Torah Study Blog

The familiar story in the Bible says that the Jews were enslaved in Egypt and Moses led them to the Promised Land of Canaan. Exodus 12 tells us that 600,000 men wandered in the wilderness; if you add women and children it would be reasonable to estimate that there were 2 million Israelites wandering.

The prophet Amos, who prophesized during the 8th century BCE recorded God’s words as:

And I
Brought you from the land of Egypt
And led you through the wilderness forty years, To possess the land of the Amorite! (Amos 2:10)

If God was so great, and if there was such a mass of humanity moving as one, why in the world did it take 40 years to reach their destination?!

The Torah portion for this week explains why it took so long. According to the Book of Numbers, God told Moses to send one man from each of the 12 tribes to act as a spy and scout the land of Canaan in preparation for battle. The spies went out but, when they returned, 10 of the 12 spies told the mass of people that the inhabitants were like giants and they were stronger than the Israelites. They reported that the Israelites could not take the land of Canaan. Two of the spies, Joshua and Caleb, reported that the Israelites did have a chance against the inhabitants. But they were overruled.

The mass of people believed the majority and railed against Moses, saying that they wished they had never left slavery in Egypt. God, in exasperation, pointed out that he has performed countless miracles but, still, the people doubt him. God declared that:

“None of the men who have seen My Presence and the signs that I have performed in Egypt and in the wilderness, and who have tried Me these many times and have disobeyed Me, shall see the and that I promised on oath to their fathers; none of those who spurn Me shall see it... your carcasses shall drop in this wilderness, while your children roam the wilderness for forty years, suffering for your faithlessness.” (Numbers 14:22-33)

The archaeological evidence does not support this familiar Bible story. Scholars believe the Israelites were a people who formed organically within the land of Canaan. There was some event, perhaps an invasion or a famine, which caused the lower classes of people to reorganize into a new people, Israel. These people wanted to prove that they were different from their neighbors, and that everything important that had happened to them happened outside the land – keeping them separate from their neighbors.

But, the stories we tell meet the needs of our times. In 586 BCE the Babylonians destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and forced the Israelites into exile. In 539 BCE the Persians defeated the Babylonians and welcomed the Israelites back. At that time, there was a different story that we needed to tell and we wanted to make it clear that we had been in the land all along.

The Books of Deuteronomy and Joshua were written much later than the book of Amos. The people knew these old stories and they used them as a base, but then they built upon the stories. The Book of Deuteronomy is presented as one long speech Moses gave to the people before they went into Canaan. In the speech, Moses reviews the history of the Israelites and, in chapter 25, Moses says: “Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt.” This statement is very timely, and does not reflect a statement that would be made to people who wandered, and mostly died off, in the desert for forty years.

Then, the Book of Joshua, which was written around the same time as Deuteronomy, retells the story of the spies sent to scout the town. In this telling Joshua sends only two spies, and they enter the land and stay at the establishment of a woman named Rahab. When the kings men hear that spies have entered the town they try to flush them out, but Rahab provides cover for them because she believes the Israelite god is God. Rahab tells them, “I know that the Lord has given the country to you, because dread of you has fallen upon us, and all the inhabitants of the land are quaking before you. For we have heard how the Lord dried up the waters of the Sea of Reeds for you when you left Egypt ... we lost heart, and no man had any more spirit left because of you; for the Lord your God is the only God in heaven above, and on earth below. (Joshua 2:9-11) Unlike the story in the Book of Numbers when 10 of the 12 spies advise against attacking, the two spies in this case tell Joshua that, “all the inhabitants of the land are quaking before us.” (Joshua 2:24)

A common motif in the Bible is having non-Israelites acknowledge the power of our God. Other examples are; Jethro, the father-in-law to Moses, the sailors on the boat that carried Jonah, and Ruth, who learned about the god of Israel from her husband and stayed loyal to God even after her husband died. The acknowledgement of the power of our God by other people may be one of the reasons the Bible has remained powerful for so long. The Jewish religion is actually a construct of the Rabbis, and the Bible itself was not an important part of earliest Judaism. However, Christians designated our Bible as sacred scripture, which caused Jews to pay more attention to it!

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