Torah Portion
After Miriam is stricken with a skin affliction for speaking badly of Moses, Aaron begs Moses to forgive her, and Moses prays to God for her healing with five words: אֵל נָא רְפָא נָא לָהּ “O God, pray, heal her.” But the original prayer was likely different.
In the 8th century B.C.E., Egypt’s Nubian (Cushite) rulers pledged support to Hezekiah’s rebellion against Assyria—but ultimately failed to deliver. Miriam’s complaint about Moses’ Cushite wife serves as a political allegory, cautioning against reliance on Egypt’s unreliable alliance.
Both Philo of Alexandria (c. 25 B.C.E. – 50 C.E.) and some later rabbinic interpreters insist that Moses remained celibate so that he might always be pure and ready to hear YHWH, but each arrived at this conclusion through a different approach.
YHWH continuously tests Israel in the wilderness with water, manna, and quail. When they fail, YHWH threatens to leave them and then punishes them with fire and plague. J's depiction of YHWH as an emotional deity is already reflected in the stories of Eden and the flood.
YHWH instructs Moses to sound a teruah blast to get the eastern camp to travel, and a second for the southern camp. What about the western and northern camps? The answer can be found by comparing the Masoretic Text, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Septuagint: It was a parablepsis.
Moses is married to a Kushite woman (Numbers 12:1). While the term Kushite is generally understood as meaning black African, several places in the Bible refer to other locations as Kush, including Midian, the home of Moses’ wife Zipporah.
Miriam and Aaron speak negatively about Moses for marrying a Kushite woman. Does their issue have to do with her skin color? Miriam’s punishment may hold the key.
Tradition and source criticism both see two ark traditions in the biblical text: The Ark of the Covenant and the Ark of the Testimony. The former accompanies Israelite troops into battle; it appears in Numbers 10 (וַיְהִי בִּנְסֹעַ הָאָרֹן) and in the stories of battles against the Philistines and Ammonites in Samuel. The latter remains in the Tabernacle, serving as a seat for YHWH’s glory and revelation.
As a historical commemoration, Passover is tied to a specific date. Nevertheless, the Torah gives a make-up date for bringing the offering a month later. Gerim, non-Israelites living among Israelites as equals, are also allowed to bring this offering, even though it wasn’t their ancestors who were freed. How do we make sense of these anomalies?
The Israelite men are commanded to separate from their wives before the revelation at Sinai. The rabbis learn from this that Moses permanently separated from his wife (Numbers 12), to be available to speak with God at all times. However, Joseph ibn Kaspi in the 14th century claims that this interpretation distorts the plain meaning of the text and that celibacy is an affront to Jewish values.
Upon purifying the Temple in his first year as king, Hezekiah delays the celebration of Passover until the 14th of Iyar, the date of the Torah’s Pesach Sheni, “Second Passover.” A close examination of the story (2 Chr 29–30) demonstrates that this wasn’t a simple application of the Pesach Sheni law, but that Hezekiah was innovating in order to create unity between the northern Israelites and southern Judahites.
Exodus 16 and Numbers 11 each describe God miraculously bringing quail to the hungry Israelites in the wilderness. What is the relationship between these two accounts?
Ancient interpreters debated the identity of Moses’ Kushite wife and the nature of Miriam and Aaron’s complaint. Philo allegorizes her as an eye’s perfect focus, reflecting Moses’ direct perception of God. Reading this together with Philo’s allegorical understanding of Zipporah as a “bird” with direct access to heaven highlights the greatness of Moses’ wife as the fourth matriarch of Israel.
Ancient interpreters contemplated the substance of manna, a food that traverses the chasm between divine and mundane realms, falling from heaven to be consumed on earth. In kabbalistic thought, the Zohar presents manna as granting the desert generation an embodied experience of knowledge of God; such an opportunity is available to mystics in everyday eating and through birkat ha-mazon (Grace after Meals).
In a polemical response to Christian and Jewish allegorical interpretation of the Torah’s laws, Bekhor Shor writes that just as God speaks to Moses “clearly and without riddles” (Num 12:8), so too the Torah is clear and means what it says, and should not be interpreted allegorically.
“There is nothing at all, nothing but this manna” (Num 11:6): How the manna tradition overtook the suffering in the wilderness tradition.
The Midianite Origin of YHWH and Aniconism
The biblical portrait of Miriam can leave the modern reader with a lingering bitterness, but a closer reading highlights her prophetic role, and her willingness to challenge the social norms and pursue an alternative, redemptive course.
The nature of prophecy is perhaps one of the most overlooked questions, but it was critically important to the medieval Jewish philosophers Sa’adia Gaon, Judah Halevi, Ibn Ezra, and Maimonides.
In biblical tradition, Miriam is known as Moses’ sister. Critical analysis reveals more about this ancient and once independent leader.
In the ancient world, genealogy was not about family relations but about political alliances.
When Eldad and Medad prophesy in the camp, Joshua zealously presses for their incarceration. Moses, however, exclaims that all the people should ideally be prophets.
