i think geo didn't do this one last year?
we open on discussing a bit from last time since a number of us missed last time, which is really, like. kind of thorny insofar as it’s about how a bunch of hebrew men took up with moabite and midianite women and got into idolatry because of it, which resulted in g-d plaguing the people again to the tune of tens of thousands dead. the whole thing does not seem great about women!
(funnily enough one of the sages notes that g-d did not destroy the moabites because ruth would later exist. gay girls stay winning)
anyway some of the sages think that the thing with the moabite and midianite women was some sort of Scheme by the midianites to prostitute their daughters to get foreigners to worship baal peor which is. hm! however we also discussed the possibility that this is trying to make some distinction between moses’s marriage to a foreigner (fine, normal) to this (idolatrous) and/or getting into a bit of reproductive anxiety of the era.
(one member of the chavurah suggested that this was recounting a horrendously botched attempt at diplomacy. robert alter’s commentary also suggests that the whole bit with an extrajudicial execution of a midianite woman and a hebrew man was a metaphor for the relations between the two nations which is less… awful as a take1)
(we pause for a brief diversion to discuss solomon and his zillion wives getting led astray, and also his shamir, the magic building worm (real) before making @geostatonary read a bunch of names again)
anyway we’re getting back around to when the big-name elders of the hebrews are dying off; aaron has passed, and moses is preparing for his own death, which we talked about a lot last year, but again we linger on the kind of… bittersweetness of that, with the specialness of moses’s relationship to g-d.
a lot of text establishing certain sacrifices for the big high holy days and various things you should do and uhhh i think that was the end or at least i ran out of things i felt were significant discussion points.
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14–15. Zimri son of Salu chieftain of the Simeonite father’s house . . . Cozbi daughter of Zur, who was chieftain of the leagues of fathers’ houses in Midian.
The information about the name and lineage of the two culprits, given only at the end of the story, casts retrospective light on the implications of their act. This is not any “man of the Israelites,” as we might have thought, but a Simeonite prince, cohabiting with a Midianite princess. The targeting of the Israelite chiefs for execution is perhaps to be understood in this connection: the sexual conjunction of an Israelite prince and a Midianite princess is not merely an encounter of desire between two individuals but a treacherous model for the populace on both sides, an emblem of the religious and sexual amalgamation of the two peoples. Her name, whatever actual Midianite provenance it might have, clearly points to the Hebrew root k-z-b, “to deceive” or “to lie.” In all this, it is notable that Moses, who leaves the bloody work of execution to Phinehas, is himself married to the daughter of a Midianite priest, a figure who, far from promoting Baal, speaks of YHWH in virtually monotheistic terms. The Israelite attitude toward its neighbors appears to have oscillated over time and within different ideological groups between xenophobia, a fear of being drawn off its own spiritual path by its neighbors, and an openness to alliance and interchange with the surrounding peoples.
