of Time, edited by Heather Dyke and Adrian Bardon, 470–85. Malden, MA: Wiley, 2013. Bell, Kenton (ed.). “Agency.” In Open Education Sociology Dictionary. https://sociologydictionary.org/agency/ Bratman, Michael. Structures of Agency: Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. DeGrazia, David. Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The House of the Dead and Poor Folk. Translated by Constance Garnett. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Fackenheim, Emile. The Jewish Return into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem. New York: Schocken Books, 1978. Ferrero, Luca (ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Agency. London: Routledge, 2022. Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. “Khmer Rouge Ideology.” www.hmd.org.uk/ learn-about-the-holocaust-and-genocides/cambodia/khmer-rouge-ideology/ Horn, Dara. People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021. Joplin, Janis. Ball and Chain Break Down, (no date). www.allthelyrics.com/lyrics/ janis_joplin/ball_and_chain_break_down-lyrics-503741.html

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Lerner, Berel Dov. “Redemption: Time and Space.” The Jewish Bible Quarterly 21, no. 3 (July 1993): 178–82. Lerner, Berel Dov. “Pharaoh and the Freedom to Will the Good.” Le’ela (December 1999): 11–13. Redshaw, Jonathan and Adam Bulley. “Future-Thinking in Animals: Capacities and Limits.” In The Psychology of Thinking About the Future, edited by Gabriele Oettingen et al., 31–51. New York: Guilford Press, 2018. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 2nd Edition. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958.

10 The Paschal Sacrifice and the Sabbath Restore Israelite Temporality and Agency

The early life of Moses, God’s agent of redemption, foreshadows the return of Israelite temporality. When Moses was born into the depths of Israelite enslavement, his mother saw how beautiful he was, she hid him for three months (Ex. 2:2); this rare act of Israelite resistance to genocide is described in temporal terms. The biblical narrator implies that Moses’ infantile presence has ignited a flicker of time consciousness in the otherwise temporally amorphous narrative. In some ways, the connection between redemption and temporality is readily apparent. Moses’ negotiations with Pharaoh repeatedly involve temporal elements. Moses’ persistent demand is that Pharaoh allow the Israelites to go a distance of three days into the wilderness to sacrifice to the Lord our God (Ex. 3:18).1 Time is referenced repeatedly in the story of the Ten Plagues. The disease of cattle will strike as scheduled: The Lord has fixed the time: tomorrow the Lord will do this thing in the land (Ex. 9:5). Later, Pharaoh is informed: This time tomorrow I will rain down a very heavy hail, such as has not been in Egypt from the day it was founded until now (Ex. 9:18). The final and most terrible plague is also the most precisely timed: Towards midnight I will go forth among the Egyptians, and every first-born in the land of Egypt shall die (Ex. 11:4–5). God invites the Israelites to take up their role in the Exodus by reestablishing their agency and their relationship to calendar time. He tells Moses to prepare the Israelites for redemption by presenting them with His first commandment – the paschal sacrifice – which will be ofered in synchrony with God’s own carefully scheduled attack on the Egyptian first-born. After centuries of timelessness and confusion, God openly shares the timetable of providence with the Israelites, who will make it their own. Moses is to begin his address to them with the famous words hahodesh hazeh lakhem – this month will be the beginning of months for you; it will be for you the first of the months of the year (Ex. 12:2). The very first stage of the redemption is marked by the establishment of the Israelite calendar, a concrete expression of the return of temporal autonomy and consciousness. All of the Torah’s later events are dated in terms of how much time had passed since that first DOI: 10.4324/9781003414346-11

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month. Later, the royal chronologies are synchronized with the Exodus calendar when Solomon begins to build his Temple. In 1 Kings 6:1, we read: In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Israelites left the land of Egypt, in the month of Ziv – that is, the second month – in the fourth year of his reign over Israel, Solomon began to build the House of the Lord. Thus, the Exodus event becomes the foundation for the Israelite sense of historical time. With temporality comes agency. In that same speech in which Moses announces the founding of the Israelite calendar, he also supplies the Israelites with a set of instructions unlike any they had received during their enslavement: On the tenth of this month each of them shall take a lamb to a family, a lamb to a household.. . . You shall keep watch over it until the fourteenth day of this month; and all the assembled congregation of the Israelites shall slaughter it at twilight. (Ex. 12:3, 6) God’s instructions reintroduce the temporal dimension to Israelite life; they require the Israelites to plan for future events. First, they must wait until the 10th of the month to choose a lamb and then wait until the 14th to slaughter it. God has deliberately begun to restore their ability to use temporal representations and to re-establish their temporal autonomy; after all, the month is for them the first month of the year. The re-establishment of temporality will require further cultivation. Exodus 16 tells us how soon after leaving Egypt the people undertake an additional exercise in time-consciousness. Manna comes down from heaven to feed the people, but the supply of God’s bounty comes with a twist which will require each of them to pay attention to the organization of days into weeks. First, they are told not to save manna from one day to the next; yet some do so only to discover that it became infested with maggots and stank (Ex. 16:20). Later, they are told on the sixth day to collect a double portion which will last them through the seventh, and that they should not go out to collect manna on the seventh day. On the seventh day, they discovered that the extra manna did not tum foul, and there were no maggots in it (Ex. 16:24). Still, some of the people went out on the seventh day to gather, but they found nothing (Ex. 16:27). By manipulating the availability of food – a basic human need – God ingrains in them the uniquely Israelite institution of the Sabbath day. Consider the Sabbath. Some passages the Torah depicts the seven day week as reflective of nature in cosmogenic terms, as reenacting the six days of creation and God’s cessation from work on the seventh. However, empirically observable nature ofers no hints of a primordial week of Creation and unlike

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lunar months and solar years, the week is not marked out by those heavenly bodies created to serve as signs for the set times-the days and the years (Gen. 1:14). Instead, the weekly schedule must be revealed by God and reflected in the supernatural phenomenon of the manna, which establishes a scheme of learning-by-doing on a massive scale. In the fashion of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s great work on education, Emile, the Israelites learn by dealing with the (super)natural consequences of their actions. Manna appears six days a week; collected on the first five days, it rots by the next morning but on the sixth, it lasts into the seventh, the day a fresh supply does not arrive. Whoever fails to notice this pattern and does not collect a double portion on the sixth day will sufer on the seventh. Manna will continue to appear on schedule until the Israelites’ entrance into Canaan (Josh. 5:12) and train them to relate to time in terms of weeks culminating in Sabbaths. God’s imposition of temporality upon the Israelites is thoroughly unlike the impositions of Pharaoh’s relentless demands for labor. God’s commands are intended to restore temporal autonomy rather than destroy it. God insists that the Israelites enjoy a day of rest, a day in which no one, not the slave’s master, nor the boss of the hired worker, nor even the necessities imposed by nature itself, will tell them what to do. God is a peculiar slave owner whose principal temporal demand is that those who serve him devote time to leisure. Appropriately, Isaiah describes the gentiles who choose to be God’s servants as, all who keep the Sabbath from profaning it and who hold fast to My covenant (Is. 56:6). The reestablishment of Israelite temporality also reflects the return to an active and more informed partnership with God. Previously duped into losing control of their time to Egyptian enslavement by God’s behind-the-scenes manipulations, they now enjoy a day of rest explicitly emulating that of the Creator God: The Israelite people shall keep the sabbath, observing the sabbath throughout the ages as a covenant for all time: it shall be a sign for all time between Me and the people of Israel. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day He ceased from work and was refreshed. (Ex. 31:16–17) It is not only the time of personal planning which has been lost and needs to be restored; as I have explained earlier, Israel’s consciousness of historical time had also been destroyed by slavery to the Egyptians. Now, with the redemption, the amorphous many days of enslavement are counted and thus made finite and comprehensible. At the moment of the Exodus, the Torah states: The length of time that the Israelites lived in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years; at the end of the four hundred and thirtieth year, to the very day, all the Lord’s hosts departed from the Land of Egypt. (Ex. 12:40)

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The seemingly endless age of persecution has been neatly contained in a single precise number: four hundred and thirty years. Radically ahistorical enslavement has been transformed into a well-defined period in Israelite history, measured precisely to the very day. Quitting Egypt and regaining temporality, the enslaved descendants of Jacob have become transformed into the Lord’s hosts. Note 1 Also Ex. 5:3; 8:23. I would suggest that Moses made this relatively minor demand instead of asking that the Israelites be freed in order to underline the religious significance of Pharaoh’s refusal. He wasn’t being directly asked to lose the Israelites’ forced labor, rather he was keeping them from worshipping God.

Reference Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Emile, or On Education. Translated by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979.

11 The Battle at Refidim and How the Miraculous Foundations of Moses’ Prophetic Authority Invited Idolatry and Required His Replacement by Joshua

The Authority of Moses Earlier in this book, I disparaged Joseph as the harbinger of an age of confusion that ended in the dehumanizing enslavement of the Israelites. God does not grant Joseph straightforward prophetic visions of the kind experienced by his ancestors; instead, he experiences dreams of uncertain origin and that lack explicit meaning. The age of confusion should be understood as constituting an intermediary stage of decline within a larger process of broader ascent from the patriarchal age to the founding of the Israelite nation as a self-consciously covenantal political community. The hero of this new age is, of course, Moses. Moses’ future role in the restoration of Israelite agency and temporality is foreshadowed in the story of his birth. As I mentioned earlier, when Moses’ mother Try to evade Pharaoh’s decree, “Every boy that is born you shall throw into the Nile, but let every girl live” (Ex. 1:22), she hides him for three months (Ex. 2:2), a first reference to units of time following Israel’s loss of temporality in Egypt. Later, when Pharaoh’s daughter discovers the infant Moses floating in a basket amid the river reeds, she adopts him and makes his biological mother a surprising ofer: “Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will pay your wages” (Ex. 2:9). Pharoah’s daughter is ofering to pay wages to an Israelite woman! This is another harbinger of the coming liberation. Upon adulthood, Moses reveals he will be an apt choice to be a future liberator by striking down an Egyptian who was beating an Israelite (Ex. 2:12) and by defending Reuel’s daughters from the shepherds who had driven them away from the local well (Ex. 2:17). Under Moses, the epistemic situation improves significantly. While the Patriarchs had a general acquaintance with God’s plan for history, and even the leaders of the intermediary period were mostly in the dark concerning the workings of providence, Moses ushers in a new age in which divine intention becomes a matter of public knowledge. From the start, all the Israelites are in on the Exodus plan. At his first encounter with the Divinity, Moses is already instructed to tell the Israelite elders that God is going to remove them from Egypt and bring them to the land of Canaan: DOI: 10.4324/9781003414346-12

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Go and assemble the elders of Israel and say to them: the Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, has appeared to me and said, “I have taken note of you and of what is being done to you in Egypt, and I have declared: I will take you out of the misery of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, to a land flowing with milk and honey.” (Ex. 3:16–17) I have mentioned earlier that Moses is the one who reintroduces knowledge of God as Hashem (the Tetragrammaton) – the name indicating God as active in history – following that name’s absence in the post-Patriarchal age. As for the declining prophetic value of dreams, that epistemic parameter becomes completely irrelevant in the Mosaic era since, after all, God communicates with Moses directly, without need for prophetic dreams: When a prophet of the Lord arises among you, I make Myself known to him in a vision, I speak with him in a dream. Not so with My servant Moses; he is trusted throughout My household. With him I speak mouth to mouth, plainly and not in riddles, and he beholds the likeness of the Lord. (Num. 12:6–8) Moses has more than recovered the level of religious knowledge achieved by the Patriarchs. His intimate knowledge of God’s plans for Israel and his unprecedented access to interactive prophetic communication allow him to even proactively negotiate successfully with God as the representative of his people. When the Israelites sin by worshipping the Golden Calf, God tells Moses he will destroy them and have Moses found a greater nation (Deut. 9:14). Moses responds by reminding God of His relationship with the Patriarchs and His plan to reveal Himself in human history through His special care for the Israelite nation: I prayed to the Lord and said, “0 Lord God, do not annihilate Your very own people, whom You redeemed in Your majesty and whom You freed from Egypt with a mighty hand. Give thought to Your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and pay no heed to the stubbornness of this people, its wickedness, and its sinfulness. Else the country from which You freed us will say, ‘It was because the Lord was powerless to bring them into the land that He had promised them, and because He rejected them, that He brought them out to have them die in the wilderness.’ Yet they are Your very own people, whom You freed with Your great might and Your outstretched arm.” (Deut. 9:26–9) The account of this fateful moment in the Book of Exodus also has Moses explicitly reminding God of His promises to the Patriarchs: Remember Your

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servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, how You swore to them by Your Self and said to them: I will make your ofspring as numerous as the stars (Ex. 32:13). A similar predicament arises when the men sent to spy out the Land of Canaan return with a report which convinces the Israelites that its conquest is impossible and that they must return to Egypt. God tells Moses I will strike them with pestilence and disown them, and I will make of you a nation far more numerous than they! (Num. 14:12). Moses again reminds God that He has yoked His reputation among humans to the accomplishment of His covenantal promise: But Moses said to the Lord, “When the Egyptians, from whose midst You brought up this people in Your might, hear the news, they will tell it to the inhabitants of that land. Now they have heard that You, 0 Lord, are in the midst of this people; that You, 0 Lord, appear in plain sight when Your cloud rests over them and when You go before them in a pillar of cloud by day and in a pillar of fire by night. If then You slay this people to a man, the nations who have heard Your fame will say, ‘It must be because the Lord was powerless to bring that people into the land He had promised them on oath that He slaughtered them in the wilderness.’” (Num. 14:13–16) Moses’ preeminence as a prophet is not accidental to his mission. He serves as God’s human agent in the Exodus from Egypt during which the Israelites form a free nation whose members are capable of entering a covenant with God. He also is the prophet who brings the terms of the covenant before the Israelites to solicit their consent and to set out the laws of the Torah which they are to observe under that covenant. Each of these roles demands an exceptionally high level of prophetic communication with God. As God’s agent in the Exodus and later leading the Israelites through the wilderness, Moses must have access to prophecy at any time to deal with emerging situations. No other biblical figure required that kind of connection to the divine; not the Patriarchs proceeding Moses, who only required direct divine guidance at great turning points in their lives, and not the prophets who came after Moses and who left the day-to-day decisions of administering Israelite life to human leaders who occasionally consulted them as oracles. The rationale for the distinction between patriarch and lawgiver is clear: family members may follow the commands of their patriarch, but only nations, with their enduring judicial institutions, can truly be governed by laws. A competent patriarch must be capable of commanding his own family’s obedience in a direct way during his lifetime. Contrastingly, the words of a lawgiver must be worthy of enforcement for an entire nation throughout the generations. If the Law being given is a divine law formulating an everlasting covenant, then the prophetic authority of its human presenter must exceed that of any possible future rival. Later prophets merely implore people to

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follow the Law of Moses but are not lawgivers themselves. What is the sign and foundation of Moses status as the ultimate prophet? The final verse of the Torah plainly implies that Moses’ authority as a prophet in Israel was built upon his unmatched role in the performance of miracles: Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses-whom the Lord singled out, face to face, for the various signs and portents that the Lord sent him to display in the land of Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his courtiers and his whole country, and for all the great might and awesome power that Moses displayed before all Israel. (Deut. 34:10–12) Ironically, his intense and active personal partnership with God in shaping history grants Moses the unique authority of a lawgiver also creates unique dangers and exacts unique costs. In the remainder of this chapter, I will investigate those dangers and costs not only as depicted in scripture, but also through the lens of post-biblical Jewish literature. Questions on the Mishnah The Mishnah is the earliest canonical compilation of Judaism’s Oral Law, meaning the interpretations and additions to the Written Law, the biblical Pentateuch. The Mishnah consists of six main subdivisions or “orders,” each of which contains several tractates, which are further divided into chapters. The chapters themselves are composed of a sequence of short, relatively independent paragraphs, each of which is referred to as a mishnah. Most of the Mishnah consists of laconically formulated rulings dealing with ritual, civil and criminal matters. It is therefore somewhat surprising to discover, in the third chapter of the tractate Rosh Hashana, a purely exegetical and theological statement: Could it be that Moses’ hands make war or break war? Rather [the verse’s intention is] to tell you that when Israel gazed upwards and subjugated their hearts to their Father in Heaven they would prevail, and if not they would fall. (Mishnah Rosh HaShanah 3:8) A bit of background will be necessary to make the Mishnah’s meaning clear. It refers to an incident recounted in the seventeenth chapter of the book of Exodus. Soon after leaving Egypt and crossing the Red Sea, the Israelites reach Refidim and are attacked for the first time by their eternal nemesis, Amalek. The Torah tells us that in response to the attack, Moses sends Joshua forth to assemble an army to oppose the enemy. Meanwhile, Moses ascends a hill overlooking the scene of battle, taking with him Aaron, Hur and the rod of God, which he used in the performance of previous miracles. And it came to

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pass, the Torah relates, when Moses held up his hands, that Israel prevailed: and when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed (Ex. 17: 11). Eventually, Moses becomes incapable of keeping his hands up by himself, so he sits on a rock and lets Aaron and Hur support his arms. With their help, Moses is able to hold up his hands until sunset and the completion of Israel’s victory over the Amalekites. The Mishnah wants us to know Moses himself was not directly responsible for the battle’s outcome. Rather, victory was dependent upon the reawakening of faith in the people who were inspired by his gesture. The Mishnah’s comment on this story raises some serious questions: Many great miracles are attributed to Moses, including several of the plagues in Egypt, the splitting of the Red Sea and bringing forth water from the rock; why focus on the defeat of Amalek? How did the Israelites commitment to God efect their victory? What purpose is served by Moses’ miracle-working? Finally, how do these issues bear upon Moses’ power and authority as a leader and prophet? Miracles Establish Moses’ Authority As I have mentioned, one of the central purposes served by Moses’ performance of miracles was the establishment of his authority as a prophet of God and as the divinely chosen leader of Israel. In his first encounter with God at the burning bush at Horeb, Moses is already concerned that the elders of Israel will question the authenticity of his revelation and asks, What if they do not believe me and do not listen to me, but say: The Lord did not appear to you? (Ex. 4:1). God calms Moses’ worry by arming him with two convincing miracles, first, the metamorphoses of his staf into a snake, and second, the instant afiction of Moses’ hand with disfiguring leprosy and its equally sudden cure. God assures Moses, And if they do not believe you or pay heed to the first sign, they will believe the second (Ex. 4: 8). If, never the less, neither miracle should prove convincing, God says that Moses shall take some water from the Nile and pour it upon the dry ground; and the water that you have taken from the Nile will turn to blood on the dry ground (Ex. 4: 9). Miracles continue to boost the Israelites’ faith in Moses’ mission throughout the redemptive process. After witnessing the splitting of the Red Sea and the drowning of Egypt’s charioteers, when Israel saw the wondrous power which the Lord had wielded against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord: they had faith in the Lord, and in His servant Moses (Ex. 14: 31). I have already mentioned the verses eulogizing Moses, which most clearly indicate the importance of his miracle working for his prophetic authority: Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord singled out, face to face, for the various signs and portents that the Lord sent him to display in the land of Egypt, against Pharaoh and

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all his courtiers and his whole country, and for all the great might and awesome power that Moses displayed before all Israel. (Deut. 34: 10–12) These verses are of paramount theological importance for Judaism. If Moses can be proven preeminent among prophets, then the content of his prophecies (the Torah) will outrank any possible future revelation. No prophet will ever have the authority to dismiss or contradict Moses’ teachings. Read this way, the verses seem to imply that Moses’ unequalled role as a miracleworker underwrites the eternal validity of Torah and of Judaism itself as the religion of the Torah. Later we shall see that some Jewish thinkers, especially the great Moses Maimonides, balked at the notion that Judaism could be so directly dependent on the performance of miracles for its validation. In the meantime, a brief look at the early career of Joshua, Moses’ successor, will ofer a final line of evidence for the importance of miracles for the establishment of Moses’ leadership. The People Test Joshua Moses did not live to enter the Promised Land. The task of its conquest and settlement fell to his protege, Joshua. The first chapter of the Book of Joshua finds him soon after Moses’ death, being instructed by God to ready the people for the entry into Canaan. Joshua’s first order of business is to require the members of the tribes of Reuben, Gad and half of the members of Manasseh to make good on a promise they had made to Moses. Numbers 32 relates how these tribes1 ask Moses to be allowed to settle outside of Canaan proper in the lands already captured laying to the east of the Jordan river: The Reubenites and the Gadites owned cattle in very great numbers. Noting that the lands of Jazer and Gilead were a region suitable for cattle, the Gadites and the Reubenites came to Moses, Eleazar the priest, and the chieftains of the community, and said, “Ataroth, Dibon, Jazer, Nimrah, Heshbon, Elealeh, Sebam, Nebo, and Beon the land that the Lord has conquered for the community of Israel is cattle country, and your servants have cattle. It would be a favor to us,” they continued, “if this land were given to your servants as a holding; do not move us across the Jordan.” (Num. 32:1–5) Moses agrees to this on the condition that they join the other tribes in the war of conquest. They agree to Moses’ deal: We ourselves will cross over as shock-troops, at the instance of the Lord, into the land of Canaan; and we shall keep our hereditary holding across the Jordan (Num. 32:32). Now that Israel is about to enter Canaan, Joshua needs to be sure that he can depend on the tribes’ military contribution. The two and a half tribes agree to keep

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their end of the bargain, but also make it clear that their continued allegiance will depend on the continuing validation of Joshua’s prophetic and political credentials: They answered Joshua, “We will do everything you have commanded us and we will go wherever you send us. We will obey you just as we obeyed Moses; let but the Lord your God be with you as He was with Moses!” (Josh. 1: 16–17) It would seem that Joshua is in for some trouble. The people require that he prove to be no less close to God than was his predecessor, but Deuteronomy has stated that no other prophet will enjoy Moses’ miracle-working abilities and intimate relationship with God. Indeed, their demand is a bit unfair. After all, Joshua is merely carrying out a program whose details had already been announced in some detail by Moses himself. In any case, something must be done to secure Joshua’s standing, and once again the testimony of a miracle serves this purpose. Eventually, God speaks to Joshua reassuringly, This day, for the first time, I will exalt you in the sight of all Israel, so that they shall know that I will be with you as I was with Moses (Josh. 3:7). If Israel came to believe in Moses after crossing the Red Sea on the dry land of the sea bed, Joshua’s authority is confirmed by Israel crossing the dry river bed of the Jordan, whose flow is miraculously cut of for their convenience. The significance of the event is clearly underlined by scripture, On that day the Lord exalted Joshua in the sight of all Israel, so that they revered him all his days as they had revered Moses (Josh. 4:14). The point of the story seems to be that similarly impressive miracles produce similarly efective authority. Miracles Invite Idolatry If Moses’ miracle-working is crucial for the establishment of his authority, and by implication, the authority of the Torah itself, why is the Mishnah wary of attributing to him yet another miracle, that is, the victory over Amalek? The beginning of an answer may be found in the very next statement of the Mishnah itself, which reads in its entirety as follows: Could it be that Moses’ hands make war or break war? Rather [the verse’s intention is] to tell you that when Israel gazed upwards and subjugated their hearts to their Father in Heaven they would prevail, and if not they would fall. Similarly, you say, Make a seraph figure and mount it on a standard. And if anyone who is bitten looks at it, he shall recover (Num. 21: 8). Could it be that the snake kills or the snake revives? Rather, when Israel gaze upwards and subjugated their hearts to their Father in Heaven they would be healed, and if not, they would waste away.

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Once again, some background should help clarify the Mishnah’s message. Number 21: 4–9 tells of one of the incidents of mutiny, which occurred during Israel’s forty-year journey through the desert. The people complain that they are tired and hungry and sorry they had left Egypt. God sends out poisonous seraph snakes to punish them, killing many. When the people plead with Moses that he intercede for them, God instructs Moses to make a copper figure of a snake which efects a cure in any victim of snake bite who simply looks at it. Once again the Mishnah insists that supernatural powers not be attributed to some thing or someone which appears to perform miracles. However, the radical nature of the Mishnah’s point can only be understood if we take into account further historical developments. Centuries after its creation, the copper snake would be destroyed by Hezekiah, the great reforming king of Judah: He did what was pleasing to the Lord, just as his father David had done. He abolished the shrines and smashed the pillars and cut down the sacred post. He also broke into pieces the copper serpent which Moses had made, for until that time the Israelites had been ofering sacrifices to it; it was called Nehushtan. He trusted only in the Lord the God of Israel. (2 Kings 18: 3–5) From the Second Book of Kings, we learn that the earthly emblems or conduits of divine power, even when instituted by God, can eventually be mistaken as being themselves divine. The copper snake made by Moses under God’s direct instruction came to be worshipped as a god. From the perspective of a king who trusted only in the Lord God of Israel, it had to be destroyed as would any other idol. If Hezekiah robbed the copper snake of its physical presence, the Mishnah undermines Nehushtan’s magical presence. It is not the snake’s magic, but rather divine mercy inspired by human piety which effects the cure: “when Israel gaze upwards and subjugated their hearts to their Father in Heaven they would be healed.” The once powerful fetish is reduced to a mere signpost pointing heavenwards to God’s metaphorical abode. By comparing Moses with the copper snake, the Mishnah suggests that human conduits of divine power, such as great prophets and miracle-workers, can also become objects of idolatrous worship. The faithful might forget that the ultimate role of such religious leaders is merely to direct attention toward God himself. More radically, we might wonder whether Moses’ death might, under certain circumstances, become as necessary as Nehushtan’s destruction. That is a question that will be addressed later in this chapter. An Alternative Foundation for Moses’ Authority Moses, like Nehushtan, is reduced by the Mishnah into a mere pointer indicating God’s heavenly abode. However, we must recall that there remains a

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crucial diference between Moses and the copper snake. There is hardly any theological price to pay for demoting Nehushtan, a ritual object that was never granted an important place in the canonical rites of Israelite religion. Moses, however, is the greatest of prophets, and his Torah is deemed the ultimate revelation. His miracles are the guarantors of the Torah’s legitimacy. The inherent conflict between the need to establish Moses’ authority through his miracle working and the need to play down Moses’ supernatural powers in order to avoid his deification will not easily be resolved. One obvious solution to our dilemma is to propose a diferent foundation for Moses’ authority. Some writers have tried to do this by pointing to the unique conditions surrounding Moses’ crucial revelatory moment, the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. For instance, the great medieval legal scholar and philosopher Moses Maimonides wrote in his Code: The Jews did not believe in Moses, our teacher, because of the wonders that he performed.. . . All the wonders performed by Moses in the desert were not intended to serve as proof [of the legitimacy] of his prophecy, but rather were performed for a purpose. It was necessary to drown the Egyptians, so he split the sea and sank them in it. . . . What is the source of our belief in him? The [revelation] at Mount Sinai. Our eyes saw, and not a stranger’s. Our ears heard, and not another’s. There was fire, thunder, and lightning. He entered the thick clouds; the Voice spoke to him and we heard, “Moses, Moses, go tell them the following” . . . How is it known that the [revelation] at Mount Sinai alone is proof of the truth of Moses’ prophecy that leaves no shortcoming? [Ex. 19:9] states: Behold, I will come to you in a thick cloud, so that the people will hear Me speaking to you, [so that] they will believe in you forever.2 While the last verses of Deuteronomy may create the impression that Moses’ unmatched success as a miracle-worker establishes his prophetic credentials, Maimonides plays down the importance of miracles and instead insists on the self-evident validity of the prophetic experience itself. Someone who experiences prophecy will be sure of its authenticity. In the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides derives this principle from the story of the binding of Isaac. According to Genesis 22, God asked Abraham to take his beloved son Isaac to the land of Moriah and sacrifice him there as a burnt ofering. Abraham obeys, and Isaac’s slaughter is cancelled at the very last moment by the command of an angelic voice. While this story has generated a whole literature of theological reflection (including my own deflationary reading in an earlier chapter), one point at least is clear; Abraham had no doubt about the validity of his prophetic experience. In the words of Maimonides’ Guide: All that is seen by a prophet in a vision of prophecy is, in the opinion of the prophet, a certain truth, that the prophet has no doubts in any way concerning anything in it, and that in his opinion its status is the same

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as that of all existent things that are apprehended through the senses or through the intellect. A proof for this is the fact that [Abraham] hastened to slaughter, as he had been commanded, his son, his only son, whom he loved, even though this command came to him in a dream or in a vision. For if a dream of prophecy had been obscure for the prophets, or if they had doubts or incertitude concerning what they apprehended in a vision of prophecy, they would not have hastened to do that which is repugnant to nature, and [Abraham’s] soul would not have consented to accomplish an act of so great an importance if there had been a doubt about it.3 According to Maimonides, the experience of revelation is so powerful and convincing that no prophet could ever doubt its reality and validity. While people may always wonder if a miracle was performed through some sort of trick, the authenticity of personal revelation is undeniable. At Mount Sinai, the entire Israelite nation became privy to Moses’ prophetic experience; they shared with him a moment of revelation. The indelible impression made by this experience is foretold by God himself. Before the epiphany at Sinai, God says to Moses, I will come to you in a thick cloud, in order that the people may hear when I speak with you and trust you forever (Ex. 19: 9). For each member of the Israelite nation, Moses’ divine message possessed the unimpeachable authority of a personal encounter with God. Moses’ Death and Burial Given the Mishnah’s concern over the danger of Moses’ deification, it may be theologically convenient to be able to fall back upon Maimonides’ alternate theory of Mosaic prophetic authority. Despite the theological appeal of Maimonides’s suggestion, my earlier argument demonstrates that the majority of verses concerned with Moses’ authority plainly root it in his stature as a miracle-worker. Still, one might ask whether scripture itself shares the Mishnah’s anxieties. In other words, one might ask whether there is any indication that the Torah itself takes steps to combat the tendency toward making Moses into a false god. The classical Jewish bible commentaries of the Middle Ages discover such a precaution in the story of Moses’ death. His last moments are described in final chapter of Deuteronomy: Moses went up from the steppes of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the summit of Pisgah, opposite Jericho, and the Lord showed him the whole land: Gilead as far as Dan; all Naphtali; the land of Ephraim and Manasseh; the whole of the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea; the Negeb; and the Plain – the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees – as far as Zoar. And the Lord said to him; “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, ‘I will give it to your ofspring.’ I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you shall not cross there.”

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So Moses the servant of the Lord died there, in the land of Moab, at the command of the Lord. He buried him in the valley in the land of Moab, near Beth-peor; and no one knows his burial place to this day. (Deut. 34: 1–6) Here we have a remarkably poignant depiction of the aged leader who has brought his people to the verge of accomplishing their national aspirations. He may only look upon the Promised Land but is not allowed to enter it. Several commentators point to a strange detail in the biblical text. The burial places of most other biblical heroes become well-known shrines. Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah are all laid to rest in the Cave of Machpelah in the city of Hebron. Each succeeding generation has no difficulty finding the cave in order to bury its dead. While Rachel, the remaining matriarch, was buried elsewhere, her grave’s location was hardly a secret, for, over her grave Jacob set up a pillar; it is the pillar at Rachel’s grave to this day (Gen. 35: 20). Why then must the location of Moses’ grave remain a mystery, which no one knows . . . to this day (Deut. 34: 6)? Levi ben Gershom (known as Gersonides, d. 1344), one of the great Jewish philosophers and exegetes of the Middle Ages, confronts this difculty in his commentary on Deuteronomy, relating it directly to the concerns of our mishnah. In his commentary on Deuteronomy 34:6, Gersonides explains that God did not allow the location of Moses’ grave to be known for perhaps if the place of his grave would be known the coming generations would err and make of him a god, on account of the fame of the wonders which he performed. Do you not see that the copper snake made by Moses caused some to err on account of the station of its fashioner? Gersonides fears that if the location of Moses’ grave would be known, it might attract inappropriate attention. Nothing is more natural for folk religion than to seek the aid of deceased prophets and saints who might intercede for the sinful before God. Nothing is more natural than the creation of new rituals and services to be performed at the graves of the great religious figures of past ages. It is a short step from beseeching the dead to pray on the behalf of the living to setting up the dead themselves as gods deserving of worship. All the more so in the case of Moses, a prophet who in life was known to be the greatest of miracle-workers. In order to avoid this danger, the place of Moses’ burial must never be known. By explicitly undermining any future attempt to set up a shrine at Moses’ grave, Deuteronomy signals its awareness of the danger of Moses’ deification. Moses Had to Die

Earlier I mentioned that if we drew the Mishnah’s parallel between Moses and the copper snake to its ultimate and most radical conclusion, we must

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suppose that Moses’ death could become just as necessary as the snake’s destruction. This is, in fact, the view of Rabbi Meir Simhah of Dvinsk, one of the leading Talmudic scholars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rabbi Meir Simhah possessed a rare mix of intellectual virtues best exemplified by his Torah commentary, Meshekh Hokhmah. That work presents striking theological and philosophical theses, which are forwarded in terms of often daringly original recombinations of ideas taken from the whole breadth of rabbinic and biblical literature. Rabbi Meir Simhah’s take on the role of Moses’ death displays all of these features. The occasion of R. Meir Simhah’s comments on Moses’ death is somewhat surprising. By the time Moses delivers the series of farewell addresses which constitute the book of Deuteronomy, he is well aware that God does not intend to allow him to enter the promised land: Now the Lord was angry with me on your account and swore that I should not cross the Jordan and enter the good land that the Lord your God is giving you as a heritage. For I must die in this land; I shall not cross the Jordan. (Deut. 4: 21–2) Most commentators understand these verses against the background of the story told in the twentieth chapter of Numbers. There we read that the shortage of water in the desert drove the Israelites toward rebellion. God told Moses that he, together with his brother Aaron, should appear before the people and speak to a rock that would then give forth water. Instead, Moses spoke harshly to the people and hit the rock with his staf. Although the water came pouring miraculously out of the rock, God was not pleased and told Moses and Aaron, Because you did not trust Me enough to afrm My sanctity in the sight of the Israelite people, therefore you shall not lead this congregation into the land that I have given them (Num. 20: 12). The various biblical commentators vie with each other to best explicate the exact nature of the sin which Moses and Aaron had committed; was Moses’ wrong to scold the people so sharply? Or perhaps Moses defied God’s command by striking the rock instead of speaking to it? Apparently, the proper interpretation of Deuteronomy 4: 21–2 will depend on how we explain the story in Numbers 20. R. Meir Simhah, for his part, completely sidesteps the story in Numbers in his interpretation of the verses from Deuteronomy. Instead, he looks to their own immediate context within Moses’ address to Israel. Oddly, these verses regarding Moses’ death outside the promised land appear just after an extended warning against the dangers of idolatry: For your own sake, therefore, be most careful-since you saw no shape when the Lord your God spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire-not to act wickedly and make for yourselves a sculptured image in any likeness whatever: the form of a man or a woman, the form of any beast

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on earth, the form of any winged bird that flies in the sky, the form of anything that creeps on the ground, the form of any fish that is in the waters below the earth. And when you look up to the sky and behold the sun and the moon and the stars, the whole heavenly host, you must not be lured into bowing down to them or serving them. (Deut. 4:15–19) What does the prohibition of idolatry have to do with Moses’ announcement of his impending death? R. Meir Simhah explains that with the words, Now the Lord was angry with me on your account, Moses meant to say that it was on account of the Israelite predilection for idolatry that God had to treat him with anger. After having so many miracles, there was a great danger that Moses might be deified by the people. But why must his death occur before entering the promised land? That is understandable in terms of the diferences between the diferent generations of Israelites who had lived under Moses’ leadership. The Advantages of Rebelliousness Although the Torah tells us of many punishments sufered by the Israelites for their repeated acts of mutiny against God and his prophet Moses, one sin in particular brought about consequences which changed the entire nature of the journey from Egypt to Canaan. Having received the Ten Commandments and built the Tabernacle, the Israelites were ready to enter the Promised Land. In the thirteenth chapter of the Book of Numbers we are told that God commanded Moses to choose a representative from each of the twelve tribes to participate in a scouting expedition of Canaan in preparation for its conquest. After successfully completing their mission, something went terribly wrong when it came time for the scouts to make their report to the people. They announced that while the land does indeed flow with milk and honey (Num. 13:27), it was also populated by powerful inhabitants who lived in fortified cities. The Israelite conquest of Canaan became unthinkable. In a memorable phrase, the scouts claimed that compared to the gigantic Nephilim of Canaan, We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them (Num. 13:33). Although two of the scouts, Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua, exhorted the people to have faith that God would ensure them an easy victory, their words fell on deaf ears, and the whole community threatened to pelt them with stones (Num. 14:10). God then tells Moses that he will annihilate the Israelites and raise up a new nation of Moses’ progeny in their place. In response to Moses’ pleading, God lessens the punishment’s severity. None of the men who have seen My presence and the signs that I performed in Egypt and in the wilderness, and who have tried me so many

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times and have disobeyed me shall see the land that I promised on oath to their fathers; none of those who spurned me shall see it. (Num. 14:22–3) More precisely, God instructs Moses to inform the people: In this very wilderness shall your carcasses drop. Of all of you who were recorded in your various lists from the age of twenty years up, you who mutter against me, not one shall enter the land in which I swore to settle you. . . . Your children who, you said, would be carried of – these will I allow to enter; they shall know the land that you have rejected. But your carcasses shall drop in this wilderness, while your children roam the wilderness for forty years, corresponding to the number of days – forty days – that you scouted the land: a year for each day. (Num. 14:29–34) The punishment for the “Sin of the Scouts,” as it is known in Rabbinic literature, casts a pale over the rest of the story of Israel’s journey to the Promised Land. Anyone who knew Moses and his troubles from before the Exodus would die before entering Canaan. An entire generation, which came to be known as “The Generation of the Wilderness,” would perish in the course of forty years of wandering. On the other hand, those who would enter the land would recall, at most, teenage memories of the dramatic yet distant events of the Exodus and the theophany at Mount Sinai. Paradoxically, R. Meir Simhah argues that the very rebelliousness of the Generation of the Wilderness was, in some ways, beneficial. All things considered, the rebelliousness of the Generation of the Wilderness was an unfortunate spiritual shortcoming that brought the Israelites much anguish. On the other hand, it also aforded them a measure of spiritual protection. People who repeatedly ignore Moses’ authority and think themselves his equal are unlikely to mistakenly worship him as a god. This was the great advantage that the Generation of the Wilderness enjoyed over their children who entered Canaan. As long as members of the rebellious older generation are around, the danger of Moses’ deification is minimal. However, the younger, faithful generation that will enter the land are primed to lose sight of Moses’ humanity. R. Meir Simhah writes4: One of the reasons why God willed that Moses die in the desert was that this man Moses brought water out of a flint boulder, abstained from having relations with his wife all the time he was in the desert [according to the Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 87], did not eat bread or drink water [forty days on Mount Sinai] gave them bread from heaven, killed the Amorite kings, and split the Red Sea. However, all the time that people of his age were alive, who remembered him as a youth and thought of themselves as his equal or superior, who continued being

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jealous of him and said, all the community are holy [. . . why then do you raise yourselves above the Lord’s congregation?] (Num. 16: 3), and who gazed after Moses to raise suspicions regarding his action [according to the Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 33], the Torah was not worried at all [that Moses would be deified]. However, after that entire generation of bickering complainers ended and was cut of, there remained a new generation which from its youth remembered only Moses’ supernatural acts . . . and in particular during their youth it had not been inscribed upon their hearts to attribute these to God, to whose name Moses called out, and with whom he spoke always. Therefore the higher wisdom feared lest upon their entry to the Land of Israel they would relate to him as to a god. R. Meir Simhah goes on to explain that this is the precise meaning of the verse from Deuteronomy 4:21, Now the Lord was angry with me on your account and swore that I should not cross the Jordan and enter the good land that the Lord your God is giving you as a heritage. It was on account of God’s anxiety on your account, that is, on account of the readiness of those entering Canaan to proclaim Moses’ divinity, that he was not allowed to enter the land. Moses, like the Copper Serpent, had to be removed from Israelite society in order to prevent idolatry. As long as the rebellious backsliders were around, Moses was safe. The faithfulness of those who entered the Land was his undoing. The audacity of R. Meir Simhah’s exegesis is remarkable. He turns the biblical narrative on its head, finding a virtue in every vice of the Generation of the Wilderness. Why the Battle With Amalek Was Special It should now be understandable why the Mishnah would be anxious to dispel the impression that Moses was personally empowered to perform miracles. One the one hand, Moses needed to serve as the most impressive human conduit for miracles in order to establish his preeminence as a prophet and the unique authority of his prophecy, the Torah. On the other hand, such miracle-working might also inspire Israelites to institute an idolatrous cult devoted to the worship of Moses. However, it remains unclear why of all of the miracles of Moses’ career, the victory over Amalek was seen by the Mishnah to constitute an especially dangerous source of theological confusion and worthy of focused attention. An important hint may be found in the words of R. Meir Simhah quoted earlier. He claims that Moses called out God’s name and spoke with Him continuously. Indeed, the Torah portrays Moses as constantly conferring with God, praying and receiving revelation. He never works alone; the divine origin of every miracle in which Moses was involved is explicitly marked by communications with the Almighty. But not quite every miracle. Look carefully at the biblical account of the battle with Amalek:

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Amalek came forth and fought against Israel at Refidim. Moses said to Joshua, “Pick some men for us, and go out and do battle with Amalek. Tomorrow I will station myself on the top of the hill, with the rod of God in my hand.” Joshua did as Moses told him and fought with Amalek, while Moses, Aaron, and Hur went to the top of the hill. Then, whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed; but when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed. (Ex. 17: 8–11) Moses did not pray at Refidim, nor did he receive divine instruction. The nearest thing to a sign of heavenly intervention in this story is the rod of God, a physical object which could be easily thought of as a kind of magic wand. Of course, Moses is not to blame here. One can easily imagine how God’s rebuke of his hesitation at the Red Sea – Why do you cry out to me? Tell the Israelites to go forward! (Ex. 14:15) – was still fresh in Moses’ mind. There is no time for standing on ceremony when the Israelites are in imminent danger. Nevertheless, Moses’ behavior does create the danger that people (and the readers of scripture) will attribute the miraculous victory to his own supernatural powers rather than to God. This, then, is the special difculty that the Mishnah tries to address. And Moses’ Hands Were Heavy Considering how theologically problematic the story of Israel’s battle with Amalek is for monotheistic religion, one would expect the Torah itself to make some gesture toward preventing its readers from attributing the victory to Moses’ own independent powers. A hint, and perhaps more than a hint, of this concern may be found in a rather peculiar detail in the continuation of the Torah’s narrative: But Moses’ hands grew heavy; so they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it, while Aaron and Hur, one on each side, supported his hands; thus his hands remained steady until the sun set. And Joshua overwhelmed the people of Amalek with the sword. (Ex. 17:12–13) It is unusual for the Torah to tell us of someone kept from acting out their intentions by simple human frailty. When Jacob decides to roll a large stone of of the well at Haran (Gen. 29:10), his strength does not betray him. Moses himself is not recorded as having experienced difculties when he fasted forty days and forty nights on Mount Sinai to appease God’s anger after the sin of the Golden Calf (Deut. 9:18). It is my contention that the Torah deliberately mentions Moses’ weakness in order to avoid any confusion about his human status. True, Moses does not consult God before assuming his vigil on the hilltop. It is also true that when he raises his hands, Israel prevails. But if we

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ask “Could Moses’ hands make war or break war?,” was Moses some kind of divine or semi-divine being gifted with autonomous magical powers, the Torah answers in a firm negative. Not only is it beyond Moses’ ability to determine the course of battle, he does not even possess complete control of his own body. How could he bear the burden of defeating the entire Amalekite nation if he was incapable of bearing the burden of his own two hands? And so the problem addressed centuries later by the Mishnah had already been answered by the Torah itself. Back to Joshua Once again, the Book of Joshua ofers a useful comparison to a story about Moses. Chapter eight of Joshua tells us how, following a failed first attempt, God instructs Joshua to try once again to conquer the town of Ai. A clever stratagem empties the city of its defenders. At that crucial moment Joshua receives a message from God: The Lord said to Joshua, “Hold out the javelin in your hand toward Ai, for I will deliver it into your hands.” So Joshua held out the javelin in his hand toward the city. As soon as he held out his hand, the ambush came rushing out of their station. (Josh. 8:18–19) The next six verses tell the tale of the day’s bloody battle, and then we read: Joshua did not draw back the hand with which he held out his javelin until all of the inhabitants of Ai had been destroyed. (Josh. 8:26) Here we have a quite strong parallel to the story of the battle at Rephidim. While Moses spent the duration of his battle holding up the rod of God in his hand, Joshua holds out his Javelin toward Ai until the town’s conquest is completed. Moses’ hands became heavy, but no mention is made of Joshua experiencing any particular difculty. If Joshua’s stamina lasts the whole day, why could Moses not endure a similar test? Because Joshua had been commanded by God to hold out his javelin (Hold out the javelin in your hand toward Ai, for I will deliver it into your hands) leaving no question that God had granted victory to Israel, while Moses chose to hold up the rod of God of his own volition, and mention of his weariness was required to demonstrate that Moses’ hands alone could not “make or break war.” The story of Joshua at Ai confirms the central point of this chapter, that in order for Moses to serve as God’s closest partner and Israel’s more authoritative prophet, he also had to risk becoming an object of idolatrous worship by his people. In this way, the story of Moses ofers a new spin on the danger of human leaders playing God. Limits must be placed even on the activities of God’s most loyal

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prophet and miracle-worker. Even if Moses was too humble to ever forget his humanity, those around him might mistake him for a god. Notes 1 Half of the tribe of Manasseh joins the bargain struck with Moses in Num. 32:33. 2 Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah 8:1, trans. Eliyahu Touger from Chabad.org, www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/904992/jewish/ Yesodei-haTorah-Chapter-Eight.htm. 3 Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 501 (=Guide III: 24). 4 Meshekh Hokhma on Deut. 4:15.

References Maimonides, Moses. The Guide of the Perplexed. Translated by Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Maimonides, Moses. Mishneh Torah. Translated by Eliyahu Touger from Chabad. org. www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/682956/jewish/Mishneh-Torah-Ram bam.htm

12 Esther, Ruth and Human-Divine Cooperation in a World Bereft of Miracles

In this book, I have taken biblical narratives at face value, and I have not read them as metaphors or allegories or otherwise “demythologized”1 them to be more immediately relevant to modern readers. I did not agonize over the morality of Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac, since in the biblical context, it was reasonable for Abraham to assume that God could undo any injury sufered by his son. If the Exodus from Egypt is described in Scripture as a thoroughly miraculous process, so much the worse for any human leader who seeks in it a model for human movements of liberation. After describing how the Israelites miraculously cross the dry riverbed of the Jordan into Canaan, the biblical narrative itself becomes increasingly naturalistic. Manna stops falling from heaven and the Israelites are nourished by the crops of the land (Josh. 5:12). The walls of Jericho fall supernaturally, but mostly the battles are won by Israelite soldiers in the usual human manner.2 As biblical historiography proceeds, God no longer takes much of an open role in defending Israel from its enemies, instead, the Book of Judges explicitly delineates a recurring historical cycle in which a generation which had not experienced [the deliverance of] the Lord or the deeds that He had wrought for Israel. And the Israelites did what was ofensive to the Lord. They worshiped the Baalim and forsook the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. . . . Then the Lord was incensed at Israel, and He handed them over to foes who plundered them. He surrendered them to their enemies on all sides, and they could no longer hold their own against their enemies. . . . Then the Lord raised up chieftains who delivered them from those who plundered them. But they did not heed their chieftains either; they went astray after other gods and bowed down to them. (Judges 2:10–12;14;16–17) God’s explicit role in this process is limited to raising up leaders who vanquish Israel’s enemies in the manner of any successful military leader. The prophets of these later generations receive divine messages and perform local miracles, but despite their providential readings of history, the biblical account DOI: 10.4324/9781003414346-13

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of Israel’s history under its judges and kings could be almost completely understood in terms of ancient politics and socioeconomic conditions.3 While biblical historiography largely describes a steady decline of Israelite power and piety ending in exile, the lack of divine miraculous intervention was always to be expected when the Israelites took up national life in their land. The Torah explicitly describes God’s future providential role in naturalistic terms. Proper behavior would bring timely rains, while idolatry would bring drought (Deut. 11:13–17); piety would bring political dominance, military success, fecundity and prosperity (Deut. 28:1–13) while impiety would bring famine, exploitation, appropriation, disease and exile (Deut. 28:15–68). Of course, these non-supernatural misfortunes signify a crisis in the relationship between God and Israel. You have screened Yourself of with a cloud, that no prayer may pass through (Lam. 3:44). The Rabbis viewed this steady decline of God’s positive influence on Israel’s afairs as coinciding with the end of prophecy, so that the Talmud states: “Since the day the First Temple was destroyed, prophecy was taken away from the prophets and given to fools and children” (Babylonian Talmud Bava Batra 12b). This remains our predicament. Can the bible address it? The two books of the Hebrew Scriptures whose stories best speak to a world devoid of prophecy and supernatural miracles are named after women: the Book of Esther and the Book of Ruth. Perhaps this should not surprise us. Even in the books loaded with miraculous goings-on, it is the women who best actualize natural human agency. We have already seen how Rebekah intervened to ensure that Jacob would receive his father’s blessing; Tamar took action to become pregnant and successfully explained her decision when threatened by Judah (Gen. 38); the midwives undermined Pharaoh’s genocidal decree (Ex. 1:15–21); Moses’ mother hid him away and his sister Miriam arranged for his care with Pharaoh’s daughter (Ex. 2:1–9); and unlike Lot who lost his wits trying to protect his angelic guests (Gen. 19:8), when Rahab hosted Joshua’s spies in Jericho, she cleverly sent the men hunting them out on a wild goose chase (Josh. 2) and so on. In many respects, Esther and Ruth are exact opposites or mirror images of each other. Esther was a Jewish woman who pretended to be a gentile, while Ruth was a Moabite woman who became an Israelite. The Book of Esther takes place in the Diaspora, while the Book of Ruth takes place in the environs of Bethlehem in Judea; Esther begins with a feast, while Ruth begins with a famine. Esther and her uncle Mordecai descended from the tribe of Benjamin (Esr. 2:5), the tribe of the failed King Saul, whose dynasty, we have seen, was doomed when he spared Agag, King of the Amalekites. Esther completes Saul’s mission by destroying Haman, the last remnant Agag’s royal house. Ruth founds the Royal House of David, King of Israel. While Ruth marries the noble Boaz, Esther is left married to the lascivious King Ahasuerus. Ruth and Esther ofer two visions of life for the covenantal community living in a world in which God’s presence is no longer evidenced by miraculous breaches of the natural order. Esther must sacrifice her identity and piety

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so that her people might weather the dangers of Diaspora life, while Ruth, through her acts of devoted kindness and afliation with the People Israel, propels forward the covenantal process of redemption. The Tragedy of Esther Jews often view the Book of Esther (to which I shall refer with the single Hebrew word Megillah, or “scroll”) as a light, almost comical, biblical text. Its public reading takes place in the carnival atmosphere of the Purim holiday. Children, dressed in costumes, eagerly follow the reading in order not to miss any opportunity to drown out Haman’s name with their noisemakers. Despite these frivolous trimmings, it is obvious that a story about a failed attempt at genocide must possess some darker aspects. The Megillah may be read as a guide to the politics of Jewish life in the Diaspora. It tells us of the dangers of anti-Semitism and of how such dangers may be neutralized. It describes anti-Semitism’s propaganda and real motivations, but speaks also of the Jewish response and of Judaism’s real concerns. In addition, it presents us with the background of a culture of government in terms of whose political discourse both anti-Semite and Jew must formulate their respective appeals. Perhaps most importantly, the Megillah has granted every new generation of Jews a textual foundation for further contemplation of these themes through the exegesis and supplementation of the biblical narrative. The concerns I have mentioned are all addressed in a seemingly simple and straightforward way by the unadorned text of the Megillah. Haman’s antiSemitism is motivated by a personal rivalry with Mordecai, who happens to be Jewish. In Haman’s speech to King Ahasuerus, political discourse shrinks to the single issue of demonstrating that it is not in Your Majesty’s interest to tolerate the Jews (Esther 3: 8). As if to underline the narrow scope of Ahasuerus’ considerations, Haman adds a personal bribe – let an edict be drawn for their destruction, and I will pay ten thousand talents of silver to the stewards for deposit in the royal treasury (Esther 3: 9) – to bolster the strength of his arguments. The implicit arguments for Jewish preservation (in as much as arguments may be said to be forwarded) are no less shallow. The Jews must be saved because, after all, the beautiful Queen Esther is a Jew and it would be a shame not to have her around. Furthermore, Mordecai must be treated well since he foiled an assassination plot against the king (Esther 2:21–3). The biblical text does present some surprising ironies. Haman complains to Ahasuerus that the Jews are a people whose laws are diferent from those of any other people and who do not obey the king’s laws (Esther 3:8). Remarkably, the Megillah makes no attempt to disprove Haman’s charge. We are explicitly told that the trouble begins when Mordecai the Jew refuses to obey one of the king’s laws, the royal command that all must bow to Haman: All the king’s courtiers in the palace gate knelt and bowed low to Haman, for such was the king’s order concerning him; but Mordecai

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would not kneel or bow low. Then the king’s courtiers who were in the palace gate said to Mordecai, “Why do you disobey the king’s order?” When they spoke to him day after day and he would not listen to them, they told Haman, in order to see whether Mordecai’s resolve would prevail; for he had explained to them that he was a Jew! When Haman saw that Mordecai would not kneel or bow low to him, Haman was filled with rage. (Esther 3:2–5) For his own part, Haman is the very model of obedience; when ordered to do so by the king, he unquestioningly dresses his arch-rival Mordecai in royal garb and leads his horse through the city, crying out, This is what is done for the man whom the king desires to honor! (Esther 6: 11). Notwithstanding the canonicity of the biblical text, the contradictions implicit to the Megillah’s story become clearer in the light of its treatment by the ancient Jewish translations (the Greek Septuagint and Aramaic Targumim) and midrashim.4 The Septuagint version of the Megillah includes several fascinating apocryphal additions to the Masoretic text, which are usually attributed, at least in part, to Lysimachus, an Alexandrian Jew who lived in Jerusalem in the 2nd century B.C.E.5 Among these is found the text of the genocidal edict prepared by Haman to be published in the king’s name: Ruling over many nations, and having obtained dominion over the whole world, I was minded (not elated by the confidence of power, but ever conducting myself with great moderation and with gentleness) to make the lives of my subjects continually tranquil, desiring both to maintain the kingdom quiet and orderly to its utmost limits, and to restore the peace desired by men. But when I had enquired of my counselors how this should be brought to pass, Haman, who excels in soundness of judgment among us, and has been manifestly well inclined without wavering and with unshaken fidelity, and has obtained the second post in the kingdom, informed us that a certain ill-disposed people is mixed up with all the tribes throughout the world, opposed in their laws to every other nation, and continually neglecting the commands of the kings, so that the united government administered by us is not quietly established. Having then conceived that this nation alone of all others is continually set in opposition to every man, introducing as a change a foreign code of laws, and injuriously plotting to accomplish the worst of evils against our interests, and against the happy establishment of the monarchy. (2nd addition)6 The Septuagint version of the edict supplies us with a more broadminded Persian political philosophy as well as with a more sophisticated attack on the Jews. Haman has Ahasuerus portray himself as trying to maintain a kind of pax Persiana whose stability requires universal respect for the king’s laws.

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Jews do not respect these laws and are furthermore “set in opposition to every man.” The other anti-Semitic charges mentioned by later Jewish writers fall under these two main headings. Let us begin by examining the first of these. As we have seen, the Megillah itself mentions the charge that Jews respect only their own laws rather than those of the king. In other words, they remain true to the covenant even while lacking the Israelite polity assumed by the covenant’s laws. Like many other Jewish sources, the Aramaic Targum Sheni7 to the Megillah connects this complaint to the multiplicity of Jewish holidays, which interfere with the performance of public works ordered by king. After a lengthy and self-mocking description of the festivals of the Jewish calendar, the Targum Sheni places these words in Haman’s mouth: “[The Jews] do not perform the service of the king; they say to us: Today it is forbidden. Thus they spend the year in idleness, in not performing the service of the king.”8 Interestingly, neither the Septuagint additions nor the Targum Sheni make any attempt to quash these charges. In the Septuagint additions’ version of Ahasuerus’ decree sparing the Jews, we read: But we find that the Jews, who have been consigned to destruction by the most abominable of men are not malefactors, but living according to the justest laws, and being the sons of the living God, the most high and mighty, who maintains the kingdom, to us as well as to our forefathers, in the most excellent order. (4th addition) The author of the Septuagint additions does not even pretend that the Jews live by the laws of the land. Rather, they live by their own laws, which are, however, just; perhaps even more just than the king’s own laws. Jewish indiference to the king’s laws does not invite anarchy because, His people having lost their commonwealth, the Jewish God now is claimed to oversee the good maintenance of the foreign state in which they reside. The Targum Sheni’s preoccupation with the Jewish festivals is itself a great bit of Purim humor. Haman despises the lazy Jews who are always celebrating some holiday when there is the work to be done. How are his accusations addressed? With the institution of yet another holiday in which the Jews will celebrate his downfall instead of performing the king’s service!9 In the words of the medieval10 midrashic collection, Esther Rabbah (7: 12):11 Said the Holy One, blessed be He, to him [Haman]: “Wretch, you cast an evil eye on their festivals. Behold, I will overthrow you before them, and they will observe an additional festival for your downfall, namely, the days of Purim”; and so it says, A fool’s mouth is his ruin (Prov. 18:7).

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Since all of these texts were written by Jews and obviously present a pro-Jewish point of view, why do they not seek to refute the charges which they themselves bring up? Because such a refutation would contradict the very point of Jewish survival. The sages who produced these texts could hardly propose that Jews actually honor the gentile king’s laws over those of God! Absolute commitment to God is Judaism’s raison de etre. If Jewish survival in the Diaspora were genuinely dependent on absolute and sole commitment to the law of the land, the Diaspora community would be doomed from the start. No consideration, not even the physical safety of the Jewish people, comes before dedication to God. The Septuagint additions even have Mordecai making this existential calculation in his explanation why he disobeyed the royal command to bow down to Haman: Thou knowest all things: thou knowest, Lord, that it is not in insolence, nor haughtiness, nor love of glory that I have done this, to refuse obeisance to the haughty Haman. For I would gladly have kissed the soles of his feet for the safety of Israel. But I have done this, that I might not set the glory of man above the glory of God; and I will not worship anyone except thee, my Lord. (3rd addition) At the personal level, Mordecai’s dilemma finds the happiest of solutions. Mordecai becomes vizier, and the command to honor Haman is rendered moot by the latter’s execution. Esther is less fortunate. It is her fate to live with the dilemmas implied by Haman’s second accusation, that the Jews are “set in opposition to every man.” This issue, like Mordecai’s, is solved by Esther’s rise to power, but at great personal cost. While the Megillah tells us of Mordecai glorying in the trappings of power, Mordecai left the king’s presence in royal robes of blue and white, with a magnificent crown of gold and a mantle of fine linen and purple wool. And the city of Shushan rang with joyous cries (Esther 8: 15), the Septuagint additions have Esther disparaging her very crown: “Thou knowest that I hate the symbol of my proud station, which is on my head in the days of my splendor: I abhor it as a menstruous cloth, and I wear it not in the days of my tranquility” (3rd addition). But here we are getting ahead of ourselves. Before considering Esther’s plight, we must be clear what is meant by the claim that the Jews set themselves “in opposition to every man.” As I understand it, this charge refers to Jewish insularity and in particular to those Jewish laws prohibiting the sharing of food, drink or beds with the gentiles, hearkening all the way back to the Patriarchs and Matriarchs worrying that their children might assimilate into Canaanite society. As the Talmud points out, the prohibitions apply even to the gentile king, and thus constitute an afront to his honor: Raba said: There was never a traducer so skillful as Haman. He said to Ahasuerus. . . . “Their laws are diverse from those of every other people

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(Esther 3:8): they do not eat our food, nor do they marry our women nor give us theirs in marriage. . . . Therefore it profiteth not the king to sufer them, because they eat and drink and despise the throne.” (Babylonian Talmud Tractate Megillah 13b)12 Here, then, is a dangerous challenge to Jewish claims of good citizenship. On the one hand, Jewish survival in the Diaspora depends on the tolerance and liberality of the powers that be. On the other hand, the demands of Jewish law and the threat of assimilation require that Jews remain somewhat illiberal toward their gentile neighbors and rulers. Esther Rabbah goes so far as to suggest that God arranged for the Jews to be threatened with destruction as punishment for their participation in Ahasuerus’ banquets. These parties were originally instigated by Haman in an attempt to entice the Jews to lewdness, and thus incur God’s wrath (Esther Rabbah 7:13). If Jews are forbidden to feast and sleep with gentiles, what are we to make of Esther, who clearly did both? Unsurprisingly, the author of the additions to the Septuagint found it difficult to accept the idea of a Jewish heroine married to a gentile king. He has her exclaim, “I hate the glory of transgressors, and that I abhor the couch of the uncircumcised, and of every stranger!” (3rd addition). Such are the innermost thoughts of Esther, for the sake of whose apparently pure love Ahasuerus was willing to spare the Jewish people. For, as the additions to the Septuagint have it, Ahasuerus explains the rescinding of Haman’s edict with the consideration that Haman had betrayed the king, “having by various and subtle artifices demanded for destruction both Mordecai our deliverer and perpetual benefactor, and Esther the blameless consort of our kingdom” (4th addition). What would Ahasuerus have thought if he had known that his beloved queen “abhorred the couch of the uncircumcised”? Yet, how could our heroine remain true to her Judaism while genuinely loving the gentile Ahasuerus? Rather than downplaying this aspect of Esther’s relationship with the king, some Jewish sources aggravate the problem. Esther’s sexual allegiance to the Jewish people is maintained at all costs. Rabbi Meir is cited in the Talmud (Babylonian Talmud Megillah 13a) as saying that Esther was not merely Mordecai’s adopted daughter, but also his wife. If, according to the Megillah, Ahasuerus became incensed at what comically appeared to be Haman’s attempt to rape Esther,13 what would he say of the Talmudic comment, “Raba said in the name of Rab: ‘She [Esther] used to rise from the lap of Ahasuerus and bathe and sit in the lap of Mordecai’” (Babylonian Talmud Megillah 13b)? In any case, even if Ahasuerus gained access to Esther’s body, he never really won her erotic interest. Esther is said to have remained completely passive in her relations with Ahasuerus, or in the memorable words of the Talmudic sage, Abbaye, Ester karka olam, “Esther was like the everlasting ground” (Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 74b). One still might ask how Esther became

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entangled in her predicament to begin with. Why did she allow herself to be taken to the king’s harem? Where was Mordecai in her hour of need? The Targum Sheni ofers an interesting version of these events: When Mordecai heard that virgins were being sought, he took and hid Esther from the ofcers of King Ahasuerus who went out to seek the virgins so that they should not come and lead her away. He enclosed one room within another room so that the messengers of the king should not see her. Now when his messengers used to pass by, the gentile girls would dance and show of their beauty through the windows. Thereupon the messengers of the king would go out and bring many virgins from the provinces. Moreover, the messengers of the king knew of Esther, so when they observed that Esther was not among these virgins, they said to one another: “We are wasting our energy in the provinces. There is here in our province a girl beautiful in looks and pleasing as well as amiable in appearance, more so than all of the virgins which we have brought.” So when Esther was sought but not found, they informed King Ahasuerus. When he heard (of it), he wrote an order that every virgin who shall hide herself from before his messengers, there is only one decree for her – that she be executed. So when Mordecai heard of the order, he panicked and brought out Esther, his father’s brother’s daughter, into the street. (Targum Sheni 2:8) Now both of our themes join together in a single episode. Mordecai, anxious to preserve Esther’s Jewish sexual purity, actively interferes with the fulfillment of a royal decree, but delivers her up to save her life. However, this sacrifice of Esther’s personal piety is not needed only to save her life. Salvation for the covenantal community of the pious may only be gained through the sacrifice of the piety of an individual woman. In his own hour of truth, Mordecai feels free to risk all, including endangerment of the community, in order to avoid idolatrous prostration before Haman. Esther enjoys no such luxuries of conscience. She simply must sleep with the gentile Ahasuerus and drink his wine, lest the Jewish people be destroyed. And if such behavior is unthinkable, the Targum Sheni and Midrashim will apologize that she did these things at pain of death. The tragic heart of the Megillah is revealed. As Esther Rabbah has Mordecai ask, “How is it possible that this righteous maiden should be married to an uncircumcised man? It must be because some great calamity is going to befall Israel and they will be delivered through her” (Esther Rabbah 6: 6). Esther struggles under the crushing weight of the Diaspora’s paradoxes. Impossibly, she must show herself and her people deserving of the king’s love and protection, while her faith leaves her incapable of genuinely seeking such love. Somehow Esther must remain a proper Jewish heroine while also serving as living proof that Jewish women are not beyond gentile reach. She is

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neither courtesan nor prostitute, but rather a victim whose rape is fortuitous for the precarious survival of her people. For many years, I have found the Megillah’s conclusion, its happy ending, chilling for its omissions: King Ahasuerus imposed tribute upon the mainland and the islands. All his mighty and powerful acts, and a full account of the greatness to which the king advanced Mordecai, are recorded in the Annals of the Kings of Media and Persia. For Mordecai the Jew ranked next to King Ahasuerus and was highly regarded by the Jews and popular with the multitude of his brethren; he sought the good of his people and interceded for the welfare of all his kindred. (Esther 10:1–3) The evil Haman, we already know, is dead. Ahasuerus is busy exploiting his subjects, and Mordecai basks in the glory of his political success. One wonders: What became of Esther? Does she not live happily ever after? No; Esther’s happiness and even her personal piety are expendable. She remains trapped in the palace and bedroom of a drunken Persian king. It is her part to absorb the story’s shocks and tensions, to physically bear and be worn away by the inherent political contradictions of Jewish survival in the Diaspora. There is no happy ending for Esther. Human Kindness as the Instrument of Providence in Ruth I began this chapter by listing some diferences between the Books of Esther and Ruth. Perhaps the most striking diference between the two books involves the number of their references to God. As the rabbis pointed out long ago, God is never openly mentioned in the Book of Esther, a peculiarity reflected in a famous midrashic play on words involving the name “Esther” and the Hebrew word hester [hiddenness]: God hides behind the human drama described by the book.14 The Book of Ruth, in contrast, is almost “promiscuous” in its frequent mention of God’s name. Characters are constantly attributing the events of the story to God, and without any immediately obvious reason, we are told that Boaz greets his field hands with the words, The Lord be with you! (Ruth 2:4). If my count is correct, the term Lord (Hashem) appears no less than twelve times in the eighty verses of Ruth, while it does not appear even once in Esther’s 167 verses. There is something ironic about the frequent mention of God’s name in Ruth. While the characters persist in their theological interpretation of events,15 nothing they experience is even remotely supernatural. A famine comes and goes, people die, people struggle, and a child is born. Compare this to the Book of Esther with its impossibly serendipitous coincidences: a Queen of Persia is dethroned, so that a Jewish girl – of all the maidens of the great empire – can replace her just in time to foil Haman’s murderous plan.

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Even while Esther pays a grave personal price, it is not far-fetched to imagine God’s hand orchestrating these events from behind the scenes. The plot of Ruth, in contrast, involves only one small bit of luck; Ruth happens to go to Boaz’s field to glean the grain left over by the reapers (Ruth 2:3). Lest we think that God somehow directed her, the verse informs us that this was a chance occurrence, va’yiker mikreha, using the same word used to refer to the blind fate that vexed Ecclesiastes (9:2): For the same fate [mikreh] is in store for all: for the righteous, and for the wicked; for the good and pure and for the impure; for him who sacrifices, and for him who does not.16 Or even more terribly: For in respect of the fate [mikreh] of man and the fate of beast, they have one and the same fate . . . both came from dust and both return to dust. (Eccles. 3:19–20) The narrator is certainly not attributing Ruth’s chancing upon Boaz’s field to the workings of a benevolent Providence! What, then, are we to make of this strange story whose characters constantly speak of a God who seems to be completely absent from their world? Consider the speech that Boaz makes to Ruth upon their first meeting in his field: I have been told of all that you did for your mother-in-law after the death of your husband, how you left your father and mother and the land of your birth and came to a people you had not known before. May the Lord reward your deeds. May you have a full recompense from the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have sought refuge! (Ruth 2:11–12) Despite Boaz’s blessing, the Lord, God of Israel is nowhere to be found. No miracle occurs to save Ruth and Naomi from impoverishment. Naomi can only hope that her kinsman Boaz will come to their rescue. Later, when Ruth surprises Boaz at night in the granary, she tells him: I am your handmaiden Ruth. Spread your wing over your handmaid, for you are a redeeming kinsman. (Ruth 3:9) In efect, Ruth has thrown Boaz’s words of consolation back in his face. He had spoken of Ruth seeking refuge under the wings of the Lord, God of

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Israel, and she tells him to spread his wings over her. She is telling him that those who speak of God’s mercy and kindness must be prepared to serve as the instruments of that mercy and kindness. An exegetical thought experiment will help us see how this call for human action serves as the organizing principle of the whole story. Imagine that most of the text of Ruth was lost to us, and all we had were a few verses from the beginning and end of the book. From the first chapter, we would find part of the speech that Naomi addressed to her daughters-in-law after they insisted on accompanying her as she returned to Bethlehem: But Naomi replied, “Turn back, my daughters! Why should you go with me? Have I any more sons in my body who might be husbands for you? Turn back, my daughters, for I am too old to be for a man.” (Ruth 1:11–12) From the last chapter, we would discover the verse: And the women neighbors gave him a name, saying, “A son is born to Naomi!” They named him Obed; he was the father of Jesse, father of David. (Ruth 4:17) Just looking at these few verses, a very common biblical motif comes to mind. In fact, it is the most common narrative framework for stories involving biblical heroines: it is the story of Sarah, Rebecca, and Hannah, among others. A woman is childless, but thanks to divine intervention, she will give birth to a child by the end of the story. One could easily imagine a missing annunciation scene, in which an angel or prophet brings good tidings of the upcoming birth. We might even hear Naomi laugh as Sarah did at the thought of conceiving a child at such an advanced age: Now that I am withered, am I to have this pleasure? (Gen. 18:12). We readers of Ruth know better. We know that there was no miraculous intervention, no heavenly sign, and no angelic visit. All that runs from the book’s desperate opening to its joyous finale is a series of incidents and relationships in which human beings decide to treat each other in an exceptionally humane fashion. Ruth refuses to abandon her aged mother-in-law, and Boaz agrees to take a destitute and elderly female relation and a Moabite widow under his wing. The old story of childlessness has taken a new twist; God’s kindness to His creatures flows through their own fearless acts of love. The sheer good will of Ruth and Boaz has produced a son for the aged Naomi. And so the line to Israel’s messiah son of David continues. Such, for Jews, is the nature of religious hope in an age lacking prophecy and divine interventions; that by faithfully fulfilling our covenantal duties (may they always be duties appropriate also to our human situation!), we also speed God’s redemption on its way.

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Notes 1 I borrow the term from the German theologian and biblical scholar Rudolf Karl Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), but I think it is descriptive of a large body of liberal Jewish biblical exegesis. 2 I should mention the supernatural events accompanying the Israelites’ victory against the five Amorite kings in Joshua 10. There we read: While they were fleeing before Israel down the descent from Beth-horon, the Lord hurled huge stones on them from the sky, all the way to Azekah, and they perished (Josh. 10:11). However, the verse continues more perished from the hailstones than were killed by the Israelite weapons; by clarifying the huge stones were hailstones, the narrator transforms an anomalous miracle into a highly unusual occurrence of a familiar natural phenomenon. Later God extends the day in response to Joshua’s request that that his troops be given more time to complete their victory: On that occasion, when the Lord routed the Amorites before the Israelites, Joshua addressed the Lord; he said in the presence of the Israelites: “Stand still, 0 sun, at Gibeon, 0 moon, in the Valley of Aijalon!” And the sun stood still And the moon halted, While a nation wreaked judgment on its foes – as is written in the Book of Jashar! Thus the sun halted in midheaven, and did not press on to set, for a whole day. (Josh. 10:12–13) While the narrator continues, Neither before nor since has there ever been such a day, when the Lord acted on words spoken by a man (Josh. 10:14), I am not sure this miracle would be especially impressive to people lacking sophisticated astronomical knowledge. The great anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard writes in connection with the Sudanese Azande people, “Very many medicines are known to all, and anyone who wishes to use them may do so at his pleasure.. . . Everyone knows that he can delay sunset by placing a stone in the fork of a tree.” See E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande, abridged ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 185. 3 At least two ritual elements of biblical law explicitly depend on providential help to ensure the viability of their strict observance. Exodus 34:23 requires that Three times a year all your males shall appear before the Sovereign Lord, the God of Israel. These scheduled absences of the entire male population from all the land outside the Temple precincts would leave the Israelite polity completely defenseless against foreign aggression. Appropriately, God promises that, no one will covet your land when you go up to appear before the Lord your God three times a year (Ex. 34:24). Similarly, it is hard to understand how the Israelites, who were completely dependent on subsistence agriculture could cease all such operations every seventh year when the land shall have a sabbath of complete rest, a sabbath of the Lord: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your untrimmed vines; it shall be a year of complete rest for the land (Lev. 25:4–5). Here the Torah explicitly promises that direct divine intervention will see to it that the Israelites remain well-fed: And should you ask, “What are we to eat in the seventh year, if we may neither sow nor gather in our crops?” I will ordain My blessing for you in the sixth year, so that it shall yield a crop sufcient for three years. When you sow in the eighth year, you will still be eating old grain of that crop; you will be eating the old until the ninth year, until its crops come in (Lev. 25:20–2). Tellingly, there is little evidence in biblical historiography that these laws were properly observed in practice; 2 Chronicles 36:21 explains the Babylonian exile as punishment for non-observance of the Sabbatical Year.

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4 For a feminist analysis of the post-biblical Jewish treatment of the Megillah, see Leila Leah Bronner, “Esther Revisited: An Aggadic Approach,” in A Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith and Susanna, ed. Athalya Brenner (Shefeld: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 176–97. See also Barry Walfish, Esther in Medieval Garb: Jewish Interpretation of the Book of Esther in the Middle Ages (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993). For an analysis of a recent Religious-Zionist reading of Esther, see Julia Schwartzmann, “The Book of Esther: A Case Study of Ideological Interpretation,” Shofar 29, no. 4 (Summer 2011): 124–47. 5 See Bruce Metzger, “Esther, Additions to the Book of,” in Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 6 (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972), 913–14. 6 All Septuagint quotations are from Sir Lancelot Brenton, The Septuagint with Apocrypha: Greek and English (London: Samuel Bagster & Sons, 1851). Personal names and punctuation have been standardized to those used in this book. 7 Scholars disagree on the dating of Targum Sheni, placing it anywhere between the 4th and 11th centuries. Despite its name (targum means, literally, translation), Targum Sheni is more of a midrashic collection than an Aramaic rendering of the Masoretic text. See Yehuda Komlosh, “Targum Sheni,” in Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd ed., vol. 15, ed. Fred Skolnik (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, 2007), 811–13. 8 Targum Sheni quotations from Bernard Gossfeld, The Two Targums of Esther (Collegeville, MI: The Liturgical Press, 1991). 9 As we read in the Meggilah’s penultimate chapter: Mordecai recorded these events. And he sent dispatches to all the Jews throughout the provinces of King Ahasuerus, near and far, charging them to observe the fourteenth and fifteenth days of Adar, every year the same days on which the Jews enjoyed relief from their foes and the same month which had been transformed for them from one of grief and mourning to one of festive joy. They were to observe them as days of feasting and merrymaking, and as an occasion for sending gifts to one another and presents to the poor. (Esther 9:20–2) 10 Esther Rabbah found its final form in the 12th or 13th century, but its first two chapters were apparently composed no later than the beginning of the 6th century. See Moshe David Herr, “Esther Rabbah,” in Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd ed., vol. 6, ed. Fred Skolnik (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, 2007), 915–16. 11 Esther Rabbah translations from Maurice Simon’s, Midrash Rabbah: Esther (London: Soncino Press, 1939). 12 I. Epstein (trans.), The Babylonian Talmud (London: Soncino Press, 1938). 13 After Esther reveals to King Ahasuerus that Haman is planning a genocide of her people, we read: The king, in his fury, left the wine feast for the palace garden, while Haman remained to plead with Queen Esther for his life; for he saw that the king had resolved to destroy him. When the king returned from the palace garden to the banquet room, Haman was lying prostrate on the couch on which Esther reclined. “Does he mean,” cried the king, “to ravish the queen in my own palace?” No sooner did these words leave the king’s lips than Haman’s face was covered. (Esther 7:7–8) 14 See Babylonian Talmud Hullin 139b. 15 For instance: when the famine ends, Naomi hears that the Lord had taken note of His people and given them food (Ruth 1:6). When she returns to Bethlehem, having lost her husband and sons, she tells the women of the town, “Do not call me Naomi [from the root meaning ‘pleasant’],” she replied. “Call me Mara [bitter one], for Shaddai has made my lot very bitter. I went away

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full, and the Lord has brought me back empty. How can you call me Naomi, when the Lord has dealt harshly with me, when Shaddai has brought misfortune upon me!” (Esther 1: 20–1) And so on through the book. 16 Admittedly, when Isaac asks Jacob (who at the time impersonating Esau) how he had succeeded so quickly in his hunt, Jacob answers: “Because the Lord your God granted me good fortune” (Gen. 27:20), using the verb hikra, from the same root as mikreh.

References Brenton, Lancelot. The Septuagint with Apocrypha: Greek and English. London: Samuel Bagster & Sons, 1851. Bronner, Leila Leah. “Esther Revisited: An Aggadic Approach.” In A Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith and Susanna, edited by Athalya Brenner, 176–97. Shefeld: Shefeld Academic Press, 1995. Bultmann, Rudolf Karl. Jesus Christ and Mythology. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958. Epstein, Isidore (trans.). The Babylonian Talmud. London: Soncino Press, 1938. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande. Abridged Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Gossfeld, Bernard. The Two Targums of Esther. Collegeville, MI: The Liturgical Press, 1991. Herr, Moshe David. “Esther Rabbah.” In Encyclopedia Judaica. 2nd Edition, edited by Fred Skolnik. Jerusalem: Keter Publishing 2007. Komlosh, Yehuda. “Targum Sheni.” In Encyclopedia Judaica. 2nd Edition, edited by Fred Skolnik. Jerusalem: Keter Publishing 2007. Metzger, Bruce. “Esther, Additions to the Book of.” In Encyclopedia Judaica. 2nd Edition, edited by Fred Skolnik. Jerusalem: Keter Publishing 2007. Schwartzmann, Julia. “The Book of Esther – a Case Study of Ideological Interpretation.” Shofar 29, no. 4 (Summer 2011): 124–47. Simon, Maurice (trans.). Midrash Rabbah: Esther. London: Soncino Press, 1939. Walfish, Barry. Esther in Medieval Garb: Jewish Interpretation of the Book of Esther in the Middle Ages. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993.

Index

Abraham 40, 44, 46, 49–52; and Babel 61–2; and the Battle at Refidim 117–18, 124–6; and the Books of Esther and Ruth 134; and the Covenant of the Pieces 66–9; creating the nation of 65–6; and Israelite enslavement 97–9; and Rebekah 34–7; and Sodom and Gomorrah 11–19; and the Tetragrammaton 76–81, 84–5 Adam 27–31, 98–9 agency 32–3, 94–6, 112–15, 116, 135; and temporality 96–107 Akedah (Binding of Isaac) 12, 14–15, 49–52 Amalek, battle with 130–1 Amalekite genocide 40–3 authority see prophetic authority R. Avihu 5–6 avodat parekh (harsh work) 101–2, 105, 107 burial 125–8 chronologies (biblical) 83, 98–100, 113 cooperation: covenantal 76–8; from Creation to covenant 4–9; handing over responsibility for punishment 9–11; human-divine 134–44; human and divine moral obligations 16–19; imitatio Dei 19–23; Soddom and Gomorrah 11–16 Covenant of the Pieces (brit bein habetarim) 65–73, 76–7, 85, 94, 102 covenants 4–12, 16–23, 50–4, 62–3, 83–5, 114–18, 135–8; cooperation and 76–8

Creation 4–9; see also God as Creator cross-purposes: from Creation to covenant 4–9; handing over responsibility for punishment 9–11; human and divine moral obligations 16–19; imitatio Dei 19–23; Soddom and Gomorrah 11–16 death 125–8 divine manipulation: and covenantal cooperation 76–8; degeneration of dreams 81–4; disappearance of God’s name 84–7; Joseph as a figure of epistemic decline 80–1; providence, fertility and famine 78–80 divine plans: the Eden story 27–31; and Rebekah 34–7; resisting divine punishments 31–4 divine punishment see punishment dreams: and covenantal cooperation 76–8; degeneration of 81–4; and the disappearance of God’s name 84–7; Joseph as a figure of epistemic decline 80–1; providence, fertility and famine 78–80 economic policies 89–93 Eden 27–31 Egypt see enslavement in Egypt Elijah 56, 58, 70–3 enslavement in Egypt 89–93, 94–96; and temporality 96–107 epistemic decline 76–7, 80–1, 89 Esther 135–43 Eve 27, 31 Exodus 84–6, 96–105, 112–18, 129

Index famine 78–80 fertility 11, 65, 78–80, 103–4 Flood 5–12, 17–18, 33, 62, 98–9 Fredman, Norman 46–7 genocide 40–6 God as Creator 68; from Creation to covenant 4–9; handing over responsibility for punishment 9–11; human and divine moral obligations 16–19; imitatio Dei 19–23; Soddom and Gomorrah 11–16 God’s name (Tetragrammaton) 117, 130, 142; and covenantal cooperation 76–8; and the degeneration of dreams 81–4; disappearance of 84–7; Joseph as a figure of epistemic decline 80–1; providence, fertility and famine 78–80 God’s plan 27, 33–7, 40–1, 66–8, 116–17 God’s requests: Jonah at Nineveh 46–9; and the rational Akedah 49–52; Saul and genocide 40–6 hiddenness: and covenantal cooperation 76–8; and the degeneration of dreams 81–4; and the disappearance of God’s name 84–7; and Joseph as a figure of epistemic decline 80–1; providence, fertility and famine 78–80 historiography, biblical 65–73 R. Hiyya b. Abin 69 humans 134–6; and covenantal cooperation 76–8; from Creation to covenant 4–9; and the degeneration of dreams 81–4; and the disappearance of God’s name 84–7; and the Eden story 27–31; and Esther 136–42; handing over responsibility for punishment 9–11; human and divine moral obligations 16–19; imitatio Dei 19–23; and Joseph as a figure of epistemic decline 80–1; providence, fertility and famine 78–80; and Rebekah 34–7; resisting divine punishments 31–4; and Ruth

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142–4; Soddom and Gomorrah 11–16 idolatry: and the authority of Moses 116–19, 120–1, 123–5; and the battle with Amalek 130–2; and the death and burial of Moses 125–8; and Joshua 121–2, 132–3; and miracles 120–1, 122–3; and questions on the Mishnah 119–20; and rebelliousness 128–30 imitatio Dei 19–23 Israel/Israelites 61–4, 89–93, 94–6, 112–15; God’s gamble on 68–70; and temporality 96–107 Jacob 65–6, 76–81, 83–7, 91–4, 100–1, 125–6 Job 54–8 Jonah 46–9 Joseph 77–9, 80–4, 86–7, 89–93 Joshua 119, 121–2, 128, 131–3, 135 kindness, human 142–4 kivyakhol (as if it could be) 2 knowledge, human: and covenantal cooperation 76–8; and the degeneration of dreams 81–4; and the disappearance of God’s name 84–7; and Joseph as a figure of epistemic decline 80–1; and providence, fertility and famine 78–80 Maimonides, Moses 102–3, 121, 124–5 R. Meir Simhah of Dvinsk 18, 24n23, 127–130, 140 Mill, John Stuart 20 miracles 120–1, 122–3, 134–6; and the authority of Moses 116–19, 120–1, 123–5; and the battle with Amalek 130–2; and the death and burial of Moses 125–8; and Esther 136–42; and Joshua 121–2, 132–3; and questions on the Mishnah 119–20; and rebelliousness 128–30; and Ruth 142–4 Mishnah 119–20 moral communities 61–4 Moses: authority of 116–19, 120–1, 123–5; and the battle with

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Index Amalek 130–2; death and burial of 125–8; and Joshua 121–2, 132–3; and miracles 120–1, 122–3; and questions on the Mishnah 119–20; and rebelliousness 128–30

R. Nahman b. Isaac 69 nations 61–4; creating the nation of Abraham 65–6 Nineveh 46–9 Noah 5–9, 31, 33, 38, 98 participation, human: the Eden story 27–31; and Rebekah 34–7; resisting divine punishments 31–4 paschal sacrifice 112–15 Patriarchs and Matriarchs: and covenantal cooperation 76–8; degeneration of dreams 81–4; disappearance of God’s name 84–7; Joseph as a figure of epistemic decline 80–1; providence, fertility and famine 78–80 Pharoah 94–6; and temporality 96–107 playing God 18, 20, 103–7, 132 policies see economic policies population control 94–6; and temporality 96–107 prophetic authority: and the battle with Amalek 130–2; and the death and burial of Moses 125–8; and Joshua 121–2, 132–3; and miracles 120–1, 122–3; of Moses 116–19, 120–1, 123–5; and questions on the Mishnah

119–20; and rebelliousness 128–30 providence 78–80, 142–4 punishment 9–11, 29–33, 46–49, 128–9 rationality 49–52 Rebekah 29, 34–7, 77, 79 rebelliousness 128–30 Refidim, Battle of 119, 130–2 responsibility 9–11; Jonah at Nineveh 46–9; and the rational Akedah 49–52; Saul and genocide 40–6 revelation 66–8 Ruth 142–4 Sabbath 31–3, 112–15 sacrifice see paschal sacrifice Satan, God’s conversation with 54–8 Saul 40–6, 135 scriptural epistemology 65–73 slavery 68, 78, 87, 89–93, 94–107, 114 Sodom and Gomorrah 11–16, 18, 46, 51, 61 temporality 96–107, 112–15, 116 Tetragrammaton see God’s name (Tetragrammaton) Tower of Babel 11, 61–4 trust fall 52 truth of the courtroom 72 Walzer, Michael 45 whirlwind 54–8 Williams, Bernard 15, 17 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 4, 56, 97, 107 R. Yishmael, House of 32