LA REDENCION

 

Finding Redemption in the Passover Story

Doing history one better

Prof. Rabbi

Burton L. Visotzky

 

Categories:

Passover

Passover traditional Seder. Photo by Jorge Novominsky for the Israeli Ministry of Tourism. Flickr

Creating Nostalgic Memories

In my office and also on my refrigerator at home, I have the same photo. My son and I are holding our flippers, snorkels, and goggles as we emerge from the waters of Ras Mohamed, at the very southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. I love the picture because the wet-suit I rented that day makes me look slim and athletic. I love the memory because it was a very good day with my family. But I cherish the experience I had as a Jew, because there we are emerging from the Red Sea.

If I can appear slim and athletic in my mind’s eye, how much the more so can I manufacture a mythic memory of my son and me, men of the tribe of Levi, there in the Sinai, just having crossed the Red Sea on our journey from Egypt. Maybe snorkeling isn’t exactly dry land, and maybe the awe inspiring corals of Ras Mohamed are “not walls of water to our right and our left,” but even when I was there in the Gulf of Suez, my own reenactment made me feel that I, too, had braved the sea with my Israelite ancestors. The evidence is right there on my fridge, next to the kids’ graduation photos.

A Critical Appraisal of the Exodus Narrative

Evidence is the antithesis of mythic memory – so I am conscious that the photo and my nostalgia for the “crossing of the Red Sea” may be at odds with one another. In truth, I feel the same way at the Seder table when we commemorate our redemption from bondage, the Exodus from Egypt.

Back in the late 1990’s I consulted for DreamWorks for their animated feature, “Prince of Egypt,” so I can speak from experience about the actual manufacture of mythic memory. But when it comes to Jewish ritual, to fulfilling the commandments, to study of the Torah, I am acutely sensitive that I am not consulting, nor is the text a cartoon. And yet, a critical appraisal of the Exodus narrative leaves us remarkably short on evidence, with only walls of mythic memory encompassing us “to our right and our left.”^[1]

The first scholarly problem is the absence of mention of the Jews enslaved in Egypt throughout the Egyptian historical record. There is also a lack of data that might serve to verify our leaving Egypt. All those hieroglyphics, but no Israelites. And did we mention that the Egyptians have no record whatsoever of the ten plagues that devastated them?

Second, and perplexing even to the rabbis of old, is the sheer mathematics of the Exodus narrative. If the number of males who left Egypt at Passover was 600,000; we must also add women and children to the mix. True, not every Jewish man had a wife, but still: wives, children, the hangers-on who left along with the Israelites; all add up so that in the Mekilta d’Rabbi Ishmael the rabbis variously estimate the grand total ranging from 1,200,000 to as much as 3,600,000. While the Midrash can imagine that God’s Cloud of Glory acted like the Army Engineer Corps steamrolling a path for the Israelites through the wilderness, the logistics are the stuff of an historian’s nightmares. No amount of shock and awe can account for the numerical details of the narrative.^[2]

Why Slavery of all Things?

And yet, I whisper quietly in my soul, we moved. Despite all evidence to the contrary from the numbers, and despite no evidence to buttress the biblical account, we celebrate Passover. We change the dishes, invite the guests, drink the wine, eat the matzah. “We were slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt. Then God took us forth from there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.” What does it mean that this is the story we tell about our ancestors and ourselves? What does it mean when critical analysis and the historic record belie the most central narrative of Jews as a people? If the events described did not actually occur, if indeed this is but building mythic memory in the absence of evidence, why this narrative and not another? Indeed, how is this night different from all other nights?

We could have said we were the offspring of the Pharaohs; that we too deserved a place among the Egyptian high and mighty in the Valley of Kings. Instead, we claim that we were strangers there. We might have suggested that our ancestors were mighty warriors who defeated Pharaoh in battle with our prowess. We could have opted for the wisdom of the Greek philosophers, the wealth of Croesus, the nobility of King Arthur, but instead we sing how we were slaves. Really? Slaves?

There is much to be said for our emphasis that victory was not ours, but God’s. “Not by might, nor by strength, but by the spirit of God.” Okay, that seems like a noble idea. We owe God our gratitude for every breath we take. But slaves? We are talking about generations of slavery! –We’re talking centuries, 210 or 400 years depending on how we read the differing biblical traditions (either counting from Jacob’s descent into Egypt until the Exodus or the biblical prophecy in Genesis 15:13).^[3] Why do we say we were slaves? Strangers in the land of Egypt?

Finding Redemption

Here is the payoff of the myth making. This is why we Jews tell the story of our lowly origins despite the historical record or lack thereof. We are reminded we were slaves, strangers in the land of Egypt, so that we might not oppress the stranger. The Talmud (b. Baba Metsia 59b) counts that we are commanded not to oppress the stranger no fewer than thirty-six times in the Torah. God commands us to be vigilant. Do not oppress the stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. Do not be xenophobic, for you once were the outsider. Welcome the immigrant for you were once immigrants, oppressed by the whip.

I think we have done history one better. If, indeed, we have created a narrative, it is one that teaches us as a people to be generous (as God is generous), to be compassionate (as God is compassionate), to care for the downtrodden (as God cared for us in Egypt). Let all who are hungry come and eat. Let all who are in need, come celebrate the myth of our redemption, that we may again be redeemed.

View Footnotes

1.   See Richard Elliott Friedman, “The Historical Exodus,” TheTorah (2015).

2.   See David Glatt-Gilad, “How Many Years Were the Israelites in Egypt?” TheTorah (2016).

3.   See Ben-Zion Katz, “Recounting the Census: A Military Force of 5,500 (not 603,550) Men,” TheTorah (2015).

הפטרת בחוקותי

Jeremiah Buys Land in Prison, Symbolizing a Future Redemption

During the Babylonian siege, while Jeremiah was in King Zedekiah’s prison, he redeems his cousin'’s land, upon YHWH’s instruction. The incarcerated prophet thus symbolically enacts the future restoration for the people who will soon be exiled from their land.

Dr.

Anathea Portier-Young

 

Categories:

Bechukotai

Jeremiah and Baruch in prison, from W. A. Foster’s The Bible Panorama, 1891. Wikimedia

Redeeming His Cousin’s Land

Set during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem, Jeremiah 32 tells the story of how the prophet gives financial assistance to his cousin. The story begins with Jeremiah receiving a message from God even before his cousin makes the request:

^{ירמיה לב:ו} וַיֹּאמֶר יִרְמְיָהוּ הָיָה דְּבַר יְ־הוָה אֵלַי לֵאמֹר. ^לב:ז הִנֵּה חֲנַמְאֵל בֶּן שַׁלֻּם דֹּדְךָ בָּא אֵלֶיךָ לֵאמֹר קְנֵה לְךָ אֶת שָׂדִי אֲשֶׁר בַּעֲנָתוֹת כִּי לְךָ מִשְׁפַּט הַגְּאֻלָּה לִקְנוֹת.

 

^{Jer 32:6} Jeremiah said: “The word of YHWH came to me: ^32:7 ‘Hanamel, the son of your uncle Shallum, will come to you and say, “Buy my land in Anathoth, for you are next in succession to redeem it by purchase.”’”^[1]

This divine prediction soon comes to pass:

^{ירמיה לב:ח} וַיָּבֹא אֵלַי חֲנַמְאֵל בֶּן דֹּדִי כִּדְבַר יְ־הוָה אֶל חֲצַר הַמַּטָּרָה וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלַי קְנֵה נָא אֶת שָׂדִי אֲשֶׁר בַּעֲנָתוֹת אֲשֶׁר בְּאֶרֶץ בִּנְיָמִין כִּי לְךָ מִשְׁפַּט הַיְרֻשָּׁה וּלְךָ הַגְּאֻלָּה קְנֵה לָךְ וָאֵדַע כִּי דְבַר יְ־הוָה הוּא.

 

^{Jer 32:8} “And just as YHWH had said, my cousin Hanamel came to me in the prison compound and said to me, ‘Please buy my land in Anathoth, in the territory of Benjamin; for the right of succession is yours, and you have the duty of redemption. Buy it.’ Then I knew that it was indeed the word of YHWH.”

The narrative does not offer specific details as to why the land must be redeemed. We might imagine that Hanamel has encountered financial hardship during the siege or anticipates that Babylonian conquest will spell financial disaster for farmers. Whatever the case, Hanamel’s request invites Jeremiah to act as redeemer of their family landholdings.^[2]

Redemption and the Jubilee Legislation in Leviticus

The laws of property redemption are laid out at length in Leviticus 25, part of the Torah’s Holiness Collection (H). Verses 13–17 clarify that land purchases are not really purchases but long-term lease agreements that end in the jubilee year, and thus prices should be fixed by how many crop seasons a given parcel of land will grow in the period between the sale and the jubilee.

Verses 25–34 discuss a case in which someone sold their land because they were falling into debt and needed the money. This subcase introduces the redeemer:

^{ויקרא כה:כה} כִּי יָמוּךְ אָחִיךָ וּמָכַר מֵאֲחֻזָּתוֹ וּבָא גֹאֲלוֹ הַקָּרֹב אֵלָיו וְגָאַל אֵת מִמְכַּר אָחִיו.

 

^{Lev 25:25} If your kinsman is in straits and has to sell part of his holding, his nearest redeemer shall come and redeem what his kinsman has sold.

Kinsmen are obligated to bail out their relatives if they can.^[3] Specifically, the redeemer is supposed to pay the person who bought the field on behalf of the relative who sold it.^[4] But this is not what Hanamel asks Jeremiah to do.^[5]

Pre-emption

Jeremiah is asked to redeem the land before it has been sold to a third party, to purchase the field from Hanamel for himself:

^{ירמיה לב:ט} וָאֶקְנֶה אֶת הַשָּׂדֶה מֵאֵת חֲנַמְאֵל בֶּן דֹּדִי אֲשֶׁר בַּעֲנָתוֹת וָאֶשְׁקֲלָה לּוֹ אֶת הַכֶּסֶף שִׁבְעָה שְׁקָלִים וַעֲשָׂרָה הַכָּסֶף.

 

^{Jer 32:9} So I bought the land in Anathoth from my cousin Hanamel. I weighed out the money to him, seventeen shekels of silver.^[6]

Leviticus makes no mention of such a “pre-emption,” though a similar practice of pre-emption appears to be described in Ruth 4:3–9. Such a pre-emptive redemption would ensure that Hanamel’s family—in this case Jeremiah’s branch of it—would not lose their claim and connection to their ancestral land, even in their time of hardship.

Careful Weighing of Silver

In Jeremiah’s first-person account of the purchase of the field from Hanamel, the prophet emphasizes his own meticulous observance of the legal customs pertaining to purchase and redemption:

^{ירמיה לב:י} וָאֶכְתֹּב בַּסֵּפֶר וָאֶחְתֹּם וָאָעֵד עֵדִים וָאֶשְׁקֹל הַכֶּסֶף בְּמֹאזְנָיִם.

 

^{Jer 32:10} I wrote a deed, sealed it, and had it witnessed; and I weighed out the silver on a balance.^[7]

These details convey the seriousness of the transaction and its legitimacy. Jeremiah’s repeated reference to weighing the silver (in the presence of witnesses) is in line with the admonition in Leviticus 25:14, 17 that purchases of land among Israelites must be conducted in fairness, without oppression or violence (whether physical or structural).^[8]

Giving the Deed to Baruch

Next, Jeremiah hands off the deeds to his trusted amanuensis, Baruch ben Neriah:

^לב:יא וָאֶקַּח אֶת סֵפֶר הַמִּקְנָה אֶת הֶחָתוּם הַמִּצְוָה וְהַחֻקִּים וְאֶת הַגָּלוּי. ^לב:יב וָאֶתֵּן אֶת הַסֵּפֶר הַמִּקְנָה אֶל בָּרוּךְ בֶּן נֵרִיָּה בֶּן מַחְסֵיָה לְעֵינֵי חֲנַמְאֵל דֹּדִי וּלְעֵינֵי הָעֵדִים הַכֹּתְבִים בְּסֵפֶר הַמִּקְנָה לְעֵינֵי כָּל הַיְּהוּדִים הַיֹּשְׁבִים בַּחֲצַר הַמַּטָּרָה.

 

^{Jer 32:11} I took the deed of purchase, the sealed text and the open one according to rule and law, ^32:12 and gave the deed to Baruch son of Neriah son of Mahseiah in the presence of my kinsman Hanamel, of the witnesses who were named in the deed, and all the Judeans who were sitting in the prison compound.

Here the story connects us back to something we learned earlier in the chapter: Jeremiah is in prison.

The Captive Prophet

Chapter 32 opens with two important elements that contextualize the account of the land redemption: Jerusalem is under siege by the Babylonians and Jeremiah is imprisoned in Zedekiah’s court of the guard:

^{ירמיה לב:א} הַדָּבָר אֲשֶׁר הָיָה אֶל יִרְמְיָהוּ מֵאֵת יְ־הוָה (בשנת) [בַּשָּׁנָה] הָעֲשִׂרִית לְצִדְקִיָּהוּ מֶלֶךְ יְהוּדָה הִיא הַשָּׁנָה שְׁמֹנֶה עֶשְׂרֵה שָׁנָה לִנְבוּכַדְרֶאצַּר. ^לב:ב וְאָז חֵיל מֶלֶךְ בָּבֶל צָרִים עַל יְרוּשָׁלָ‍ִם וְיִרְמְיָהוּ הַנָּבִיא הָיָה כָלוּא בַּחֲצַר הַמַּטָּרָה אֲשֶׁר בֵּית מֶלֶךְ יְהוּדָה. ^לב:ג אֲשֶׁר כְּלָאוֹ צִדְקִיָּהוּ מֶלֶךְ יְהוּדָה לֵאמֹר מַדּוּעַ אַתָּה נִבָּא לֵאמֹר כֹּה אָמַר יְ־הוָה הִנְנִי נֹתֵן אֶת הָעִיר הַזֹּאת בְּיַד מֶלֶךְ בָּבֶל וּלְכָדָהּ.

 

^{Jer 32:1} The word which came to Jeremiah from YHWH in the tenth year of King Zedekiah of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of Nebuchadrezzar. ^32:2 At that time the army of the king of Babylon was besieging Jerusalem, and the prophet Jeremiah was confined in the prison compound attached to the palace of the king of Judah. ^32:3 For King Zedekiah of Judah had confined him, saying, “How dare you prophesy: ‘Thus said YHWH: “I am delivering this city into the hands of the king of Babylon, and he shall capture it….”’”^[9]

Jeremiah is in the “prison compound attached to the palace” of king Zedekiah; having been arrested because he prophesied the success of Babylon against Judah.^[10] Thus, Hanamel’s request seems insensitive, as he is asking Jeremiah to act as redeemer from the midst of his (Jeremiah’s) own confinement. Moreover, Hanamel doesn’t even offer to help negotiate the incarcerated prophet’s freedom (which might be analogous to acting as redeemer on Jeremiah’s behalf), nor does he offer to provide for Jeremiah’s needs in captivity.

Jeremiah doesn’t react to this insensitivity but immediately acquiesces to the request. This was not merely a sign that he takes his familial responsibility seriously, but a reflection of the symbolic meaning that he attributes to the act.^[11]

Jeremiah’s Planning and Optimism

Purchasing land while in prison is a sign of optimism. Jeremiah believes that he and his descendants, or at least his kinsmen, will one day be able to work the land that he bought. Jeremiah’s long-term planning is clear from his instructions to Baruch:

^{ירמיה לב:יג} וָאֲצַוֶּה אֶת בָּרוּךְ לְעֵינֵיהֶם לֵאמֹר. ^לב:יד כֹּה אָמַר יְ־הוָה צְבָאוֹת אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל לָקוֹחַ אֶת הַסְּפָרִים הָאֵלֶּה אֵת סֵפֶר הַמִּקְנָה הַזֶּה וְאֵת הֶחָתוּם וְאֵת סֵפֶר הַגָּלוּי הַזֶּה וּנְתַתָּם בִּכְלִי חָרֶשׂ לְמַעַן יַעַמְדוּ יָמִים רַבִּים.

 

^{Jer 32:13} In their presence I charged Baruch as follows: ^32:14 Thus said YHWH of Hosts, the God of Israel: “Take these documents, this deed of purchase, the sealed text and the open one, and put them into an earthen jar, so that they may last a long time.”

The repeated detail of two copies of the deed of purchase, one sealed and one open (Jer 32:11, 14), can be understood on both a literal and a symbolic level.^[12] At the literal level, the deposit of both deeds ensures that Jeremiah’s investment in redemption will yield return for his family regardless of whether he personally is able to claim or work this land in the future.

The choice of vocabulary used to describe the two deeds suggests that they have symbolic value. The qal passive participle חָתוּם, here translated “sealed,” also means shut-up, shut-inside, locked up, while the qal passive participle גָּלוּי (from the root גלה), here translated “open,” also means “exposed” and “taken into exile.” The people of Judah are the subjects of this symbolism.

The symbolic meaning is made explicit in Jeremiah’s next sentence:

^{ירמיה לב:טו} כִּי כֹה אָמַר יְ־הוָה צְבָאוֹת אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל עוֹד יִקָּנוּ בָתִּים וְשָׂדוֹת וּכְרָמִים בָּאָרֶץ הַזֹּאת.

 

^{Jer 32:15} For thus said YHWH of Hosts, the God of Israel: “Houses, fields, and vineyards shall again be purchased in this land.”

These documents, sealed and open, represent one promise for the people under siege, shut-up within city, the people in the countryside of Judah, vulnerable to Babylonian forces, the people already in exile, and the people who will be taken into exile, but will someday return.^[13]

The text continues with Jeremiah asking YHWH if it is really possible that the Judahites will inhabit the land again after the Babylonians conquer and destroy it, and YHWH responds by asking rhetorically if anything is really impossible for him to accomplish (vv. 16–41). The chapter ends with God’s promise:

^{ירמיה לב:מב} כִּי כֹה אָמַר יְ־הוָה כַּאֲשֶׁר הֵבֵאתִי אֶל הָעָם הַזֶּה אֵת כָּל הָרָעָה הַגְּדוֹלָה הַזֹּאת כֵּן אָנֹכִי מֵבִיא עֲלֵיהֶם אֶת כָּל הַטּוֹבָה אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי דֹּבֵר עֲלֵיהֶם. ^לב:מג וְנִקְנָה הַשָּׂדֶה בָּאָרֶץ הַזֹּאת אֲשֶׁר אַתֶּם אֹמְרִים שְׁמָמָה הִיא מֵאֵין אָדָם וּבְהֵמָה נִתְּנָה בְּיַד הַכַּשְׂדִּים. ^לב:מד שָׂדוֹת בַּכֶּסֶף יִקְנוּ וְכָתוֹב בַּסֵּפֶר וְחָתוֹם וְהָעֵד עֵדִים בְּאֶרֶץ בִּנְיָמִן וּבִסְבִיבֵי יְרוּשָׁלַ‍ִם וּבְעָרֵי יְהוּדָה וּבְעָרֵי הָהָר וּבְעָרֵי הַשְּׁפֵלָה וּבְעָרֵי הַנֶּגֶב כִּי אָשִׁיב אֶת שְׁבוּתָם נְאֻם יְ־הוָה.

 

^{Jer 32:42} For thus said YHWH: “As I have brought this terrible disaster upon this people, so I am going to bring upon them the vast good fortune which I have promised for them. ^32:43 And fields shall again be purchased in this land of which you say, ‘It is a desolation, without man or beast; it is delivered into the hands of the Chaldeans.’ ^32:44 Fields shall be purchased, and deeds written and sealed, and witnesses called in the land of Benjamin and in the environs of Jerusalem, and in the towns of Judah; the towns of the hill country, the towns of the Shephelah, and the towns of the Negeb. For I will restore their fortunes”—declares YHWH.

As a symbol of YHWH’s pre-emption of the people who will go into exile, Jeremiah’s careful purchase signifies that YHWH has attended in advance to every necessary detail in order to ensure the future YHWH has planned for the people of Israel.

A People with a Future

Jeremiah’s land redemption functions as a sign and enactment of Israel’s future, both the people and the land. Even though Nebuchadnezzar will conquer and destroy Jerusalem, the land and people will not be lost to one another. The prisoner-prophet embodies the people’s condition and their future.

His confinement also mirrors that of the Jerusalemites, who are under siege, amplifying and emblematizing their shared condition. And though he will later be taken not to Babylonia, but to Egypt (43:6–7), his repeated imprisonment also symbolizes the people of Israel who are already in exile and presages the Babylonian captivity in store for many of Judah’s leaders and citizens.

YHWH’s choice to work through the imprisoned prophet similarly presages YHWH’s choice to empower YHWH’s people for covenant obedience (32:39–40) when they are restored to their land (32:41). Captivity will be temporary and will not spell the end of this covenant relationship.

View Footnotes

1.   The English is from the NJPS Tanakh translation, with slight adjustments.

2.   Kelvin Friebel suggests that, because Jeremiah had publicly advocated surrender to the Babylonians, Hanamel may have imagined that Jeremiah would be in a stronger position to ensure that their family retained possession of this land in the future. See Kelvin G. Friebel, Jeremiah’s and Ezekiel’s Sign-Acts: Rhetorical Non-Verbal Communication (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 318.

3.   See discussion in, John Bergsma, The Jubilee from Leviticus to Qumran: A History of Interpretation (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 64.

4.   This is clear from the next verses, which explain how the price is calculated:

^כה:כו וְאִישׁ כִּי לֹא יִהְיֶה לּוֹ גֹּאֵל וְהִשִּׂיגָה יָדוֹ וּמָצָא כְּדֵי גְאֻלָּתוֹ. ^כה:כז וְחִשַּׁב אֶת שְׁנֵי מִמְכָּרוֹ וְהֵשִׁיב אֶת הָעֹדֵף לָאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר מָכַר לוֹ וְשָׁב לַאֲחֻזָּתוֹ.

 

^25:26 If a man has no one to redeem for him, but prospers and acquires enough to redeem with, ^25:27 he shall compute the years since its sale, refund the difference to the man to whom he sold it, and return to his holding.

The purchaser is required at all times to allow the seller or his kin to pay back the value of the remaining years and retake the field for the family.

5.   Note that this passage is located in a section of Leviticus (chaps. 17—27) commonly referred to by scholars as the Holiness Collection or Code, whose date is debated. Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17—22: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Anchor Yale Bible Commentary; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, 1361-1364), for example, argues for a pre-exilic date. Jeffrey Stackert argues for a date after 622, leaving open the possibility of an exilic or post-exilic date (Rewriting the Torah: Literary Revision in Deuteronomy and the Holiness Legislation [FAT; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2007, 17-18 and passim). Given the uncertainty regarding the dating of the Holiness Collection, it is difficult to ascertain whether this legislation was known and practiced in the time of Jeremiah.

6.   Lisbeth S. Fried and David Noel Freedman argue instead that a) the land was part of Jeremiah’s patrimony and b) Hanamel approached him in a jubilee year, meaning that Jeremiah would at this time have had the opportunity to reclaim what had previously been his. “Was the Jubilee observed in Preexilic Judah?” in Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 23–27: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB3c; New York: Doubleday, 2000), 2257–70.

7.   Editor’s note: For more on how silver was used in this period, see Tzilla Eshel, “How Silver Was Used for Payment,” TheTorah (2018).

8.   The family member who exercises this right of redemption mirrors, embodies, and participates in the liberative work of YHWH, who “freed [YHWH’s servants] from the land of Egypt” (Lev 25:55). Just as Leviticus places such familial acts of redemption in the broader context of YHWH’s own liberative, redemptive, and restorative work, so Jeremiah’s action will participate in and function as a sign and guarantee of the liberation and restoration that YHWH will work on behalf of people and land following the Babylonian conquest and captivity. For an opposing view, see Steed Vernyl Davidson, Empire and Exile: Postcolonial Readings of the Book of Jeremiah (New York: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2011), 72.

9.   Jeremiah’s captivity is a recurrent motif in the book. The timeline of Jeremiah’s incarcerations is not linear:

[W]ithin the (arguably loose) timeline of the book of Jeremiah, this scene [Jer 32] is dislocated. As we move forward in the book, we will move backward again in time, before the reign of Zedekiah to his predecessor Jehoiakim (Jeremiah 36), then gradually forward to a period earlier in Zedekiah’s reign (Jeremiah 37–39:1). Narratively, we come to this cusp, this almost-ending, then back away from it before we come up to it again, and finally cross the threshold into exile. The investment in hope and future this passage narrates and elicits will help equip the audience to face the realities of destruction and slaughter that is yet to unfold.

Anathea Portier-Young, “Commentary on Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6–15,” workingpreacher.org (September 29, 2019).

10.                    In Jeremiah 20, the prophet is placed in stocks (20:2). The narrator reminds the reader of Jeremiah’s captivity at 33:1 and later we are told that Jeremiah was arrested on charges of desertion to the Babylonian cause (37:14) and imprisoned in a house that had been converted to a jail (37:15).There he was placed “in the pit and the cells,” where he remained “a long time” (37:16; cf. v. 18). Chapter 38 narrates Jeremiah’s confinement in and rescue from a cistern in the prison compound (38:7–13); the narrator takes pains to assert that Jeremiah remained in custody in the prison compound after his rescue from the cistern (38:13) until the fall of Jerusalem (38:28; cf. 39:14–15). While there remains much we do not know about incarceration in ancient Judea, readers interested in the social and material realities of incarceration in the ancient world may consult Edward Peters, “The Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds,” in The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (Ed. Norval Morris and David Rothman; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3–43; Matthew Larsen, “Carceral Practices and Geographies in Roman North Africa,” Studies in Late Antiquity 3, no. 4 (2019): 547–577; Julia Hillner, Prison, Punishment, and Penance in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). On the close relationship between language of incarceration and language of exile in texts of the Hebrew Bible, see Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, A Biblical Theology of Exile, Overtures to Biblical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 71–73. It should be noted that there are stark differences between the contemporary prison-industrial system (especially as it exists in the United States) and practices of incarceration in ancient Judea. Imprisonment is not a punishment prescribed in biblical law, for example. Instead, biblical narratives suggest that incarceration was a tool for confining/limiting the agency of political opponents and for holding individuals awaiting trial.

11.                    Editor’s note: For a different analysis of these compositional elements in the chapter, looking at how the text may have developed in layers, see Mark Leuchter, “Turning Jeremiah's Land Deed into an Oracle of Hope,” TheTorah (2016).

12.                    Ben Zion Wacholder argues for a correspondence between these two documents in Jeremiah 32 and references to “the sealed torah” (hattorah heḥathum) and “revealed [torah]” (niglah) in CD V.1–6. “The ‘Sealed’ Torah versus the ‘Revealed’ Torah: an exegesis of Damascus Covenant V, 1–6 and Jeremiah 32:10–14,” Revue de Qumran 12.3 (1984): 351–368. Wacholder also reviews competing proposals for the “form” of Jeremiah’s two scrolls. One links Jeremiah’s two scrolls to the description in m. B. Bat. 10:1 of a “simple document” (גֵּט פָּשׁוּט) and a “sewn one” (מְקֻשָּׁר), with material analogues discovered at Wadi Murabbaʿat and Masada; a second proposal suggests that under normal circumstances a sealed, formal copy would be deposited in an archive while the purchaser would retain an unofficial (“open”) copy for their own records (358–359).

13.                    For Terence Fretheim, this judgment is the path to restoration: “it is only through judgment that salvation becomes possible,” because, according to Fretheim’s understanding of Jeremiah 32, to short-circuit the judgment would be unfaithful to the covenant relationship. Terence E. Fretheim, “Is Anything Too Hard for God? (Jeremiah 32:27)” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 66.2 (2004): 231–236.

Sukkot, the Festival of Future Redemption for Jews and Gentiles

Zechariah 14 envisions a time when all the nations will come to the Temple in Jerusalem on Sukkot. The festival’s eschatological significance in the Second Temple period may be further hinted at in Pseudepigraphical works, in the book of Revelation, and on coins minted during the great rebellion and the Bar Kochba rebellion.

Prof. Rabbi

Joshua Garroway

Categories:

Sukkot

Sukkah near Western Wall, Jerusalem (2008). © Simon Mannweiler / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Sukkot can be awkward when you are the only Jewish family on the block. I recall the curiosity we encountered when erecting a sukkah for the first time at our home in Pasadena, California. The clangs and bangs in the backyard brought out the neighbors on all sides, who peered suspiciously at the bizarre sight: a makeshift hut with a lightly thatched roof, festooned with construction paper rings and suspended gourds.

Onlookers brave enough to inquire learned about the Jewish customs of their new neighbors. Both they and the more bashful were invited to join us for dinner the following night. Eight years later and the sukkah has become a familiar late-summer/early-fall visitor to the neighborhood, but I am quite certain that the non-Jewish denizens still find it rather weird.

Zechariah 14, therefore, gives me solace. In this passage, which is the haftarah for the first day of Sukkot, the prophet foresees a day when many gentiles will celebrate Sukkot alongside Jews, not by building booths on their diaspora residences, but by converging annually upon Jerusalem to worship God—a time when “Adonai will be one, and his name one” (Zech 14:9), as Jews pray for thrice daily in aleinu.^[1]

Gentiles Celebrating Sukkot in Zechariah 14

The oracles recorded in Zechariah 9-14, so-called Deutero-Zechariah,^[2] represent a notorious interpretive mare’s nest. The last oracle is no exception. Martin Luther famously surrendered to the passage by lamenting, “Here, in this chapter, I give up. For I am not sure what the prophet is talking about.”^[3] Modern scholars have not followed Luther in his restraint, but their commentaries have yielded little to no consensus regarding who composed the chapter, when, where, or why.

Zechariah 14 envisions a complex eschatological scenario:

1) Armies attack Jerusalem—An ominous “Day of YHWH” arises, during which foreign armies attack Jerusalem, plunder it, and send many Jews into exile (14:1–2);

2) YHWH Appears—YHWH, appearing on the Mount of Olives and splitting the earth asunder, joins the battle (14:3–5);

3) Miraculous Light—YHWH inaugurates a period of supernatural phenomena in which sunlight and moonlight give way to a new kind of luminosity, while living waters flow forth from a secure Jerusalem (14:6–11);

4) Enemies Defeated—The armies that invaded Jerusalem are stricken with plague, then plundered by the remaining Jewish armies (14:12–15);

5) Nations Observe Sukkot—The war having finished, survivors from the nations flock to Jerusalem annually to observe Sukkot; those who do not are punished with drought; (14:16-19)

^{זכריה יד:טז} וְהָיָה כָּל הַנּוֹתָר מִכָּל הַגּוֹיִם הַבָּאִים עַל יְרוּשָׁלָ‍ִם וְעָלוּ מִדֵּי שָׁנָה בְשָׁנָה לְהִשְׁתַּחֲו‍ֹת לְמֶלֶךְ יְ־הוָה צְבָאוֹת וְלָחֹג אֶת חַג הַסֻּכּוֹת.

 

^{Zech 14:16} All who survive of all those nations that came up against Jerusalem shall make a pilgrimage year by year to bow low to the King YHWH of Hosts and to observe the Feast of Booths.

6) Elevated Holiness—Jerusalem reaches unknown heights of holiness, as household cooking pots become as sacred as utensils before the altar. (14:20–21);

Why Sukkot?

While most of these eschatological events find parallels within the repertoire of prophetic and apocalyptic Jewish literature from the Second Temple period, stage (5) is peculiar. Why is Sukkot singled out as the aspect of Jewish observance that Gentiles ultimately will adopt? Is Sukkot here a metonym standing for all three pilgrimage festivals or perhaps even for Jewish life in general, or does the author mean Sukkot and only Sukkot?

Most interpreters have opted for the latter view, taking as their guide the preeminent status Sukkot appears to have acquired in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. Even before the exile, the Deuteronomic historian refers to Sukkot simply as החג, "the festival" (1 Kgs. 8:1-2), a practice that continues in the exilic (Ezek. 45:23) and postexilic periods (Neh. 8:14; 2 Chron. 5:3), continuing into rabbinic literature.^[4]

The modeling of Chanukah on Sukkot in 2 Maccabees^[5] offers further proof that, as Jeffrey L. Rubinstein has put it, by the third century B.C.E. Sukkot “became the main pilgrimage and primary temple festival, and retained this status until the destruction in 70 C.E.”^[6] It is no wonder, therefore, that the seer in Zechariah 14, probably writing at some time between the fifth and second centuries B.C.E., portrayed the ultimate obedience of the gentiles to God by their participation in the ultimate Temple festival, Sukkot.

An Eschatological Pilgrimage of Gentiles

The representation of a gentile pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the idealized future in Zechariah 14 taps into a widespread trope in ancient Jewish eschatology. Such a hope had already been expressed in Isaiah’s famous prediction that,

^{ישעיה ב:ב} וְהָיָה בְּאַחֲרִית הַיָּמִים נָכוֹן יִהְיֶה הַר בֵּית יְ־הוָה בְּרֹאשׁ הֶהָרִים וְנִשָּׂא מִגְּבָעוֹת וְנָהֲרוּ אֵלָיו כָּל הַגּוֹיִם. ^ב:ג וְהָלְכוּ עַמִּים רַבִּים וְאָמְרוּ לְכוּ וְנַעֲלֶה אֶל הַר יְ־הוָה אֶל בֵּית אֱלֹהֵי יַעֲקֹב וְיֹרֵנוּ מִדְּרָכָיו וְנֵלְכָה בְּאֹרְחֹתָיו.

 

^{Isa 2:2} In the days to come, the Mount of YHWH's House shall stand firm above the mountains and tower above the hills; and all the nations shall gaze on it with joy. ^2:3 And the many peoples shall go and say: "Come, Let us go up to the Mount of YHWH, to the House of the God of Jacob; that He may instruct us in His ways, and that we may walk in His paths."^[7]

Third Isaiah (Is. 56:7; 60:5-6)^[8] said much the same:

^{זכריה ח:כב} וּבָאוּ עַמִּים רַבִּים וְגוֹיִם עֲצוּמִים לְבַקֵּשׁ אֶת יְ־הוָה צְבָאוֹת בִּירוּשָׁלָ‍ִם וּלְחַלּוֹת אֶת פְּנֵי יְ־הוָה.

 

^{Zech 8:22} The many peoples and the multitude of nations shall come to seek YHWH of Hosts in Jerusalem and to entreat the favor of YHWH.

Jewish Apocalyptic Literature

Although the other preserved Jewish apocalypticists of the Second Temple period do not mention Sukkot, they express universalistic ideas similar to those found in Zechariah 14 and its parallels. For example, 1 Enoch 90 (ca. 150 B.C.E.) describes an eschatological vision in which the Jews (represented by the sheep) will be revered by the gentiles (represented by all other animals) and will go with them to the Temple:

^90:30 And I saw the sheep which were left, and all the animals on the earth and all the birds of heaven falling down and worshipping those sheep, and entreating them and obeying them in every command…. ^90:33 And all those which had been destroyed and scattered and all the wild animals and all the birds of heaven gathered in that house, and the Lord of the she sheep rejoiced very much because they were all good and returned to his house.^[9]

The Psalms of Solomon (ca. 2^nd cent. B.C.E.), in perhaps the earliest description of a messianic redeemer descended from David, foresees the king purifying Jerusalem (Ps. Sol. 17:31):

So that nations may come from the end of the earth to see his glory... and to see the glory of the Lord.

So significant was an eschatological pilgrimage of gentiles to Jerusalem in (apocalyptic) Jewish thought that many historians have argued that Paul’s eagerness to spread the message of redemption through Christ to gentiles the world over is best explained as an effort to manifest this aspect of history’s consummation. In other words, if the future time will bring about the conversion of gentiles, then the conversion of gentiles signals (and may bring about) the end times, when the Messiah will return.^[10]

On Sukkot?

Can we assume that these authors, like the author of Zechariah 14, believed that the pilgrimage they describe constitutes an observance of Sukkot? Is it possible that this assumption is in the background? For example, 2 Baruch 68:5 (1^st-2^nd cent. C.E.) says:

^68:5 Zion will again be rebuilt, and its offerings will again be restored, and the priests will return to their ministry, and also the Gentiles will come to glorify it.”

Can we interpret this to mean, “Gentiles will come to glorify it [on Sukkot]”? The same suggestion can be offered about the other sources as well. Alternatively, perhaps Zechariah 14 was unique in identifying the eschatological pilgrimage specifically with Sukkot.

It is impossible to say, of course, but two further pieces of evidence hint at a messianic valence to Sukkot well into the first and second centuries C.E.^[11]

Symbols of Sukkot on the Coins of the Revolts

During the Jewish insurrection against Rome from 66 to 73 CE, the rebels minted coins as a demonstration of their independence.^[12] The bronze coins bear the dating scheme, “year one” (i.e., 66–67 C.E.), “year two” (67–68 C.E.), and so on, and read לחרות ציון, “the freedom of Zion.” The coins of “year four” differ from those of previous years—they used the phrase, לגאולת ציון, “the redemption of Zion,” and clearly depict a lulav and etrog. Why the change?

Coins from year four of the Jewish Revolt against Rome. Credit: IAA Right: Bottom/front depicts a lulav between two etrogs and says שנת ארבע ("year 4"); the top/back depicts a goblet, possibly for the water libation, and says לגאולת ציון ("of the redemption of Zion"). Left: Bottom/front depicts two lulavs and the top/back an etrog. The writing is the same except the front also says רביע, meaning it is a "quarter [shekel]."

Some historians have taken it to mean that the insurgents, in the months leading up to the sack of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., shifted the aspiration of their campaign from a this-worldly “freedom” from Rome to a messianic “redemption of Zion” brought about by intervention from God, and this shift was indicated not only by the change in phrasing, but also by adopting iconography associated with eschatological redemption—namely, the lulav and etrog of Sukkot.^[13]

"Freedom of Jerusalem" coin from the Bar Kochba rebellion, Wikimedia. Left/Front depicts the facade of the Temple with the Ark inside, and says שמעון (Simon), i.e., Bar Kochba. Right/back depicts a lulav and etrog and says לחרות ירושלם ("of the freedom of Jerusalem")

If this explanation is correct, then it is intriguing how the Bar Kochba rebellion, which broke out sixty years later, developed differently. The Bar Kochba imagery, including the star which appears in his name and on some coins, is overtly messianic. Coins from this revolt also feature the lulav and etrog, but in this case the phraseology begins by using the term גאולה “redemption” in the first year, and moves to חרות ירושלם, “freedom of Jerusalem” in the second; some coins even feature both terms on opposite sides.

A Vision of Jews and Christians Celebrating Sukkot Together

A more explicit connection between messianic redemption and Sukkot, as well as an eschatological pilgrimage of Gentiles, occurs in the Book of Revelation, the final book in the New Testament Canon. These oracles, attributed to John of Patmos^[14] and probably penned sometime between the two Jewish revolts, describe a series of well-ordered trials and tribulations that will occur in advance of the end-times victory of Christ (depicted as the Lamb) over Rome, (depicted as the whore of Babylon), followed by a great judgment, a new heaven and earth, and a new Jerusalem.^[15]

In one of the earlier visions in the book, believers will be worshiping God in the heavenly throne room. One part of that group comprises 144,000 Jews—12,000 from each tribe—marked for protection with a seal on their forehead, and deemed “the servants of our God.” The second group is a throng of gentiles (Rev 7:9–15, NRSV):

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying,

“Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”

And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing,

“Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might
be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them.”

This passage depicts a heavenly pilgrimage specifically on Sukkot. This is implied by the palm branches in the hands of the worshippers. Furthermore, their cry for “Salvation” parallels the אנא ה׳ הושיעה נא, “Please, Lord, please deliver us!” (Psalm 118:25) that accompanies the shaking of the lulav according to Mishnah Sukkah 3:9. The description of God is suggestive as well: God “will shelter” the pilgrims: the Greek verb for “shelter,” skēnoō, is a version of the noun skēnē, the Septuagint’s translation for the Hebrew סכה, sukkah.

The Christian Jewish author of Revelation, then, fashions a specifically Christian and heavenly version of the venerable Jewish notion of an eschatological pilgrimage of the Gentiles. As in Zechariah, the culmination is in a celebration of Sukkot.^[16] In his view, Jews, presumably Christian Jews, are marked off for salvation first. Thereafter, innumerable (Christian) Gentiles “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” appear before their sheltering God with fronds in hand.

Is John of Patmos thereby giving expression to a commonly held, if rarely expressed, ancient Jewish expectation about an eschatological Sukkot, or is Revelation 7 simply a refashioning of the prophecy in Zechariah 14? We cannot know. At the very the least, we can say that two ancient seers, one canonized by Jews and both canonized by Christians, foresaw the day when all the world’s faithful would appear before God to celebrate Sukkot.

View Footnotes

1.   Editor’s note: For more on Aleinu, see Reuven Kimelman, “Aleinu: God of All, or God of the Jews?” TheTorah (2014); idem, “The Future World as a Universal Temple,” TheTorah (2015).

2.   Most biblical scholars divide the book of Zechariah between chapters 1-8, the oracles associated with the prophet himself, and chapters 9-14, Deutero-Zechariah, the oracles added later and which never mention the name Zechariah. Indeed, commentary series often treat them in discrete volumes (e.g., Carol L. and Eric M. Meyers, Haggai, Zechariah 1-8, Anchor Bible Commentary [New York: Doubleday, 1987]; Zechariah 9-14, Anchor Bible Commentary [New York: Doubleday, 1993]; and David L. Petersen. Haggai and Zechariah 1-8, Old Testament Library [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985]; Zechariah 9-14 and Malachi, Old Testament Library [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1995]).

3.   This was in his second commentary on Zechariah, introducing the fourteenth chapter; see Martin Luther, “Lectures on Zechariah. The German Text, 1527,” in Luther’s Works, Vol. 20: Lectures on the Minor Prophets III: Zechariah, ed. Hilton C. Oswald (St. Louis: Concordia, 1973), 337. In his first commentary on Zechariah, composed in the previous year, Luther simply ignored chapter 14.

4.   The popularity of Sukkot may be connected to the simple fact that it comes at the end of the harvest seasons, such that it is easier for people to make a pilgrimage.

5.   Editor’s note: See Yael Avrahami, "Identifying the Building Blocks of Chanukah," TheTorah (2014).

6.   Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, The History of Sukkot in the Second Temple and Rabbinic Periods, Brown Judaic Studies 302 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1995), 100. The epistle that opens the book of 2 Maccabees dates to the year 124 BCE. Written by Jews in Jerusalem to the Jews in Egypt, this letter calls upon the letter to “celebrate the Days of Sukkot in the month of Kislev” (2 Macc. 1:9).

7.   On Second Temple era attitudes towards Gentiles generally, and regarding eschatological salvation specifically, see Terence L. Donaldson, Judaism and the Gentiles: Jewish Patterns of Universalism (to 135 CE) (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), esp. 499-505.

8.   Many scholars divide Isaiah into three books: The book of the prophet Isaiah, chs. 1–39; the book of an unnamed exilic prophet referred to as Deutero-Isaiah (i.e., second Isaiah), chs. 40–55; the book of an unnamed post-exilic prophet, referred to as Trito-Isaiah (i.e., third Isaiah), chs. 56–66.

9.   See also, Sibylline Oracles 3 (ca. 2^nd cent. B.C.E.), 773-775.

10.                    The foundational work in this regard is Johannes Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind (London: SCM, 1959).

11.                    Editor’s note: For a discussion of Sukkot’s connections with messianism, see Malka Zeiger Simkovich, "Sukkot, the Temple, and the Messianic Controversy," TheTorah (2013).

12.                    For a helpful discussion of these coins, including references to the works in which images of them can be found, see Rubinstein, The History of Sukkot, 97-99.

13.                    Editor’s Note: For a discussion of how the lulav and its procession was perceived in the Gentile world during the Second Temple period, see Rene Bloch, "What Sukkot Meant to Jews and Gentiles in Greco-Roman Antiquity," TheTorah (2018).

14.                    For a discussion of John of Patmos in a different context, see my, “Balaam the Seducer of Jews and an Early Christian Polemic,”TheTorah (2017).

15.                    Editor’s note: For another discussion of Revelation and Sukkot, see Shayna Sheinfeld, "Sukkot in the New Testament: From Lulav to Palm Sunday," TheTorah (2018).

16.                    Not every interpreter thinks that Rev 7:9-15 refers to a celebration of Sukkot. Opponents find the parallels to Psalm 118 and the verb skēnoō unconvincing and regard the palm fronds as a symbol of victory rather than Sukkot. See, for example, Robert H. Charles, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Revelation of St. John, ICC, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1920), 211. For the most compelling interpretations of the connection between Rev. 7:9-15 and Sukkot, see Jonathan A. Draper, “The Heavenly Feast of Tabernacles: Revelation 7.1-17,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 19 (1983): 133-47; and Håkan Ulfgard, Feast and Future: Revelation 7:9-17 and the Feast of Tabernacles, Coniectanea Biblica NT Series 22 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1989).

פדיון הבן

Relegating Redemption of the Firstborn to a One-time Event in the Wilderness

The Priestly Torah has two different conceptions of why/how the firstborn Israelites are exempt from serving as priests. Is a questionable firstborn census an effort to weigh in on this dispute?

Dr.

Eve Levavi Feinstein ,

 

Dr. Rabbi

Zev Farber

 

Categories:

Bamidbar

The Mitzvah of Pidyon HaBen

Sekhel Tov of R. Menachem ben Shlomo (12^th cent., Rome)

With regard to the redemption of the firstborn, when [a father] comes to give five selas or their equivalent to the Kohen, the Kohen asks the father: “Is he a firstborn?” The father answers: “Yes.” [The Kohen asks]: “Do you wish to redeem him?” The father answers: “Yes.”

The Kohen says to the firstborn [= a month-old child]: “When you were in your mother’s womb, you were independent. Now you are in our possession and you have become consecrated, as the Torah says (Exod 13:2), ‘consecrate each first born to me.’ Now, these coins or objects are mundane while you are consecrated, but your forefathers accepted upon themselves to redeem you with them from the Kohen, just as the Torah said (Num 18:16), ‘Take as their redemption price, from the age of one month up, the money equivalent of five shekels by the sanctuary weight.’ You are leaving our possession in exchange for these coins and you are now mundane and in the possession of your fathers, while these objects enter our possession in your stead to redeem you.”^[1]

Introduction – Pidyon HaBen

Most of us are familiar with the mitzvah of pidyon haben, where a father hands over five silver coins to a Kohen to “ransom” his son. In theory, if a father were not to pay this ransom for his firstborn, that boy would be consecrated to God like a Levite or Kohen. This institution is confusing, since there appears to be no historical precedent whatsoever for firstborns serving as Levites or Priests in postbiblical or even biblical times.^[2]

Some biblical sources imply that unredeemed firstborn boys are consecrated to God, though it appears that for millennia this redemption process was a ritual with no practical consequences for those who did not perform it.^[3] Other sources imply that firstborn males need not be redeemed, since Moses already redeemed them and/or traded them for Levites in the wilderness. Let us begin by looking at this latter model.

The One-Time Levite-Firstborn Replacement: An Overview of Chapter 3

After completing the census of the Israelites (Numbers 1-2), God’s first command to Moses in chapter 3 is to place the Levites into the hands of Aaron and the priests, because they were given to God by the Israelites to serve (vv. 5-10). Next, God explains that the Levites are actually a replacement for the Israelite firstborn who are God’s, because of what happened in Egypt.

^ג:יא וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר יְ-הֹוָ֖ה אֶל מֹשֶׁ֥ה לֵּאמֹֽר: ^ג:יבוַאֲנִ֞י הִנֵּ֧ה לָקַ֣חְתִּי אֶת הַלְוִיִּ֗ם מִתּוֹךְ֙ בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל תַּ֧חַת כָּל בְּכ֛וֹר פֶּ֥טֶר רֶ֖חֶם מִבְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וְהָ֥יוּ לִ֖י הַלְוִיִּֽם: ^ג:יג כִּ֣י לִי֘ כָּל בְּכוֹר֒ בְּיוֹם֩ הַכֹּתִ֨י כָל בְּכ֜וֹר בְּאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרַ֗יִם הִקְדַּ֨שְׁתִּי לִ֤י כָל בְּכוֹר֙ בְּיִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל מֵאָדָ֖ם עַד בְּהֵמָ֑ה לִ֥י יִהְי֖וּ אֲנִ֥י יְ-הֹוָֽה:

 

^3:11 Yhwh spoke to Moses, saying: ^3:12 I hereby take the Levites from among the Israelites in place of all the first-born, the first issue of the womb among the Israelites: the Levites shall be Mine. ^3:13 For every first-born is Mine: at the time that I smote every firstborn in the land of Egypt, I consecrated every firstborn in Israel, man and beast, to Myself, to be Mine, Yhwh’s.

Following this explanation, God commands Moses to conduct a census of the Levite males from the age of one month and over, which Moses then carries out (vv. 14-39). After completing this census, Moses receives the command to complete a census of the firstborn (3:40-43). Why must Moses count the firstborn males? God explains:

^ג:מא וְלָקַחְתָּ֨ אֶת הַלְוִיִּ֥ם לִי֙ אֲנִ֣י יְ-הֹוָ֔ה תַּ֥חַת כָּל בְּכֹ֖ר בִּבְנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וְאֵת֙ בֶּהֱמַ֣ת הַלְוִיִּ֔ם תַּ֣חַת כָּל בְּכ֔וֹר בְּבֶהֱמַ֖ת בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל:

 

^3:41 And take the Levites for Me, Yhwh, in place of every firstborn among the Israelite people, and the cattle of the Levites in place of every firstborn among the cattle of the Israelites.

Moses completes the census as commanded, and there turns out to be a disparity between the number of Levite males over the age of one month (22,000) and the number of firstborn males (22,273).

^ג:מב וַיִּפְקֹ֣ד מֹשֶׁ֔ה כַּאֲשֶׁ֛ר צִוָּ֥ה יְ-הֹוָ֖ה אֹת֑וֹ אֶֽת כָּל בְּכ֖וֹר בִּבְנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל: ^ג:מג וַיְהִי֩ כָל בְּכ֨וֹר זָכָ֜ר בְּמִסְפַּ֥ר שֵׁמֹ֛ת מִבֶּן חֹ֥דֶשׁ וָמַ֖עְלָה לִפְקֻדֵיהֶ֑ם שְׁנַ֤יִם וְעֶשְׂרִים֙ אֶ֔לֶף שְׁלֹשָׁ֥ה וְשִׁבְעִ֖ים וּמָאתָֽיִם:

 

^3:42 So Moses recorded all the first-born among the Israelites, as Yhwh had commanded him. ^3:43 All the first-born males as listed by name, recorded from the age of one month up, came to 22,273.

What is to be done with the extra 273 firstborn males? God solves this problem with a suggested purchasing of their freedom.^[4]

^ג:מד וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר יְ-הֹוָ֖ה אֶל מֹשֶׁ֥ה לֵּאמֹֽר: ^ג:מהקַ֣ח אֶת הַלְוִיִּ֗ם תַּ֤חַת כָּל בְּכוֹר֙ בִּבְנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל וְאֶת בֶּהֱמַ֥ת הַלְוִיִּ֖ם תַּ֣חַת בְּהֶמְתָּ֑ם וְהָיוּ לִ֥י הַלְוִיִּ֖ם אֲנִ֥י יְ-הֹוָֽה: ^ג:מו וְאֵת֙ פְּדוּיֵ֣י הַשְּׁלֹשָׁ֔ה וְהַשִּׁבְעִ֖ים וְהַמָּאתָ֑יִם הָעֹֽדְפִים֙ עַל הַלְוִיִּ֔ם מִבְּכ֖וֹר בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל: ^ג:מז וְלָקַחְתָּ֗ חֲמֵ֧שֶׁת חֲמֵ֛שֶׁת שְׁקָלִ֖ים לַגֻּלְגֹּ֑לֶת בְּשֶׁ֤קֶל הַקֹּ֙דֶשׁ֙ תִּקָּ֔ח עֶשְׂרִ֥ים גֵּרָ֖ה הַשָּֽׁקֶל: ^ג:מח וְנָתַתָּ֣ה הַכֶּ֔סֶף לְאַהֲרֹ֖ן וּלְבָנָ֑יו פְּדוּיֵ֕י הָעֹדְפִ֖ים בָּהֶֽם:

 

^3:44 Yhwh spoke to Moses, saying: ^3:45 Take the Levites in place of all the first-born among the Israelite people, and the cattle of the Levites in place of their cattle;^[5] and the Levites shall be Mine, Yhwh’s. ^3:46 And as the redemption price of the 273 Israelite firstborn over and above the number of the Levites, ^3:47 take five shekels per head—take this by the sanctuary weight, twentygerahs to the shekel—^3:48 and give the money to Aaron and his sons as the redemption price for those who are in excess.

The chapter ends (vv. 49-51) with Moses carrying through God’s command, collecting the silver (365,000 shekel), and giving it to Aaron the high priest.

Pidyon (Redemption) Was a One-Time Occurrence

Following the logic of the chapter, the only reason silver was ever exchanged for a firstborn was because of the “historical” accident that there were 273 more firstborns than Levites. There would be no reason—according to this text—for later Israelites to redeem their firstborns, since all of them were, at this point, redeemed.

The idea that the Levites replaced the firstborn at a particular time in history is picked up later in chapter 8.

^ח:יד וְהִבְדַּלְתָּ֙ אֶת הַלְוִיִּ֔ם מִתּ֖וֹךְ בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וְהָ֥יוּ לִ֖י הַלְוִיִּֽם: ^ח:טו וְאַֽחֲרֵי כֵן֙ יָבֹ֣אוּ הַלְוִיִּ֔ם לַעֲבֹ֖ד אֶת אֹ֣הֶל מוֹעֵ֑ד…^ח:טז כִּי֩ נְתֻנִ֨ים נְתֻנִ֥ים הֵ֙מָּה֙ לִ֔י מִתּ֖וֹךְ בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל תַּחַת֩ פִּטְרַ֨ת כָּל רֶ֜חֶם בְּכ֥וֹר כֹּל֙ מִבְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל לָקַ֥חְתִּי אֹתָ֖ם לִֽי: ^ח:יז כִּ֣י לִ֤י כָל בְּכוֹר֙ בִּבְנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל בָּאָדָ֖ם וּבַבְּהֵמָ֑ה בְּי֗וֹם הַכֹּתִ֤י כָל בְּכוֹר֙ בְּאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרַ֔יִם הִקְדַּ֥שְׁתִּי אֹתָ֖ם לִֽי: ^ח:יח וָאֶקַּח֙ אֶת הַלְוִיִּ֔ם תַּ֥חַת כָּל בְּכ֖וֹר בִּבְנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל:

 

^8:14 You shall set the Levites apart from the Israelites, and the Levites shall be Mine. ^8:15 Thereafter the Levites shall be qualified for the service of the Tent of Meeting… ^8:16 For they are formally assigned to Me from among the Israelites: I have taken them for Myself in place of all the first issue of the womb, of all the firstborn of the Israelites. ^8:17 For every firstborn among the Israelites, man as well as beast, is Mine; I consecrated them to Myself at the time that I smote every first-born in the land of Egypt. ^8:18 Now I take the Levites instead of every first-born of the Israelites.

As in chapter 3, here too God says explicitly that the firstborn males are God’s as a consequence of God saving them when God struck the firstborn Egyptian males, but, since God prefers the Levites, God has exchanged the firstborn for the Levites. The latter will now serve as God’s attendants for all time.

Redemption of the Firstborn as a Perpetual Requirement

The model of Levites exchanged for firstborn is not the only model in the Torah, however. According to other sources—even other Priestly sources—firstborn Israelites are consecrated to God for all time. Accordingly, every father of a firstborn son must redeem him. The following two Priestly texts, which are quite similar to each other,^[6] require that firstborn sons be redeemed with silver.

Exodus 13:12-13

^יג:יב וְהַעֲבַרְתָּ֥ כָל פֶּֽטֶר רֶ֖חֶם לַֽי-הֹוָ֑ה….^יג:יג …וְכֹ֨ל בְּכ֥וֹר אָדָ֛ם בְּבָנֶ֖יךָ תִּפְדֶּֽה: ^יג:יד וְהָיָ֞ה כִּֽי יִשְׁאָלְךָ֥ בִנְךָ֛ מָחָ֖ר לֵאמֹ֣ר מַה זֹּ֑את וְאָמַרְתָּ֣ אֵלָ֔יו בְּחֹ֣זֶק יָ֗ד הוֹצִיאָ֧נוּ יְ-הֹוָ֛ה מִמִּצְרַ֖יִם מִבֵּ֥ית עֲבָדִֽים: ^יג:טו וַיְהִ֗י כִּֽי הִקְשָׁ֣ה פַרְעֹה֘ לְשַׁלְּחֵנוּ֒ וַיַּהֲרֹ֨ג יְ-הֹוָ֤ה כָּל בְּכוֹר֙ בְּאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרַ֔יִם מִבְּכֹ֥ר אָדָ֖ם וְעַד בְּכ֣וֹר בְּהֵמָ֑ה עַל כֵּן֩ אֲנִ֨י זֹבֵ֜חַ לַֽי-הֹוָ֗ה כָּל פֶּ֤טֶר רֶ֙חֶם֙ הַזְּכָרִ֔ים וְכָל בְּכ֥וֹר בָּנַ֖י אֶפְדֶּֽה:

 

^13:12 You shall set apart for Yhwh every first issue of the womb….^13:13 …And you must redeem every first-born male among your children. ^13:14 And when, in time to come, your son asks you, saying, ‘What does this mean?’ you shall say to him, ‘It was with a mighty hand that Yhwh brought us out from Egypt, the house of bondage. ^13:15 When Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, Yhwh slew every first-born in the land of Egypt, the firstborn of both man and beast. Therefore I sacrifice to Yhwh every first male issue of the womb, but redeem every first-born among my sons.’

Numbers 18:15–16

^יח:טו כָּל פֶּ֣טֶר רֶ֠חֶם לְֽכָל בָּשָׂ֞ר אֲשֶׁר יַקְרִ֧יבוּ לַֽי-הֹוָ֛ה בָּאָדָ֥ם וּבַבְּהֵמָ֖ה יִֽהְיֶה לָּ֑ךְ אַ֣ךְ׀ פָּדֹ֣ה תִפְדֶּ֗ה אֵ֚ת בְּכ֣וֹר הָֽאָדָ֔ם וְאֵ֛ת בְּכֽוֹר הַבְּהֵמָ֥ה הַטְּמֵאָ֖ה תִּפְדֶּֽה: ^יח:טז וּפְדוּיָו֙ מִבֶּן חֹ֣דֶשׁ תִּפְדֶּ֔ה בְּעֶ֨רְכְּךָ֔ כֶּ֛סֶף חֲמֵ֥שֶׁת שְׁקָלִ֖ים בְּשֶׁ֣קֶל הַקֹּ֑דֶשׁ עֶשְׂרִ֥ים גֵּרָ֖ה הֽוּא: ^יח:יז אַ֣ךְ בְּֽכוֹר שׁ֡וֹר אֽוֹ בְכ֨וֹר כֶּ֜שֶׂב אֽוֹ בְכ֥וֹר עֵ֛ז לֹ֥א תִפְדֶּ֖ה קֹ֣דֶשׁ הֵ֑ם…

 

^18:15 The first issue of the womb of every being, man or beast, that is offered to Yhwh, shall be yours; but you shall have the firstborn of man redeemed, and you shall also have the firstling of unclean animals redeemed. ^18:16 Take as their redemption price, from the age of one month up, the money equivalent of five shekels by the sanctuary weight, which is twenty gerahs. ^18:17 But the firstlings of cattle, sheep, or goats may not be redeemed; they are consecrated….

Although the text does not say so, ostensibly, if the boys are not redeemed, they would be considered consecrated to God all their lives (like Levites or Kohanim), at least in theory. The requirement to redeem the firstborn is perpetual – hence the modern day Pidyon HaBenritual.

Contrasting the Two Models

Reading the two sets of text together leads to some confusion. The two sets of text do not seem to acknowledge each other, nor do they cohere. If all firstborn Israelite males are to be redeemed (as in Exod 13 and Num 18), there is no need to replace them with the Levites (Num 3 and 8).^[7] Conversely, once the Levites had replaced the firstborn (as per Num 3 and 8), the law requiring the redemption of firstborn sons (Exod 13 and Num 18) should no longer be operative.

It is difficult to make sense of the Priestly source without positing that it preserves multiple traditions about the firstborn.

The Redemption of the 273: A Compromise

Here we would like to offer a speculation. We begin by taking a step back and looking at chapter 3 as a whole and in context. The book of Numbers begins with a military census—counting only males age 20 and above—of the twelve tribes. Chapter 3 has an altogether different objective; it is about the position of the Levites vis-à-vis the priests and God. Moses is told to count them, too, but in this case it is all the males one month and older.

Doublets and Tensions

The explanation for the appointment and the census of the Levites is doubled within the chapter itself. In verse 9, God says that the Levites were given to him (נ-ת-נ) by the Israelites, and this is why they are to be appointed as servants to the priests. Then in verse 12, God says he will take (ל-ק-ח) the Levites as replacements for the firstborn Israelites, who are his. While this is not a contradiction—if Israel gives the Levites God will take them–the doubling seems superfluous and the second text introduces a concept entirely missing from the original statement. In fact, the latter text implies that the Israelites are not “giving” the Levites to God; rather, God already “owns” their firstborns and is switching them for Levites of God’s own accord.

A similar tension exists with the Levitical census. Verses 14-39, which describe the census, describe the division of the Levites into families. The passage implies that the purpose of the census was to ascertain the relative sizes of the three families, so each family could be assigned appropriate tasks. However, the end of the chapter (vv. 40-51) implies that the Levitical census was meant to be in conjunction with that of the firstborn, so that the Levites could be exchanged with the firstborns head for head.

Both of the above tensions are between passages that deal only with the Levites (vv. 5-10, 14-39) and passages that deal with the Levites and the firstborn (vv. 11-13, 40-51). This cumulative, overlapping evidence suggests that the sections dealing with the firstborn are secondary insertions. In fact, the chapter reads quite well without them, and the flow to the next chapter is also smoother. (See the Appendix.)

The Numbers Problem

Seeing the firstborn material as a later addition solves an important numbers problem. In order for this chapter’s solution to work, the number of Levites and firstborns needs to be very close—but this creates a serious problem. As some commentators note, in a population of 600,000 males, the notion that only 22,273 of them are firstborn seems highly improbable. The ratio implies that firstborns died off at an inordinately high rate or that there was a much higher percentage of firstborn girls than should be statistically likely, or that families had 30 male children or more per household—all improbable solutions.^[8]

Following our suggestion above, it is likely that the number 22,273 was invented by the later scribes, who added this entire section to the Levite census in order to obviate the perpetual need for the redemption of the firstborn.^[9]

The Imperfect Correspondence: A Nod to Pidyon HaBen

The point of having too many firstborns—in addition to creating verisimilitude—was specifically to allow for a one-time pidyon haben ritual, performed by Moses and not their fathers. If there was tension in the Priestly circles over whether there was a need to redeem a firstborn son, as we suggested above, this could have been an attempt at compromise, legitimating the ritual but only as a relic of the past, performed once in the wilderness by Moses.

As we know, in the end, the older tradition of redemption won out, which is why we still have the ritual of pidyon haben. But these texts allow us a glimpse into an ancient polemic, in a time where this ritual was still controversial.

Appendix

Layers in Chapter 3

^ג:ה וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר יְ-הֹוָ֖ה אֶל מֹשֶׁ֥ה לֵּאמֹֽר: ^ג:ו הַקְרֵב֙ אֶת מַטֵּ֣ה לֵוִ֔י וְֽהַעֲמַדְתָּ֣ אֹת֔וֹ לִפְנֵ֖י אַהֲרֹ֣ן הַכֹּהֵ֑ן וְשֵׁרְת֖וּ אֹתֽוֹ: ^ג:ז וְשָׁמְר֣וּ אֶת מִשְׁמַרְתּ֗וֹ וְאֶת מִשְׁמֶ֙רֶת֙ כָּל הָ֣עֵדָ֔ה לִפְנֵ֖י אֹ֣הֶל מוֹעֵ֑ד לַעֲבֹ֖ד אֶת עֲבֹדַ֥ת הַמִּשְׁכָּֽן: ^ג:ח וְשָׁמְר֗וּ אֶֽת כָּל כְּלֵי֙ אֹ֣הֶל מוֹעֵ֔ד וְאֶת מִשְׁמֶ֖רֶת בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל לַעֲבֹ֖ד אֶת עֲבֹדַ֥ת הַמִּשְׁכָּֽן: ^ג:ט וְנָתַתָּה֙ אֶת הַלְוִיִּ֔ם לְאַהֲרֹ֖ן וּלְבָנָ֑יו נְתוּנִ֨ם נְתוּנִ֥ם הֵ֙מָּה֙ ל֔וֹ מֵאֵ֖ת בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל: ^ג:י וְאֶת אַהֲרֹ֤ן וְאֶת בָּנָיו֙ תִּפְקֹ֔ד וְשָׁמְר֖וּ אֶת כְּהֻנָּתָ֑ם וְהַזָּ֥ר הַקָּרֵ֖ב יוּמָֽת:

 

^3:5 Yhwh spoke to Moses, saying: ^3:6 Advance the tribe of Levi and place them in attendance upon Aaron the priest to serve him. ^3:7They shall perform duties for him and for the whole community before the Tent of Meeting, doing the work of the Tabernacle. ^3:8They shall take charge of all the furnishings of the Tent of Meeting—a duty on behalf of the Israelites—doing the work of the Tabernacle. ^3:9 You shall assign the Levites to Aaron and to his sons: they are formally assigned to him from among the Israelites.^3:10 You shall make Aaron and his sons responsible for observing their priestly duties; and any outsider who encroaches shall be put to death.

 

^ג:יא וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר יְ-הֹוָ֖ה אֶל מֹשֶׁ֥ה לֵּאמֹֽר:^ג:יב וַאֲנִ֞י הִנֵּ֧ה לָקַ֣חְתִּי אֶת הַלְוִיִּ֗ם מִתּוֹךְ֙ בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל תַּ֧חַת כָּל בְּכ֛וֹר פֶּ֥טֶר רֶ֖חֶם מִבְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וְהָ֥יוּ לִ֖י הַלְוִיִּֽם: ^ג:יג כִּ֣י לִי֘ כָּל בְּכוֹר֒ בְּיוֹם֩ הַכֹּתִ֨י כָל בְּכ֜וֹר בְּאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרַ֗יִם הִקְדַּ֨שְׁתִּי לִ֤י כָל בְּכוֹר֙ בְּיִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל מֵאָדָ֖ם עַד בְּהֵמָ֑ה לִ֥י יִהְי֖וּ אֲנִ֥י יְ-הֹוָֽה:

 

^3:11 Yhwh spoke to Moses, saying: ^3:12 I hereby take the Levites from among the Israelites in place of all the first-born, the first issue of the womb among the Israelites: the Levites shall be Mine. ^3:13 For every first-born is Mine: at the time that I smote every first-born in the land of Egypt, I consecrated every first-born in Israel, man and beast, to Myself, to be Mine, Yhwh’s.

 

^ג:יד וַיְדַבֵּ֤ר יְ-הֹוָה֙ אֶל מֹשֶׁ֔ה בְּמִדְבַּ֥ר סִינַ֖י לֵאמֹֽר: ^ג:טו פְּקֹד֙ אֶת בְּנֵ֣י לֵוִ֔י לְבֵ֥ית אֲבֹתָ֖ם לְמִשְׁפְּחֹתָ֑ם כָּל זָכָ֛ר מִבֶּן חֹ֥דֶשׁ וָמַ֖עְלָה תִּפְקְדֵֽם: ^ג:טז וַיִּפְקֹ֥ד אֹתָ֛ם מֹשֶׁ֖ה עַל פִּ֣י יְ-הֹוָ֑ה כַּאֲשֶׁ֖ר צֻוָּֽה: ^ג:יז וַיִּֽהְיוּ אֵ֥לֶּה בְנֵֽי לֵוִ֖י בִּשְׁמֹתָ֑ם גֵּרְשׁ֕וֹן וּקְהָ֖ת וּמְרָרִֽי: ^ג:יח וְאֵ֛לֶּה שְׁמ֥וֹת בְּֽנֵי גֵרְשׁ֖וֹן לְמִשְׁפְּחֹתָ֑ם לִבְנִ֖י וְשִׁמְעִֽי: ^ג:יטוּבְנֵ֥י קְהָ֖ת לְמִשְׁפְּחֹתָ֑ם עַמְרָ֣ם וְיִצְהָ֔ר חֶבְר֖וֹן וְעֻזִּיאֵֽל: ^ג:כ וּבְנֵ֧י מְרָרִ֛י לְמִשְׁפְּחֹתָ֖ם מַחְלִ֣י וּמוּשִׁ֑י אֵ֥לֶּה הֵ֛ם מִשְׁפְּחֹ֥ת הַלֵּוִ֖י לְבֵ֥ית אֲבֹתָֽם:^ג:כא לְגֵ֣רְשׁ֔וֹן מִשְׁפַּ֙חַת֙ הַלִּבְנִ֔י וּמִשְׁפַּ֖חַת הַשִּׁמְעִ֑י אֵ֣לֶּה הֵ֔ם מִשְׁפְּחֹ֖ת הַגֵּרְשֻׁנִּֽי: ^ג:כבפְּקֻדֵיהֶם֙ בְּמִסְפַּ֣ר כָּל זָכָ֔ר מִבֶּן חֹ֖דֶשׁ וָמָ֑עְלָה פְּקֻ֣דֵיהֶ֔ם שִׁבְעַ֥ת אֲלָפִ֖ים וַחֲמֵ֥שׁ מֵאֽוֹת: ^ג:כגמִשְׁפְּחֹ֖ת הַגֵּרְשֻׁנִּ֑י אַחֲרֵ֧י הַמִּשְׁכָּ֛ן יַחֲנ֖וּ יָֽמָּה:^ג:כד וּנְשִׂ֥יא בֵֽית אָ֖ב לַגֵּרְשֻׁנִּ֑י אֶלְיָסָ֖ף בֶּן לָאֵֽל: ^ג:כה וּמִשְׁמֶ֤רֶת בְּנֵֽי גֵרְשׁוֹן֙ בְּאֹ֣הֶל מוֹעֵ֔ד הַמִּשְׁכָּ֖ן וְהָאֹ֑הֶל מִכְסֵ֕הוּ וּמָסַ֕ךְ פֶּ֖תַח אֹ֥הֶל מוֹעֵֽד: ^ג:כו וְקַלְעֵ֣י הֶֽחָצֵ֗ר וְאֶת מָסַךְ֙ פֶּ֣תַח הֶֽחָצֵ֔ר אֲשֶׁ֧ר עַל הַמִּשְׁכָּ֛ן וְעַל הַמִּזְבֵּ֖חַ סָבִ֑יב וְאֵת֙ מֵֽיתָרָ֔יו לְכֹ֖ל עֲבֹדָתֽוֹ: ^ג:כז וְלִקְהָ֗ת מִשְׁפַּ֤חַת הַֽעַמְרָמִי֙ וּמִשְׁפַּ֣חַת הַיִּצְהָרִ֔י וּמִשְׁפַּ֙חַת֙ הַֽחֶבְרֹנִ֔י וּמִשְׁפַּ֖חַת הָֽעָזִּיאֵלִ֑י אֵ֥לֶּה הֵ֖ם מִשְׁפְּחֹ֥ת הַקְּהָתִֽי: ^ג:כח בְּמִסְפַּר֙ כָּל זָכָ֔ר מִבֶּן חֹ֖דֶשׁ וָמָ֑עְלָה שְׁמֹנַ֤ת אֲלָפִים֙ וְשֵׁ֣שׁ מֵא֔וֹת שֹׁמְרֵ֖י מִשְׁמֶ֥רֶת הַקֹּֽדֶשׁ: ^ג:כט מִשְׁפְּחֹ֥ת בְּנֵי קְהָ֖ת יַחֲנ֑וּ עַ֛ל יֶ֥רֶךְ הַמִּשְׁכָּ֖ן תֵּימָֽנָה: ^ג:לוּנְשִׂ֥יא בֵֽית אָ֖ב לְמִשְׁפְּחֹ֣ת הַקְּהָתִ֑י אֱלִיצָפָ֖ן בֶּן עֻזִּיאֵֽל: ^ג:לא וּמִשְׁמַרְתָּ֗ם הָאָרֹ֤ן וְהַשֻּׁלְחָן֙ וְהַמְּנֹרָ֣ה וְהַֽמִּזְבְּחֹ֔ת וּכְלֵ֣י הַקֹּ֔דֶשׁ אֲשֶׁ֥ר יְשָׁרְת֖וּ בָּהֶ֑ם וְהַ֨מָּסָ֔ךְ וְכֹ֖ל עֲבֹדָתֽוֹ: ^ג:לב וּנְשִׂיא֙ נְשִׂיאֵ֣י הַלֵּוִ֔י אֶלְעָזָ֖ר בֶּן אַהֲרֹ֣ן הַכֹּהֵ֑ן פְּקֻדַּ֕ת שֹׁמְרֵ֖י מִשְׁמֶ֥רֶת הַקֹּֽדֶשׁ: ^ג:לג לִמְרָרִ֕י מִשְׁפַּ֙חַת֙ הַמַּחְלִ֔י וּמִשְׁפַּ֖חַת הַמּוּשִׁ֑י אֵ֥לֶּה הֵ֖ם מִשְׁפְּחֹ֥ת מְרָרִֽי:^ג:לד וּפְקֻדֵיהֶם֙ בְּמִסְפַּ֣ר כָּ זָכָ֔ר מִבֶּן חֹ֖דֶשׁ וָמָ֑עְלָה שֵׁ֥שֶׁת אֲלָפִ֖ים וּמָאתָֽיִם: ^ג:לה וּנְשִׂ֤יא בֵֽית אָב֙ לְמִשְׁפְּחֹ֣ת מְרָרִ֔י צוּרִיאֵ֖ל בֶּן אֲבִיחָ֑יִל עַ֣ל יֶ֧רֶךְ הַמִּשְׁכָּ֛ן יַחֲנ֖וּ צָפֹֽנָה: ^ג:לו וּפְקֻדַּ֣ת מִשְׁמֶרֶת֘ בְּנֵ֣י מְרָרִי֒ קַרְשֵׁי֙ הַמִּשְׁכָּ֔ן וּבְרִיחָ֖יו וְעַמֻּדָ֣יו וַאֲדָנָ֑יו וְכָל כֵּלָ֔יו וְכֹ֖ל עֲבֹדָתֽוֹ: ^ג:לזוְעַמֻּדֵ֧י הֶחָצֵ֛ר סָבִ֖יב וְאַדְנֵיהֶ֑ם וִיתֵדֹתָ֖ם וּמֵֽיתְרֵיהֶֽם: ^ג:לח וְהַחֹנִ֣ים לִפְנֵ֣י הַמִּשְׁכָּ֡ן קֵ֣דְמָה לִפְנֵי֩ אֹֽהֶל מוֹעֵ֨ד׀ מִזְרָ֜חָה מֹשֶׁ֣ה׀ וְאַהֲרֹ֣ן וּבָנָ֗יו שֹֽׁמְרִים֙ מִשְׁמֶ֣רֶת הַמִּקְדָּ֔שׁ לְמִשְׁמֶ֖רֶת בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וְהַזָּ֥ר הַקָּרֵ֖ב יוּמָֽת: ^ג:לט כָּל פְּקוּדֵ֨י הַלְוִיִּ֜ם אֲשֶׁר֩ פָּקַ֨ד מֹשֶׁ֧ה וְאַהֲרֹ֛ן עַל פִּ֥י יְקֹוָ֖ק לְמִשְׁפְּחֹתָ֑ם כָּל זָכָר֙ מִבֶּן חֹ֣דֶשׁ וָמַ֔עְלָה שְׁנַ֥יִם וְעֶשְׂרִ֖ים אָֽלֶף:

 

^3:14 Yhwh spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, saying: ^3:15Record the Levites by ancestral house and by clan; record every male among them from the age of one month up. ^3:16 So Moses recorded them at the command of Yhwh, as he was bidden. ^3:17These were the sons of Levi by name: Gershon, Kohath, and Merari. ^3:18 These were the names of the sons of Gershon by clan: Libni and Shimei. ^3:19 The sons of Kohath by clan: Amram and Izhar, Hebron and Uzziel. ^3:20 The sons of Merari by clan: Mahli and Mushi. These were the clans of the Levites within their ancestral houses: ^3:21 To Gershon belonged the clan of the Libnites and the clan of the Shimeites; those were the clans of the Gershonites. ^3:22 The recorded entries of all their males from the age of one month up, as recorded, came to 7,500. ^3:23 The clans of the Gershonites were to camp behind the Tabernacle, to the west.^3:24 The chieftain of the ancestral house of the Gershonites was Eliasaph son of Lael. ^3:25 The duties of the Gershonites in the Tent of Meeting comprised: the Tabernacle, the tent, its covering, and the screen for the entrance of the Tent of Meeting; ^3:26 the hangings of the enclosure, the screen for the entrance of the enclosure which surrounds the Tabernacle, the cords thereof, and the altar—all the service connected with these. ^3:27 To Kohath belonged the clan of the Amramites, the clan of the Izharites, the clan of the Hebronites, and the clan of the Uzzielites; those were the clans of the Kohathites. ^3:28 All the listed males from the age of one month up came to 8,600, attending to the duties of the sanctuary. ^3:29 The clans of the Kohathites were to camp along the south side of the Tabernacle. ^3:30 The chieftain of the ancestral house of the Kohathite clans was Elizaphan son of Uzziel. ^3:31 Their duties comprised: the ark, the table, the lampstand, the altars, and the sacred utensils that were used with them, and the screen—all the service connected with these. ^3:32 The head chieftain of the Levites was Eleazar son of Aaron the priest, in charge of those attending to the duties of the sanctuary. ^3:33 To Merari belonged the clan of the Mahlites and the clan of the Mushites; those were the clans of Merari. ^3:34 The recorded entries of all their males from the age of one month up came to 6,200. ^3:35 The chieftain of the ancestral house of the clans of Merari was Zuriel son of Abihail. They were to camp along the north side of the Tabernacle. ^3:36 The assigned duties of the Merarites comprised: the planks of the Tabernacle, its bars, posts, and sockets, and all its furnishings—all the service connected with these; ^3:37 also the posts around the enclosure and their sockets, pegs, and cords. ^3:38 Those who were to camp before the Tabernacle, in front—before the Tent of Meeting, on the east were Moses and Aaron and his sons, attending to the duties of the sanctuary, as a duty on behalf of the Israelites; and any outsider who encroached was to be put to death. ^3:39 All the Levites who were recorded, whom at Yhwh’s command Moses and Aaron recorded by their clans, all the males from the age of one month up, came to 20,000.

 

^ג:מ וַיֹּ֨אמֶר יְ-הֹוָ֜ה אֶל מֹשֶׁ֗ה פְּקֹ֨ד כָּל בְּכֹ֤ר זָכָר֙ לִבְנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל מִבֶּן חֹ֖דֶשׁ וָמָ֑עְלָה וְשָׂ֕א אֵ֖ת מִסְפַּ֥ר שְׁמֹתָֽם: ^ג:מאוְלָקַחְתָּ֨ אֶת הַלְוִיִּ֥ם לִי֙ אֲנִ֣י יְ-הֹוָ֔ה תַּ֥חַת כָּל בְּכֹ֖ר בִּבְנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וְאֵת֙ בֶּהֱמַ֣ת הַלְוִיִּ֔ם תַּ֣חַת כָּל בְּכ֔וֹר בְּבֶהֱמַ֖ת בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל: ^ג:מב וַיִּפְקֹ֣ד מֹשֶׁ֔ה כַּאֲשֶׁ֛ר צִוָּ֥ה יְ-הֹוָ֖ה אֹת֑וֹ אֶֽת כָּל בְּכ֖וֹר בִּבְנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל: ^ג:מג וַיְהִי֩ כָל בְּכ֨וֹר זָכָ֜ר בְּמִסְפַּ֥ר שֵׁמֹ֛ת מִבֶּן חֹ֥דֶשׁ וָמַ֖עְלָה לִפְקֻדֵיהֶ֑ם שְׁנַ֤יִם וְעֶשְׂרִים֙ אֶ֔לֶף שְׁלֹשָׁ֥ה וְשִׁבְעִ֖ים וּמָאתָֽיִם:

 

^3:40 Yhwh said to Moses: Record every first-born male of the Israelite people from the age of one month up, and make a list of their names; ^3:41 and take the Levites for Me, Yhwh, in place of every first-born among the Israelite people, and the cattle of the Levites in place of every first-born among the cattle of the Israelites. ^3:42 So Moses recorded all the first-born among the Israelites, as Yhwh had commanded him. ^3:43All the first-born males as listed by name, recorded from the age of one month up, came to 22,273.

 

^ג:מד וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר יְ-הֹוָ֖ה אֶל מֹשֶׁ֥ה לֵּאמֹֽר:^ג:מה קַ֣ח אֶת הַלְוִיִּ֗ם תַּ֤חַת כָּל בְּכוֹר֙ בִּבְנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל וְאֶת בֶּהֱמַ֥ת הַלְוִיִּ֖ם תַּ֣חַת בְּהֶמְתָּ֑ם וְהָיוּ לִ֥י הַלְוִיִּ֖ם אֲנִ֥י יְ-הֹוָֽה:^ג:מו וְאֵת֙ פְּדוּיֵ֣י הַשְּׁלֹשָׁ֔ה וְהַשִּׁבְעִ֖ים וְהַמָּאתָ֑יִם הָעֹֽדְפִים֙ עַל הַלְוִיִּ֔ם מִבְּכ֖וֹר בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל: ^ג:מז וְלָקַחְתָּ֗ חֲמֵ֧שֶׁת חֲמֵ֛שֶׁת שְׁקָלִ֖ים לַגֻּלְגֹּ֑לֶת בְּשֶׁ֤קֶל הַקֹּ֙דֶשׁ֙ תִּקָּ֔ח עֶשְׂרִ֥ים גֵּרָ֖ה הַשָּֽׁקֶל: ^ג:מחוְנָתַתָּ֣ה הַכֶּ֔סֶף לְאַהֲרֹ֖ן וּלְבָנָ֑יו פְּדוּיֵ֕י הָעֹדְפִ֖ים בָּהֶֽם: ^ג:מט וַיִּקַּ֣ח מֹשֶׁ֔ה אֵ֖ת כֶּ֣סֶף הַפִּדְי֑וֹם מֵאֵת֙ הָעֹ֣דְפִ֔ים עַ֖ל פְּדוּיֵ֥י הַלְוִיִּֽם: ^ג:נ מֵאֵ֗ת בְּכ֛וֹר בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל לָקַ֣ח אֶת הַכָּ֑סֶף חֲמִשָּׁ֨ה וְשִׁשִּׁ֜ים וּשְׁלֹ֥שׁ מֵא֛וֹת וָאֶ֖לֶף בְּשֶׁ֥קֶל הַקֹּֽדֶשׁ: ^ג:נא וַיִּתֵּ֨ן מֹשֶׁ֜ה אֶת כֶּ֧סֶף הַפְּדֻיִ֛ם לְאַהֲרֹ֥ן וּלְבָנָ֖יו עַל פִּ֣י יְ-הֹוָ֑ה כַּאֲשֶׁ֛ר צִוָּ֥ה יְ-הֹוָ֖ה אֶת מֹשֶֽׁה:

 

^3:44 Yhwh spoke to Moses, saying: ^3:45 Take the Levites in place of all the first-born among the Israelite people, and the cattle of the Levites in place of their cattle; and the Levites shall be Mine, Yhwh’s. ^3:46 And as the redemption price of the 273 Israelite first-born over and above the number of the Levites, ^3:47 take five shekels per head—take this by the sanctuary weight, twenty gerahs to the shekel—3:48 and give the money to Aaron and his sons as the redemption price for those who are in excess. ^3:49 So Moses took the redemption money from those over and above the ones redeemed by the Levites; ^3:50 he took the money from the first-born of the Israelites, 1,365 sanctuary shekels. ^3:51 An Moses gave the redemption money to Aaron and his sons at Yhwh’s bidding, as Yhwh had commanded Moses.

View Footnotes

 

1.    

ולענין פדיון הבן כשבא ליתן חמש סלעים או שווייהון לכהן, שואל הכהן לאביו ואומר בכור הוא זה ואומר אין, רוצה אתה לפדותו ואומר אין, והוא אומר לבכור כשהיית במעי אמך הייתה ברשותך, ועכשיו אתה ברשותנו וקידש אותך כמו שאמרה תורה קדש לי כל בכור, והמעות או החפיצין הללו חולין הן ואתה קודש וקבלו אבותיך עליהן לפדותך בהם מן הכהן כמו שאמרה תורה ופדוייו מבן חדש תפדה בערכך כסף חמשת שקלים, ועכשיו יצאת מרשותנו בחפיצים הללו, ונכנסת לחולין ברשות אבותיך, ואלו החפיצים יכנסו תחתיך לפדיונך לרשותנו.

2.   This is certainly true of modern-day pidyon haben; see Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh Deah305:15, which merely states that if a father does not redeem his firstborn son, the son must redeem himself when he becomes an adult.

3.   Yet again, we find no legal or narrative precedent that would demonstrate that such a thing occurred or was even seen as a possibility in Israelite society. Although Samuel is a non-Levite firstborn dedicated to God (1 Sam 1), the fact that his mother specifically made the oath and did not take his consecration as a default demonstrates that the author of this story did not think that a firstborn male was somehow consecrated at birth.

4.   But this command comes only after God repeats the content of v. 41 verbatim in v. 45, to take the Levites in place of the firstborn. This Wiederaufnahme or resumptive repetition implies a complex redaction history for this section, most likely that the intervening verses are secondary, something that will have to be explored another time.

5.   The line about cattle here seems to come out of nowhere and is difficult to understand. Moreover, there is no ritual at the end of the chapter for exchanging cows as there is for people.

6.   Several non-Priestly texts that discuss what to do with a firstborn (Exodus 22:28-29 and Exodus 34:19-20—the latter discusses redemption) will not be dealt with here.

7.   There is nothing stopping God from having both firstborns and Levites serve but there would be no need for the exchange.

8.   For more on these problems and an alternative solution, see Ben Zion Katz’s TABS essay,“Recounting the Census Numbers.”  

9.   This would answer a further problem with the text: If the author of the census account had originally envisioned Moses counting the firstborn as well, would it not make more sense—from the perspective of verisimilitude at least—to have told this to Moses from the beginning? If Moses was already going to count all the Israelite males—hundreds of thousands of them—would it not have been more convenient to have done both of these censuses at the same time? If, as we suggest, the census of the firstborn was added later, this problem falls off, since the original author did not envision a second census of the same families.

Balancing Social Responsibility with Market Economics

Leviticus 25 legislates a multi-tiered system of rights and requirements that act as a corrective to a market in which even human beings can be sold. This system preserves the dignified status of Israelite brothers as free persons with their own ancestral agricultural land, ensuring that no Israelites become a permanent lower class.

Noam Zion

 

Categories:

Behar

In the United States’ Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson declares that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” In a sense, Leviticus 25 is also about an Israelite’s inalienable rights, but while Jefferson guarantees life and liberty without providing financial capital or a family holding from which to support oneself and one’s family, Leviticus 25 grants the Israelites freedom from permanent debtor slavery by virtue of a promised return of their land which is their basic economic capital.

Moreover, Leviticus 25 guarantees Israelites the inalienable claim to ownership of their ancestral lands even if they are temporarily “leased” to another. Each brother in Israel sees in that holding a guarantee of their dignity as an equal, a fellow land owner. It is his title to a piece of the God-given land as Israel’s patrimony that connects him to the foundational event of the Crossing of the Jordan and the Conquest that complete the narrative of the Exodus that defines Jewish identity (Josh 4:6-7).^[1]

Thus, the grand narrative of God’s liberation of Hebrew slaves from Egypt (Lev 25: 55) and God’s gift of the land of Canaan to the people Israel (Lev 25:38) is translated by the legislation of Leviticus 25 into a social welfare society that not only maintains but rehabilitates its failing members without eviscerating the dynamics of a market economy.

In other words, Leviticus 25 intervenes in the free market by establishing “unalienable rights” exempted from the rules of a market, and designed in theory so that no Israelite can become a member of a permanent economic underclass. The system further encourages generous interventions by family members to reverse or soften the economic losses and the psychological suffering.

Part 1

The Jubilee

Isn’t the alienation of man primarily the fact of having no home? … The triumph of justice is the possibility of a society in which everyone has his home, returns home and to himself, and sees the face of the other. —Emanuel Levinas, “Judaism and Revolution”^[2]

Ancestral Plots

Leviticus 25 lays out the principle that every fifty years, in a cyclic fashion, all land is returned to the original owners and all people are free to return to their ancestral land:

^{ויקרא כה:י} וְקִדַּשְׁתֶּם אֵת שְׁנַת הַחֲמִשִּׁים שָׁנָה וּקְרָאתֶם דְּרוֹר בָּאָרֶץ לְכָל יֹשְׁבֶיהָ יוֹבֵל הִוא תִּהְיֶה לָכֶם וְשַׁבְתֶּם אִישׁ אֶל אֲחֻזָּתוֹ וְאִישׁ אֶל מִשְׁפַּחְתּוֹ תָּשֻׁבוּ.

 

^{Lev 25:10} And you shall sanctify the fiftieth year, proclaiming liberty/release (dror) throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee (yovel) for you, when each of you shall return to his holding and each of you shall return to his family.^[3]

The phrase “his holding” (אֲחֻזָּתוֹ) refers back to the foundational divine land grant described in Numbers, in which each Israelite male was allotted a plot of land suitable to the size of his household based on the census Moses conducts in the wilderness (Num 26:53), and whose distribution following the entrance into the land, is reported in the book of Joshua (13:7 to 19:51).

The working assumption of Leviticus 25 is that each family holds this ancestral plot of land in perpetuity, and that, no matter what happens with market fluctuations, debts and the family’s “sale” of its property, this plot returns to the family’s possession automatically on the jubilee year every fiftieth year.^[4] Though many scholars assume that this law was more of an ideal than a real enactment,^[5] its conception of economic equality and rootedness in the land educates the people to understand distribution of property in a unique way.

The Downward Spiral of Poverty: The “Sale” of One’s Land

In the ideal world imagined by this chapter, individual families—each with its own ancestral holding—are thought of as self-sufficient economic units dependent on their own productive labor and their own fertile land, though presumably they also rely on God’s seasonal, fructifying rain (Deut 11:11–12). More than economic units, these household plots are a social unit giving its owner a dignified standing as a freeholder and head of a family.

And yet, Leviticus 25 is aware that in a market economy, families rise and fall economically, thus creating socio-economic inequality and financial dependence on those who are supposed to see themselves as equal brothers. (The term “brother” appears innumerable times in this chapter.) Under stress the owner of an ancestral holding can be coerced by market conditions to sell his land, presumably, in order to feed himself and his family or to pay back his debts.

In a buyers’ market where the sellers are in distress, the buyers are instructed not to take wrongful advantage in paying below market prices, but to pay for the land’s use according to its crop years until the next Jubilee, while at the same time, the seller is exhorted not to overcharge either:

^{ויקרא כה:יד} וְכִי תִמְכְּרוּ מִמְכָּר לַעֲמִיתֶךָ אוֹ קָנֹה מִיַּד עֲמִיתֶךָ אַל תּוֹנוּ אִישׁ אֶת אָחִיו. ^כה:טו בְּמִסְפַּר שָׁנִים אַחַר הַיּוֹבֵל תִּקְנֶה מֵאֵת עֲמִיתֶךָ בְּמִסְפַּר שְׁנֵי תְבוּאֹת יִמְכָּר לָךְ.^כה:טז לְפִי רֹב הַשָּׁנִים תַּרְבֶּה מִקְנָתוֹ וּלְפִי מְעֹט הַשָּׁנִים תַּמְעִיט מִקְנָתוֹ כִּי מִסְפַּר תְּבוּאֹת הוּא מֹכֵר לָךְ.

 

^{Lev 25:14} When you sell property to your neighbor, or buy any from your neighbor, you shall not wrong one another. ^25:15 In buying from your neighbor, you shall deduct only for the number of years since the jubilee; and in selling to you, he shall charge you only for the remaining crop years: ^25:16 the more such years, the higher the price you pay; the fewer such years, the lower the price; for what he is selling you is a number of harvests.

Legally speaking the land is not being sold at all, for it is God’s, and God commands that it be returned to the original owner at the culmination of each jubilee cycle. The produce of a certain number of years may be sold, nonetheless. (Even before the jubilee, the legal bond between the first owner and his holding is not severed completely, for, as we will discuss in the next part, he or his close relatives can redeem it by the right of repurchase at a fair price.)

Further Downward Spiral: Bankruptcy and “Sale” as an Indentured Servitude

The de facto sale of land is a temporary windfall with which one can pay off debts or feed the family for a period, but it does not extract a person from his fundamental food insecurity. In an agricultural economy once a person no longer possesses land to cultivate, he must reside elsewhere and work on other people’s land as a seasonal farm worker or borrow more money often at scalper’s interest rates to make ends meet.^[6]

To preempt that spiral into deeper dependence and eventually into debtor slavery,^[7] a fellow Hebrew described as a generic brother of the impoverished Israelite is exhorted to provide financial support and take him in to reside with him.^[8] Nevertheless, the text is aware that even such largesse may not be enough to save someone drowning in debt, and thus it turns to the discussion of what happens when the person’s financial collapse is total:

^{ויקרא כה:לט} וְכִי יָמוּךְ אָחִיךָ עִמָּךְ וְנִמְכַּר לָךְ לֹא תַעֲבֹד בּוֹ עֲבֹדַת עָבֶד. ^כה:מ כְּשָׂכִיר כְּתוֹשָׁב יִהְיֶה עִמָּךְ עַד שְׁנַת הַיֹּבֵל יַעֲבֹד עִמָּךְ.^כה:מא וְיָצָא מֵעִמָּךְ הוּא וּבָנָיו עִמּוֹ וְשָׁב אֶל מִשְׁפַּחְתּוֹ וְאֶל אֲחֻזַּת אֲבֹתָיו יָשׁוּב.

 

^{Lev 25:39} If your brother, being (further) impoverished with you is sold to you, do not make him work as a slave. ^25:40 He shall remain with you as a resident hireling; he shall work with you until the jubilee year. ^25:41 Then he and his children with him shall be released from you; he shall return to his kin group and return to his ancestral holding.

When no one is willing or able to support the destitute further, then a Hebrew is permitted to buy a brother and use him as a laborer who is indentured keep him until the jubilee. Like the legal fiction that calls the “sale” of land a sale of the crops grown on the holding, the “sale” and redemption of a Hebrew slave is calculated in terms of the annual cost of his wages as if he were a free wage-earner (Lev 25:52–53).

Beyond the euphemistic terminology, economic dependence and legal loss of freedom may not justify humiliation of one’s brother.^[9] The purchaser may not treat a brother in a demeaning fashion as one treats a slave at a market or as a harsh overseer tyrannizes over a slave laborer. One must treat him as if he were a hired laborer, as if he had a choice to work for you, though he has no legal choice.

Perhaps since the disciplining of a slave in one’s household is hidden from public scrutiny, the fear of God’s ubiquitous surveillance is invoked to awe the purchaser into refraining from humiliating his new acquisition and treating a brother as a means rather than an end. Thus, the chapter ends with a reiteration of the grand theological narrative of God’s redemption from Egypt but would a new twist:

^{ויקרא כה:מב} כִּי עֲבָדַי הֵם אֲשֶׁר הוֹצֵאתִי אֹתָם מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם לֹא יִמָּכְרוּ מִמְכֶּרֶת עָבֶד. ^{ויקרא כה:מג} לֹא תִרְדֶּה בוֹ בְּפָרֶךְ וְיָרֵאתָ מֵאֱלֹהֶיךָ.

 

^Lev 25:42 For they are my slaves, whom I freed from the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves are sold.^25:43 You shall not rule over him with harshness; you shall fear your God.

The theological rationale of Leviticus 25 is founded on two paradoxes. First, God took the Hebrews out of Egypt and thus gave them their freedom, yet God keeps them as his own permanent slaves. Second, God gave the Israelites the land, even dividing it into family plots, but God also owns the land and is merely leasing it to them. The point seems to be that Israel experiences their freedom as landowners while at the same time they must recognize that really they are God’s and so is their land.

Thus, Leviticus 25 claims, since each Israelite’s own freedom and his own holding belong de jure to God, the Hebrew and his land cannot be sold but only hired or rented. Moreover, no one may treat him disrespectfully as a slave because his true owner, God, forbids it.

Beyond rhetoric, the market pressures have de facto, though not de jure, made one’s brother into a slave, though one must treat him with greater empathy and delicacy than Pharaoh who commanded his overseers to engage in ruthless בְּפֶרֶךְ enslavement of the children of Israel in order to torment them (Exod 1:11, 13–14).^[10]

Periodic Resets: Avoiding the Creation of Permanent Classes

Leviticus 25 allows great latitude to the interests and rights of financially successful Israelites who can buy their brothers as slaves and buy up their ancestral holdings up to 49 years. The purchaser of an ancestral patrimony and a Hebrew slave is not regarded negatively by Leviticus 25. Unlike the passionate prophet Amos, there is no moral critique of the market as a tool enabling the rich to exploit the destitute (Amos 8:4–7).

As long as they do not cheat and do not take unfair advantage of their economic prerogatives, or humiliate their brothers, they serve a positive function by allowing the impoverished to pay their debts and to find a job as an indentured servant in which their families have food and a residence.

Even so, while for Leviticus 25 nothing is illegal or immoral about market forces that lead to buying and selling labor and land, commodifying human labor and ancestral land tends over time to undermine broadly distributed private ownership of the means of production. This is the basic tension between the ideal “original” division of land depicted under Moses and Joshua, and the realities of individual economic trajectories of given landowners over time.

In each jubilee cycle, a differentiated distribution of wealth inevitably develops due to changes resulting from an individual’s luck, effort, and skill and the vagaries of an agricultural market society greatly dependent on weather. To avoid Israelite society becoming rigidly divided by permanent barriers between classes—rich and poor, landowners and landless, masters and slaves—the jubilee cycle restores the “original” distribution of lands and cancels all debts, functioning as a kind of social and economic reset, somewhat akin to leveling the playing field and starting over with the same bank allotment in a new game of Monopoly, for the next 49 years.

In short, whereas in a truly laissez faire market society, economic gains may congeal into permanent landlessness and then slavery, in Leviticus 25 economic “class” is meant to be a temporary status, not a basic stratification of Hebrew brothers. Its mechanisms for aiding the needy aim not only to provide a safety net of social insurance for individuals but also to build an egalitarian society of male Hebrew brothers blessed with political-economic solidarity among its Hebrew citizens.

Samson Raphael Hirsch: Breaking out of the Dead-End Cycle of Poverty

The system of support for the needy in Leviticus 25 is not about maintenance, such as we see in other places for the Levite, widow, orphan, and resident alien, without resolving their fundamental vulnerability. Instead, the laws are designed to rehabilitate the former landowner, and to return him to productive existence. As Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888) notes in his commentary on Leviticus (25:34):^[11]

Striking is the effect which the automatic reversion in the Jubilee of all landed property to the original owners or their heirs must have in the prevention of complete permanent poverty of some families by the side of overpowering accumulation of property in the hands of a few. Never can a clique of so called great landowners build itself up in the midst of a landless, and therefore dependent, pauperism when every fiftieth year the whole land reverts to its original division, and the richest goes back to the original acres of his heritage, and the poorest is given back the acres of his.

In short, the system in Leviticus 25 offers a pattern for coherent and total overhaul of the economic system, not merely palliative loans or handouts. Sooner or later, but assuredly, these integrated mechanisms bail out, when necessary, Hebrew citizens from the consequences of economic failure and then return to them the capital and the freedom to become independent again.

Part 2

Redemption (Geulah) and Familial Responsibility

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. I should have called it something you somehow haven’t to deserve. —Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man”

Land Redemption before the Jubilee

The jubilee is supposed to restart the system with basic equality, but what happens in the meantime during 49 years of market activity? It is difficult to rehabilitate people who lived as indentured servants for decades, and so long an establishment of new market distributions of wealth cannot be erased easily after fifty years. Therefore, the chapter adds the redemption laws as another mechanism for freeing the poverty-stricken person’s ancestral land.^[12]

The primary form of redemption is through next-of-kin redeemers:

^{ויקרא כה:כה} כִּי יָמוּךְ אָחִיךָ וּמָכַר מֵאֲחֻזָּתוֹ וּבָא גֹאֲלוֹ הַקָּרֹב אֵלָיו וְגָאַל אֵת מִמְכַּר אָחִיו.

 

^{Lev 25:25} When your brother (Israelite) becomes impoverished and has to sell part of his holding, his closest redeemer shall come and redeem the sold property of his brother.

A famous example of such a redeemer—though based on different legal assumptions to those in Leviticus 25—is Boaz, a relative of Ruth’s deceased husband Machlon, who buys back his land for the family (Ruth 3:12-13; 4:1-10). Alternatively, if the man has no family able or willing to redeem him, Leviticus 25 permits the original owner to reverse his act of selling off his ancestral holding. The purchaser is expected to agree to sell the property back to the original owner at any point the owner has acquired enough capital with which to buy it back:

^{ויקרא כה:כו} וְאִישׁ כִּי לֹא יִהְיֶה לּוֹ גֹּאֵל וְהִשִּׂיגָה יָדוֹ וּמָצָא כְּדֵי גְאֻלָּתוֹ. ^כה:כז וְחִשַּׁב אֶת שְׁנֵי מִמְכָּרוֹ וְהֵשִׁיב אֶת הָעֹדֵף לָאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר מָכַר לוֹ וְשָׁב לַאֲחֻזָּתוֹ.

 

^{Lev 25:26} If a man has no redeemer but prospers and acquires enough for his redemption, ^25:27 he shall compute the years since its sale, refund the difference to the man to whom he sold it, and return to his holding.

According to the redemption law, the price is fixed by the value of crop years, so the original owner does not suffer from the rise of real estate prices after his sale. In short, the volatile market mechanisms are hobbled to make repurchase more accessible. Only if both of these options prove to be impossible, does the original owner need to wait till the jubilee year, when the property automatically reverts to its true owner (Lev 25:28).

Redemption from Non-Israelite Owners

The text does not bring up the redemption option for Israelites sold as slaves to other Israelites, and commentators discuss why this is. Jacob Milgrom, in his Leviticus commentary, suggests:

The answer is that the Israelite slave is not a slave…; he is sakir, a “hireling”… whose work amortizes the principal—a status to which redemption does not apply. The wages he earns may even provide him a surplus with which to free himself of his debt and status…. Thus it is preposterous to deduce categorically from the absence of a redemption provision that “the one who sold himself into debt bondage remains in service until the jubilee.”

And yet, Milgrom adds, “To be sure, his family has no obligation to redeem him.” Contrast this with the acute, even shrill anxiety reflected in the ratcheting up of the rhetoric of suasion for familial redemption when the purchaser is a resident alien, i.e., a non-Israelite who lives among the Israelites and keeps some of their laws.^[13] Here, every brother, uncle, first cousin or blood relative being urged to redeem this Hebrew long before the jubilee:

^{ויקרא כה:מז} וְכִי תַשִּׂיג יַד גֵּר וְתוֹשָׁב עִמָּךְ וּמָךְ אָחִיךָ עִמּוֹ וְנִמְכַּר לְגֵר תּוֹשָׁב עִמָּךְ אוֹ לְעֵקֶר מִשְׁפַּחַת גֵּר. ^כה:מח אַחֲרֵי נִמְכַּר גְּאֻלָּה תִּהְיֶה לּוֹ אֶחָד מֵאֶחָיו יִגְאָלֶנּוּ.^כה:מט אוֹ דֹדוֹ אוֹ בֶן דֹּדוֹ יִגְאָלֶנּוּ אוֹ מִשְּׁאֵר בְּשָׂרוֹ מִמִּשְׁפַּחְתּוֹ יִגְאָלֶנּוּ אוֹ הִשִּׂיגָה יָדוֹ וְנִגְאָל.

 

^{Lev 25:47} If a resident alien among you has prospered, and your kinsman being in straits, comes under his authority and gives himself over to the resident alien among you, or to an offshoot of an alien’s family,^25:48 he shall have the right of redemption even after he has given himself over. One of his kinsmen shall redeem him, ^25:49 or his uncle or his uncle’s son shall redeem him, or anyone of his family who is of his own flesh shall redeem him; or, if he prospers, he may redeem himself.

The rabbis suggest that the Torah’s fear is assimilation,^[14] though I suggest that Leviticus 25 fears that the alien will treat the Hebrew he has acquired as an actual slave or he will not consent to set him free on the jubilee. Perhaps the legal subjection of a Hebrew citizen to a “mere” resident alien, however prosperous, is itself intolerably demeaning to the whole Hebrew brotherhood.

Assuming no redemption proves feasible, the chapter reiterates an admonition to the Hebrew band of brothers not to permit the resident alien master to treat the Hebrew slave ruthlessly:

^{ויקרא כה:נג} כִּשְׂכִיר שָׁנָה בְּשָׁנָה יִהְיֶה עִמּוֹ לֹא יִרְדֶּנּוּ בְּפֶרֶךְ לְעֵינֶיךָ.

 

^{Lev 25:53} He shall be under his authority as a laborer hired by the year; he shall not rule ruthlessly over him in your sight.

Finally, the Israelites must make sure the resident alien, like the Israelite master of any unredeemed Israelite indentured servant, release his indentured servant at the jubilee even without compensation.

^{ויקרא כה:נד} וְאִם לֹא יִגָּאֵל בְּאֵלֶּה וְיָצָא בִּשְׁנַת הַיֹּבֵל הוּא וּבָנָיו עִמּוֹ.

 

^{Lev 25:54} If he has not been redeemed in any of those ways, he and his children with him shall go free in the jubilee year.

At the risk of overreading the language of the legislation, it seems that the negative report, “if he is not redeemed in any of these diverse ways” is meant as a criticism, implying moral as well as economic bankruptcy. Even so, the basic rule is that Israelite family members are not expected to bankrupt themselves to support their relatives, but affluent family members must redeem their relatives’ property.^[15]

Your Brother’s Keeper: Biblical Social Security

This “web of brothers” ideal, in which extended family are expected to pay out of their own pockets in order to redeem their relative’s property or person functions as a corrective to an unregulated market economy that leaves any given member vulnerable. The ethos of the extended family’s responsibility for one another differs from that of the pure market-driven society, in which distribution of goods is supposed to reflect the “just deserts” of an individual’s talents and efforts. The family is a structure founded on the interdependence of unequal members who, nonetheless, see themselves as a whole.^[16]

The “brother as go’el” gives new meaning to Cain’s rhetorical question, הֲשֹׁמֵר אָחִי אָנֹכִי, Am I my brother’s keeper? (Gen 4: 9). For the responsibility to be a guardian means not only protection from external enemies but also aid when one’s own failures make one vulnerable. Brothers are mutual guarantors, which is the rationale of responsibility articulated by Judah to his father when, to make up for past failures in protecting Joseph and Simeon, he urges his father to place his brother Benjamin’s well-being in his (Judah’s) hands:

^{בראשית מג:ט} אָנֹכִי אֶעֶרְבֶנּוּ מִיָּדִי תְּבַקְשֶׁנּוּ אִם לֹא הֲבִיאֹתִיו אֵלֶיךָ וְהִצַּגְתִּיו לְפָנֶיךָ וְחָטָאתִי לְךָ כָּל הַיָּמִים.

 

^{Gen 43:9} I myself will be a surety for him, you may hold me responsible, if I do not bring him to you and present him before you, otherwise I will be “guilty before you all of my days.^[17]

In fact, the brother-redeemers who provide social security can expect their temporarily distressed brothers to reciprocate after they have succeeded in the rehabilitative process. The rationale of a web of co-responsible brothers is not radically utopian, rather it reflects the way some traditional families share resources and provide a safety net. Rav Hirsch makes this same point in his commentary using highly speculative etymologies (Lev 25:36):

The Torah says: the life of your brother is with you (Lev. 25:36), i.e. the whole of the development of his life, the fulfillment of the mission of his life is closely bound up with you and yours. You are not there only for yourself, and you do not earn only for yourself. Although, in the first instance, you have to look after yourself in order to acquire the means which enable you to accom­plish the mission in life which God has set for you, part of this mission in life is to acquire also the means which enable you to help the brother who is socially connected with you to achieve the mission of his life. What you earn you earn for yourself and for him. His life is bound up with you and with what you possess. This im = ‘with’ [from the life of your brother is with you] makes you into an am = nation.”^[18]

In sum, the redemption system envisions the ideal Hebrew society as a balance between individual, financially independent, self-sufficient landowners who are sovereign to buy and sell their labor and capital at will within a dynamic agricultural market society and a web of organically related brothers individuals who are interdependent and co-responsible to save their relatives from the disastrous effects of an economic crisis without blaming them.

Non-Slavery and Protection in Leviticus 25

The consistent legal euphemism of Leviticus 25 is never to call the Hebrew slave “a slave,” and that too maintains his dignity. In essence, de jure, he is a landowning freeman, regardless of the market transaction by which he is indentured. This is not simply a transparent euphemism, a humane face concealing – with a wink and a nod – a rapacious capitalist slave owner.

The Hebrew slave knows that he is not a slave in perpetuity for he and his temporary owner and his relatives know he will eventually be liberated at the jubilee. Moreover, the slave and his relatives still has a legal right to redeem himself and his land at any point that becomes feasible. All these rights anchor the poor’s self-consciousness within a collective social and legal consciousness that maintains a self-image of human dignity, equality and freedom as one’s true status.

View Footnotes

 

1.   Moreover, Leviticus 25’s rights are not extended to all people. Leviticus 25 portrays God as the Redeemer of Israel from Egypt, not as the Creator of humanity. History, not nature, provides the basis for the rights that precede and ground the constitution of society. Thus, this mythic event in Israel’s history only guarantees equal rights to the Israelites, not to all people even if they are created in the image of God, and not even if they are resident aliens living on the God’s territory. (Though see a possible alternative conception in Exod 12:49, Lev 24:22, Num 15:15.) That said, Jefferson was a slaveholder, and slaves were not given the right to freedom even after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, regardless of the fact that the plain meaning of the text implies that slavery is wrong.

2.   Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 107.

3.   The author’s translation.

4.   The text later clarifies that this rule or redemption does not apply to houses in cities and villages, only to agricultural land and farmsteads (vv. 29–31). For more on the logic of this exception, see Avraham Faust, “The Jubilee Real Estate Law,” TheTorah.com (2014). The text makes an exception to this exception, so that in Levitical cities the Levites’ holdings retain their jubilee protection (25:32–34).

5.   Editor’s note: See discussion in Yairah Amit,  “The Jubilee Law: Ideal Legislation,” TheTorah.com (2015).

6.   Leviticus 25, however, forbids charging such interest:

^{ויקרא כה:לו} אַל תִּקַּח מֵאִתּוֹ נֶשֶׁךְ וְתַרְבִּית וְיָרֵאתָ מֵאֱלֹהֶיךָ וְחֵי אָחִיךָ עִמָּךְ. ^כה:לז אֶת כַּסְפְּךָ לֹא תִתֵּן לוֹ בְּנֶשֶׁךְ וּבְמַרְבִּית לֹא תִתֵּן אָכְלֶךָ.

 

^{Lev 25:36} Do not exact from him advance or accrued interest, but fear your God. Let him live by your side as your kinsman. ^25:37 Do not lend him your money at advance interest, or give him your food at accrued interest.

For a discussion of the Torah’s interest prohibition, see Michael Satlow, “What Is Wrong with Charging Interest?” TheTorah.com (2019).

7.   The interpretation of this chapter as outlining a spiral into poverty was put forward by Jacob Milgrom in his commentary on Leviticus: Leviticus 23–27, Anchor Bible 3B (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010; repr. of, New York: Doubleday, 2001), 2091–2093.

8.    

^{ויקרא כה:לה} וְכִי יָמוּךְ אָחִיךָ וּמָטָה יָדוֹ עִמָּךְ וְהֶחֱזַקְתָּ בּוֹ גֵּר וְתוֹשָׁב וָחַי עִמָּךְ.

 

^{Lev 25:35} If your brother declines, falls with you, you should hold him up [as though he were] a resident alien, and let him live with you.

Milgrom (Leviticus 23–27, 2205) suggests that the reference is to the creditor.

9.   While in Exodus and Deuteronomy, the Torah speaks about the “Hebrew slave” (עבד עברי), referring to a six-year indenture of one Israelite to another, Leviticus 25 never uses the term slave, whose hard lot is described in a number of biblical passages: Psalm 105:17-18 describes the torment of a slave, and Psalm 123:2-3 implies that slaves in their dependence are treated with contempt. In fact, Jeremiah 34:9 implies that an Israelite should not enslave a brother Israelite, perhaps because, it is an indignity for a brother to be treated by his brother in that way.

10.                    This is also why Leviticus 25 avoids calling the “brother Israelite” who when in debt sells himself into slavery the pejorative, humiliating term Hebrew slave (eved ivri): Lest brothers lose their sense of solidarity and become reified in class distinctions that congeal into the terminology of master and slave that stigmatizes, alienates, and essentializes individual members of society.

11.                    Translations from Samson R. Hirsch, The Pentateuch, 5 vols., trans. Isaac Levy (London: Judaica Press, 1960).

12.                    See Jeremy Unterman, “Redemption,” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 5:650–654.

13.                    For more on this category, see Ishay Rosen-Zvi, “In the Torah, is the Ger Ever a Convert?,” TheTorah.com (2019).

14.                    See Sifra, Behar, Parasha 6, 8:1, and Rashi on Leviticus 25:48, s.v., geulah tihiyeh.

15.                    Admittedly, these same protections do not extend to non-Israelite slaves (vv. 42–46). For discussion of this problem and how Jewish tradition has dealt with it, see James Diamond, “The Treatment of Non-Israelite Slaves: From Moses to Moses,” TheTorah.com (2016).

16.                    As David Novak explains in his book, Jewish Social Ethics:

Family life includes members who are not productive by any measurable standard: the very young, the very old, the infirm, the handicapped, even the unborn. Their needs far outstrip their economic deserts. Because all of us are never totally assured of our own productivity, we desire family life, because the family is where we are accepted for what we are, rather than for what we make. Society, in any fully human sense, must be a balancing between the needs of the hearth and the deserts of the marketplace.

David Novak, Jewish Social Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 208.

17.                    See also Genesis 44:32. This language is borrowed from the terminology of economic responsibility of guardianship, such as a shepherd’s responsibility for his flock to the owner of the livestock (Gen. 31:39). A “surety” is a kind of mortgage or collateral. Later the Rabbis will use that same term to describe the mutual surety or guarantee among Jews – kol Yisrael arevim zeh lazeh – “All Jews are co-guarantors for one another” (b. Shavuot 39a).

18.                    R. Hirsch is well-known for his inventive sermonic etymologies which are not necessarily accepted by contemporary Hebrew philologists. See “speculative etymologies” in Yishay-Chay Rosenberg, Rabbi S.R.‎‎ ‎Hirsch’s Educational Worldview,‎ as Reflected in His Torah Commentary (PhD diss., Bar-Ilan University, 2013).

Can Elijah Reconcile Fathers and Sons?

Biblical tradition often depicts difficult father and son relationships. Accordingly, the concluding verses of Malachi—the final book of the Prophets—imagines ultimate redemption through a metaphor of father-son reconciliation, in which the fire and brimstone prophet Elijah is its unlikely harbinger. Leave it to the poet Yehuda Amichai to step in and offer a counter-model to rescue the metaphor.

Prof.

Wendy Zierler

Categories:

Tzav

 

Elisha standing by as God sends bears to attack the youths that taunted him (2 Kings 2:23-25). Elijah in the sky. From “French 1463 Manuscript Douce 336 Bodl. lib”

The third chapter of Malachi, read as the haftarah for Shabbat Hagadol, describes the great, awesome day of God being epitomized by reconciliation of fathers and sons:

^כד וְהֵשִׁיב לֵב-אָבוֹת עַל-בָּנִים, וְלֵב בָּנִים עַל-אֲבוֹתָם

 

²⁴ And he [Elijah] shall return the heart of the fathers to the sons, and the heart of the sons to their fathers;

Standing on the other side of the mechitzah as my son become a bar mitzvah on Shabbat Hagadol a few years ago,^[1] I found myself at a remove, a spectator beholding the transmission of a tradition between the men of this congregation, between fathers and sons. Watching that ceremony of seemingly seamless patriarchal transmission, compelled me, if against my will, to look more closely at the specific, male-centered theme being addressed at the end of Malachi’s prophecy. And not just in Malachi, but Tanakh writ large. It seems, our textual tradition—and here we share something with Western Literature writ large—has a lot of trouble with Fathers and Sons.

The Troubled Father-Son Relationship

The Mother-Son vs. Father-Son Relationship: Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac

The tradition, as it turns out, has little trouble with mothers and sons, a relationship that it repeatedly depicts as stable, abiding, and uninterrupted. For example, in Genesis 24:67, when Isaac marries Rebecca, he brings her into his mother’s tent, and is comforted in his marriage over the loss of his mother Sarah.^[2]

All this stands in stark contrast to Isaac’s relationship with his father after the incident of the Akedah, as depicted at the end of Genesis 22. When Abraham and Isaac initially set out on their journey to Moriah, they are described as walking yachdav– together. But after Abraham bound his son on an altar and almost slaughtered him to demonstrate his love for God, Abraham is depicted as walking yachdav with ne’arav (his servants, a telling rhyme) but not with Isaac.

Bad Father-Son Relationships in the Bible

The Bible is filled with examples of troubled relationships between fathers and sons:

• While Noah is drunk, one of his sons leaves him naked on the floor (Gen 9:21-23).^[3]
• Isaac chooses Esau over Jacob, and Jacob (with the encouragement of his mother) tricks him in return (Gen 27). When our forefathers love a son, they often do so at the expense of others sons, which fosters resentment and even violence.
• Jacob prefers Joseph, and his other sons trick both of them, such that Joseph spends years in bondage and Jacob spends decades assuming that his beloved son is dead (Gen 37).^[4] By the time Jacob reunites with Joseph, he is a broken man, one who describes the days of his life to Pharaoh as short and bitter (Gen 47:9).
• Reuben strikes up a relationship with Jacob’s concubine, Bilhah (Gen 35:22).
• We learn next to nothing about Moses’ sons, but from the little we do hear, we learn that he neglected to circumcise one of them (Exod 4:24-26) and that he abandoned both of them, causing his father-in-law to make a trip to Sinai to bring Moses his family back (Exod 18:2-5).
• Aaron’s sons Nadav and Avihu are consumed by a heavenly fire, and in response to their death, Aaron falls strangely silent (Lev 10:3).
• When Eli the priest hears about the death of his sons and the loss of the ark, it is the latter that makes him fall back on his chair and break his neck (I Sam 4:17-18).^[5]
• King David has a famously tragic and bellicose relationship with his son, Absalom—whose name ironically means “father of peace,” but who dedicates himself to waging war against his father David and proclaiming himself king in his father’s stead (II Sam 15-19).^[6] David eventually defeats Absalom and dramatically mourns his passing, which occurs in a grisly fashion, with Absalom’s head “caught up” by the branches of a terebinth tree (II Samuel 18:9).

Despite the emphasis on the problematic aspects of father-son relationships, Jewish tradition offers us a theological metaphor of God as father and the people as God’s sons. The imagery in Malachi fits within this tension. What better metaphor to imagine an overturning of the world order than to imagine fathers and sons finally reconciling!

Maimonides Use of Malachi in His Description of Messianic Times

Quoting Malachi 3:24 as a prooftext, Maimonides teaches in Hilkhot Melachim (Laws of Kings) 12:2:

ייראה מפשוטן של דברי הנביאים, שבתחילת ימות המשיח תהיה מלחמת גוג ומגוג; ושקודם מלחמת גוג ומגוג, יעמוד נביא לישראל ליישר ישראל ולהכין ליבם: שנאמר “הנה אנוכי שולח לכם, את אלייה הנביא” (מלאכי ג,כג). ואינו בא לא לטמא הטהור, ולא לטהר הטמא, ולא לפסול אנשים שהם בחזקת כשרות, ולא להכשיר מי שהוחזקו פסולין; אלא לשום שלום בעולם, שנאמר “והשיב לב אבות על בנים” (מלאכי ג,כד).

 

It seems from the simple understanding of the prophets that the Messianic age will begin with the war of Gog and Magog, and that before the war of Gog and Magog, a prophet will arise in Israel to correct the Israelites and prepare their hearts, as it says, “behold I am sending you Elijah the prophet” (Mal 3:23). He will not come to declare the pure impure or to declare the impure pure, nor will he declare people with a presumption of legitimacy to be illegitimate or to declare the presumed illegitimate to be legitimate. Rather, he will bring peace to the world, as it says, “and he shall return the heart of the fathers to the sons” (Mal 3:24).

This, in and of itself, our tradition teaches, is messianic and miraculous, and not so easy to attain.

Elijah: A Role Model Father Figure?

That Malachi designates Elijah the Prophet as the harbinger of this reconciliation proves particularly perplexing. It is true that at the end of his life, when Elijah is carried off to the heavens in a chariot of fire, his disciple Elisha designates him as a father figure, crying out: אָבִי אָבִי רֶכֶב יִשְׂרָאֵל וּפָרָשָׁיו (My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof!) (II Kings 2:12). Elisha claims Elijah as his spiritual father and inherits his prophetic mantle, but Elijah is a harsh father.

When Elisha first meets him and wishes to follow him, he requests the opportunity to kiss his mother and father goodbye, which Elijah refuses him (I Kings 19:19-21); Elijah seems to be more interested in breaking the natural father-son relationship, replacing it with a relationship between the prophet and his disciple. If Elijah is a father figure, he is one who seems to stand, inexorably, for the father-son relationship torn asunder. His chariots of fire “death” in front of Elisha, which “parted them both asunder” only underscores the fact of Eljah’s abidingly schismatic ways.

Elisha’s ensuing behavior suggests that he has inherited from Elijah a disturbingly punitive paternal/prophetic model: when a group of children taunt Elisha for his baldness, he curses them and two she-bears maul forty-two of these children to bits (II Kings 2:23-24).

Cut off from the People

Indeed, Elisha learns these ways well from his spiritual father/master, as Elijah’s relation with the people is marked throughout by furious dissent, resulting in a recurrent need to flee and live at a remove from civilization. No sooner do we meet Elijah in I Kings 17, he is forced, after announcing a punitive drought, to flee Ahab and the people to Nachal Kerit, a place whose very name, evocative of the Pentateuchal punishment of Karet, bespeaks a condition of being cut off. There at Nahal Kerit, Elijah is left to drink of the brook and be fed by the ravens, a carrion bird designated by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss as a mediator between life and death.^[7] While miraculous, Elijah’s means of sustenance at Nahal Kerit is a dubious honor that consigns him to a liminal netherworld and prevents involvement in the day-to-day workings of the people he should be influencing.

This liminal existence recurs. In the aftermath of Elijah’s upstaging and subsequent slaughter of the prophets of Ba’al on Mount Carmel (II Kings 18:19-40), Elijah once again flees to the wilderness, this time to Mt. Horeb, where God tries to teach Elijah to have more sympathy for the people endeavors to show Elijah that the divine spirit is to be found neither in thunder nor in loud noises nor in grand miraculous acts but rather in the “kol demamah dakah” – the still small voice.

But Elijah remains impervious to this lesson, reprising verbatim his initial complaint to God from I Kings 19:10:

^{מלכים א יט:יד} וַיֹּאמֶר֩ קַנֹּ֨א קִנֵּ֜אתִי לַי-הֹוָ֣ה׀ אֱלֹהֵ֣י צְבָא֗וֹת כִּֽי עָזְב֤וּ בְרִֽיתְךָ֙ בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל אֶת מִזְבְּחֹתֶ֣יךָ הָרָ֔סוּ וְאֶת נְבִיאֶ֖יךָ הָרְג֣וּ בֶחָ֑רֶב וָאִוָּתֵ֤ר אֲנִי֙ לְבַדִּ֔י וַיְבַקְשׁ֥וּ אֶת נַפְשִׁ֖י לְקַחְתָּֽהּ:

 

^{I Kings 19:14} I have been very jealous for the LORD the God of hosts; for the children of Israel have forsaken Thy covenant, thrown down Thine altars, and slain Thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.

Elijah will not listen, change, or even modulate for a moment his fiery rhetorical tone, even when schooled by God to behave otherwise.

What Elijah Is Malachi Imagining?

To imagine Elijah as the harbinger of the reconciliation of the father-son relationship, both on a human and theological level, as Malachi does, is to imagine another Elijah entirely, one closer to his rabbinic guise—a “legal authority, a teacher of the wise, and a helper of those in crisis^[8]—than what we see in the biblical text. Elijah as we meet him in I and II Kings fits the bill as herald of בּוֹא יוֹם ה’ הַגָּדוֹל, וְהַנּוֹרָא, the coming of “the great and terrible day of the LORD: (Malachi 3:23). He also fits the very last threatening words of the prophecy: פֶּן-אָבוֹא, וְהִכֵּיתִי אֶת-הָאָרֶץ חֵרֶם, “lest I come and smite the land with utter destruction” (Malachi 324). That same Elijah hardly seems relevant to the intervening verse that speaks of the turning of the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, unless one construes him as representing an redemptive extreme: the end of days will see even Elijah making peace.

Yehudah Amichai’s Exploration of the Tense Father-Son Relationship

Yehudah Amichai addresses the dissonance between the loving and the frightening, immovable father, in a beautiful poem about his own mild-mannered, loving father, included in his last book of poems,^[9] פתוח סגור פתוח. Following I Kings 19, which casts Elijah in the Mosaic model by alluding explicitly to the giving of the Torah at Horeb, Amichai brings together references to Moses’ and Elijah’s wilderness theophanies, all for the sake of exploring the implications of the father-son relationship, both in human and theological terms:

אבי היה אלוהים ולא ידע.

 

My father was God and didn’t know.

 

הוא נתן לי את עשרת הדברות ולא ברעם ולא בזעם, ולא באש ולא בענן.

 

He gave me the ten commandments not in thunder nor in fury, not in fire nor in cloud.

 

אלא ברכות ובאהבה. והוסיף ליטופים והוסיף מילים טובות.

 

Rather in softness and love. And he added caresses and added good words.

 

והוסיף "אנא" והוסיף "בבקשה."

 

And added “Please” and added “You’re welcome.”

 

וזימר זכור ושמור בניגון אחד והתחנן ובכה בשקט בין דיבר לדיבר.

 

And hummed you shall remember and you shall observe in a single tune and pleaded and quietly wept between commandments.

 

לא תשא שם אלוהיך לשוא, לא תשא, לא לשוא.

 

Do not take the name of your God in vain, Do not take, not in vain.

 

אנא, אל תענה ברעך עד שקר.

 

Please, do not bear false testimony against your neighbor

 

וחיבק אותי חזק ולחש באזני, לא תגנוב, לא תנאף, לא תרצח.

 

And he hugged me and whispered in my ear, don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, don’t murder.

 

ושם את כפות ידיו הפתוחות על ראשי בברכת יום כיפור.

 

And placed his open palms on my head for the Yom Kippur blessing.

 

כבד, אהב, למען יאריכון ימיך על פני האדמה.

 

Honor, love, so that your days shall be lengthened on the face of the land

 

וקול אבי לבן כמו שער ראשו.

 

And my father’s voice was white like the hair on his head.

 

אחר כך הפנה את פניו אלי בפעם האחרונה כמו ביום שבו מת בזרועותי.

 

Afterward he turned his face toward me that last time as on the day when he died in my arms.

 

ואמר: אני רוצה להוסיף שנים לעשרת הדיברות:

 

And he said: I want to add two more to the Ten Commandments:

 

הדיבר האחד-עשר, "לא תשתנה"

 

The eleventh commandment, “Do not change.”

 

והדיבר השנים-עשר, "השתנה תשתנה."

 

And the twelfth commandment, “Surely you shall change.”

 

כך אמר אבי ופנה ממני והלך ונעלם במרחקיו המוזרים.

 

That’s what my father said and then turned from me and went and disappeared into his strange distance.

Appropriately, Amichai looks to God, not to Elijah, as a paternal role-model, recalling God’s efforts in I Kings 19 to teach Elijah the parenting as well as the theological lesson of the “still small voice.” As a giver of dibrot, “sayings,” Amichai’s father / God transmits h/His message not in thunder, or fury, not in fire and cloud, but in the tender, quiet mode of blessing and love.

Rather than turning away from his child in jealous fury, Amichai’s F/father turns toward h/His son and even dies in his arms, even as h/He continues to live on his imagination and sensibility. And though in death, h/He departs like Elijah to strange distances, neither chariots nor fire spirit him away from h/His son. He simply turns and walks.

Yehudah Amichai’s Father’s Two Commandments and the Role of Fathers and Sons

Before departing, h/He adds new “sayings” or commandments that bespeak the desire both for permanence and abiding values—don’t change—as well as awareness of the necessity of transformation—you shall surely change. The role of a son is to remain loyal as well as to mature, develop. Acknowledging the fundamental need for change is a precondition for the reconciliation of Fathers and Sons, a redemptive condition that Maimonides, following Malachi calls for, but fails ultimately to see in his own day.

Amichai’s poem picks up this yearning where the prophets leave off and tries to give it an everyday familial face—kindly rather than terrible, but nevertheless, the stuff of a new revelation.

View Footnotes

For my daughters’ benot mitzvah, I had been the gabba’it at a Women’s tefillah service, and therefore, had stood right next to my daughters as they read their parashiyot, their haftarot, and led tefillah.

1.   Abraham attempts to take Isaac away from Sarah; despite this, the mother-son relationship prevails. Other examples of this include Yokheved, who manages to nurse and maintain a relationship with Moses, even after he is drawn from the water and adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter, and Hannah’s relationship with Samuel. Though Samuel is pledged to service in Shiloh, Hannah makes him “a little robe,” and brings “it to him from year to year, when she came up with her husband to offer the yearly sacrifice,” (I Samuel 2:19).

2.   To be fair, his other two sons cover him.

3.   Throughout that time, Joseph makes no effort to contact his father and inform him of his whereabouts.

4.   Admittedly, his sons are described as wicked.

5.   In the Western literary tradition, we know that Oedipus took what belonged to his father (namely, his mother) and that the Jewish Freud built a whole psychology around this myth of the son wanting to kill his father to marry his mother. And the Jewish literary critic Harold Bloom built a whole literary theory around Freud’s model, arguing that strong poets can never really come into being unless they wrestle their predecessor (father) poets to death and clear space for their own literary creativity. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

6.   Claude Levi Strauss, Structural Anthropology, Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, trans. (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 224-225.

7.   Kirsten Lindbeck, Elijah and the Rabbis: Story and Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. ix.

8.    Open Closed Open, 1998.