Torah Posting: מטות
Now that everyone knows Mosheh’s time in charge is limited, it’s time to start offloading all that prophetic knowledge of God’s Law in a hurry. Things still feel pretty shaky in the community even though they’re right on the precipice of entering the land, so Mosheh begins giving over new laws to tighten things up.
The first laws in this parashah concern the seriousness of vows and oaths. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, but they are not to be broken. The text sets up the responsibility for this in terms of households. The householder is ultimately responsible for the upholding of vows and oaths. Of course, in the Torah’s cultural context, this is a gendered arrangement, but remember that this was immediately preceded by the legal establishment of women as householders by inheritance. Still, the way these laws on vows and oaths are written gives fathers and husbands veto power over women’s vows and oaths when those women are under their control. The text makes clear that women who are not owned, or whose male owners endorse their vows or oaths, are equally bound by them. Also, if a husband finds out about his wife’s oath or vow and waits before annulling it, they are both guilty of breaking it.
I feel like this is a great example of the sort of thing to which contemporary readers — at least those who are not Orthodox Jews — don’t pay much attention. It’s hard to appreciate the relevance of such a section when you don’t consider its premises relevant. Sure, okay, vows matter, but most of this section is about why women’s vows don’t matter as much, right? So why take it seriously? At best, people reading from a modern perspective might be able to enjoy it anthropologically, as a way to understand this ancient people in the context of their time.
But the Jewishly rigorous way to read the Torah, in my opinion, is from the premise that these teachings are eternally relevant, and thus Jewish people’s job is to figure out how they are relevant to us. Huge volumes of rabbinic literature are filled with discussion of sections like these. The question behind all that work is, what are the values behind such laws, and how do we express and uphold those values now? I’m not a Talmud scholar, so I can’t tell you exactly where legal consensus (such as it ever does) has ended up on this point, but I can say for sure that vows and oaths are very serious and they are not simply individual undertakings but implicate all relations who are affected.
And now a brief diversion back to the war on Midyan, which we covered last parashah by way of pointing out that Mosheh being married to the daughter of the Midyanite priest does not really seem to be a concern to anyone. They seduced Israelites into all the classic forms of Torah bad behavior — and, to be fair, they joined up with Balak, king of Mo’av, to curse the children of Yisra’el — so now they must be destroyed. Here, God frames that as the last significant thing Mosheh is to do before he dies.
Mosheh drums up a thousand men from each tribe, sending Pinhas, son of El’azar, along as priest. He was, after all, the one who first prosecuted the crime of dallying with the Midyanites at the tip of his spear. He brings with him unspecified “holy vessels” — which may be the priestly divination tools — and the trumpets for signaling the army.
The Israelite army dispatches with the Midyanites and all five (apparently) of their kings. They also kill Bil’am the wizard. So much for those lovely blessings. They capture all the woman and children of Midyan, seize all their animals and possessions, and burn all their towns and encampments. They bring all this booty to Mosheh and El’azar before the leaders of the community. Mosheh is angry with them. Why? Because they spared the women. You know, the ones who harlotted themselves with the Israelites or whatever. And what’s weird is, Mosheh says that they did this because of Bil’am, so I guess that’s why he got killed?
This is not explained in the Torah. There’s just a big ol’ plot hole. There are midrashic texts that explain this via oral tradition. They say ol’ Bil’am understood the ways of the children of Yisra’el so well that he told those who hired him how much the God of Yisra’el hates immorality and whatnot. So that was his crime; he revealed this vulnerability to Yisra’el’s enemies, who then sent hordes of seductive women to exploit it. Anyway, Mosheh decides that all the captured women who are not virgins must be executed. Then everybody who participated in the executing has to do the full ritual purification process. El’azar elaborates that all the metal instruments of war must be purified, too.
This is pretty horrible! Hard to stomach. The only even semi-constructive thing I can say about it is that this is probably meant to sound like it deprives the Israelite men of something. They can’t have these women they lusted after, or whatever. Except the virgins; they can have those. Ugh. But this is the most important stuff to sit with! Yes, it sure would be nice if one’s people’s sacred text were pure beauty and righteousness, and one could just sit and placidly contemplate that and feel good (if not superior) about one’s own culture. But as we have seen more than enough of by this point, the Torah is full of barbaric cruelty on the part of its nominal heroes, so unfortunately we’ll have to confront the barbaric cruelty in the hearts of human beings and feel bad about it in order to get our spiritual lessons that are so important to us.
God instructs Mosheh about how to divide the spoils amongst the soldiers and the rest of the community. God shall take the God tax to be given to the priests, of course. The booty is tallied exhaustively in the text.
After everything is all divvied up, the commanders of the army come to Mosheh and report that not a single soldier is missing. As a voluntary tribute in gratitude for this, the officers have brought all kinds of lovely gold articles that they pillaged. The rank-and-file troops kept theirs, though.
With that little matter settled, our attention turns to the vast and growing tribes and their herds and need for land. The leaders of the tribes of Reuvein and Gad come to Mosheh, El’azar, and the chieftains and say, “These lands we’ve been conquering recently. They’re pretty good cattle country, and we have, like, a lot of cattle. Can we just stay here instead of crossing the Jordan?”
This pisses Mosheh off. He accuses them of wanting to stay behind while their brothers go to war, and of turning the minds of the people away from crossing the river and getting the job done. He reminds them of what the scouts did a long time ago, when Mosheh sent them ahead to survey the land and report back: They freaked out and reported all kinds of ridiculous things, killing everyone’s morale and making Mosheh’s job harder. That failure of courage, we are reminded, inspired God to declare that that whole generation (except Kalev and Yehoshu’a, who are now Mosheh’s trusted protégés) would not enter the land, and that they’d have to wander for 40 years instead. Now the next generation is right on the edge of the land and hasn’t learned the lesson.
The Gadites and Reuveinites understand the problem, and they offer to go in on the front lines as shock troops until the whole land is conquered, as long as they can return to their holdings here when all is said and done. They don’t even want holdings beyond the Jordan anymore; what they have here is enough.
Mosheh says this will work, but if they don’t uphold this promise, God will be mighty displeased. They swear they will — which is good timing right after all those serious laws about vows and oaths — and Mosheh accepts their terms and tells the leadership the plan. The parashah ends with the renaming of all the conquered places on this side of the Jordan where Gad and Reuvein plan to settle.
🏆
