Parashat Naso (Num 4:21-7:89)
Numbers and Pierre Menard
In Israel, as I mentioned last week, they have moved on with their lives and are reading Parashat Be-ha’alotcha this week, but here in Philadelphia, where a second day of Shavuot gave us twice as long to eat cheesecake, we're a little bit more lethargic and we are stuck in Parashat Naso. So we’ve had an extra week to think about Num 4:21–7:89.
V. 89 is the last verse of Numbers 7, and not a moment too soon. That’s right, there are 89 verses in that chapter, and if you don't remember why, I'm about to remind you. That’s the chapter in which the leader of every tribe brings an offering for the dedication of the altar when the Tabernacle is inaugurated, and each offering takes six verses to list. Six verses times 12 tribes (or, more precisely, 12 tribal leaders) makes 72 verses. Then there are another five verses to tot up the full amount of all the offerings — the sum total of the dedication offering.
With very slight differences, each of those sets of six verses is exactly the same; the offerings themselves are precisely the same. Here is the first one, Num 7:12–17, giving pride of place (as the Torah sometimes does) to the tribe of Judah and its leader Nahshon son of Amminadab:
12 The one who presented his offering on the first day was Nahshon son of Amminadab of the tribe of Judah. 13 His offering: one silver bowl weighing 130 shekels and one silver basin of 70 shekels by the sanctuary weight, both filled with choice flour with oil mixed in, for a meal offering; 14 one gold ladle of 10 shekels, filled with incense; 15 one bull of the herd, one ram, and one lamb in its first year, for a burnt offering; 16 one goat for a sin offering; 17 and for his sacrifice of well-being: two oxen, five rams, five he-goats, and five yearling lambs. That was the offering of Nahshon son of Amminadab. [NJPS translation]
The Torah is very careful to make sure to balance the ticket with a leader from each tribe:
On the 2nd day, Nethanel son of Zuar, chieftain of Issachar (v. 18)
On the 3rd day, the chieftain of the Zebulunites, Eliab son of Helon (v. 24)
On the 4th day, the chieftain of the Reubenites, Elizur son of Shedeur (v. 30)
On the 5th day, the chieftain of the Simeonites, Shelumiel son of Zurishaddai (v. 36)
On the 6th day, the chieftain of the Gadites, Eliasaph son of Deuel (v. 42)
On the 7th day, the chieftain of the Ephraimites, Elishama son of Ammihud (v. 48)
On the 8th day, the chieftain of the Manassites, Gamaliel son of Pedahzur (v. 54)
On the 9th day, the chieftain of the Benjaminites, Abidan son of Gideoni (v. 60)
On the 10th day, the chieftain of the Danites, Ahiezer son of Ammishaddai (v. 66)
On the 11th day, the chieftain of the Asherites, Pagiel son of Ochran (v. 72)
On the 12th day, the chieftain of the Naphtalites, Ahira son of Enan (v. 78)
Yes, it is Shelumiel, the chieftain of the Simeonites — clearly an extremely important man at the time — who gave us the Yiddish word schlemiel ‘a screw-up’. Sorry, pal.
What I want to do this week is to think a little bit about the nature of the text of the Torah — not whether it's divine or human, but what it's like to experience the Torah, whether as a written text or as an oral one. Specifically, I’m thinking about what it is like for us to absorb all 12 of these repeated paragraphs one after another.
For that purpose, let me turn to something James Kugel said in his book The Idea of Biblical Poetry. In biblical poetry, the second poetic line often repeats the meaning of the first line in different words. Kugel says that even if the second line repeats exactly the same words, as it sometimes does, it can never be exactly the same thing because it comes afterwards. You’ve already heard those words once, so the experience of hearing them or reading them or thinking about them a second time is different.
I thought I would bring an empirical model from another kind of literature, one that I’ve always found very amusing. This, if I'm correct, is the first short story ever written by Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine writer and one of the great writers of the 20th century. It appears in his book Ficciones and it’s called “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote.”
According to the Wikipedia article about this story, Borges wrote the story while he was recovering from a head injury. Take that as you will. The story is about a French 20th-century writer whom Borges made up. Pierre Menard’s goal in life was to rewrite Don Quixote in exactly the same words used by Cervantes. He didn’t manage to rewrite all of it — Don Quixote is enormous — but he did rewrite some of it and, yes (according to Borges), in exactly the same words as Cervantes had used centuries before.
Here’s what Borges writes:
It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):
. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.
Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:
. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.
History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor—are brazenly pragmatic.
The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not going to try to rewrite the 12 repetitive paragraphs of Numbers 7 in exactly the same words originally used in the Torah. I am going to ask this question: What does it do to us when we read exactly the same paragraph not once, not twice, not three times, but 12 times? Then finally in Num 7:84–88 we read:
84 This was the dedication offering for the altar from the chieftains of Israel upon its being anointed: silver bowls, 12; silver basins, 12; gold ladles, 12. 85 Silver per bowl, 130; per basin, 70. Total silver of vessels, 2,400 sanctuary shekels. 86 The 12 gold ladles filled with incense—10 sanctuary shekels per ladle—total gold of the ladles, 120. 87 Total of herd animals for burnt offerings, 12 bulls; of rams, 12; of yearling lambs, 12—with their proper meal offerings; of goats for sin offerings, 12. 88 Total of herd animals for sacrifices of well-being, 24 bulls; of rams, 60; of he-goats, 60; of yearling lambs, 60. That was the dedication offering for the altar after its anointing.
Not just reading it … not just listening to it … even writing it must have been exhausting. They did not have a copy & paste function in Torah times. What are we supposed to do with all that repetition?
You may remember that in the Zohar R. Shimon bar Yohai is quoted as saying that there must be a mystical level to the Torah, an esoteric level that's not obvious on the surface, because if the Torah was as superficial as it sometimes seems, anyone could write a better Torah than what we have. Certainly if I were writing the sacred text for a great world religion I would not have repeated all of these goats and rams and oxen and ladles and bowls 12 times. I certainly would not have used the little adding machine function at the end that does the arithmetic for you.
I just don't know what to do with all of that repetition. But it seems to me that if we're to understand the Torah properly, we have to think very hard about what the Torah is trying to do to us by repeating those paragraphs over and over again. It’s not just the words and the sentences, not just the information that the letters provide us, but the composition of the text that we must think about.
In this particular case, we have to reconcile this extreme example of repetition — and its potential almost to numb the mind — with the astounding verse that follows, ending the chapter and the parashah:
89 When Moses would go into the Tent of Meeting to speak with Him, he would hear the Voice speaking to itself [מִדַּבֵּ֣ר אֵלָ֗יו] from above the cover atop the Ark of the Covenant, in between the two cherubim. Then it would speak to him.
This special verb of speaking, in the Hitpael binyan (more on binyanim in Lesson 15 of my Hebrew course) does not occur anywhere else in the Bible except twice in the book of Ezekiel, 2:2 and 43:6. This verb, and Num 7:89, most certainly deserve a column of their own — a column which will be deficient unless it tells us why we are lulled into a state of stupefying monotony before this last verse drops its bombshell. One day I hope to write that column too.