Parshah Commentary
Parshat Eikev, like the Book of Devarim as a whole, repeatedly articulates a vision of the Israelites settling the land of Canaan through force. At the beginning of our parshah, we are told: “You will eat up all the peoples which the Lord your God will deliver to you,” and in its conclusion, we are promised: “Every place where the sole of your foot treads will be yours.” This focus on the exclusivity of the Jewish claim to the land—and the sanctioning of the violent dispossession of the local population—bitterly calls to mind central strands of Zionist thought, from Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall to an insistence by many contemporary Religious Zionist thinkers that settling the land of Israel is the Torah’s central commandment.
And yet, in the 12th century, when Maimonides wrote a comprehensive list of every commandment in the Torah, he omitted conquest and settlement of the land. One reason for this is an ambiguous point in Hebrew grammar, in which the imperfect future tense can accommodate instruction (“you must”), prediction (“you will”), permission (“you may”), and even warning (“you may well”). Thus, a verse that is commonly translated as “you will inherit the land” could indeed be an eternal imperative, but it could also be a contingent, circumstantial description that applies only in a limited context.
Beneath this grammatical issue lies a fundamental theological question about when terrible bloodshed is morally permissible. The Sifrei is clear that it requires God’s active authorization, going so far as to frame violent dispossession solely in terms of divine agency: “God shall dispossess; flesh and blood shall not dispossess,” the text states. At another point, the Sifrei notes: “You do what is yours to do [cleave to God]; God will do what is God’s to do [conquest].” But even this doesn’t necessarily clarify matters. The medieval commentator Nachmanides (whose list of commandments does include settlement of the land) makes the general point that Devarim moves freely, without signposting, between the simple future tense, describing what will come to be, and the subjunctive mood that indicates words of caution. Thus, when Moses states that the conquest will proceed gradually to avoid a profusion of wild beasts, Nachmanides suggests that the language of the text is at once a promise of safety and a warning that Israel may sin and lose divine protection.
Perhaps because statements about conquering the land are ambiguous within the Torah itself, the Israelites are prone to misinterpreting the extent of divine support for these endeavors. In the Book of Bamidbar, for example, when God postpones the conquest of the land of Israel until the next generation due to the Israelites’ reservations, the people belatedly try to fulfill what they understood as a command by storming the hill country. But without God’s backing, they are soundly rebuffed. God’s support is elusive even once the invasion is in full swing in the Book of Joshua. After one member of the tribe of Judah secretly steals sacred property, the people lose a bloody skirmish. Only once expiation has been made can they continue their campaign. So perhaps it is no surprise that Joshua’s conquest is partial, and despite the stern warnings of Devarim about the importance of conquering the land, the Israelites settle down with Canaanite peoples in their midst. The second half of the Book of Joshua is sprinkled with such concessions: “The people of Israel did not dispossess the Gashurite or the Maacite. Gashur and Maacat live among Israel until this day.”
While thirst for total conquest animates the Torah’s designs for Canaan, it seems that the text’s fundamental logic—rooted in the Israelites’ chosenness—fatally undermines that goal. The election of this people as the vehicle for God’s purpose in the world, regardless of their capability or virtue, is essentially paradoxical: Despite the alignment between God’s and the Israelites’ goals, the people’s sinfulness makes it impossible for the divine directive, in all its horror, to be achieved. The totalizing impulse ascribed to God is saved from its monstrous expression only by the feebleness of the chosen mortal agents. But if God elected a people who could only ever fall short, perhaps the Torah’s lesson, lost on advocates of Zionist conquest, is ultimately that no people is perfect enough to commit slaughter with divine support. So what fate awaits a people that confidently claims such sanction, and seeks to accomplish by its own power what God’s involvement never could?
Avi Garelick is a researcher and organizer based in Washington Heights, New York.
