This is the last portion of the book of Numbers. In this week’s portion we start with a summary of all the places the Israelites visited during the journey. God then gives Moses the boundaries of the territory of Israel. Moses appoints representatives for each tribe to receive the lots. Levi, who has no land, is given forty eight cities, of which six are cities for refuge in the case of accidental homicide. The procedures for the case of accidental homicide and the legal procedure for homicide cases are enumerated. Finally, the tribe of Manasseh has an objection to the ruling made for some of their own tribe, the five daughters of Zelophehad.
3. And if they are married to any of the sons of the other tribes of the people of Israel, then shall their inheritance be taken from the inheritance of our fathers, and shall be given to the inheritance of the tribe where they are received; so shall it be taken from the lot of our inheritance. 4. And when the jubilee of the people of Israel shall be, then shall their inheritance be given to the inheritance of the tribe where they are received; so shall their inheritance be taken away from the inheritance of the tribe of our fathers. [Num 36:3-4]
The daughters had made an objection earlier that as their father died before having sons, and the inheritance chain was through sons, then the daughters would lose the inheritance of their father. The resolution was to allow in the case of a father who had no sons but did have daughters to let the daughters inherit. The elders of Gilead, relatives of the Daughters have brought this objection because such a system presents the problem of diluting the family and tribal holdings.
The resolution to this objection is rather simple:
5. And Moses commanded the people of Israel according to the word of the Lord, saying, the tribe of the sons of Joseph has said well… 8. So every daughter, who possesses an inheritance in any tribe of the people of Israel, shall be the wife to one of the family of the tribe of her father, that the people of Israel may enjoy every one the inheritance of his fathers. 9. Neither shall the inheritance move from one tribe to another tribe; but every one of the tribes of the people of Israel shall keep himself to his own inheritance.
With this commandment and the daughters of Zelophehad’s compliance with this mitzvah, we end the book of Numbers with a concluding statement.
13. These are the commandments and the judgments, which the Lord commanded by the hand of Moses to the people of Israel in the plains of Moab by the Jordan near Jericho.[Numbers 36:13]
Thus the commandment for daughter who inherit to marry within their tribe is the last commandment. This last commandment in the book of Number is remarkable in many ways. It contains a rather curious expression Moses commanded the people of Israel according to the word of the Lord.
Part of the curiosity is the rare forms of commanding used here, and only in this sequence in this verse. Moses, not God, first of all is doing the commanding. He is doing this commanding by the word of the lord, which is literally by the mouth of the Lord.
By the Mouth of the Lord is rare except for the book of Numbers. In Hebrew it is usually part of the expression al pi Hashem b’yad Moshe. Literally it means by the mouth of the Lord by the hand of Moses. It’s literal connotation is the dictation of the Torah, God spoke and Moses used his hands to write it down. It may also mean God gave a commandment and Moses executed it. One such use is the counting of the tribes at the beginning of the journey, but there it is often accompanied by another phrase: as God commanded. But in the last commandment, it’s not God doing the commanding, but Moses. One way of understanding this is a comment by the Talmudic sages:
Our Rabbis have taught…‘By the hand of Moses’ refers to the Gemara. I might include also the Mishnah; therefore it reads ‘that ye may teach’. [K'rithoth 13b]
By the hand of Moses means the Oral law, but a very specific one. The classic statement of the oral law is found in the Perkei Avot:
Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the men of the Great Assembly. [Avot 1:1]
According to tradition, this was an oral transmission of the stuff that explained the details of the written Torah. After the destruction of the Temple, it was compiled into the book we refer to as the Mishnah. A work expanding on the Mishnah with both new rulings to reflect new living patterns, explanations for the rules of the Mishnah, and a lot of stories for illustrative purposes became known in Aramaic as the Gemara. The Gemara along with the Mishnah is the work we refer to today as the Talmud.
This was not the first time Moses commanded something. Back in Exodus we read:
4. And all the wise men, that did all the work of the sanctuary, came every man from his work which they made; 5. And they spoke to Moses, saying, The people bring much more than enough for the service of the work, which the Lord commanded to make. 6. And Moses gave commandment, and they caused it to be proclaimed throughout the camp, saying, Let neither man nor woman do any more work for the offering of the sanctuary. So the people were restrained from bringing. [Exodus 36:4-6]
Moses stops the donations of materials to the Mishkan. He evaluated the situation by himself and came to a ruling. The stopping of the Mishkan donations and the last commandment, though backed by the word of God, was a judgment of Moses, not the direct commandment of God. It was Gemara: human and not divine derived rules to live by.
The last commandment was also the result of an objection to an objection. It could have been just as easy to blindly obey the original rule. But neither the daughters nor the elders of Gilead did. They saw a legitimate problem in the commandments, and brought it up for discussion. One solution led to another problem, and then that problem has to be resolved. This became the pattern of rabbinic thought. Once again look at the rhetoric used in the rabbinic statement:
Our Rabbis have taught…‘By the hand of Moses’ refers to the Gemara. I might include also the Mishnah, therefore it reads ‘that ye may teach’. [K'rithoth 13b]
The rabbis qualify themselves due to a possible objection that “by the hand of Moses” includes both parts of the Talmud, Mishnah and Gemara. They state that a proof text qualifies this and excludes the Mishnah. This passage is actually part of a bigger argument about whether one should study teach, or make rulings in the Law while intoxicated, and as such was part of a much bigger objection and question. That was part of a bigger objection itself and so on.
The last commandment was not as significant in its content but in its process. It is the idea behind rabbinic thinking: everything you need to know is in the Torah, yet some things are not written down. There will be times where things contradict or cause problems with the text. It is our duty as to question them, take from the ancestral sources and resolve the problem. Such thinking expands the texts and reveals new ideas which can be added to the body of thought. It is that thinking more than anything else that has kept the Jewish people alive to the present day.
For the book of B’midbar we have been looking at the text in terms of internal change from being in a place of slavery to getting to some personal goal or accomplishment in ourselves, we looked at the resistance that can occur to such goals and in the last few parshiot, how we need to prepare for the Promised Land. Some comments to me describe this process as a transformation from child to adult, which I find very wise and true. The last thing we need to learn is that the world is not static, but dynamic. Things change and our rules and boundaries will need to change with them. Moses and the miracles of God in the wilderness, what we might call parental support and protection, are not coming with us. We have to think on our feet like adults. We need to understand a process to make such changes. The last commandment, the last oral one, in B’midbar does exactly that. Things will change and there will exceptions and exceptions to exceptions. When necessary, change them in the spirit of the texts that came before you.
We do not enter the Promised Land in the Torah nor in the book of Numbers. We are lead to the banks and have a short crossing over yet to do. The land has yet to be fought for, as we will learn in Joshua, and starting with Judges all the way through the rest of the prophets, there is always a fight against idolatry among the people. The last commandment may be fighting Idolatry too or more accurately, Idle-atry. Part of the problem of Idolatry is one does not have the chance to grow and change, as all is in the hands of a capricious god. There is no incentive or even concept to do so. Progress is an alien concept to the pagan. Learning is meaningless. Learning’s use to create something new to adapt to changing conditions is meaningless too because nothing changes in their world view. But we must learn, as the law must be derived from the precedents of our ancestors, our true inheritance. It should not be derived from not our own emotional whims nor the emotional and manipulative arguments of outsiders.
We have come to the end of the journey, only to find that it never ends, just starts new chapters, and new books. Now we have the tools to take on those adventures.
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