A Commentary on Numbers

Narrative, Ritual, and Colonialism

Pekka Pitkänen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351782913
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This book provides a new reading of the biblical book of Numbers in a commentary form. Mainstream readings have tended to see the book as a haphazard junkyard of material that connects Genesis–Leviticus with Deuteronomy (and Joshua), composed at a late stage in the history of ancient Israel. By contrast, this book reads Numbers as part of a wider work of Genesis–Joshua, a carefully crafted programmatic settler colonial document for a new society in Canaanite highlands in the late second millennium BCE that seeks to replace pre-existing indigenous societies. In the context of the tremendous influence that the biblical documents have had on the world in the last 2,000–3,000 years, the book also offers pointers towards reading these texts today. This volume is a fascinating study of this text, and will be of interest not only to biblical scholars, but to anyone with an interest in the history of the ancient Levant, and colonisation and colonialism in the ancient world more broadly.

1
Introduction

Place in the canon and the interpretative context of Numbers

Numbers is the fourth book in the Old Testament canon, following Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus. It is also the fourth book of the Jewish canon and part of the torah, the most holy set of books in the Jewish religion, consisting of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, and with the word torah meaning teaching, instruction in the original Hebrew. Jews generally prefer the label “Hebrew Bible” to “the Old Testament”. Here the latter will be used, but those favouring the former can substitute with it. In Christian settings, the torah is called the Pentateuch. The word Pentateuch derives from the Greek pente, five, and teuchos, book – thus, “five books”. This reflects the translation of the torah into Greek in the last centuries before the birth of Jesus and its use by Hellenistic Jewish communities in the Mediterranean area. This translation, the Septuagint (deriving from seventy in reference to the number of the translators of the Hebrew Old Testament according to legend), was also used by the early Christian community rather than the Hebrew original, even if both versions were transmitted in the ensuing centuries and beyond. While the Hebrew version is preferred by the moderns today, the Greek translation retains its significance for Christian communities and is also used today to compare diverging readings of the differing manuscripts of the Old Testament that have survived to the present.

In terms of the story, Numbers closely integrates with the story of the Pentateuch. Genesis starts with a story of creation and the expulsion of man from the paradisal garden (Gen 1–3). Humanity and civilisation then develop but a cataclysmic flood destroys them due to their wickedness (Gen 4–6). Yahweh nevertheless gives humanity a chance for a new start through Noah and his descendants (Gen 6–9). In the new world, various nations arise (Gen 10–11). Out of these, an individual, Abraham, is called by the god Yahweh to relocate to a different part of the ancient world (Gen 12). Yahweh also promises the new land to Abraham and his descendants in order to form a new nation. This happens some generations later, but not before Abraham’s descendants have sojourned in another land, Egypt (Gen 12–50). Having entered Egypt to escape famine, and after initially having found a good standing in the Egyptian society, later on they become slaves, as the attitude of the Egyptians towards them changes (Ex 1). There Moses enters the story. Called by his forefather Abraham’s god Yahweh from a burning bush while in exile from Egypt after committing a homicide in defence of a member of his social group, Moses returns to Egypt and leads his enslaved countrymen out from there (Ex 2–13). The intention is to also migrate over to the land promised to Abraham and where Abraham had lived as an individual before the move to Egypt by his (great) grandsons. The group traverses into the wilderness between Egypt and Canaan, the destination of the return journey. There in the wilderness they meet Yahweh at the mountain where Yahweh had called Moses to lead them out from Egypt (Ex 14–19; cf. Ex 3). Yahweh reveals to the escapees a new order of society and related laws they are to follow in the land of their destination, with much of the books of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers detailing these laws. Unfortunately, the people rebel and have to suffer various punishments and troubles in the wilderness. Eventually they have to die there, but their children are given a chance to enter the land of Canaan (Num 13–14). Even Moses slips and has to suffer death before entering the new land (Num 20). However, before his death, as the book of Deuteronomy describes, Moses adds additional instruction and legislation for the people to follow in the so-called promised land. Moses then dies and the Pentateuch ends there at the edge of the land of Canaan, just east from it. Such an ending may seem a bit of a cliffhanger for some readers; however, the book of Joshua does describe a successful entry into and more or less successful conquest of the land by Moses’s successor, Joshua. Further down the line, the books of Judges, Samuel and Kings, with parallels in the books of Chronicles to Samuel–Kings, describe in sequence the further vicissitudes of the new nation all the way through an establishment of a monarchy by Saul and David and its subsequent division into the Northern kingdom of Israel and Southern kingdom of Judah till the destruction of these kingdoms, first the northern one by the Assyrians towards the end of the eighth century BCE and then the southern one by the successors to the Assyrians, the Babylonians, in the sixth century BCE. The books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings also follow the Pentateuch in terms of the order of books in both Christian and Jewish canonical collections of the Bible. In the Jewish bibles Joshua–Kings are considered to be part of the canonical division of the so-caller former prophets. These together with the so-called writing or latter prophets, such as Isaiah and Jeremiah, constitute the so-called prophets section (nevi’im). In Christian bibles there is an interlude of the short book of Ruth between Judges and Samuel that depicts events around the time implied by the canonical order.

All in all, in its canonical and overall literary setting, the book of Numbers is part of a continuous story from creation to the exile of the kingdom of Judah. In addition to the books mentioned earlier, the Old Testament canon includes various writings, such as Psalms and wisdom literature. These are called “writings” (ketuvim) in Jewish bibles to round off the tripartite division of what the Christians would call the Old Testament. Christians themselves broadly divide the Old Testament into the Pentateuch, historical books, prophets and psalms and wisdom writings. The slight difference with Jewish perspectives already shows that how one looks at things is in many ways a matter of classification in order to make sense of the materials, just as humans often try to conceptualise various things around them in order to understand and handle them. In this, that the books of Chronicles that provide a parallel account to Samuel–Kings follow them in the canonical order in Christian bibles but are placed at the end in the Jewish canon in the writings (ketuvim) section suggests at least a somewhat differing appropriation of the Chronicles and the Old Testament canon as a whole. For example one may read the Christian Old Testament as ending in the stern words of Malachi 4, in contrast to the hopeful message of return from exile in 2 Chronicles 36 in the Jewish/Hebrew Bible. Further considerations about this and other differences in the canonical order of books in Christian and Jewish bibles are beyond the scope here as they ultimately have only limited relevance to the interpretation of the book of Numbers; however, it is useful to keep the canonical setting of Numbers in mind as a backdrop to interpretation.

History of scholarship

I consider the book of Numbers as an integral part of the Pentateuch, together with the book of Joshua (see ahead). Accordingly, the interpretation of Numbers is strongly tied with the interpretation of these books. The history of scholarship has been outlined well in the past (see e.g. Wenham 1996; Wenham 1999a; Wenham 2003:159–186; Otto 2012a:33–230; cf. also Frevel 2013), and I will therefore present only the most salient features of that scholarship, also as it impinges on the book of Numbers in particular.

Before the Enlightenment and the rise of biblical criticism, the Pentateuch was traditionally considered to be the work of Moses (with perhaps some discussion about how he could have written the account of his death in Dt 34). This view came to be shattered by the rise of Old Testament and Pentateuchal criticism. The first stage of that criticism was to divide the Pentateuch into sources. This is generally attributed to the French physician Jean Astruc in the eighteenth century, who detected separate sources in Genesis based on a distinction between the names Yahweh and Elohim in the Hebrew original. Soon the Pentateuch was divided into four sources of Yahwist (J; Ger. Jahwist), Elohist (E), Deuteronomy (D) and priestly source (P). J and E are narrative sources, P consists of ostensibly priestly legal materials and narratives in a specific priestly style, and D is essentially of the book of Deuteronomy. These divisions still broadly hold in today’s scholarship, except that a so-called Holiness Code (H) that is concentrated in Lev 17–26 was identified within P in the mid-nineteenth century (see ahead for further details).

With Martin Lebrecht de Wette’s 1805 dissertation (see de Wette 1830/1805; ET and commentary in Harvey and Halpern 2008), Deuteronomy came to be associated with Josiah’s reform (2 Ki 22) and accordingly dated to the seventh century BCE. The book was seen as a pious forgery by priests to support and perhaps even drive that reform. This can be considered as marking a second stage in the development of Old Testament criticism.

The third stage, a crucially important development, can be associated with Julius Wellhausen’s monumental work Prolegomena to the History of Israel (Prolegomenona zur Geschichte Israel), first published in 1878 (Wellhausen 1905/1878). What was important with this work was that, in contrast to dating the priestly materials of the Pentateuch to an early time, as had been the case previously, Wellhausen considered P as being the latest source. In this, he drew from the work of his predecessor and colleague Karl Heinrich Graf but succeeded in arguing the case in such a persuasive manner that the new hypothesis soon became the accepted basis for Old Testament scholarship. The order of sources was now J (ca 900 BCE), E (ca 800 BCE), D (late seventh century BCE) and P (late sixth–fifth century BCE).¹ Wellhausen also interpreted the history of ancient Israel based on these sources, with the older sources attesting spontaneous and decentralised religion that then developed into a more centralised, formalised and institution-alised one. The new paradigm, as it can be called, and also often labelled as the Wellhausenian or newer documentary hypothesis, became so dominant that anyone who wanted to be part of the Old Testament academic guild essentially had to follow it. Some dissenting voices remained, but these were essentially relegated to the margins of scholarship.

Wellhausen considered the sources to essentially be the creation of the time of their composition, with no earlier tradition included. However, the work of Hermann Gunkel on the Psalms and on the book of Genesis in the turn of the twentieth century (see Gunkel 1925–1926; Gunkel 1997/1901) pioneered the so-called form criti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Abbreviations and glossary
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Commentary
• Bibliography
• Author and subject index
• Index of archaeological and related sites
• Index of references to the Bible and other ancient sources