Introduction
The Book of Numbers is in some respects the most miscellaneous of the five books of the Torah, but it also includes a series of uniquely fascinating episodes that exhibit distinctive literary features. The first ten chapters are, by scholarly consensus, the work of Priestly writers and in a certain sense constitute a continuation of Leviticus. The four initial chapters are taken up with a detailed tabulation of the census of the tribes conducted in the wilderness and are the warrant for the prevalent English title of the book, which goes back to the Vulgate and the Septuagint and is also reflected in a designation appearing in rabbinic sources, ḥomesh hapequdim, “the Fifth [that is, one book of the Five] of Reckonings.” (The generally used Hebrew title, Bemidbar, which is simply the first common noun in the text, means “in the wilderness.”) The Priestly writers’ enthusiasm for pageantry is manifested in this great initial roll call of the tribes, which is picked up in the review of the order of their march through the wilderness in chapter 10 and in the elaborately repetitive rehearsal of the gifts of the twelve chieftains in chapter 7. In between these, we are given laws intended to protect cultic purity in chapters 5 and 6, with considerable attention devoted to the trial by ordeal of the wife suspected of adultery and to the nazirite’s vows of abstinence, and then the dedication of the Levites and the ritual of the Passover offering in chapters 8 and 9.
The book returns to the narrative impulse that marks the first half of Exodus—indeed, with certain pronounced parallels to episodes in Exodus—in chapter 11. Although some legal material, in large part concerned with the cult, will be introduced along the way, together with an additional chapter (26) devoted to census, narrative predominates to the end of the book. The Israelites, Sinai behind them, are on the move, edging toward the prospect of the conquest of the land that is first engaged here in the reconnaissance mission of the twelve spies (chapters 13 and 14) and that will become imminent, forty years later in narrated time, with actual combat against kingdoms to the east of the Jordan, from chapter 21 onward. We are repeatedly reminded of the passing of generations as the story carries us to the border of the promised land. After the incident of the spies, the entire adult generation that came out of Egypt is fated to die before the promise of the land can be realized. Moses, seconded by Aaron, fails the test of trusting in God’s provident intervention when he strikes the rock on his own initiative in order to bring forth water (chapter 20), and as a result, he, too, will not be privileged to enter the land. Miriam and Aaron die; Moses’s impending death on Mount Nebo is announced by God; and Joshua is lined up to succeed him as leader (the logical narrative continuation of this book being the Book of Joshua).
But if Israel is on the move from chapter 11 to the end, it must be said that this text associates movement with trouble. After the initial choreographed procession of the teeming tribes, each arrayed in orderly fashion around its own banner, we get repeated representations of a motley crew of malcontents—the Hebrew pejorative ʾasafsuf, “riffraff” (11:4), is aptly invoked to characterize them—a mob churning with complaints and frustrated desires, restive under Moses’s leadership, fed up with the hardships of life in the wilderness, and nostalgic for the material comforts of life in Egypt.
The incidents of Taberah (Conflagration) and Kibroth-Hattaavah (the Graves of Desire) reported in chapter 11 establish a model for much of what follows. The narrative motifs deployed, which first appeared in Exodus and now recur in a whole series of episodes here in Numbers, constitute such a fixed sequence that one is tempted to say they qualify as a type-scene, like the type-scenes of betrothal and annunciation in Genesis and Exodus. The one notable difference, however, from type-scene is that instead of the same scene, with significant variations, featuring different characters, we have a repetition of the same scene involving the same actors—Israel, Moses, and God—manifesting a certain intensification more than significant variation from one recurrence to the next. The scheme of the recurrent scene of “murmuring” or complaint is as follows: the people bitterly protests its misery in the wilderness or Moses’s leadership or both; God’s wrath flares against the people, expressing itself in some sort of “scourge” that decimates the Israelite ranks; Moses intercedes—in two instances, after God actually threatens to wipe out the entire people and to begin anew with Moses—and He relents. The two most salient episodes of Israelite recalcitrance are the story of the spies, who report the fabulous bounty of the land but despair of conquering it, then seek to storm it without divine authorization, and the story of the mutiny led by Korah (respectively, chapters 13–14 and 16–17). Restiveness under Moses’s rule is so epidemic that even Miriam and Aaron are infected by it, at one point resentfully rebelling against their brother (chapter 12). One suspects that all these repetitions of the scene of murmuring are introduced because the writers conceived it as a paradigm for the subsequent history of Israel: recurrent resentment of God’s rule and of the authority of His legitimate leaders, chronic attraction to objects of base material desire, fearfulness, divisiveness, and the consequences of national disaster brought about, in the view of the biblical writers, by this whole pattern of constant backsliding.
For all the prominence of these scenes of rebellion, Numbers offers a kind of dialectical counterimage to the representation of Israel as an obstinate and refractory mob. This generation that cannot free itself from the slave mentality it brought with it from Egypt also constitutes the beginnings of a people meant to realize a grand historical destiny. Imagery and acts of martial prowess, reinforced by sheer numbers that daunt the other nations of the region, and more pacific images of well-watered vegetation luxuriantly burgeoning, are associated with the assembled tribes of Israel. Many of these terms are introduced in poetry, and it is the striking poetic insets in Numbers that account for much of its distinctive quality among books of the Bible. The more typical convention of biblical literature is to insert a relatively long poem at the end of a book, as happens with the Blessing of Jacob at the end of Genesis and with the Song of Moses at the end of Deuteronomy, or after a climactic narrative event, as in the instance of the Song of the Sea in Exodus. Here, however, we are given snippets of what look like very ancient Hebrew poems at unpredictable points in the narrative, together with one relatively extended sequence of poems (it is not really a single continuous poem), Balaam’s oracles, a series of prophecies about Israel’s future that is pronounced, unlike any other biblical poetry, by a non-Israelite soothsayer.
It is worth reflecting on the ancient character of the poems and what role that plays in the narrative panorama of Numbers. The first of these (if one excepts God’s oracular pronouncement in 12:6–8 to Miriam and Aaron on Moses’s unique status as prophet) is a highly fragmentary quotation from a vanished work, the Book of the Battles of YHWH: “Against Waheb in a whirlwind and the Wadis of Arnon, / and the cascade of the wadis that turns down toward Ar’s dwelling, / and clings to Moab’s border” (21:14–15). These opaque lines are followed, two verses on, by the Song of the Well: “Rise up, O Well! / Sing out to it. / Well, that captains dug, / the people’s nobles delved it, / with a scepter, with their walking stick.” No one has offered a convincing explanation of what this is all about, and it is an interesting question why such scraps of old verse should have been incorporated in the Book of Numbers. The French literary critic Roland Barthes, in a much discussed essay, once provocatively claimed that many details of material reality in realist fiction are introduced not to signify anything or to serve any function of plot or theme but solely to invoke the category of the real, to produce a “reality effect.” In a roughly analogous way, I would like to propose that these fragments of old poems are introduced into the narrative of Numbers at least in part in order to produce an “antiquity effect.” There is no way of knowing whether Hebrew audiences in, say, the ninth century B.C.E. were still familiar with the Book of the Battles of YHWH, or whether it was already a lost work, surviving only in remembered fragments or perhaps tag ends of manuscript. The point, in any case, of the fragmentary quotation, triggered in context by the geographical references, would have been to evoke a distant moment in early Israelite history, suffused with the aura of the historical era of the story’s setting in the thirteenth century B.C.E. One may surmise that the Book of the Battles of YHWH was deemed too anthropomorphic or too mythological in character to be included in the canon that was evolving, perhaps (to judge by the title) featuring a warrior-god wielding lightning as his weapon, as in some of the Psalms and in Ugaritic poetry, leading the assault against Israel’s enemies. The enigmatic lines cited from this ancient text conjure up an era of fierce martial energies when Israel first established itself among the peoples of Canaan as a conquering nation. (The early-twentieth-century Hebrew poet Saul Tchernikhovsky would capture something of the spirit of this era by referring to the primordial deity of the Hebrews in a programmatically Nietzschean poem as “El, god of the conquerors of Canaan in a whirlwind.”) The Song of the Well might possibly recall a particular incident of discovering water in the wilderness, but, more prominently, it evokes a whole nomadic way of life in the desert, and in its extreme brevity, it looks more like the refrain of an old song than the complete text.
Later in chapter 21 (verses 27–30), a third ancient poem is introduced, beginning with the words “Come to Heshbon, let it stand built, / may the city of Sihon be unshaken.” What is striking about this particular text is that it is explicitly presented as coming from a non-Israelite source: it is said to be what the “rhapsodes” (moshlim) say; these would be West Semitic, possibly trans-Jordanian, bards of unspecified national identity, and the burden of their song is a celebration of the predominance of the Amorite city Heshbon over Moab that has no direct connection with Israelite history. These lines (which become somewhat obscure toward the end) are either a Hebrew translation of a foreign poem or a citation of a poem from a language so closely cognate with Hebrew that it required only minor adaptation. Given the foreign provenance of the poem, it is an especially striking instance of an antiquity effect, taking the story of the approach of the Israelite masses to the eastern border of Canaan back to a half-remembered time when many kingdoms rose and fell in this region.
The brilliant centerpiece among these citations of archaic poetry is the oracles of Balaam (chapters 23 and 24), which follow the story of Balaam and his she-ass, tracing a cunning network of analogies to it. That story has often been characterized as a folktale, and there are no other instances of talking animals in the historical narratives of the Bible (the only other candidate, the serpent in the Garden story, belongs to the primeval and hence more mythological phase of biblical literature). Especially because, according to prevalent preconceptions, there is no humor in the Bible, it should be noted that this story is quite funny. The humor serves the purposes of a monotheistic satire of pagan notions of the professional seer with independent powers to curse or bless: Balaam the celebrated visionary cannot see the sword-wielding divine messenger who is plainly visible to his ass, and he is reduced to spluttering frustration, finally engaging in an angry argument with his beast of burden. Balaam then plays the role of the ass whose eyes, and mouth, are opened by God vis-à-vis the thrice frustrated, and understandably fuming, Moabite king Balak, to whom Balaam’s previous role as imperceptive satiric butt is assigned in this second story.
The very figure of Balaam is part of the antiquity effect cultivated in this narrative. This selfsame soothsayer is the principal character in an inscription discovered in Jordan in 1967, written in a language that is a close relative of Hebrew, with Aramaic elements, and dating from the eighth century B.C.E.; and so we may infer that he was known as a seer of fabled powers in the traditions of this region, perhaps going back to tales told centuries earlier. His appearance in Numbers, pronouncing blessings on Israel in lofty poetic language, sets this story of Israel on the threshold of its entrance into the land in the large context of the archaic traditions of the region. It is an Aramean prophet, summoned from “the eastern mountains,” who beholds from a promontory the vast array of the tribes of Israel (a vivid narrative realization of the dry census figures at the beginning of the book) and projects spatial into temporal vision, prophesying the future greatness of Israel:
[F]rom the top of the crags do I see them
and from the hills do I gaze on them.
Look, a people that dwells apart,
amongst nations it is not reckoned.
Who has numbered the dust of Jacob,
who counted the issue of Israel? (23:9–10)
The archaic coloration of Balaam’s oracles is nicely conveyed through the names he uses for the deity. Balaam in the poems refers to God once, near the beginning of the first oracle, as YHWH, but then God is variously invoked as El, Shaddai, and Elyon, all names of deities from the Canaanite pantheon that have been, one might say, co-opted by the Hebrew monotheists. Balaam expresses his own identity as a seer schooled in the lore of West Semitic polytheists by using animal imagery for God (as the Psalms do), representing Him charging against Israel’s enemies with “wild ox’s antlers.” And yet, this pagan prophet, both through the ingenious turns of the story and through the poetry that is put in his mouth, has been enlisted in the monotheistic cause. All prophetic utterance, all curses and blessings, come from YHWH alone: “What can I hex that El has not hexed, / and what can I doom that the LORD has not doomed?” (23:8). His prophecies about Israel move from sheer multitudinousness to martial fierceness—the people ravening like a lion, smashing the bones and crushing the loins of its foes—to a pacific vision of palm groves and gardens by a river followed by concluding reprise of martial imagery. Instructively, the sequence of oracles ends not with Israel but with a rapid panorama, couched in rather obscure vatic language, of sundry nations of the region plummeting to destruction. Once again, this chronicle of IsraeI poised for the conquest of the land God has promised it is set into an ancient world, whether remembered or reinvented through scraps of inherited literary tradition, where kingdoms rise and fall in the long reaches of history.
In the end, there are complementary parallels, counterpoints, and also strong tensions between the Priestly sections of the Book of Numbers and its narrative and poetic passages. The Priestly writers above all seek to establish a vision of order and stability—through the intricate system of laws regulating personal behavior and cultic practice, through the long lists of numbers and names, through the representation of the grand order of march of the tribes. They aspire to an ideal of Israel as a holy people, bound by Priestly ordinances, that is altogether unique among the nations of the earth. The poetry Balaam utters also registers the idea of “a people that dwells apart,” yet his oracles, like the surrounding narrative, clearly see Israel as part of the unfolding history of the whole region. This is a theater in which great kingdoms have come and gone, long before the arrival of Israel: the biblical self-perception of the Israelite nation as a latecomer to the historical scene is palpably present here. Now, at this reported moment in the thirteenth century B.C.E., it is Israel’s turn to establish itself through conquest. As the concluding chapters of Numbers take up issues of inheritance and the division of the land, and as the departure of Moses is announced, the narrative has prepared us for the defining moment of the crossing of the Jordan, with Joshua in command.