Alter states that the Book of Numbers “returns to the narrative impulse that marks the first half of Exodus…. We are repeatedly reminded of the passing of generations as the story carries us to the border of the promised land…. But if Israel is on the move from chapter 11 to the end, it must be said that this text associates movement with trouble…. We have a repetition of the same scene involving the same actors—Israel, Moses, and God—manifesting a certain intensification more than significant variation from one recurrence to the next…. One suspects that all these repetitions of the scene of murmuring are introduced because the writers conceived it as a paradigm for the subsequent history of Israel: recurrent resentment of God’s rule and of the authority of His legitimate leaders, chronic attraction to objects of base material desire, fearfulness, divisiveness, and the consequences of national disaster brought about, in the view of the biblical writers, by this whole pattern of constant backsliding…. This generation that cannot free itself from the slave mentality it brought with it from Egypt also constitutes the beginnings of a people meant to realize a grand historical destiny.”
In his introduction, Alter reveals that the Book of Numbers incorporates much verse into the flow of its narrative. “It is the striking poetic insets in Numbers that account for much of its distinctive quality among the books of the Bible…. It is an interesting question why such scraps of old verse should have been incorporated in the Book of Numbers…. I would like to propose that these fragments of old poems are introduced into the narrative of Numbers at least in part in order to produce an “antiquity effect.” There is no way of knowing whether Hebrew audiences in, say, the ninth century B.C.E. were still familiar with the Book of the Battles of YHWH, or whether it was already a lost work…. The point, in any case, of the fragmentary quotation, triggered in context by the geographical references, would have been to evoke a distant moment in early Israelite history…. The biblical self-perception of the Israelite nation as a latecomer to the historical scene is palpably present here.”
In Numbers 5:2, Alter explains that impurity was not always an issue of morality, “by a corpse: Literally, “for a [dead] person,” lanafesh. All three of these categories of impurity are clearly cultic, not moral. Pathology and death are viewed as contaminants, and the camp of Israel in the wilderness, in which God’s presence dwells with a specific locus in the Tabernacle, must be kept free of them.”
Alter relates both the poetic and historic natures of the blessing in Numbers 6:23-27, “‘Thus shall you bless the Israelites. Say to them: May the Lord bless you and guard you./ May the Lord light up His face to you and grant grace to you;/ May the Lord lift up His face to you and give you peace.’ And they shall set My name over the Israelites, and I myself shall bless them.” This cadenced threefold blessing came to play a central liturgical role for both Jews and Christians, and probably began to serve that function even in the biblical period…. After the pronouncing of the threefold blessing, God’s name, a kind of divine proprietorship, will be set over Israel, and God Himself will carry out the blessing.” Alter relates how the Bible incorporates all the physical senses. In Numbers 10:2, Alter describes the introduction of sound, “two silver trumpets. After all the lists of the early chapters of Numbers, the visual pageantry of the Tabernacle furnishings, and the deployment of the tribal troops with their banners, sound enters the text—in essence, musical flourishes, a pageantry of sound. These particular sounds are in the first instance the signal for the forward movement of the camp, and so propel the whole story from the long stasis of the stay at Sinai into the narrative of wanderings that constitutes much of what follows.”
In Numbers 15:38, Alter details a historical tidbit, which also relates to the issue of word choice in translation, “an indigo twist. Though indigo may be a reasonable approximation of the color in question, it should be noted that the dye is not derived from a plant, as is indigo, but from a substance secreted by the murex, harvested off the coast of Phoenicia…. The extraction and preparation of this dye were labor-intensive and thus made quite costly. It was used for royal garments in many places in the Mediterranean region, and in Israel it was also used for priestly garments and for the cloth furnishings of the Tabernacle. One may infer that the indigo twist was a token of the idea that Israel should become a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” and perhaps also that, as the covenanted people, metaphorically God’s firstborn, the nation as a whole had royal status…. The indigo twist—Rashi even seeks to link it with the color of the sky on the night of the Exodus—is thus a reminder not only of the commandments but of the liberation from slavery, prelude to the Sinai epiphany through which Israel took on the obligation to become a kingdom of priests. The once enslaved people is henceforth to wear a constant token of royalty and sanctity.”
The recurrent use of the envelope structure is once again used in Numbers 19:32, “you shall not bear offense for it . . . and you shall not profane the holy things . . . and you shall not die. This whole unit of instructions to the Aaronides closes in an envelope structure: the danger of suffering the consequences of violating the sanctuary, invoked at the beginning, recurs now on a note of reassurance: because these tithes of agricultural offerings are the priests’ just wages for their service in the cult, they run no risk of perishing for having eaten consecrated foodstuffs.”
Alter helpfully points out rare occurrences of all kinds within the biblical narrative. In Numbers 22:28, he notes, “And the Lord opened the ass’s mouth. This is the only talking animal, if one excludes the mythological serpent in the Garden story, in the entire Bible…. The talking ass is perfectly in accord with the theological assumption of the story: if God absolutely controls blessings and curses and vision, He can do the same for speech.” In Numbers 23:23, Alter describes a difference between the monotheism of Israel and their polytheistic neighbors, “Now be it said to Jacob/ and to Israel what el has wrought. This line of verse follows directly from the assertion that there is no divining in Israel. Other nations may foolishly have recourse to soothsayers and word-magic professionals like Balaam, but Israel is immediately informed, whether through prophets or direct divine revelation, what God’s designs are.” Alter admits when a smooth translation is a challenge. In Numbers 24:23-24, he states, “who can love more than El has set him,/ and ships from the hands of the Kittites. An honest translator must admit that the Hebrew text here is not intelligible, and that the nexus between the seemingly philosophical pronouncement of the first verset and the invocation of a Mediterranean fleet in the second verset is obscure.”
In Numbers 28:2, Alter details the issue of biblical chronology. He states, “My offering. The end of the previous chapter was clearly what should have been the penultimate moment of the Moses story: Moses summoned to the mountaintop where he will be gathered to his kin and where he is enjoined to pass the leadership on to Joshua. Now, however, the Priestly redactors, pursuing their own professional concern with the cult, introduce a large block of material stipulating regulations for sacrifices…. One could scarcely find a more emphatic illustration of the rabbinic principle that “there is neither early nor late in the Torah,” i.e., that the text of the Torah passed down to us does not exhibit consistent chronological sequence.” Finally, in Numbers 36:13, Alter concludes, “in the steppes of Moab by the Jordan across from Jericho…. It is fitting that “Jericho” should be the last word in the Book of Numbers. Jericho will be the first military objective when the Israelites cross the Jordan, and so the concluding word here points forward to the beginning of Joshua.”
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