Torah Study Blog

The Torah portion for this week is from the Book of Numbers. In the portion, the Israelites are at the end of the wandering and are ready to go into Canaan to claim the land as their own. 12 spies are sent ahead to scout the land and 10 of the spies come back saying that, although the land “does indeed flow with milk and honey,” the land is inhabited by giants who cannot be defeated. In fact, a cluster of grapes was cut down and brought back to the people to show how large the giants were. It took two men to carry the cluster because it was so big!

Two of the spies, Caleb and Joshua, keep faith with God and say that, with the Lord’s help, the Israelites will capture the land.

This story is, like several other stories in the Bible, repeated elsewhere with conspicuous discrepancies. Rabbi Jaech reminded us that scholars believe the Bible is a collection of traditions from at least four different sources. Sometime around 300 BCE these stories were canonized into one book, but someone had to do some editing to cobble them all together while also trying to preserve as much as possible.

The opening sentence of Numbers 13 is, “The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Send men to scout the land of Canaan…’” Deuteronomy 1 is a retelling of the story, but that story says Moses says to the people, “All of you came to me and said, ‘Let us send men ahead to reconnoiter the land…’” So who send the spies? God, or the people? We don’t know.

Upon closer inspection we can see that the story was probably originally a story about Caleb keeping faith with God. However, the book immediately following Deuteronomy in the Bible is, Joshua, who became the leader of the Israelites after Moses, and he is the person who leads the Israelites into the Promised Land. Somewhere along the way, Joshua was added with Caleb as one who kept faith with God.

As proof that the story was originally only about Caleb, Rabbi Jaech pointed out that the scene in Numbers 13:11 where the people are afraid to fight the giants, but, “Caleb hushed the people.” There is no mention of Joshua.

Alternately, in Deuteronomy 1:34-35 the scene is, again, that the people were expressing their fear of the giants, and God said, “Not one of these men, this evil generation, shall see the good land that I swore to give your fathers – none except Caleb…” Again, there is no mention of Joshua in this paragraph.

BUT… in the very next paragraph there is clumsy language that was probably added later that says Joshua will also enter the land. While it might be easy to chalk this discrepancy down to sloppy writing and ancient error, the fact is that there are plenty of passages in the Bible that are beautiful and poetic and wonderfully constructed. It is unlikely that the original writer made a mistake like this. It is much more believable that Joshua was shoehorned in later.

Who was Caleb? According to Joshua 14:6-14 Caleb was not one of the original Israelites that can trace his lineage back to Abraham. Caleb was a Kenizzite, which is a separate tribe of people. But Caleb was trusted to be one of the spies and he showed great loyalty to God. Therefore, Caleb earned a share of the land.

Recall from the Exodus story that when Pharaoh let the people leave their bondage of Egypt, they were a “mixed multitude.” (Exodus 12:38) This multitude was not restricted to just Israelites. They were a group of people who had been oppressed and came together to throw off the chains of bondage.

For traditional Jews, the requirement to be considered a Jew is that your mother be Jewish. For Reform and Reconstructionist Jews the requirement is that your mother OR father be Jewish and that you be raised with some Jewish practices. (This, of course, does not address converts.)

Rabbi Jaech pointed out to us that we have always been a mixed group of people who were not a separate and distinct race of people. Our ancestors coalesced into one group to overcome oppression. And oppression has come time and time again throughout history.

Torah Study attendee, Professor Martin Meisel, pointed out to us that early Christianity was considered a slave religion and was practiced by people who were also oppressed.

misquotes or misunderstandings in what Rabbi Jaech taught us are the responsibility of Tara Keiter