Devarim 5786
Deuteronomy 2’s Many Voices
This week we are reading Parashat Devarim, which means we are beginning the book of Deuteronomy, reading all the way from 1:1–3:22. And this week what I thought I would do is take a page out of my own book. I mean that quite literally. I have a book called The Bible’s Many Voices that perhaps some of you have read.
When I say that the Bible has many voices, that’s an expression that can be taken in a number of different ways. There are, of course, the different voices of the different biblical characters who speak in the Bible. However, there’s something else I mean by “voice” that I think gets too little attention: what I would call literary voice or perhaps writerly voice. When a writer is very good (or occasionally not so good but very idiosyncratic), you can pick up a piece of unmarked writing and recognize that you have something by that particular writer. I have friends who have looked at the “Frequently Asked Questions” in the Commentators’ Bible and say: I can hear your voice asking those questions.
It’s a very interesting and somewhat goofy exercise, when you are reading a writer with a very strong writerly voice, to put down that writer and then pick up something else written in a totally different way — the newspaper, a cookbook — and continue reading. For a moment or two, at least, you can make yourself hear the original writer’s voice reading you a recipe or the results of the baseball game. It can be startling and amusing.
Anyway, one of the things I discuss in The Bible’s Many Voices is something in this week’s parashah that’s rather unusual for the Torah: a footnote. It’s true, we scholars love our footnotes, and of course there are editions of the Bible with footnotes. What I’m talking about, though, is a biblical text that is itself a footnote. It’s quite clear that what I’m going to talk about today is one.
And this is not a unique occurrence. There are other footnotes in the Bible. I (naturally) don’t mean that they are written literally at the bottom of the page; like ours in Parashat Devarim, they are incorporated into the text. The kind of page formatting that we use had not been invented yet. Here (in the NJPS translation) is an example of what I mean. Saul and a servant go looking for some of Saul’s father’s lost animals and get so desperate that they decide to ask a prophet where to find them:
1 Sam 9:3 Once the asses of Saul’s father Kish went astray, and Kish said to his son Saul, “Take along one of the servants and go out and look for the asses.” … 7 “But if we go,” Saul said to his servant, “what can we bring the man? For the food in our bags is all gone, and there is nothing we can bring to the man of God as a present. What have we got?” 8 The servant answered Saul again, “I happen to have a quarter-shekel of silver. I can give that to the man of God and he will tell us about our errand.”— 9 bFormerly in Israel, when a man went to inquire of God, he would say, “Come, let us go to the seer,” for the prophet of today was formerly called a seer.— 10 Saul said to his servant, “A good idea; let us go.” And they went to the town where the man of God lived.
1 Sam 9:11 As they were climbing the ascent to the town, they met some girls coming out to draw water, and they asked them, “Is the seer in town?”
b This verse explains the term “seer” in v. 11.
NJPS, using modern punctuation but treating the Bible as Bible, put dashes around the explanation of the word “seer” (רואה) and includes a footnote of its own to tell you what this verse is explaining. It’s easy for us to see that v. 9 is really a footnote to v. 11, awkwardly incorporated into the text itself.
In my Bible Guy column, I translated Gen 6:4 this way: “(The Nephilim were on earth in those days.*)” — at which point I moved the rest of v. 4 into a footnote, referenced by that asterisk. Since I haven’t published my own translation in print, I too simply explained this rather than putting it at the bottom of the page.
There’s a footnote similar to the Samuel one in chapter 4 of the book of Ruth:
Ruth 4:7 Now this was formerly done in Israel in cases of redemption or exchange: to validate any transaction, one man would take off his sandal and hand it to the other. Such was the practice in Israel. 8 So when the redeemer said to Boaz, “Acquire for yourself,” he drew off his sandal.1
Once again, a remark that, if it were in published in our day, would be relegated to a footnote to v. 8 is incorporated right into the text.
As I said, there is such a footnote in this week’s parashah as well. In fact, there are two of them. Here is a long selection (again in the NJPS translation) from Moses’s farewell speech, taken from Deuteronomy 2. You remember that he is reminding the Israelites, who are camped on the east side of the Jordan River, exactly what has happened to them to bring them to this point, where they are about to cross over to the west side of the river and take possession of the land of Canaan. Here is what he says, starting in Deut 2:8:
We then moved on, away from our kinsmen, the descendants of Esau, who live in Seir, away from the road of the Arabah, away from Elath and Ezion-geber; and we marched on in the direction of the wilderness of Moab. And the LORD said to me: “Do not harass the Moabites or provoke them to war. For I will not give you any of their land as a possession; I have assigned Ar as a possession to the descendants of Lot. Up now! Cross the wadi Zered!” So we crossed the wadi Zered.
Could you tell — without verse markers — that I left out three verses of that passage? After v. 9, when God explains to Moses, “I have assigned Ar as a possession to the descendants of Lot,” the passage continues this way:
Deut 2:10 It was formerly inhabited by the Emim, a people great and numerous, and as tall as the Anakites. 11Like the Anakites, they are counted as Rephaim; but the Moabites call them Emim. 12 Similarly, Seir was formerly inhabited by the Horites; but the descendants of Esau dispossessed them, wiping them out and settling in their place, just as Israel did in the land they were to possess, which the LORD had given to them.
These three verses are all technically inside a speech of “the Lord.” It’s true that the Lord does sometimes call himself “the Lord” in the third person, but that’s not what’s happening here. This is a different voice, interrupting — if you like — the Lord’s speech to Moses with some interesting geographical and ethnographic information, facts that we might want to know or (at least) that the author of Deuteronomy wants available to us.
They make no sense as part of God’s instruction to Moses and even less sense as part of Moses’s recounting that instruction to the people. Have a look at vv. 16–25 of this same chapter, this time in the NRSV translation, where there is another such footnote. NRSV puts it inside parentheses and outside quotation marks, both of which I have removed; your challenge is to find where they were:
Deut. 2:16 Just as soon as all the warriors had died off from among the people, 17 the LORD spoke to me, saying, 18 Today you are going to cross the boundary of Moab at Ar. 19 When you approach the frontier of the Ammonites, do not harass them or engage them in battle, for I will not give the land of the Ammonites to you as a possession, because I have given it to the descendants of Lot. 20 It also is usually reckoned as a land of Rephaim. Rephaim formerly inhabited it, though the Ammonites call them Zamzummim, 21 a strong and numerous people, as tall as the Anakim. But the LORD destroyed them from before the Ammonites so that they could dispossess them and settle in their place. 22 He did the same for the descendants of Esau, who live in Seir, by destroying the Horim before them so that they could dispossess them and settle in their place even to this day. 23 As for the Avvim, who had lived in settlements in the vicinity of Gaza, the Caphtorim, who came from Caphtor, destroyed them and settled in their place. 24 Proceed on your journey and cross the Wadi Arnon. See, I have handed over to you King Sihon the Amorite of Heshbon, and his land. Begin to take possession by engaging him in battle. 25 This day I will begin to put the dread and fear of you upon the peoples everywhere under heaven; when they hear report of you, they will tremble and be in anguish because of you.
All right, I admit it, it was not that difficult a challenge — just something to get you into this same exercise of listening to the different voices in the Bible.
It’s not, therefore, just a curiosity that there are footnotes here. It does actually tell us something rather interesting about the writer of the book of Deuteronomy. Let me step back for a moment and show you, with a certain amount of amazement, the sheer number of voices that we find when we read Deuteronomy 2:
a scholar adding encyclopedia-style footnotes (vv. 10–12 and 16–25) within …
a speech of God that is being …
quoted by Moses, whose farewell address is …
introduced by a narrator, whose voice was …
created by an author whom we call the Deuteronomist.
Perhaps you have a different attitude toward the text and simply call that author “God.” It actually makes no difference to this argument. There are still five different layers of voices when you read Deut 2:10–12. It’s nested five layers down: a footnote, in a speech, that’s being quoted, by a character, who himself is being presented by a narrator, all of which is being written by an author.
Although Deuteronomy may be the most complicated biblical book in that sense, it’s by no means alone. It’s well worth thinking about the different levels of voices that you “hear” when you read the Bible. Let me emphasize that (from my perspective) if you read the Bible all in that one King James voice, you are not understanding what the original writers of the Bible are saying to you.
If you understand the Bible, as I think most Jews do, to be the history of your family, written by your ancestors, then you certainly want to listen very carefully to their voices. If that is indeed your perspective, you will not be surprised when you hear certain voices trying to speak louder or more insistently than the next.
That is Torah Talk for this week, all in my own single voice (except for what I’m quoting); by all means do add your voice by leaving a comment. Next week, a recap of the Ten Commandments.
As Joseph Bekhor Shor notes in his comment to Exod 3:5, what he’s really taking off is his glove.