Canter Bridge

Famously labeled ‘Torah’, the first five books of the Bible are received as Moses’, the lawgiver’s, legacy.

Yet ‘Torah’ relates the verb ‘to teach’, not ‘to legislate’. Torah is before anything else instruction.

The substantive legal component of this Mosaic anthology is embedded in the story of Israel’s origins, a genesis that this people shares with humanity itself. Common ancestry does not dawdle, however, and the story quickly particularizes its focus onto Abraham’s descendants and then those of Jacob himself. He is renamed Israel, for his habit and privilege of struggling with God. Continue Reading »

The Pentateuch’s development of a world where murdered Abel’s blood cries out from the soil into which it has poured imposes a severe legal mercy upon its organized inhabitants.

What is one to do when blood pollutes the earth beyond redemption unless it is taken seriously enough to be avenged? How will a community keep vengeance from becoming an absolute virtue in the light of the blessing it allegedly maintains?

The Levites, liturgical odd men out that they are, will play a part in the legislative balance that Israel achieves in its constituent documents. We read in Numbers 5 that they will serve as the custodians of a half dozen cities of refuge, enough for each pair of tribes to have claim on one. Proximity, when one is fleeing for one’s life, is not empty promise. Continue Reading »

Zelophehad’s audacious daughters cast a remarkable shadow as they stride to the Tent of Meeting to plead their case before Moses. Through pages of genealogy, land assignment, and guild-establishing, the book of Numbers has not been a text eager to name a woman’s name.

Yet one would probably be wrong to sense incipient feminism or even gender egalitarianism in this text. It is all about preserving the father’s name, one unfortunate enough not to have left sons and therefore vulnerable to erasure from Israel’s memory. That would be a fate at least as bad as sonlessness and death itself. Continue Reading »

The whimsied story of Balak’s hired prophetic gun firing blanks still entertains. It also ventures a sly tale about magical religion.

In his trouble over the Israelite masses who are passing through is land, the Moabite king Balak contracts Baalam, a highly regarded speaker of curses, to put the whammy on these well-herded Israelites before they consume his grain like locusts or make it safely out the other end of his pasture. Ancient shepherd-kings, it seems, could be cranky about such intrusions onto the metaphorical pasture. The upkeep of that turf, after all, is what in part underwrote a regal authority that often had little else to stand on.

Baalam famously misfires, pronouncing blessing after blessing upon Moses’ people when he should have been foreshadowing their skewering with fiery words that would turn in good time into swords, dripping with real blood in answer to the prophet’s crimson words. Continue Reading »

It only takes a generation of ease for a people to forget that the world is perilous.

Men and women who know what a rocking chair is are ill equipped to imagine wolves. We are capable of doing so, of course, when pressed by adversity into action. Yet that observation confirms the point that pressure is required for us to imagine threat, let alone to rise against it at the risk of life, limb, and torn bodies.

In his brilliant work, Shepherds After my Own Heart: pastoral traditions and leadership in the Bible, Timothy S. Laniak argues that the ancient shepherd’s role is something other than we moderns suppose. Its quintessence, Laniak persuades, was to protect and provide for the flock in a context rich of scarcity and danger. Continue Reading »