In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers

254 Pages·2001·4.175 MB·English

by  Mary Douglas

Title Pages
In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in
the Book of Numbers
Mary Douglas
Print publication date: 2001
Print ISBN-13: 9780199245413
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245413.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) In the Wilderness (p.ii)
(p.iii) In the Wilderness
(p.iv)
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Title Pages
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Page 2 of 2
In the Wilderness…In the Days of Her Youth
In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in
the Book of Numbers
Mary Douglas
Print publication date: 2001
Print ISBN-13: 9780199245413
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245413.001.0001
(p.v) In the Wilderness…In the Days of Her
Youth
‘These are the statutes which the Lord commanded Moses, as between a
man and his wife, and between a father and his daughter, while in her
youth, in her father's house’
(Num. 30.16).
‘Thus says, the Lord,
I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you
followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown’
(Jer. 2.2).
‘Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and
speak tenderly to her…and there she shall answer as in the days of her
youth and as at the time when she came up out of the land of Egypt…And I
will betroth you to me forever; yea, I will betroth you to me in
righteousness and in justice, and in steadfast love, and in mercy. I will
betroth you to me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord’
(Hos. 2.14–20).
(p.vi)
Page 1 of 1
Illustration
In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in
the Book of Numbers
Mary Douglas
Print publication date: 2001
Print ISBN-13: 9780199245413
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245413.001.0001
Illustration
(p.xi)
(p.xii)
Descendants of Ham
Descendants of Shem
Page 1 of 2
Preface to the Paperback Edition
In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in
the Book of Numbers
Mary Douglas
Print publication date: 2001
Print ISBN-13: 9780199245413
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245413.001.0001
(p.xiii) Preface to the Paperback Edition
Preparing a new edition, a friend told me, is like ‘confession with a firm purpose
of amendment’. This paperback edition of In the Wilderness is not a new edition
in the full sense; the original book has not been revised, no new bits added or
old bits suppressed. In default, an extended preface gives me a chance to
confess my errors and thank my critics. There are also points of disagreement,
on which I will try to make my views more persuasive.
First I must thank Oxford University Press for bringing out a paperback edition
of this book on Numbers (which was originally published by Sheffield Academic
Press) at the same time as a paperback of Leviticus as Literature. 1 It is good
that they should be together since Leviticus and the book of Numbers are
already a pair, assumed to have been edited by the same person/persons, or at
least to stem from the same priestly milieu, and at about the same time. My two
books on them are also a pair; the second depends on the first. The work I had
done earlier on Numbers is the foundation for how I approached Leviticus. For
example, I naturally carried over to Leviticus the prejudice in favour of the
priestly editor that I had formed while studying Numbers.
I start with an absurd mistake that was passed over by most of the reviewers in
charitable silence. It is like saying left instead of right, or east instead of west;
there is no defending it, only confession. On p. 100 a diagram made Abraham
look like the ancestor of Noah (p. 101). What I had in mind is explained correctly
on the previous page. I had been struck with the thought that Numbers takes up
themes of fraternal rivalry from Genesis, and produces developments or
commentaries on them, but in reverse order. For example, at the beginning of
Genesis Canaan is cursed by Noah, his grandfather (9.25), and the curse has its
effect at the end of Numbers when the armies of Israel (p.xiv) defeat the
Canaanites (31). At the end of Genesis the dying Joseph foretells that God will
bring the sons of Israel to the land he has promised them (50.24), which links
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Preface to the Paperback Edition
directly to the beginning of Numbers where the arms-bearing men of Israel are
numbered in readiness to fight for the land. It would have been much simpler to
show it as a ring, one side of which is the Genesis sequence, taken up
chiastically by the Numbers sequence. The other criticisms are more important.
Who was the Priestly Editor?
There has been some discussion about whether it is acceptable for me to treat
Leviticus and Numbers as two separate books. True, they are more like major
sections of one vaster work, the Pentateuch, and no one could seriously dispute
their elaborate intermeshing with each other and with the other ‘books’, nor do
we want to quibble about the word ‘book’. I could use the word ‘composition’
quite comfortably, but I am impressed by the compositional differences, by the
independence from each other of the two literary patterns, and by the
completeness of their execution. It is worth insisting on these differences and it
seems to be unlikely that the same editor (philosopher or poet) could have
achieved two equally splendid and equally polished compositions in one lifetime.
It is possible, but it would be a stupendous achievement. There are many
differences between what I am calling two books because one is centred on the
tabernacle, the other an epic journey and war history. As far as theology and the
cult are concerned, their agreement is close. There certainly could have been
one priestly editor, or a school of priestly editors who used the same linguistic
resources and stock of ideas, and whose members may have taken up the task at
different times.
The priestly editor is called P in the context of the documentary hypothesis
which stratifies the Pentateuch into different authorial periods based on putative
documents, identified as J, E, P and D. The immensely learned philological
debate about P is very technical. The general questions which underlie it are
somewhat like those debated in Homeric scholarship at the beginning of the
twentieth century. Two conversations were running along parallel lines, taking
little notice of each other. Who was Homer? Who was P? What was he like? Was
he one person or several? How could one poet alone be responsible for such an
enormous achievement? Was Homer literate? Did he write down the Iliad
himself? Are the repetitions in P evidence of an oral tradition?
(p.xv) Homer never lacked admiration, but P used to have many detractors. It
is distressing to see how unkindly he has been treated by important biblical
scholars. Wellhausen started with an assumption about how religion would
develop. He saw it as originally spontaneous and direct, but moving inevitably
towards bureaucratization and meaningless rituals with its ministers passionless
and remote from the congregation. This chimed with the passage in Isaiah and
Psalms in which God rejects sacrifice and demands a humble and contrite heart;
and it chimes with our own denominational history. The effect was that the
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priestly books were all too lightly dismissed by prejudiced scholarship; and not
so long ago.
Writing as late as the 1960s Martin Noth, a great Bible scholar, saw Leviticus as
a codex of regulations, 'mostly concerned with daily life and its different
circumstances and activities. In its transmitted form, this codex is indeed
remarkably diverse and disordered. Even the apparently capricious and random
alternations between second person singular and third plural…show that the
whole probably took shape as part of a fairly long and complicated process…The
different departments of life were arranged very much at random.2 He was
similarly convinced that the book of Numbers was an incoherent jumble: ‘There
can be no question of the unity of the Book of Numbers, nor of its originating
from the hand of a single author. This is already clear from the confusion and
lack of order in its contents.’3 He regarded Numbers as ‘a multiplicity of texts’
that had been quite carelessly put together. Conformably with the practice of
source critics, even though he felt unable to assign its parts among the
recognized Pentateuchal sources, his main effort was to assign primary and
secondary character to individual bits. This is the practice that, for a long time,
has stopped the book from being read as a whole.
The obscurities in the law books seems to have given free rein to nineteenth
century imperial prejudices against primitive mentality, culture and magic, and
to the anticlerical prejudices of our own nonconformist tradition against dark
superstition and the dead hand of hierarchy. To my mind the biggest insult to the
priestly editors was to expect their texts would not make sense. Many would still
agree with Lester Grabbe who starts his book on Leviticus saying: ‘No other
book of the Bible is less appealing, at first sight, to the modem student of
theology than Leviticus.4
Dating and History
(p.xvi) Many reviews of In the Wilderness made criticisms of the kind that a
writer must humbly accept. These were mostly in the domain of history. I could
never develop or defend an independent conclusion about the probable dating of
Numbers or Leviticus. My principal mentor, Jacob Milgrom, takes a complex
view of the dating issues: some parts of Leviticus and Numbers are very, very
old, perhaps even premonarchical, and, at the same time, their editing into the
literary form we know could have been very late: in the sixth century BCE, exilic,
or post-exilic. From this I have taken licence to focus only on the final versions,
and so indulged my desire to read the book as a whole.
The really mysterious thing is that the production of the Pentateuch would have
been the most important event of the epoch, world-shaking, and yet nothing is
said about it in the contemporary sources. Perhaps the work started during the
exile in Babylon, and perhaps it was finished in the period of the second temple
community, but, if a learned reviewer5 says that I am 'making some leaps of
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faith’ in dating Numbers to this period, so be it. The scholars are divided; what
can I say? The matter is still very technical. So little is known about the
tabernacle at Shiloh and the premonarchical society living at the earliest date
attributed to the sources for Numbers and Leviticus that it would be difficult to
perform the anthropological exercise of relating a text to its historical context
for the earliest date. This may be why I find myself leaning towards the later
date, the post-exilic community.
In any case, if there was a consensus it had started to crack before I started.
Vast new resources on the ancient Near East were available, documentary and
archaeological. New vistas were presented on every side. The liberating spirit of
the 1960s opened topics that had been closed; a new tolerance flourished in the
schools. According to David Noel Freedman the spirit of renewal infected the
San Francisco Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union, where
he and Jacob Milgrom first met in 1965. From that 'momentous and portentous
time’ they have been ‘associated as companions-in-arms in the mighty battles of
the Bible, the very serious work of expounding and (p.xvii) interpreting the
Torah and Tanakh’.6 Mighty battles! What a far cry from regarding Leviticus as
boring.
A completely justified criticism is that I know too little about post-exilic Israel.
Yes, too true. At the time of writing I thought that Samaria was the main danger
recognized by the governors of Judah. Since then, of course, I have been trying
to read that complex history. I realize that the province of Judah itself was full of
foreign settlements, refugees, merchants, farmers and labourers. The histrionics
of Ezra and Nehemiah made me suspect them of paranoia, but I find that
historians agree with their assessment of the perils surrounding Judah while
they were returning from exile. Israel's political integrity, its very existence, was
really at grave risk from the nations playing out the great game of international
politics. So Samaria was not the only or main problem, as I imply in this book. At
least we can agree that, if the redaction process is dated to the postexilic period,
it was a troubled time indeed, and it would have been hard to keep out of
politics.
We do not know whether the priestly editors were left in the land of Judah when
the others were taken into exile. If they had remained they would have been out
of sympathy with the returning exiles. The latter, living within closed ranks in
their own small enclaves in Babylon, among many other exiled ethnic groups,
would be inclined to think of themselves as the elect in a world of saints and
sinners; sectarian in the sense that all issues were moral issues, and moral
issues all seen in black and white. They would be more suspicious of outsiders.
By contrast, the priestly families of pre-exilic times had been leading members of
a rich temple community. They would remember the far-reaching contacts with
wealthy and influential foreigners that they had enjoyed and knew how much the
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prosperity of Judah depended on friendly interaction. They would have had deep
misgivings about the exclusionary views of the returnees.
Moral and Political Concerns
The above pre-empts the criticism of several reviewers who rebuked my belief in
the Numbers editor's strong political bias. It is an interesting point. Some
reviewers regard it as sacrilege to attempt to give (p.xviii) historical context to
sacred books which have a timeless vision. It is as if historicizing the priestly
editor would besmirch his integrity. To place him in history gives scope for
attributing to him motives born of local conflicts and so impugns his divinely
inspired insights. I would like to persuade these critics that no harm would come
of trying the historical interpretation. The difference between us may come from
professional bias. An anthropologist considers that knowledge of the community
for whom a text has been composed enhances understanding of its message.
Knowing the context is essential for interpretation and detracts not one jot from
the authority of the writer. I would still say that politics are the framework for
the theological issues of the book of Numbers. Furthermore, I consider the price
of refraining from historical interpretation is too high if it means accepting the
denigration of the priestly editors.
Numbers starts with Moses being told to count the children of Israel, and he
does so. The number of the ‘father's houses’ or tribes descended from the sons
of Jacob, is twelve. There are other countings in the course of the story, and each
time there are always twelve tribes. Attributing the book to the second temple
period has the advantage of providing a plausible reason for reckoning the
twelve tribes, over and over, so prominently. By that time there was only Judah
and a remnant of Benjamin. The rest had disappeared into mythology, except for
the Josephites (represented by Ephraim) who had been located in Samaria: the
remnants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Politically, Samaria and Judah
confronted each other; rival peoples with a common ancestor. It is not safe to
jump from the beginnings of the first return to Judah from Babylon in 538 to the
return of Ezra in 455. But one can assume that, to a large extent, the problems
faced by returning exiles concerning the local populations would have been
much the same from the start: problems about land, intermarriage and
inheritance.
When the Assyrian king defeated Samaria and deported her inhabitants he
drafted in thousands of miscellaneous deportees from other conquered lands to
replace them. Ezra and Nehemiah seem to have understood that Samaria was
now inhabited only by foreign idolaters and refused to have anything to do with
them. They made the equivalent assumption that in Judah there were no Judeans
or other people of Israel; apart from those who had returned from Babylon the
inhabitants were all foreign idolaters. For these leaders the full responsibility for
keeping the covenant with God now lay solely with Israel. As they defined her,
Israel consisted of the returnees from Babylon (p.xix) inhabiting Judah: a
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province in great danger, surrounded by idolatrous enemies. But the definition of
Israel was too narrow. There would have been numerous heirs to the covenant
still living around; many of them in Judah itself, or in the bordering countries.
Rather than supposing that he was not involved in politics it was more likely the
Numbers editor was making a major political statement against the Persian-
backed governors of Judah. Numbers makes sense as an attack on their policy
against intermarriage, and particularly as a rebuke to the definition of Israel as
consisting only of those who had been to Babylon. In that political climate it
would have been bold for these priests to say outright to their congregations,
‘Look, these surrounding peoples (whom our governor tells us to reject) are our
brothers. We must cherish them.’ Many passages in the book read as a covert
plea on behalf of the other people living in Judah, 'sons of Jacob, but not Jews’,
as Rolf Rendtorff puts it.7 The book insists overtly that the ger, the stranger, is
entitled to share in the cult (Num. 5.14–16). He has the right to offer sacrifice
and he can have atonement made for his unintentional sins (Num. 22–30). It
follows that the rules of ritual uncleanness must apply to him because he is
entitled to approach the tabernacle.
It is fair to read the priestly editor as protesting against the appropriation of the
Covenant for a small section of the descendants of Jacob. It was certainly very
much his duty as a priest. In this light the Numbers' stories of wars fought by
the armies of Israel against the Canaanites, sometimes viewed askance as a
glorification of violence and bloodshed, carry another implication. The war
stories (19–21) show God's people fighting together, against terrible odds; all
twelve tribes marshalled against common enemies. The point is reinforced when
the armies of Reuben and Gad, who seem prepared to opt out, are speedily
brought back into line (32). If my reading of the political context is right,
recalling the wars celebrates the common military past of all these, now
scattered, peoples. They have fought together, shoulder to shoulder, and shared
in losses and victories; they should stand together and succour each other now.
However ancient their sources, there would have been a reason for composing
the whole book around these numberings. If it was edited in the tempestuous
days of the second temple period, it was probably (p.xx) a brave thing to insist
that all of Jacob's twelve sons were heirs to God's promises to Israel.
Enclavism
Another criticism that I willingly accept concerns the typology of religions that
fills the first three chapters of my book.8 The reviewer is quite right in pointing
out that I have drawn too sharp a line between the culture of hierarchies and the
culture of sectarian religions. This has been borne home to me by two
workshops on the culture of the enclave organized subsequently in London.9
Several Jewish friends have told me that Chapter 2, on enclave religion,
reminded them vividly of their childhood in a kibbutz, particularly the concern to
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