Ḥukkat חוקת
Ḥukkat begins with the law of the red heifer, judged by the sages to be the most incomprehensible in the Torah. It became a classic example of a ḥok, a “statute,” often understood as a law that has no reason, or at least none we can understand.
The text then shifts from law to narrative. After the death of Miriam the people find themselves without water. They complain to Moses and Aaron, who turn to God. They then respond to the people in a way that seems to suggest anger. They are judged to have acted wrongly, and both are told they will not enter the land. Aaron dies.
The people complain again and are attacked by venomous snakes. Moses, at God’s command, places a brass serpent on a pole, so that all who look up to it will be healed. The people sing a song about a miraculous well that gave them water. Moses then leads the people into successful battles against Sihon and Og.
In the essays in this section, the first looks at one of the recurring themes in Numbers, the close connection between law and ritual, in this case between the law of the red heifer and the story that follows, about Miriam, Aaron, and Moses. The second examines the approach of one of the early masters of rabbinic Judaism, Yoḥanan b. Zakkai, to the red heifer. The third offers a new approach to “statutes” in terms of contemporary neuroscience. The fourth looks at the famous episode in which Moses struck the rock, for which he was sentenced not to enter the land. Was this a punishment, or something else? The fifth looks at an alternative way of understanding the episode. The sixth examines a strange rabbinic interpretation of a fragment of a song that appears towards the end of the parasha, about “the book of the Wars of the Lord.”
Statute and Story
The rabbis found the law of the red heifer with which Parashat Ḥukkat opens hard to understand. Without going into detail, they found it odd that a ritual that purified the impure also made the pure impure.1Midrash Lekaḥ Tov, 119b.
It seemed to cleanse and defile at the same time. It was, they said, a law that even King Solomon, wisest of men, found unfathomable.2Pitron Torah, Ḥukkat, 174, which interprets Eccl. 7:23, “All this have I tested by wisdom: I said, ‘I will be wise,’ but it was far from me,” as relating to Solomon’s inability to understand the law of the red heifer.
Rabban Yoḥanan b. Zakkai, one of the deepest of rabbinic thinkers, had to make up a fanciful story about it to ward off the ridicule it evoked in his Roman contemporaries.3See the next essay.
I hope that after this and the following two essays it will seem less obscure. But what is really odd is: What is the law doing here?
Surely this law belongs elsewhere. It is about a ritual of purification for one who had come into contact with the dead and now sought to enter the precincts of the Sanctuary. Its place should be in the book of Leviticus, which deals with purification rituals. It does not obviously belong in the book of Numbers, which deals with the second half of the Israelites’ journey through the wilderness. We have just read about a serious revolt against Moses’ leadership. We are about to read a story in which Moses and Aaron are rebuked by God for failing to believe in Him. These are stories of high drama. Why are they interrupted by a law about purification by sprinkling a mixture of the ashes of a heifer, hyssop, cedar wood, scarlet thread, and water? What has this to do with Moses, his anger and anguish? This is not a minor matter but a major one because it touches on the compositional logic of the Torah as a whole. Why is it written this way?
The Torah is a unique book, written in a strange, seemingly disjointed way. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible. There is nothing quite like it in the religious literature of humankind. What is odd is the way it mixes genres. It contains all sorts of texts. Numbers alone includes two censuses, lists of names, a heterogeneous collection of laws, battle accounts, legal disputes, travel itineraries, oracles from a non-Jewish prophet, fragments of songs, and much else, in no apparent order. Above all, it mixes law and narrative.
Law and narrative are two different things that do not naturally belong together. The ancient world had law codes: those, for example, of Urukagina, Ur-Nammu, Eshnunna, and Hammurabi, dating from the time of Abraham or before. It also had its stories and myths, tales of the fights between the gods and human beings – some of them not unlike the stories of Genesis, most notably the Flood. But these were two different literatures that did not overlap – not then, and not now. You would not expect to find a history of the United States in a book about American law, or a complete guide to English legislation in a book of British history. Once in a while, on campus, there might be an interdisciplinary seminar between members of the law and history faculties, but that would only serve to highlight the differences between the disciplines.
This, sadly, has led many generations of Bible scholars to the conclusion that what we have in the Torah is a composite work, a palimpsest or patchwork quilt of different documents, and the best way to understand it is to disaggregate the fragments, reading each one separately, so that they can be seen to be the work of different schools with different agendas, in different places at different times. This, I believe, is a monumental failure of understanding, a “map of misreading.”4The phrase is borrowed from Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). This, together with his The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), argues that misreading a text is not accidental. It has deep psychological roots. That is certainly the case for Western readings of the Hebrew Bible, especially from the Enlightenment onward.
The Mosaic books constitute a tightly organised and integrated text weaving together multiple voices and perspectives into a unity that is the literary correlate of the unity of God in His relationship to the diversity of humankind and the frequent disunity of His adopted children, the Israelites.
What does it mean to call the Five Books of Moses, with all their internal variety, Torah? The word itself means “law,” but it also means “teaching,” “instruction,” “guidance.” The verb y-r-h from which it derives also means “to shoot an arrow,” “to aim at a target.” Clearly, we have here a concept larger than “law” in a narrow, legalistic sense, for which the Mosaic books have other words, among them ḥok, mishpat, edut, din, and mitzva. Torah does sometimes have a narrow meaning, roughly, “the procedure to be followed in such-and-such a case.” But in its more general sense, it seems to mean guidance as it emerges not only from laws but also from history. “Torah” in this broad sense is about the counterpoint, the creative tension, between law and life, between the world as it ought to be and the world as it is.
Torah tells us that law is not merely a set of rules whose only logic is that they are the will of God. Judaism is not a matter of blind obedience. Astonishingly, despite the fact that the Torah is full of commands – 613 of them, according to tradition – there is no word in biblical Hebrew that means “to obey.”5The word used by the Torah is shema, which means many other things as well as “to obey.”
Law, in Judaism, is rooted in history and cosmology. It reflects something other and larger than the law itself. Many of the laws have as their explanation some such phrase as “because you were slaves in Egypt,” as if to say: You know what it feels like to suffer injustice or oppression. Therefore do not inflict these things on others.
The central law of the Noahide covenant, “He who sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed” (Gen. 9:6), emerged directly from the violence that led to the Flood, making God regret that He had created man in the first place. Law is a way of putting right what we know, from our or our ancestors’ experience, to have been wrong. Judaism exists in the cognitive dissonance between the order God creates and the chaos we create. Law is the path that leads us back from chaos to order, from discord to harmony, from death to life.
That is why the Torah is constructed as a counterpoint between law and narrative, between statute and story. God wants us to understand not only what to do, but why. He wants us not merely to obey but also to reflect on and internalise the lessons of history, the experiences of our ancestors, the story of our people that tells us where we came from and what we learned on the way.
Rarely is this set out more subtly and powerfully than in the parasha of Ḥukkat. Something extraordinary happens between the previous parasha and this one. It is not stated explicitly in the text and it takes us a while to realise that it has happened. Almost forty years have passed. In chapter 18 we read the final stages of the Korah revolt, in the second year of the journey, and now suddenly we are near the end. There is nothing in the text to signal the leap in time, but the characters have aged. Almost an entire generation has died.
Until this point we have had a reasonable grasp of time. In the book of Exodus, epic events succeed one another at a breathless pace: oppression, slavery, plagues, escape, the sound of Pharaoh’s chariots in the distance, the division of the sea, the journey into the wilderness, and the divine voice at Sinai. Then time slows almost to a stop. From the end of Exodus to the ninth chapter of Numbers, no time passes at all. Then the journey begins again, but as soon as it does so, it threatens to fall apart in a welter of complaints, despair, and the simmering resentments that surface in the Korah revolt.
Then without warning, the story leaps forwards thirty-eight years. We are now nearing the end not only of the journey but of the generation of those who left Egypt. They proved unequal to the challenge of fighting battles and building a society in the Promised Land. This is, by any standards, a devastating moment. For almost four decades the people who left Egypt have lived with the knowledge that they would not reach their destination. They would die before they set foot in the land flowing with milk and honey.
The first sign we have of the passage of time is so simple that we almost miss it. Miriam dies (Num. 20:1). She was the one who set the story of the Exodus in motion as she watched over baby Moses floating in a basket down the Nile. Just as she was there at the beginning of the beginning, so her death marks the beginning of the end of the story of that generation.
The Torah then adds a detail. Suddenly there was no water (Num. 20:2). This simple fact – one we have come across before6Ex. 15:22; 17:1. but not one that provoked any major crisis – will in the end prove to be the beginning of the end for Aaron and Moses also. Uncharacteristically, they lose their temper with the people – “Listen, you rebels” (Num. 20:10). For this they are condemned not to enter the Promised Land. Aaron dies, and the people mourn. Moses too knows that his days are numbered. He will not live to cross the Jordan. He will die in sight of the land but without setting foot on it.
Parashat Ḥukkat is thus about mortality. It is about the death of an entire generation, symbolised in the fate of its three leaders. It is about the discovery of a painful truth, most famously expressed by
R. Tarfon in the Mishna: It is not for you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it (Mishna Avot 2:16). The great challenges of humanity are too large to be completed in a single generation. The kind of leadership needed to lead a people out of slavery is not the same as that needed to lead them across the Jordan into the responsibilities of freedom. It takes a long time for people to change. We rarely live to see the full consequences of the changes we have lived through. That is the human condition, and this parasha tells us that even Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, for all their greatness, were also only human. But this can be a bitter truth. Ecclesiastes is an entire book driven by the fear that our lives are no more than hevel, a “fleeting breath.”7I have written about this at length in my introduction to the Koren Sukkot Maḥzor (Jerusalem: Koren, 2015).
That is why the narrative of Parashat Ḥukkat, which speaks about the death of the leaders of the wilderness generation, is preceded by the law of the red heifer, whose entire purpose is to purify those who have come into contact with death. The whole passage exemplifies one of the axioms of Judaism that “God provides the cure before the disease” (Megilla 13b).
The symbolism of the red heifer is simple. The red heifer itself represents life in its most primal form. Firstly it is an animal – and an animal lives without consciousness of death. Secondly it is red, symbolising blood, which for the Torah represents life itself. Thirdly it is an animal “on which a yoke has not yet come” (Num. 19:2). Its life has never been constrained by being domesticated, used. This is life at its most vigorous and elemental.
The heifer is killed and burned and reduced to ash in the most dramatic possible enactment of death. The ashes are then mixed with those of burnt cedar wood, hyssop, and crimson thread (part of the purification ritual of the metzora or “leper” as well; see Lev. 14 – evidently these three elements had a particular power, physical or symbolic, to absorb and thus remove impurity). They are then dissolved in “living water” to be sprinkled over the person who has been contaminated by contact with, or proximity to, a human corpse. The phrase “living water” is an explicit metaphor. Water is the source of all life, plant, animal, and human. In the desert, or more generally in the Middle East, you feel this with a peculiar vividness. Hence it became the symbol of God-who-is-life. Jeremiah says of his generation, “They have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living water” (Jer. 17:13). We now understand the symbolic significance of the fact that when Miriam died, the flow of water to the Israelites ceased. As long as she was alive, there was water, i.e., life. Her death marked the beginning of the end of Moses’ generation, and the sign of this was the drying up of the well that had served the people until then.
We die, but life goes on – that is the symbolic statement of the red heifer rite. All that lives eventually turns to dust and ash, but life continues to flow like a never-ending stream. Significantly, the Hebrew word for “inheritance,” naḥala, is related to the word for a stream or spring, naḥal. Heraclitus said that no one bathes in the same river twice. The water that was once here is gone. It has flowed into the sea, evaporated into cloud, and fallen again as rain. But the stream continues to flow in the same course, between the same banks. There is death, yes, but there is also continuity. We are not always privileged to complete the task, but others will take it on and move a little closer to fulfilment. So long as there is a covenant between the dead, the living, and those not yet born, mortality is redeemed from tragedy. The dead live on in us, as we will live on in our children or in those whose lives we touch. As dust dissolves in living water, so death dissolves in the stream of life itself.
Far from being unintelligible, the law of the red heifer is a powerful statement about life and death, grief and consolation, the ephemeral and the eternal. And far from being disconnected with the narrative that follows, it is intimately related to it, and the two are commentaries on one another. Together they form a fugue. Before we are exposed to the death of Miriam and Aaron and the decree of death against Moses, the Torah provides us with a profound metaphysical comfort. They died, but what they lived for did not die. The water ceased, but after an interval, it returned. We are destined to mourn the death of those close to us, but eventually we reconnect with (the water of) life.
Law informs the narrative, and the narrative explains the law. We need both, just as we need the analytical left hemisphere and the integrating right hemisphere of the brain. We now also have a deeper understanding of the word that gives the parasha its name: ḥok, usually translated as “statute” or “decree.” In actual fact, ḥok is a word that brings together two concepts of law. There are scientific laws, which explain the “isness” of the world, and there are moral laws, which prescribe the “oughtness” of the world.8Jer. 31:34–35 speaks of “the laws [ḥukkot] of the moon and the stars,” or what we would nowadays call laws of science.
The singular meaning of ḥok is that it brings both concepts together. There are laws we ought to keep because they honour the structure of reality.
The most significant feature of the structure of human reality is death. To be human is to be mortal. The law of the red heifer honours the fact of death. It does not try to deny it. Death is real; grief is inevitable; bereavement is the most painful of all human experiences. But God is life. God is to us as water is to the desert (“God, you are my God; I search for You, my soul thirsts for You, my body yearns for You, as a parched and thirsty land that has no water”; Ps. 63:2). The red heifer comforts us for the loss of Miriam, Aaron, and Moses, and for the existence of death itself. The touch of God, like the sprinkled drops of the waters of purification, heals our loss and brings us back to life.