1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,If I weren't tempting fate enough by running a Bible Study for Atheists, here I am tangling with Numbers 13.
2 Send thou men, that they may search the land of Canaan, which I give unto the children of Israel: of every tribe of their fathers shall ye send a man, every one a ruler among them.
3 And Moses by the commandment of the LORD sent them from the wilderness of Paran: all those men were heads of the children of Israel.
4 And these were their names: of the tribe of Reuben, Shammua the son of Zaccur.
5 Of the tribe of Simeon, Shaphat the son of Hori.
6 Of the tribe of Judah, Caleb the son of Jephunneh.
7 Of the tribe of Issachar, Igal the son of Joseph.
8 Of the tribe of Ephraim, Oshea the son of Nun.
9 Of the tribe of Benjamin, Palti the son of Raphu.
10 Of the tribe of Zebulun, Gaddiel the son of Sodi.
11 Of the tribe of Joseph, namely, of the tribe of Manasseh, Gaddi the son of Susi.
12 Of the tribe of Dan, Ammiel the son of Gemalli.
13 Of the tribe of Asher, Sethur the son of Michael.
14 Of the tribe of Naphtali, Nahbi the son of Vophsi.
15 Of the tribe of Gad, Geuel the son of Machi.
16 These are the names of the men which Moses sent to spy out the land. And Moses called Oshea the son of Nun Jehoshua.
17 And Moses sent them to spy out the land of Canaan, and said unto them, Get you up this way southward, and go up into the mountain:
18 And see the land, what it is, and the people that dwelleth therein, whether they be strong or weak, few or many;
19 And what the land is that they dwell in, whether it be good or bad; and what cities they be that they dwell in, whether in tents, or in strong holds;
20 And what the land is, whether it be fat or lean, whether there be wood therein, or not. And be ye of good courage, and bring of the fruit of the land. Now the time was the time of the firstripe grapes.
21 So they went up, and searched the land from the wilderness of Zin unto Rehob, as men come to Hamath.
22 And they ascended by the south, and came unto Hebron; where Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the children of Anak, were. (Now Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.)
23 And they came unto the brook of Eshcol, and cut down from thence a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff; and they brought of the pomegranates, and of the figs.
24 The place was called the brook Eshcol, because of the cluster of grapes which the children of Israel cut down from thence.
25 And they returned from searching of the land after forty days.
26 And they went and came to Moses, and to Aaron, and to all the congregation of the children of Israel, unto the wilderness of Paran, to Kadesh; and brought back word unto them, and unto all the congregation, and shewed them the fruit of the land.
27 And they told him, and said, We came unto the land whither thou sentest us, and surely it floweth with milk and honey; and this is the fruit of it.
28 Nevertheless the people be strong that dwell in the land, and the cities are walled, and very great: and moreover we saw the children of Anak there.
29 The Amalekites dwell in the land of the south: and the Hittites, and the Jebusites, and the Amorites, dwell in the mountains: and the Canaanites dwell by the sea, and by the coast of Jordan.
30 And Caleb stilled the people before Moses, and said, Let us go up at once, and possess it; for we are well able to overcome it.
31 But the men that went up with him said, We be not able to go up against the people; for they are stronger than we.
32 And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched unto the children of Israel, saying, The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature.
33 And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.
#1: The Lord tells Moses...
#2: Send your men to scout out Canaan (ol' Hobab might have come in handy), which I'm giving to you. The spies should be "a ruler" from each tribe.
#3: Moses sent 'em.
#4-15: The spy-rulers are listed. For some reason, the Manasseh line's connection to Joseph is noted, while the Ephraimites are not. The latter is represented by the Bible's first Irish Catholic: O'Shea, the son of Nun....
#16: But Moe knew him as
#17: Moses told them to go southward and up on a mountain...
#18: And to size up the current tenants...
#19: And the quality of the real estate...
#20: And its agricultural characteristics.
#21-24: The looked here and there and snagged some fruit.
#25: After the time-honored interval of forty days, they returned to camp.
#26: They told Moses and the 2,000,000 (or 600,000 — depending on who was invited) Israelites what they saw and showed them the fruit.
#27: They said that the land flowed with milk and honey. And fresh fruit!
#28: But the bad news was that the people were strong (and the men were good-looking?), and what's more, they said, "we saw the children of Anak there." Apparently, that was bad news.
#29: There were Amaleks, Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, and of course Canaanites, with their homes by the sea. We had been promised a showdown with all these unchosen people, especially the sons of Amalek.
#30: Caleb was the resident Donald Rumsfeld. He was confident that their mission would be short work.
#31: The other spies were naysayers. They said the Israelites couldn't compete against those whom God wanted them to oust.
#32: "And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched unto the children of Israel, saying, The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature." Not sure if "evil report" means it was a lie, an exaggeration, or just bad news.
#33: It does sound a little fishy: "And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight." But that wouldn't the first thing here that sounds a little fishy.
1 comments:
You may have noticed that the text suddenly reverts back to the style of Leviticus with "And Yahweh told Moses..." followed by a terribly dull list. That's because its once again back to text from the priestly source. At least until the second third of verse 17.
As is common with the Priestly Source, one of the later priestly writers has inserted a bureaucratic document - the list of princes - into the earlier text. That's why there's an obvious edit in the text, with "Manasseh" being substituted for "Joseph"; the original document would have been old enough to be written before the Joseph tribe had completely split up into Manasseh and Ephraim, with Ephraim clearly being the group that "split off". There's more evidence about the change in the tribes towards the end of the book of Numbers.
One of the most important details for later is that Joshua ("Oshea, son of Nun") is associated with Ephraim, and less specifically with the Joseph tribe - the reality is that the only Israelites that were ever in Egypt were the Joseph tribe, who were the Hyksos, the other tribes were always in Canaan, but more on that subject later.
"Jehoshua" ("Joshua" in normal English) is just "Yah" + "Oshea"; "Yah" is the name of the levantine god of the "untamed sea", but fundamentalist Jews/Christians claim that in biblical contexts its an abbreviation of "Yahweh". It was a common semitic practice to have official names of the form [deity]+[usual name], eg.
-"Meribaal"="Meri"+"baal" ("beloved of"+"ba'al"/"hadad"); censored by some parts of the bible as "Meriboseth"="Meri"+"Boseth" ("beloved of"+"the shameful one")
-"Joanna"="Yeho"+"Anna"
-"Isaiah"="Isa"+"Yah"
-"Benhadad"="Ben"+"Hadad" ("son of" [metaphorically] + "Hadad")
-"Hadadezer"="Hadad"+"Ezer" ("Hadad" + "is [my] help")
-"Melchizedek"="Melchi"+"Zedek" ("The King" + "[is] Zedek")
-"Asenath"="As"+"Anat" ("holy to"+"Anat"); at one point the bible calls Joseph's wife "Asenath"
-"Jesus"=(latinisation of) "Yeshu"= (pet version of) "Yehoshua"
-"Abdullah"="Abd"+"El"+"lah" ("Servant"+"El"/"God"+"name", ie. "Servant of El/God"; "El"/"God" is euphemistically referred to as "El/God's name")
A particularly interesting example of this practice, which is called Theophory, is the case of "Nathan" as it occurs in several variations:
-"Nathaniel"="Nathan"+"El" ("gift"+"[of] El")
-"Jonathan"="Yeho"+"Nathan"
-"Netanyahu"="Nathan"+"Yahu"
A more infamous example occurs in the Book of Kings, with three different variations on the name of the same king:
-"Jeconiah" = "Yeho"+"Chon"+"Yeho"
-"Coniah" = "Chon"+"Yeho"
-"Jehoiachin" = "Yeho"+"Yeho"+"Chon"
Theophory was also occasional in Rome:
-"Christopher"="Christ"+"Pher" ("Christ"+"bearer")
-"Martin"="Mars"
-"Theophilus"="Theos"+"Philos" ("God"+"lover"); commonly abreviated as "theo"
So, back to the text, to a section generally known as "the report of the spies". Verse 17 onwards, including into chapter 14, is spliced together from the Jahwist, Elohist, and the Priestly Source. Its quite finely spliced between the Jahwist and Elohist, and less so between those two and the Priestly Source; sometimes the splice between the first two is less than the size of a single verse.
As always, the Jahwist version is that of Judah, the Elohist version is that of the kingdom of Israel and particularly of the Joseph tribes, these two were spliced together, and the Priestly Source was later written to rival the Jahwist-Elohist combination.
Essentially the versions are as follows:
-The Jahwist says that Caleb leads the spies up to the south of Canaan, only getting as far as Hebron, where they ran into the Anakim. They report back about this and say that it is a land of milk and honey but the people there were strong, though Caleb calms them down by suggesting an immediate attack, claiming that the Israelites would win.
-The Elohist, in a similar way, says that twelve men are sent out, and reach the Eschol valley, where they collect some fruit, and return. Their report states that they saw several Nephilim (translated in the KJV as "giants"), so large as to make the men seem like grasshoppers in comparison.
-But the Priestly Source distorts this as if wearing theologically-idealist glasses. It says that Caleb AND Joshua, and ten others went into Canaan and got all the way to the other side (Hamath is basically in Lebanon). The mission takes the magic number of 40 days. They report back to Moses AND Aaron, and tell them about the evil in the land, the destructiveness of the territory (its phrased as if its saying "its exhausting work" - ie. its not very fertile), and the very tall people.
The Jahwists "land of milk and honey" is the Elohist's "grapes, pomegranates, and figs". The Jahwist's Anakim is the Elohist's Nephilim ("...and Anakim" in verse 33 is a later addition to make the two versions harmonise - its only in the masoretic text, not the Septuagint).
In contrast to the Jahwist/Elohist narrative, the priestly source twists it so that Canaan is evil and toxic, rather than a paradise (as far as food). The priestly source also adds Joshua and Aaron into the narrative.
"Nephilim" is just the plural of "Nephil" - although it can also imply "children of Nephil". As mentioned back in Genesis 6, "Nephil" is just the Aramaic word for the constellation the modern west calls "Orion". Its clearly some sort of polytheistic thing.
The "Anakim" are a bit more ambiguous. The splicing combined with the masoretic text's distortion has historically made a number of people mistakenly assume they are just another description of the Nephilim, but they are not. "Anak" means "neck". The classical Jewish explanation, which remains a plausible answer, was that they were people who wore stacks of neck rings - like the Kayan people of Burma and Ndebele people of South Africa. Another, related solution is that the Anakim had distinctively long necks.
There is no known non-biblical evidence concerning the Anakim, and very little in the bible, so they are a bit of a mystery; but they seem to be particularly connected to Hebron - it may have been a cult, rather than a culture.
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