Chapter 20 The Land of Israel as Diasporic Topos in Rabbinic Parables

In: The Power of Parables
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Constanza Cordoni
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In a “mashal about the mashal,”1 one of the few explicitly poetological passages of rabbinic literature pertaining to the small form mashal, a term whose polysemy notwithstanding is generally rendered in English as “parable,” we read: “Let not the parable be lightly esteemed in your eyes, for by means of the parable a man can understand the words of Torah” (Song Rab. 1:1:8).2 According to this dictum, parables are essentially didactic forms in the service of learning and teaching Torah. In the following pages, I will be concerned with the use of parables in rabbinic literature to convey teachings about a part of Torah which is a major theme of Scripture: the promised land, a notion that is richly expanded upon and elaborated in the literature of the sages.3

Crucial changes in Roman Palestine in the wake of the defeat of the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century CE and, more importantly, after the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, appear to have had an impact on a new definition of Judaism as decentralized and deterritorialized as well as on the emergence of the Jewish diaspora as we understand it today, the paradigmatic diaspora. Since their beginnings in the 1990s, Diaspora Studies have operated with a concept of diaspora that takes the Jewish case as a departure point and conceives of the homeland as playing a major role in the self-definition of a diasporic community.4 The literature of the sages is a corpus that can be described as diasporic insofar as it was created by Jews dispersed both from and in their ancestral homeland (Sassanian Babylonia and Roman Palestine, respectively). This literature refashioned the promised land of Scripture where Judaism’s cultic centre had once stood in a plethora of statements, some of them explicitly exegetical, some others less so. In this chapter I discuss a series of parables on the Land, one of several ways of speaking about the Land indirectly.5 These parables reveal some of the strategies6 with which the sages addressed the significance of the Land, which has become a topos of a diasporic literature. What kind of teachings about the Land of Israel did the sages transmit using parables? In what literary contexts and with what different focalizations do these teachings occur? In order to address these questions, I have established a corpus of parables excerpting midrash documents (or corpora), to which I will refer following scholarly convention as Tannaitic, Amoraic, and post-Amoraic. For reasons of scope, I will focus on a selection of representative examples.

1 The Corpus

A first question that arises concerns the way the Land becomes part of the rabbinic parabolical discourse. Is the explicit mention of the Land in a scriptural verse that functions as lemma or base verse the hermeneutic “occasion” for a parable? Or is it rather the case that verses without any evident reference to the Land are interpreted with parables in which the Land happens to feature more or less prominently? As far as the corpora I have excerpted are concerned, the former is the exception.7 The rabbinic discourse on the Land is brought into an exegetical dialogue with scriptural wording which does not evoke the Land. The heuristic followed to identify parables for my corpus is that a parable is regarded as a Land-parable if the expression Land (ארץ), in the territorial sense of bounded space or “country” (i.e., Land of Israel) rather than “ground” or “earth,” features in one of the constitutive parts of the rabbinic parable as described for example by Arnold Goldberg or David Stern,8 or in the co-text/context of the parable.9 The expression may therefore be found preceding the secular narrative (mashal proper) in the lemma (exception), or in the brief commentary on this verse, or else in the general rabbinic wording that connects the base verse to a petichah verse. It can also feature in the application of the secular narrative (nimshal), which may in turn include other key scriptural verses. Taking these criteria into account, I was able to identify thirty-two Land-parables transmitted in Tannaitic, Amoraic, and post-Amoraic Palestinian documents.10 While in some of the sources the Land features only marginally, in others it is evidently focalized. The examples I will discuss in what follows are of the latter type, and they address the Land in relation to three themes: 1) The patriarchs’ special attachment to the Land; 2) Moses’s vain wish to enter the Land;11 and 3) God’s relation to the Land.12 For each of these themes I have selected examples from more than one of the three (Tannaitic, Amoraic, and post-Amoraic) periods of rabbinic creativity.

2 The Patriarchs and the Land

Only one Tannaitic Land-parable addresses the link between the Land and the patriarchs. In Deut 1:8, Moses quotes the words with which God symbolically transfers its legal title to Israel at Horeb: “See, I have set the land before you; go and take possession of the land that the Lord swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give to them and to their descendants after them.” The halakhic midrash Sifre Deuteronomy interprets apparently redundant aspects of this verse with the aid of a parable:

[The land] that the Lord swore to your ancestors (Deut 1:8): … Why then does Scripture say [in addition], to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob? To [indicate that] Abraham on his own [was worthy], Isaac on his own [was worthy], Jacob on his own [was worthy]. It is like a king who gave a servant a certain field as a gift, gave it to him as it was. The servant went to work and improve it, saying, What I have is only that which was given to me as it was. And he planted a vineyard in it, saying again, What I have is only that which was given to me as it was. So also when the Holy One, blessed be He, gave Abraham the Land, He gave it to him only as it was, for it is said, Rise up, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you (Gen 13:17). Abraham then went to work to improve it, for it is said, And Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beer-sheba (Gen 21:33). Isaac likewise went to work to improve it, for it is said, And Isaac sowed seed in that land, and in the same year reaped a hundredfold (Gen 26:12). Jacob too went to work to improve it, for it is said, And he bought the plot of land [on which he had pitched his tent] (Gen 33:19).

Sifre Deut. 813

Although the parable is initially told to explain the rephrasing of “your ancestors” as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as well as the repetition of the preposition le- (“to”) before the names of the three patriarchs in the scriptural lemma, the secular narrative stresses only the difference made by the work on the field by one and the same servant. The field of the parable and what the servant does on it, the midrash suggests, is comparable to deeds of each of the three patriarchs in the Land, deeds which are seen as alluded to in Scripture. Each is singled out in the type of action he performs on the Land—Abraham plants a tree, Isaac cultivates the land, and Jacob buys a piece of land from the children of Hamor in the territory of Shechem. Common to the three is that each with his actions modifies the place where he resides, which happens to be the land promised to and/or given to Abraham, and in this way each makes it his own.

This argument is also found in three of the four Amoraic Land-parables in the corpus that focus on the attachment of the patriarchs to the Land and are thus parables of the Land as ancestral homeland.14 I will limit myself to an example from the Amoraic exegetical midrash on the book of Genesis, Genesis Rabbah. In Gen 18:17–18 we read: “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, since Abraham is to become a great and populous nation and all the nations of the earth are to bless themselves by him?” Scripture provides a sort of answer to this question with a dialogue between God and Abraham in which the latter takes up the role of a prophet (Gen 18:19–33). Genesis Rabbah addresses the exegetical and theological problem posed by God’s rhetorical question both by spelling out that Abraham is a prophet and by having three Palestinian amoraim15 tell three consecutive parables. What these have in common is that they compare Abraham to a king’s friend or adviser without whose consent the king does nothing. The first of these parables is the one of interest for the question pertaining to the meaning of the Land in parabolical discourse:

This Abraham is a prophet … shall I then not reveal to him [the impending destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah?] ⟨The Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, etc. (Gen 18:17)⟩. Rabbi Joshua ben Levi said: It is like a king who gave an estate (usiah, אסייא)16 to his friend and after some time wished to cut down five non-fruit-bearing trees from it. The king said, If I wanted to cut them down even from his patrikon (פטריקון, “patrimony”),17 he would certainly not refuse me. What is there [for me to lose]? And he consulted him [about it]. Similarly, the Holy One, blessed be He, said, I have already given [the land as a gift to Abraham, To your descendants I give] this land (Gen 15:18). Now these five towns were indeed in what is mine; yet if I desired them even of his patrikon, he would not refuse me. What is there [for me to lose]? And he consulted him [about it].

Gen. Rab. 49:2 [Theodor-Albeck 499−500]18

The parable is told to illustrate Abraham’s status as prophet rather than to address the Land itself. After giving an estate to a friend, the king as previous owner is depicted as still being in a position to decide whether certain trees may be felled in what has become someone else’s property. This is incidentally the first of the Land-parables in my corpus where the Land-equivalent in the mashal narrative is an expression that evokes the concept of homeland. The parable uses a Greek loanword (פטריקון, patrikon) which, like patria (for which rabbinic Hebrew has no equivalent), connotes the Land’s ancestral character, that is to say, the link between the forefathers (patres) and the Land.

The parable is about the king’s dilemma as to whether he should discuss with his friend this measure, the felling of trees in the estate he has given to his friend (not explicitly referred to as owner or tenant), and about the king’s conclusion that to inform his friend would not imply a conflict of interest. God—unlike the king of flesh and blood who may have been in doubt—knows his wish will be granted, so asking the flesh and blood possessor of the land entails no risk for him. More importantly, the parable addresses the ambivalent status of a land which, while “given” to Abraham and his descendants in several speech acts, referred to as their patrimony, and acknowledged by God himself as their patrimony, will always be also God’s territory.

While the parables of Sifre Deut. 8 and Gen. Rab. 49:2 suggest that the patriarchs took possession of the Land,19 a different position is represented by the following post-Amoraic parable on the connection between the patriarchs and the Land:

Send men [to spy out the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites] … (Num 13:2). Rabbi Acha the Great opened: The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever (Isa 40:8). What does the matter resemble? It is like a king who had a friend. Now he made an agreement with him and said to him, Come with me, and I will give you a present. He went with him but died. The king said to the son of his friend, Although your father has died, I am not withdrawing the present that I said I would give him. Come and get it yourself. The king is the Holy One, blessed be He, and the friend is Abraham, for it is said, [But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen,] the offspring of Abraham, my friend (Isa 41:8). The Holy One, blessed be He, said to him, Come with me, for it is said, Go from your country (Gen 12:1). He made an agreement with him to give him a present, for it is said, Arise, walk about the land … for I am giving it to you (Gen 13:17) and it [Scripture] says, for all the land that you see I will give to you [and to your offspring forever] (Gen 13:15). … The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Moses, Although I had agreed with the ancestors to give them the land and they died, I am not going back on [my word], rather the word of our God shall stand forever (Isa 40:8).

Tanh. B. Shelah Lekha 320

This is one of those exceptional cases referred to above in which the Land is mentioned in the verse that provides the hermeneutic occasion for a Land-parable.21 In its original scriptural context, the lemma is part of the narrative episode of the spies (Num 13–14), which is particularly richly interpreted in Tanhuma literature, not only by means of Land-parables.

Instead of retrojecting the possession of the Land onto the time of the patriarchs as Sifre Deut. 8 and Gen. Rab. 49:2 do, this parable from Tanhuma Buber argues that the promise to the patriarchs could not be fulfilled during their lifetime. After identifying the king and his friend as God and Abraham, the nimshal provides a parallel to the secular narrative—according to which someone is promised something which someone else receives—with a rephrasing of the scriptural narrative of the promise that uses prooftexts from that same narrative (Gen 12:1, 13:15). The midrash associates the moment of fulfilment of the promise with Moses, even though Moses is not an exact equivalent of the friend of the mashal insofar as he is not told to enter and possess the Land. The nimshal is closed with a quotation of the petichah verse which the mashal seeks to illustrate, as anticipating the fulfilment of the promise in Joshua’s time.22

3 The No-Land’s Man Moses

Four out of ten Tannaitic and three out of sixteen post-Amoraic Land-parables in my corpus are concerned with the problem posed by a scriptural narrative event that called for an explanation: God does not allow Moses to enter the promised land. This is a problem with which rabbinic literature deals in extenso in a sort of macro-rabbinic narrative about the end of Moses’s life outside of the Land. According to this narrative, following God’s command to go up a mountain in Transjordan to see the Land and disregarding God’s hints that Joshua will be the one to bring the people into the Land, Moses attempts to have God change his mind and allow him to enter the Land. This is, incidentally, as Günter Stemberger points out, a motif without a parallel in pre-rabbinic Judaism.23 It is as part of this rabbinic retelling of the end of Moses’s life that we encounter several Land-parables. Let us look at the one transmitted in the Mekhilta de Rabbi Ishmael:

Whence do we know about Moses? It is said, And recite it in the hearing of Joshua (Exod 17:14). [With these words God] said [to him], Joshua will lead Israel to inherit the land. However, in the end, he [Moses] was still standing and beseeching, for it is said, And I besought the Lord etc. (Deut 3:23). A parable: It is like a king who decreed against his son that he should not come into his palace with him (עמו לפלטרין). The son entered the first gate and the guards kept their peace. At the second [gate] they kept their peace. But at the third they rebuked him and said to him, It is enough for you to have come so far. So also was it when Moses conquered the land of the two peoples, the land of Sichon and Og, and gave it to the tribe of Reuben and the tribe of Gad and to half the tribe of Manasseh. They, then, said to him, It seems as if the decree against you was issued on a condition. Maybe we likewise have been sentenced on a condition.

Mekh. R. Ishm. Amalek 224

According to the tanna Rabbi Eleazar of Modiʿin, in the context immediately preceding the text quoted above, Moses and Jacob have in common that they are not able (or willing) to grasp a hint God gives them. In Moses’s case, it should have become evident to him at the mention of Joshua in Exod 17:14 that he would not be the one to lead the people into the Land. However, the midrash argues, he failed to interpret the hint properly or chose to interpret it to suit his own wishes. Moses’s predicament is what the parable appears to illustrate, taking the words of Deut 3:23 as a hermeneutic occasion: After entering two areas of the king’s palace, the king’s son is stopped. No reason is given to explain why he may not pass through the third gate.25 The nimshal identifies the two areas the son enters with the lands conquered from Sichon and Og26 and has the collective character of the two and a half tribes to whom these lands are given argue for a similarity between Moses being obliged to stay outside and their own remaining outside and settling in Transjordan. Furthermore, the nimshal somehow conflates in the character of the two and a half tribes the roles of both the king’s son and the guards of the secular narrative. The latter’s rebuking words with which the secular narrative is closed are echoed in the nimshal with the less determined and more sympathetic words of the two and a half tribes that settled of their own accord in Transjordan. They appear to express a hope that Moses’s and, accordingly, their own fate may be changed, but then no explicit answer to this question is given, for both will remain outside.

The passage immediately following upon this question, which strictly speaking does not belong to the parable,27 has Moses elaborate on the prohibition in an attempt to challenge the parable. He negotiates his right to enter the Land using language that reminds us of the language of parables: his argument can be paraphrased in the typical words of an anti-mashal, one that contests God’s decree with the words “Your ways are not like those of a king of flesh and blood!” (Mekh. R. Ishm. Amalek 2). In this parable and its parallels, the narrative of the son not allowed into part of the king’s palace appears to tell us that, no matter how good the relationship between a king and his son may be, it is for the former to decide who has access to which space of his realm. The fact that in this context the Land is compared to the innermost of a king’s place of residence tells us something about a special connection between God and the Land, but also about Moses and the space before the Land—in both a spatial and temporal sense.

Tanhuma literature transmits numerous Land-parables, some of which are especially rich in style and content. The example below depicts Moses again negotiating a chance to enter the Land and drawing a boundary between the spies and himself:

For the same fate is in store for all: for the righteous, and for the wicked (Qoh 9:2): Moses said [to the Holy One, blessed be He, Master of the world,] everything is the same for You, he destroys both the blameless and the wicked (Job 9:22). The spies provoked You with anger with the evil report on the land, while I have served Your children forty years in the wilderness. Is the same lot [in store] for me as for them?

Tanh. B. Vaetchanan 2

The report of the men sent by Moses to scout the land is mentioned as part of a homily on Deut 3:23 which makes use of Qoh 9:2 as petichah verse. Moses’s powerful argument here is that he should not be placed in the same category with slanderers and with the generation of the wilderness. He therefore refuses to accept Qoh 9:2 and Job 9:22 as applicable to his case. The following parable is then told to support Moses’s argument:

A parable: What does the matter resemble? It is like a king who wanted to take a wife. He sent emissaries to see her, [and find out] whether she was beautiful or not. They went to see her. They came and said to him, We have seen her and there is no one more neglected and uglier than she. When her shoshvinah (שושבינה, “bride’s friend, agent”) heard, he said, My lord, there is no one in the world more beautiful than she. [So] he came to marry her. The father of the young woman said to the king’s emissaries, I swear that none of you shall enter [the wedding feast], seeing that you humiliated her before the king. When the shoshvin came to enter, he said to him, You also may not come in. The shoshvin said to him, I have not seen her and yet told the king that there was no one more beautiful than she, while those said that there is no one uglier than she! And now I shall see whether [the truth is] according to my words or to their words. So Moses said to the Holy One, blessed be He, Master of the world, the spies uttered slander, a land that devours its inhabitants (Num 13:32), but I, who have not seen it, said, for the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land[, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills] etc. (Deut 8:7). And now I shall see it, whether it is like my words or like their words, for it is said, Let me cross over to see the good land beyond the Jordan (Deut 3:25). He said to him, for you shall not go over the Jordan (Deut 3:27). If so, then everything is the same for you, he destroys both the blameless and the wicked (Job 9:22).

Tanh. B. Vaetchanan 2

We could be tempted to think that it is Moses himself who tells God the parable, even though it is more likely that the same anonymous voice that quotes Moses arguing with God is the one that tells the parable and then quotes Moses again applying the narrative to his own case. While the secular narrative ends with the expression of the agent’s wish, the nimshal comes to a close with Moses’s words of resistance. He might repeat the last word in the parable and this is one of reproof,28 but—as was the case in the parable in the Mekhilta, where the two and a half tribes wondered whether there could be any hope for a change of fate for Moses and themselves—the midrash cannot go any further, since Moses’s story cannot be changed.

4 The Land Belongs to God

The majority of the Land-parables of the corpus with a focus on the link between the Land and God are post-Amoraic. It is to three examples of such post-Amoraic Land-parables that I wish to turn in this section of my chapter.

God promises the Land to Abraham, gives the Land for a possession to the three patriarchs and/or their descendants, but the Land, which rabbinic literature characteristically refers to with the genitive construction “Land of Israel,” is God’s, as stated in Lev 25:23. The Mishnah treats the Land as special in its connection with God in the rulings pertaining to cultic purity and agricultural offerings, in rulings relating to social and spatial taxonomies, all of which is part of what Richard Sarason has described as a “sustained act of imagination [that] describes and legislates for an ideal Israelite world of Temple cult, priesthood, Sanhedrin, and king that nowhere existed at the time of its compilation.”29 We also find traces of the Mishnah’s “as if”-attitude towards the Land in post-Tannaitic texts. An example is the following Tanhuma Buber:

When you come into the land (Lev 19:23): This is what Scripture says, I thought how I would set you among children, and give you a pleasant land (ארץ חמדה) [the most beautiful heritage of all the nations] (Jer 3:19). It is like a king who had concubines and many children. But he had one child with a matrona and he loved him dearly. The king gave fields and vineyards (שדות וכרמים) to all the children of the concubines, and after that he gave this one son one orchard (pardes, פרדס) from which all his qlarin (“provisions,” קלארין) came. The son sent and said to his father, To the children of the concubines you have given fields and vineyards, but to me you have given one garden. The king said to him, By your life, all my qlarin come to me from this garden; and because I love you more than your brothers, I have given it to you. Similarly, the Holy One, blessed be He, created the peoples of the world, for it is said, There are sixty queens [and eighty concubines] (Song 6:8): these are the peoples; One is my dove[, my perfect one] (Song 6:9): this is the congregation of Israel. And the Holy One, blessed be He, distributed fields and vineyards among the peoples of the world, for it is said, When the Most High apportioned the nations (Deut 32:8); but to Israel he has given the Land of Israel, the qlarin of the Holy One, blessed be He. The offerings come from it; the shewbread comes from it; the first fruits come from it; the omer comes from it; all the good things in the world come from it. Why all this? In order to make a distinction between the son of the matrona and the children of the concubines, for it is said, I thought how I would set you among children (Jer 3:19).

Tanh. B. Kedoshim 12

It is once again with the aid of loanwords that the midrashic discourse evokes the Land in a parable.30 The son by the woman who is not referred to as a concubine but as a matrona,31 is distinguished from his siblings in that he receives from the king an orchard (pardes, Persian loan word). When the son questions his father’s apparent discrimination, he is told that he has been given the choicest of the gardens.32

The nimshal specifies that the Land is special to God because it is the place from whence the agricultural offerings come which God expects Israel to bring him.33 These do not come from the vineyards and fields in the rest of the countries given to the nations. This parable addresses not just the special connection between God and the Land, but rather the fundamental triad of the Hebrew Bible: God−Land−people.34 While the segment of Jer 3:19 quoted at the end of the nimshal emphasizes the view that Israel belong in their Land rather than among the nations, all along the parable seems also to have been addressing the problematic scriptural designation of the Land as “the most beautiful heritage of all the nations” in the unquoted part of Jer 3:19.

Due to its interest in the land-commandments, the previous parable may be considered to be broadly related to halakhic questions. The midrashic imagination also represents the special bond between God and the Land in Land-parables in more clearly aggadic terms, as in the following midrash on Num 21:14:

Wherefore it is said in the Book of the Wars of the Lord, Waheb in Suphah and the valleys of the Arnon (Num 21:14): The signs and miracles in the valleys of the Arnon were like the signs and miracles which were done for them at the Red Sea. What were the miracles of the valleys of the Arnon? A man would stand on the top of this mountain and speak with his neighbour on the top of the other mountain, even though he would be seven miles away. The road went down into the midst of the valley and then went up and Israel on their way had to pass through the midst of the valleys. All the nations assembled endless troops and some among them were stationed in the midst of the valley. [The slope of] the valley became riddled with caves and the mountain opposite them became correspondingly riddled with projections resembling breasts (שדים), for it is said, and the slope (אשד) of the valleys (Num 21:15). The troops went into the caves and said, When Israel descends into the midst of the valley, those in front of them in the valley and those above them from the caves, will stand and we will kill them all. When Israel arrived at the place, the Holy One, blessed be He, did not make it necessary for them to go down to the midst of the valley. He signalled to the mountains and the breasts of this mountain entered the caves and killed them all. And the mountains brought their heads close to each other and [so] they made a level road (דרך כבושה) and [this in such a manner that] there was no knowing where this one joined its neighbour. And this valley separates the borders of the Land of Israel (techume erets yisrael, תחומי ארץ ישראל) and the Land of Moab, for it is said, for the Arnon is the boundary of Moab (Num 21:13). The mountain in the land of Moab was not moved, in it were the caves, while the mountain in the Land of Israel was moved, in it were the projections resembling breasts, joining the mountain opposite. And why was it [that the latter] moved? Because it is from the Land of Israel. A parable: It is like a woman slave who saw the son of her master coming to her. She was excited and greeted him and welcomed him. The projections entered into the caves and crushed all the mighty men among them and the well descended into the valley and became mighty there and destroyed all the troops, in the same manner as there the sea destroyed them [the Egyptians], therefore it is written, Waheb in Suphah and the valleys of the Arnon (Num 21:14). Israel passed along those mountains but did not know about these miracles. The Holy One, blessed be He, said, See, I will let the children of Israel know how many troops I destroyed on their account. The well descended into the cave and brought out innumerable skulls, arms, and legs. So when Israel returned to look for the well, they saw it shining like the moon in the midst of the valley bringing out the limbs of the troops. And whence [do we infer] that the well informed them? [Hence,] for it is said, and the slope of the valleys etc. (Num 21:15). And from there to the well (Num 21:16). Now was the well given them then? Was it not with them from the beginning of the forty years? It was, but it went down to proclaim the miracles. So Israel would stand by the valleys saying to it, Spring up, O well! Sing to it! (Num 21:17): and they stood and sang a song.

Tanh. B. Chukat 47

The parable’s exegetical context is a reading of Num 21:14 and Num 21:17. The two verses are interpreted as being related not just because they are part of the same scriptural segment: it is argued that 1) there is a link between the events at the Red (סוף) Sea and the events in Suphah (סופה) in Transjordan prior to the conquest of the Land (Num 21:14); and 2) the well that had accompanied Israel from the very beginning of the forty years of wandering was only temporarily out of sight when Israel were in Moab, and not, as one might infer from Num 21:17, only at this point given to Israel, at the end (בסוף) of the forty years of wandering.

Thus the etymology of a place name, Suphah, gives the hermeneutic occasion for the midrash to explain the miraculous nature of the events during Israel’s journey in Transjordan. For this purpose, Tanhuma’s anonymous voice gives an account of how the geography of the Land becomes an ally of the Israelites and an active participant in their military encounter with the nations. According to this account,35 however, it is not Israel who are responsible for the killing of the troops in ambush in the caves, but rather the mountains of the Land of Israel qua breasts that in response to God’s orders crush humans, whom the well then drowns.36 Resorting to an image of the real world to explain the miracle and echoing the powerful gender metaphor of the lengthy account of the miracle, a brief parable compares the behaviour of the mountains of the Land of Israel to that of a slave woman rejoicing at the arrival of her master’s son and moving in his direction. This parable is told to bring down to earth what may be considered a parable of imaginary geography that encompasses it and that purportedly explains a name (Suphah) and argues for a passive role on the part of Israel in their military triumph in Moab.

A final example of a Land-parable that addresses the special connection between God and the Land is found in the late exegetical midrash Aggadat Bereshit. As part of the commentary on Gen 37:1, “Jacob settled in the land where his father had lived as an alien, the land of Canaan,” we read the following exposition by the fourth-century Rabbi Acha:

Rabbi Acha said: The Holy One, blessed be He, said, I only created a dwelling place in order that you will do my will and fear me on these conditions. [And He also said,] Fear me, take my lesson and the dwelling place will not be destroyed (Zeph 3:7). He drove out the enemy before you, and said, Destroy! (Deut 33:27). At that time Israel lives in peace (Deut 33:28). Whenever the kingdoms of the world live in peace, Israel does not live in peace. It is like a partridge that sang in the house of its master. When he sat down to dine, the partridge would sing. After a while, his master brought a falcon. When the partridge saw it, it fled under the bed to hide itself, and did not open its mouth anymore. The king came to dine and said to his house-servant, Why does the partridge not sing? He said, Because you brought a falcon to it; it sees it and is afraid and therefore does not sing. Take the falcon away and it will sing. So it is with Israel in this world when they are placed outside of the Land of Israel while the kingdoms of the world live in their land. … Also the Holy One, blessed be He, is, as it were, not visible in the world, until the moment He uproots the kingdom of Edom, for it is said, God is king over the nations (Ps 47:9), and at that time God sits on his holy throne.

Ag. Ber. 5837

The parable is told to illustrate Zeph 3:7 and Deut 33:28, verses that are understood as evocative of how Israel perceive foreign rule both within and without the Land of Israel. The parable stands out in that it is the only one in the corpus which explicitly addresses the fact that foreign rule in the Land of Israel implies that the people of Israel do not live in their land, but in the diaspora. It is a parable about a Sehnsucht for the Land that we do not find in the rest of the parables in the corpus. Rabbi Acha’s words tend to be interpreted as the expression of a Jewish wish for the end of Roman rule, a wish usually read in terms of anti-Christian sentiment.38 In view of the assumed date of redaction of this work in the eleventh century or sometime earlier, probably outside of the Land and even beyond the borders of the Islamicate world, it is conceivable that the passage above expressed a desire for the end of all foreign rule in the Land, that is, including that of the Muslim caliphate. Foreign rule in Israel’s land, it is argued, causes Israel not only to be away from their homeland but also to lead an invisible existence. Even God appears to be invisible when foreign kings rule the Land.

5 Conclusion

The Land-parables in my corpus show little interest for scriptural or historical geography,39 for the phenomenon of the Jewish diaspora in the geographical sense of a place of residence outside the ancestral homeland40 or the notion of a loyal opposition between the Palestinian and Babylonian centres of learning.41 However, the Land-parables of which the ones discussed are representative examples are also part of the broader diasporic conceptualization of the Land in the literature of the sages of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

How does the Land feature in the Land-parables? How do these parables, mainly king-parables, argue for the significance of the Land, a land that in the period during which they took shape, roughly between the third and eleventh centuries CE, existed as bounded territory in the texts and minds of the rabbis and the anonymous redactors behind the texts? As the examples showed, the Land may be parabolically connoted with various images, including spatial ones. Apart from comparing it to a field (Sifre Deut. 8), the midrashic imagination resorts to loanwords from different languages to evoke the Land in parables: the Land is a palace’s third gate to which a king’s son is denied access (Mekh. R. Ishm. Amalek 2), a patrimonial estate (Gen. Rab. 49:2), or an orchard/larder (Tanh. B. Kedoshim 12).42 Although vineyards feature in several of the Land-parables in my corpus, these are never identified with the Land, but rather with other geographies or even other peoples.43 Other parables use anthropomorphic images, such as that of a bride (Tanh. B. Vaetchanan 2) or a slave girl (Tanh. B. Chukat 47), as well as images of inanimate objects, such as “a present,” to connote the Land (Tanh. B. Shelah Lekha 3). The importance of the Land may also be addressed in form of a Land-parable even if no equivalent of the Land can be identified in the mashal narrative, as is the case in the parable of the partridge which ceases to sing once it is in the undesired company of a falcon (Ag. Ber. 58).

In the reading of the eight parables in this chapter, we could distinguish several arguments that are made with Land-parables in the three thematic sections related to the links between the Land and the patriarchs, Moses, and God.

1) Patriarchs: On the one hand, it is claimed that the Land was in the possession of the patriarchs, not just promised them (Sifre Deut. 8); it is even referred to with a name (patrikon) that evokes the forefathers (Gen. Rab. 49:2). On the other hand, it is argued that the land was promised with a promise meant to transcend the lives of the patriarchs and whose fulfilment takes place in Moses’s time (Tanh. B. Shelah Lekha 3).

2) Moses: In line with the account in Scripture, the fulfilment of the Land-promise does not take place during Moses’s life. In the comparison of the Land with a king’s palace to which his son is not allowed access, another parable addresses Moses’s predicament of having to stay outside and leaves unanswered the question of the two and a half tribes with which they express their hope for a change of fate, both for Moses and for themselves. Moses himself slips into the role of his own lawyer to plead with God for mercy, challenging the very genre of the king-parable to argue for his right to see the Land (Mekh. R. Ishm. Amalek 2), a right unjustly granted even to the spies (Tanh. B. Vaetchanan 2).

3) God: The Land is compared to an orchard and larder from which God expects Israel to bring their offerings (Tanh. B. Kedoshim 12) and to a woman slave who rejoices at the arrival of her lord’s son and moves in his direction just as the Land itself is imagined to have moved following God’s orders to relieve Israel in their bellic encounter with the nations in Transjordan (Tanh. B. Chukat 47); God having permitted the Land to be in the hands of others results in Israel being brought to silence just as a cheerfully singing partridge is brought to silence in the undesired company of a falcon (Ag. Ber. 58). These parables illustrate scriptural notions related to the Land, but also embellish and elaborate on them to update and bring them to be in line with the post-scriptural agendas of the sages.

Appendix: List of Parables

Mekh. R. Ish. Amalek 2; Sifre Num. 82, 84, 119, 132, 134; Sifre Deut. 8, 28, 29, 43; Gen. Rab. 49:2; Lev. Rab. 25:5, 36:5; Pesiq. Rav Kah. 10:2; Song Rab. 8:9:2; Tanh. B. Kedoshim 12; Shelah Lekha 3, 4; Chukat 32, 47; Balak 29; Maseʿei 7; Vaetchanan 2; Reʾeh 3, 8, 13; Midr. Ps. 5:1, 24:2; Ag. Ber. 58; S. Eli. Zut. 2 (Friedmann 173).

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1

David Stern, Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 41.

2

This contribution has been written in the context of the project “Reconfiguring Diaspora: The Transformation of the Jewish Diaspora in Antiquity,” directed by Leonard V. Rutgers and financially supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). On the equivalence between mashal and parable, see Robert B.Y. Scott, Louis Isaac Rabinowitz, and Ángel Sáenz-Badillos, “Parable,” in Encyclopedia Judaica, ed. Fred Skolnik and Michael Berenbaum, 2nd ed., 22 vols. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 15:620; Rüdiger Zymner, “Parabel,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. Gert Ueding, 12 vols. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992–2015), 6:502–514; Rüdiger Zymner, “Gleichnis,” in Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Klaus Weimar et al., 3rd ed., 3 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007), 1:724–727. On the rabbinic parable in general, Arnold Goldberg, “Das Schriftauslegende Gleichnis im Midrasch,” FJB 9 (1981): 1–90; David Flusser, Die rabbinischen Gleichnisse und der Gleichniserzähler Jesus, vol. 1, Das Wesen der Gleichnissen (Bern: Lang, 1981); David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Daniel Boyarin, “Midrash in Parables,” AJSR 20 (1995): 123–138; Eric Ottenheijm and Marcel Poorthuis, eds., Parables in Changing Contexts: Essays on the Study of Parables in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, JCP 35 (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

3

See Richard Sarason, “The Significance of the Land of Israel in the Mishna,” in The Land of Israel: Jewish Perspectives, ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 109–136; Isaiah Gafni, Land, Center and Diaspora: Jewish Constructs in Late Antiquity, JSPSup 21 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997); Gabrielle Oberhänsli-Widmer, “Bindung ans Land Israel—Lösung von der Eigenstaatlichkeit: Der Umgang der Rabbinen mit einer virtuellen Heimat,” in Heiliges Land, ed. Martin Ebner, JBTh 23 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2008), 149–175; Daniel Boyarin, A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Constanza Cordoni, “Inheriting and Buying a Homeland: The Land of Israel and the Patriarchs,” JSJ 49 (2018): 551–580.

4

See William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora (1991): 83–99; William Safran, “The Diaspora and the Homeland: Reciprocities, Transformations, and Role Reversals,” in Transnationalism: Diasporas and the Advent of a New (Dis)order, ed. Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg, ICSS 19 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 75–99; André Levy and Alex Weingrod, “On Homelands and Diasporas: An Introduction,” in Homelands and Diasporas: Holy Lands and Other Places, ed, A. Levy and A. Weingrod (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 3–26; Robin Cohen, “Solid, ductile and liquid: Changing notions of homeland and home in diaspora studies,” in Transnationalism: Diasporas and the Advent of a New (Dis)order, ed. Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yizhaq Sternberg, ICSS 19 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 117–134; Hasia R. Diner, Introduction, The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora, ed. Hasia R. Diner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 1–19.

5

Parables may be regarded as forms of indirect or figurative speech of different scope. See Rüdiger Zymner, “Uneigentlich,” in Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Klaus Weimar et al., 3rd ed., 3 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007), 3:727.

6

Even though Tannaitic, Amoraic, and post-Amoraic midrashim were searched for Land-parables, the present study is not exhaustive.

7

To give but one example: the Book of Psalms contains thirty-five explicit references to the Land (which is not once called “land of Israel,” but “land of Canaan,” “their land,” “his land,” “the land,” “the land of the living,” “the pleasant land”). Furthermore, in fourteen verses the Land is indirectly referred to as a “heritage” with the same expression (nachalah) used for the people (male children and even God’s decrees). I was interested in finding out whether the verses that refer to the Land function as lemmata in Midrash Tehillim, the rabbinic midrashic compilation on the book of the Psalms, and if so, whether parables came into play in the interpretation—which proved to be the case in only two instances: Midr. Ps. 5:1 and Midr. Ps. 24:2.

8

See Goldberg, “Das schriftauslegende Gleichnis,” 134–198; Stern, Parables in Midrash, 8. In my search for “Land-parables,” I did not include parables that may deal with the Temple, Jerusalem, or the aratsot (provinces?) Judea, Transjordan, and Galilee (even though the significance of these “parts” of the Land is of importance in many of the texts I have come across during my research).

9

With the term “co-text,” I refer to the immediate linguistic environment of the parable; with “context,” the wider textual environment.

10

The distribution is as follows: ten Tannaitic Land-parables (34 percent): Mekh. R. Ishm. (1), Sifre Num. (5), Sifre Deut. (4); four Amoraic Land-parables (13 percent): Gen. Rab. (1), Lev. Rab. (2), Pesiq. Rav Kah. (1); and eighteen post-Amoraic Land-parables (53 percent): Song Rab. (1), Tanh. B. (11), Midr. Ps. (2), S. Eli. Zut. (1), Ag. Ber. (1). See the appendix for a complete list of the Land-parables corpus.

11

This includes comparing his punishment to that of the generation of the wilderness and the spies, all of whom die outside of the Land.

12

Apart from these questions, the Land-parables also address the division of the Land after the conquest (Sifre Num. 132), the fact that the Levites do not receive a portion (Sifre Num. 119), and the evil report of the spies in Num 13–15 (Tanh. B. Shelah Lekha 4; Vaetchanan 2).

13

The translation follows and slightly modifies Reuven Hammer, ed. Sifre: A Tannaitic Commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy, translated from the Hebrew with Introduction and Notes, YJS 24 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 33.

14

See the discussion of Tanh. B. Shelah Lekha 3 below for a different argument. On the patriarchs’ faithfulness to the Land, see Tanh. B. Reʾeh 8.

15

Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, Rabbi Judah ben Rabbi Simeon, and Rabbi Samuel ben Nachman.

16

MS reading: Aram. אסייא. Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, Talmud Babli, Talmud Yerushalmi and Midrashic Literature (London: Luzac, 1903), s.v. אוסיא, “(οὐσία) substance, (landed) property, farm, estate”; Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period, 2nd ed. (Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2002), s.v. אוסייה, “landed property, estate.”

17

The Historical Dictionary of the Hebrew Language (Maʾagarim) lists six occurrences of this loanword, four of them found in Genesis Rabbah.

18

Quoted with minor modifications following Harry Freedman, Midrash Rabbah: Genesis, ed. Harry Freedman and Maurice Simon, 2 vols. (London: Soncino, 1939).

19

In the wider context of the rabbinic argument on whether the patriarchs were only promised the Land or also took possession of it, such statements are in line with the notion that Joshua did not have conquer but could enter the Land without resorting to weapons.

20

Texts from Tanhuma are quoted, with minor modifications, following John T. Townsend, Midrash Tanhuma (S. Buber Recension), 3 vols. (Hoboken: Ktav, 1989–2003).

21

Arguably, the Land itself is not strictly speaking part of the lemma in view of the fact that the part of the verse in which it is mentioned is not spelt out and the parable is told to illustrate the so-called petichah verse brought in connection with the lemma (Isa 40:8).

22

In the original scriptural context of the book of Isaiah, the prophet would have used these words to refer back to the fulfilment in Joshua’s time of the promise made to Abraham, given that the words of Isa 40:8 are spoken after Moses’s death.

23

See Günter Stemberger, Moses in der rabbinischen Tradition (Freiburg: Herder, 2016), 189.

24

See Lieve M. Teugels, The Meshalim in the Mekhiltot: An Annotated Edition and Translation of the Parables in Mekhilta de Rabbi Yishmael and Mekhilta de Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, TSAJ 176 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), 373–378, for a synoptic edition of the parable in both Mekhiltot, with translation and commentary.

25

In two “parallels” in other Tannaitic documents, it is the rooms of the palace which the prince may enter, not the gates. The bedchamber is the forbidden area. See Sifre Deut. 29 and Sifre Num. 134.

26

Neither in Sifre Numbers nor in Sifre Deuteronomy does the application of the narrative give analogies for the parts of the palace.

27

We might argue, however, that it is an extended application.

28

This is in line with the findings of Dov Weiss on the development of the idea of confronting God. See Dov Weiss, Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 11.

29

Richard Sarason, “The significance of the Land of Israel in the Mishna,” in The Land of Israel: Jewish Perspectives, ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 111.

30

See Mekh. R. Ishm. Amalek 2 and Gen. Rab. 49:2 above, where the Land is referred to with the expressions פלטרין, אסייא and פטריקון.

31

Matrona is one of the types of rabbinic narrative and it appears to be based on the idea the Rabbis had of a respectable Roman matron. At times, as Tal Ilan, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity, vol. 2, Palestine 200–650, TSAJ 148 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 305–306, argues the expression also functions as a given Jewish name.

32

A Latin loanword used in the sense of food, qlarin, as here in the mashal, but also in the sense of “receptacle for food,” as in the nimshal. Jastrow, Dictionary, s.v. קילרין “(cellarium) receptable for food, pantry; provisions.” According to the Ma’agarim of the Hebrew Academy, this is, with just eight occurrences in rabbinic texts, a rare loanword; alternative spelling is קלארין.

33

Cf. m. Kel. 1:6. On this major text on the Land of Israel, see Alexander Dubrau, “Heiligkeitskonzepte von Eretz Israel in rabbinischen Texten der Spätantike,” in Heilige, Heiliges und Heiligkeit in spätantiken Religionskulturen ed. Peter Gemeinhardt, RVV 61 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 143–163.

34

See Jacobus Cornelis de Vos, Heiliges Land und Nähe Gottes: Wandlungen alttestamentlicher Landvorstellungen in frühjüdischen und neutestamentlichen Schriften, FRLANT 244 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 26.

35

And against the scriptural account earlier in Num 21, where Israel is explicitly involved in the killing of the Canaanites at Arad.

36

On the rabbinic motif of Miriam’s well as related to ancient near eastern myths in which gender and sexuality play a role, see Jan-Willem van den Bosch, “The Well of Miriam and Its Mythological Forebears,” in Religious Stories in Transformation: Conflict, Revision and Reception, ed. Alberdina Houtman, Tamar Kadari, Marcel Poorthuis, and Vered Tohar, JCP 31 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 213–233, esp. 225–228. I thank Marcel Poorthuis for drawing my attention to this essay.

37

Quoted, with minor modifications, following Lieve M. Teugels, Aggadat Bereshit: Translated from the Hebrew with an Introduction and Notes, JCP 4 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 174–175.

38

See Teugels, Aggadat Bereshit, xxix–xxx; see also Lieve Teugels, “The Background of the Anti-Christian Polemics in Aggadat Bereshit,” JSJ 30 (1999): 178–208.

39

In one Land-parable, the real historical geography of the Land is addressed: “The people took to complaining bitterly before the Lord (Num 11:1). The matter may be compared to the case of people who said to the king, We shall see whether you will come with us to the ruler of Acre. By the time they got to Acre, he had gone to Tyre. When they got to Tyre, he had gone to Sidon. When they got to Sidon, he had gone to Biri. When they got to Biri, he had gone to Antioch. When they got to Antioch, the people began to complain against the king, for they had wandered on the way, and the king had to complain against them, that on their account he too had wandered on the way. So the Presence of God went on a single day a distance of thirty-six mils so that the Israelites should enter the land. The Israelites began to complain before the Omnipresent that they had wandered on the way. But the Omnipresent has to complain against them that on their account the Presence of God had gone thirty-six mils on a single day so that Israel should enter the land.” (Sifre Num. 84)

40

The one exception is the parable of Aggadat Bereshit.

41

For the notion of a “loyal opposition,” see Gafni, Land, Center and Diaspora, 96–117.

42

In other parables of the corpus, the Land is a bedchamber, a field, a bride’s marital home, and even a dunghill.

43

See, for example, Tanh. B. Reʾeh 3. In Tanh. B. Shelah Lekha 4, a vineyard is mentioned in a Land-parable to connote Israel among whom God distinguishes those who may be brought in relation with him (“Gather for me seventy of the elders of Israel” [Num 11:16]) from those who should not (the spies, alluded to in: “Send you men yourself” [Num 13:2]). On the motif of the vineyard in Mark 12:1–12, Isa 5:1–5, and rabbinic texts, see the rich survey by Gregory R. Lanier, “Mapping the Vineyard: Main Lines of Investigation Regarding the Parable of the Tenants in the Synoptic and Thomas,” CurBR 15 (2016): 74–122.

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The Power of Parables

Essays on the Comparative Study of Jewish and Christian Parables

Series:  Jewish and Christian Perspectives Series, Volume: 39

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