Mattot-Masei 5786
Priestly Atonement
This week we are reading a double parashah, Mattot and Masei (Num 30:2–36:13), finishing the book of Numbers. Most of the other combined pairs are read separately during leap years (see here and here for details), but it’s normal for these two parshiyot to be combined except on the rarest of occasions. If my Hebrew calendar app is correct, they will not each get to stand on their own again until 2035. In any case, this week I’m going to look at Numbers 35.
I’ve been saying for quite some while that the book of Numbers should really be called the Book of the Tribes. As you remember, in the book of Numbers those tribes include Ephraim and Manasseh and exclude their father Joseph as well as Levi, ancestor of the Levites who are separated from the rest of Israel in the book of Numbers. We presume the Numbers arrangement implies that Joseph is getting the double portion of the firstborn son, two tribes instead of just one. (Alternatively, it was treating the Levites separately that was important, and using Ephraim and Manasseh was a convenient way to fill out the roster of twelve.)
The מַטּוֹת mattot are indeed the tribes, mysteriously invoked in Num 30:2 to be taught the laws of vows (whence that parashah gets its name) and more pertinently in 33:54, to introduce the subject of allotting Canaan to the various tribes. At this stage of the story, the Israelites are camped on the east bank of the Jordan River, waiting to cross into the land promised in Genesis to their ancestors.
The Levites are not going to get one of the twelve geographical areas that the other tribes are all going to get. Instead, they are going to get towns of their own scattered through the territories of the (other) tribes. The Levite aspect of these towns involves their also being cities of refuge for people who commit manslaughter, that is, who kill someone accidentally. That leads the chapter to continue by discussing deliberate murder:
Num 35:30 If anyone kills a person, the manslayer may be executed only on the evidence of witnesses; the testimony of a single witness against a person shall not suffice for a sentence of death. 31 You may not accept a ransom for the life of a murderer who is guilty of a capital crime; he must be put to death. 32 Nor may you accept ransom in lieu of flight to a city of refuge, enabling one to return to live on his land before the death of the priest. 33 You shall not pollute the land in which you live; for blood pollutes the land, and the land can have no expiation for blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of him who shed it. 34 You shall not defile the land in which you live, in which I Myself abide, for I the LORD abide among the Israelite people. [NJPS]
That is, the only way in which the “pollution” created by a murder can be cleaned up is by the “blood” — that is, the death — of the person who did the original killing.
Since we are not merely discussing criminal procedure but חנף ḥ‑n-p ‘polluting’, it seems reasonable to think that the blood of someone who is accidentally killed would equally pollute the land in which YHWH abides. In this case, though, unless we decide that the accidental killer must be executed despite his lack of moral guilt, there is no obvious way to provide similar “expiation” for the blood of the murdered man.
Numbers 35, however, has a solution for that problem — one that I suspect feels more Christian than it does Jewish to most Jews nowadays: vicarious atonement. Someone has been killed, and so someone must die. Here is where the Levitical cities of refuge come in. Once the killing is ruled accidental, in the ancient Israelite equivalent of a legal proceeding, the accidental killer can take refuge in one of those cities. It is the legal equivalent of being on base: you cannot be tagged out — killed by the dead person’s avenging relative — as long as you stay inside the city.
But that is not necessarily a life sentence:
Num 35:22 But if he pushed him without malice aforethought or hurled any object at him unintentionally, 23 or inadvertently dropped upon him any deadly object of stone, and death resulted—though he was not an enemy of his and did not seek his harm— 24 in such cases the assembly shall decide between the slayer and the blood-avenger. 25 The assembly shall protect the manslayer from the blood-avenger, and the assembly shall restore him to the city of refuge to which he fled, and there he shall remain until the death of the high priest who was anointed with the sacred oil. 26 But if the manslayer ever goes outside the limits of the city of refuge to which he has fled, 27 and the blood-avenger comes upon him outside the limits of his city of refuge, and the blood-avenger kills the manslayer, there is no bloodguilt on his account. 28 For he must remain inside his city of refuge until the death of the high priest; after the death of the high priest, the manslayer may return to his land holding.
Num 35:29 Such shall be your law of procedure throughout the ages in all your settlements.
That is, when someone is killed, someone has to die. When the killing is deliberate, the killer himself must pay that penalty. When it is not, no one should have to suffer the penalty of death. Yet we all do suffer it eventually — and in ancient Israel (at least according to the book of Numbers) the death of the high priest, as representative of the nation, atones vicariously for the unhappy accidental killing.
Christian readers can tell me whether their fellow Christians ever even read the book of Numbers. If they did, I imagine they would be quite happy to find in the “Old Testament” an ancient Jewish example of vicarious atonement. That does not really jibe with the way we live in the world today: no high priest, no “pollution” of a metaphysical kind, along with the expectation — not always fulfilled — that we should take personal responsibility for our actions. Yet we see that in biblical Judaism, the only way to deal with the metaphysical problem of a killing that no one deserves to die for is to wait until someone who has taken the burden of dying for it dies naturally. And that is the high priest.
I will leave as an exercise for the reader the question of whether and how these ideas might be applied to solve, or at least to soothe, the desire for vengeance that multiplies, rather than eliminating, the pollution of blood. Next week, we begin the book of Deuteronomy.
