The Blasphemer
Parashat Emor, which deals with the holiness of priests, the Sanctuary, and time, ends with an episode that has long puzzled commentators. Leviticus, a book of law rather than narrative, is suddenly interrupted by a tragic and disturbing story:
Now the son of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father went out among the Israelites, and a fight broke out in the camp between him and an Israelite. The son of the Israelite woman blasphemed the Name with a curse; so they brought him to Moses. (His mother’s name was Shelomith, the daughter of Dibri the Danite.) They put him in custody until the will of the Lord would be made clear to them. (Lev. 24:10–12)
Two men start fighting. The text does not tell us why. Evidently, the details of their quarrel are irrelevant to the subject at hand. One of the men, in the course of the struggle, blasphemes. He curses God, or possibly, uses the sacred Name to curse his opponent. Everyone present knew that something serious had happened: that is why they put him in custody immediately. Taking God’s name in vain had already been forbidden in the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20:6). Just a few chapters earlier, a law had been given: “Anyone who curses his father or mother is to be put to death” (Ex. 21:17, Lev. 20:9). If cursing your parents is a capital sin, how much more so is cursing God.
What the people were unsure of is whether the law applies to someone of mixed parentage. That much is clear from the answer God eventually gave: “Say to the Israelites: Anyone who curses his God will be held responsible; anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death…. Whether foreigner or native-born” (Lev. 24:15–16). So their doubt is resolved. But in the course of the revelation, the people learn something else: “Take the blasphemer outside the camp. All those who heard him are to lay their hands on his head,” prior to carrying out the punishment. This, as Maimonides notes in his law code, is unique. In no other case of the death sentence do people, in this case the witnesses, lay their hands on the condemned man.1Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Avodat Kokhavim, 2:10.
The episode raises many questions. What is the story doing here? Leviticus is not a book of narrative. It contains only one other story, about the death of two of Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, on the day the Sanctuary was consecrated. But that story belonged to the subject at hand, namely the inauguration of the Sanctuary. The story of the blasphemer, by contrast, seems to have no relevance to the subject at hand. It is preceded by laws about the Menora and the show bread. It is followed by the social legislation of Leviticus 25. The Torah deals with curses elsewhere. So why is it here?
Even stranger is the fact that the revelation in which God tells Moses the punishment for the offender does not end there. It passes immediately to another topic, one about which Moses had not asked:
Whoever takes a human life is to be put to death. One who takes the life of an animal must make restitution – life for life. One who injures his neighbour, as he has done so shall it be done to him: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. One who has inflicted an injury must suffer the same injury. One who kills an animal must make restitution, but one who kills a human being is to be put to death. (Lev. 24:17–21)
This is the famous and much misunderstood lex talionis, the law of retribution. As the sages make clear, the principle of “an eye for an eye” was never meant literally.2Bava Kamma 84a.
A world based on a literal practice of an eye for an eye would eventually go blind. Other than in the case of murder, it meant monetary compensation. The principle is simply that the punishment must fit the crime. It was meant restrictively, to forbid either excessive leniency or excessive harshness.
The question here, though, is this: What are these laws doing here, in the middle of the story of the blasphemer? Seemingly, they have nothing to do with one another. The blasphemer has committed a sin against God. The laws that follow are about crimes against people or property. One is spiritual, the others are physical. Yet they are presented seamlessly as part of a single narrative, as God’s answer to Moses’ question. But Moses did not ask about injury. He asked about blasphemy. Besides which, he and the people already knew the laws about injury and murder. They appear in the book of Exodus (21:24–25). There seems to be no connection between them whatsoever.
It may be that the story of the blasphemer is brought here because Leviticus has been about the sanctity of time, person, and place. The Torah now turns to sanctity of speech. Just as special care must be taken in entering the house of God, so must the same care be taken about using the name of God. The priests had already been warned: “Do not profane My holy name, that I may be sanctified in the midst of the Children of Israel. I am the Lord who sanctify you” (Lev. 22:32). The story of the blasphemer tells us that the same applies to ordinary Israelites, “whether foreigner or native-born.” The reason the law is told by way of a story may simply be because that is how it happened. Moses and the Israelites learned the law because of an incident that occurred.
Holiness, Leviticus tells from chapter 19 onward, is not only the special preserve of an elite, the priests. It belongs to the people as a whole, for they are “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Not only are there holy times and holy places that must be honoured and not abused. So there are holy words. Language itself can sometimes be sacred.
The story may be conveying no more than this. But there is another possibility. Recall that the story of the blasphemer occurs at the end of chapter 24 in Leviticus. The next chapter begins with the words, “The Lord said to Moses at Mount Sinai.” According to most commentators, the remaining chapters (25–27) were actually recorded earlier, before the construction of the Sanctuary. The first twenty-four chapters of Leviticus are set several months later, after the construction. So the episode of the blasphemer represents the end of the long sequence of laws which began forty chapters earlier (Ex. 25:1), about the Sanctuary, sacrifices, the priesthood, purity, and the entire code of holiness as it applied to the people as a whole. Why end this literary unit, which stands at the very centre of the Torah, with so negative a note?
The end of the book of Exodus gives us a clue. As we have noted,3Covenant and Conversation: Exodus – The Book of Redemption, 329–337.
Exodus ends the way Genesis begins: with an act of creation. In Genesis it was God’s creation of the universe. In Exodus it was the Israelites’ creation of the Sanctuary, the microcosmos, the universe in miniature. The connection is deliberate. In the beginning, God created order. Then He gave humans free will and they proceeded to create chaos. Only with the completion of the Sanctuary do we find humans creating order, symbolised in the holy place they have made for God. Perhaps the Torah wants us to make the same connection in the case of Leviticus also. To understand the end we must revisit the beginning.
The Torah begins with a swift set of narratives telling us in a highly schematic way about humanity’s decline and fall. First comes the story of Adam and Eve, then Cain and Abel, followed by the generation of the Flood. These are not three independent stories. They are three chapters in a single story. It begins with what seems to be a minor offence. Adam and Eve eat forbidden fruit. They do not harm anyone. There is no physical injury. All they do is transgress a boundary between permitted and forbidden. But small acts have large consequences. A generation later, their eldest son commits murder. Within a few generations, “God saw the world, and it was corrupted. All flesh had perverted its way on the earth.” Violence had become pervasive. Humanity had reached a dead end. What begins as a seemingly minor offence, a crossing of boundaries, never ends there. An offence against God eventually leads to assaults against humans. Spiritual sins lead to physical crimes. Once boundaries are disrespected, a process has begun that leads, not immediately but ultimately, to civilisational breakdown.
That is one of the defining insights of Torat Kohanim, priestly consciousness. We can summarise it in a single sentence: sacred order leads to social order. The two are inextricably intertwined. When people lose their fear of God, eventually they lose their other inhibitions. They become creatures of impulse and desire, and the end of this long road is violence. The priest is the guardian of this truth. It is an unpopular one. The serpent is always waiting in the wings, saying to us as he said to Eve: “What harm is there in eating one forbidden fruit?” Yet the result is paradise lost. A world God created and pronounced good can all too easily be destroyed if we forget the concept of boundaries and the habits of self-restraint.
This story, told in the first six chapters of Genesis, is told again near the end of Leviticus in the single story of the blasphemer. It begins with the crossing of a boundary. The man is “the son of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father.” Recall that the story is set about a year after the Exodus and the man is already mature. So we are dealing with a woman who, in Egypt itself, had physical relations with a member of the nation that was oppressing her people.4There are many midrashic traditions, some of which say that the Egyptian was the man Moses saw beating an Israelite slave.
A line had been crossed.
The next fact we are told is that “a fight broke out in the camp between him and an Israelite.” There is physical violence. Immediately thereafter we read: “The son of the Israelite woman blasphemed the Name with a curse.” There is a desecration of God’s holy name. What follows, as we have seen, is that God not only answers the question put to Him – what is the punishment for blasphemy? – but goes on to repeat the laws about murder and injury. Sacred and secular, spiritual and physical, offences against God and crimes against human beings are indissolubly connected. Sacred order and social order go together. Lose one and you will eventually lose the other. That is the message with which the book of Leviticus draws to a close.
The question to which the story of the blasphemer is the answer is this: Why is there a book of the Torah – indeed the central book – entirely dedicated to the subject of the holy? What difference does it make to have God at the heart of a society, symbolised by the Sanctuary and its service?
The fundamental issue addressed by the Torah is violence and the misuse of power. That has remained the greatest threat to the future of humankind from the dawn of history to today. There is more than one way of thinking about violence. There is the way of wisdom: Judaism’s insights into philosophy and the social sciences. There is the way of prophecy, focusing on emotion and the moral sense. And there is the way of priesthood, whose central insight is the connection between sacred order and social order. When human beings lose respect for God, they eventually lose respect for humanity. Therefore, the way to defend humanity is to make sure people never lose their respect for God.
Does blasphemy injure God? No. The very idea is blasphemous. God cannot be injured, but humanity can. Blasphemy injures society by desecrating the sacred. That is why, uniquely in this case, the witnesses are to lay their hands on the sinner, to indicate that they understand that this affects all of them. Language has been debased. Something sacred has been abused. A word – God’s name – that signals peace has been used like a weapon in a fight.
The message of Leviticus throughout is that life itself is holy. Everything to do with the Sanctuary had to be cleansed of connections with death and mortality. People, not just priests, are holy, as is the whole of life, not just edited parts of it. So we have to be holy in the way we eat, the way we conduct our most intimate sexual relationships, and the way we use language. We must not curse even the deaf, let alone our parents, let alone God Himself, because verbal abuse leads to physical abuse. A sense of the sacred is what lifts us above instinct and protects us from our dysfunctional drives. What begins with dishonouring God ends by desecrating humanity.