May 19/07 — Parashat Bemidbar

Commentary by Rabbi Alan Green

“These are the sums that Moses, Aaron, and the leaders of Israel counted … these were all the sums of the sons of Israel, according to their fathers’ households, from twenty years of age and up, everyone capable of going to war in Israel. Their whole sum amounted to six hundred and three thousand, five hundred and fifty males.”

Numbers 1:44 – 46

The book of Numbers begins with a detailed census of the fighting men of the newly-born nation of Israel. The numbers seem exceptionally large, especially in light of the rabbis’ teaching that only 20 percent of the Israelite slaves left Egypt, while 80 percent preferred “the devil that they knew” and remained behind as slaves to the Egyptians.

Further, the census is concerned only with the mature male portion of the Israelite population. So we can also assume that there must have been roughly six hundred thousand women in addition to the men.

Next, we have to factor in the number of Israelites, both male and female, under the age of twenty. A rough estimate of could be based on the number of couples above. If most Israelites over the age of twenty were married, and there were an average of two children per couple, that would add another 1.2 million individuals to the population—for a grand total of some 2.4 million Israelites.

The sheer implausibility of a population of this size moving en masse across the Sinai Peninsula has led more than one historian to conclude that the events of the Exodus may not have happened exactly the way they are described in the Torah. The Exodus story is certainly based on some genuine historical kernel. The question is, what is it? Once we leave the literalism of the Torah text behind, there are several possible scenarios.

One scenario may be that far fewer people participated in the Exodus than what is described in this week’s Parashah. Another possibility is that the Exodus story may be a conflation of many small migrations across the Sinai Desert extending over a period of a century or more.

Indeed, historian Sir Arnold Toynbee calls the era of the Exodus—the thirteenth century BCE—the “Volkervanderung”, a German word meaning “folk wandering.” It was a time when many peoples were on the move. Certainly, the migration of the ancient Israelites from Egypt to the land of Canaan is a fit with Professor Toynbee’s description of other, similar migrations that occurred simultaneously throughout the region.

However, this raises a serious question. If the Torah is so imprecise in its description of the Exodus, what other details might be wrong? How is it possible to take the Torah seriously, as a Divine document, if it contains such glaring inaccuracies?

The answer is that the Torah was never intended to be historical in the way that we write history today, or scientific, in the way that we do science today. In the ancient world, it was understood by anyone with a modicum of sophistication that myths weren’t meant to be taken literally.

But this isn’t to say that myths were treated like made-up fairy tales, the way they are today. Nor were these myths held in anything other than the highest possible esteem. Why? Because the ancients understood the unique power of myth to transmit the deepest truths and most sacred values of a civilization from generation to generation. This is the true function of the Torah.

Two teachings will help focus what I’m saying here. The first comes from the rabbis, who had as clear a grasp of the nature of Torah and its interpretation as could ever be. And this is what they say: “One who denies the Midrash (the rabbinic interpretation of Torah) is a heretic; but one who takes it literally, is a fool.” Though the rabbis would never have said so out loud, this same teaching could easily be applied to the Torah itself. They are saying that when it comes to understanding Torah, a middle path is required, located somewhere between a completely innocent faith, and a destructive skepticism.

The second teaching comes from Nobel Prize winning author Elie Wiesel, who once said, “Not everything that actually happened is true; and not everything that didn’t happen is false.” In other words, descriptions of objective reality may be reasonably close to what actually occurred. However, most of the time, there is exceptionally little that can be learned from this kind of information. It offers no “truth”, or benefit, other than its factuality.

On the other hand, a religious myth, or even a classic of literary fiction may describe events that never took place, yet they may uplift and inspire a person to be the best human being that he or she can be. This is the kind of truth of which the Torah is filled to overflowing. This is why, ultimately, the historic or scientific accuracy of the census in Parashat Bemidbar is completely beside the point.

Shabbat Shalom.