Parshah Commentary
What does one say about Jews committing genocide? The Book of Devarim mandates that “you shall not let a soul remain alive” among “the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites.” This week’s parshah, Re’eh, includes a cultural corollary to this campaign of extermination: The Israelites are instructed to “tear down their altars, smash their pillars, put their sacred posts to the fire, and cut down the images of their gods, obliterating their name from that site.” What are we to make of these texts now, after Israel has flattened nearly every cultural site in Gaza, while bombing and starving its people for nearly two years, often invoking Devarim’s words as encouragement and justification?
One might start by observing that, by the Bible’s own account, Devarim’s grand vision was never realized. (I bracket here the question of that story’s historicity—about that I don’t have the foggiest idea, though having been to graduate school, I’m pretty sure no one else does either.) Those Jebusites, for instance? According to the Books of Joshua and Judges, the Israelites either could not or simply did not dispossess them; in both accounts, they continued to dwell in Jerusalem “until this very day.” Even after David conquers the city in 2 Samuel, he is so far from displacing—let alone liquidating—its inhabitants that he later buys a threshing-floor from Araunah, a Jebusite man still described as a “king.” As my colleague and friend Rachel Havrelock argues, in such narratives, Israelites and Jebusites permanently, if uneasily, cohabitate—much as Devarim’s eliminationism awkwardly coexists with more realistic, moderate scriptural voices.
In the Bible, such rival traditions are often unreconciled. Like relatives at a Thanksgiving dinner who have agreed to disagree about “settler colonialism,” they just sit grumpily next to each other. Rabbinic midrash, however, often forces them into explosive dialogue. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, for instance, teaches that Abraham swore an oath to the Jebusites not to take over Jerusalem without their permission. When, several hundred years later, the Israelites arrive from Egypt, the Jebusites erect copper statues in the streets of their city, on which is written Abraham’s oath—and which, whether by magic or moral suasion, prevent the Israelites from conquering the city. Only when David has one of his soldiers remove these statues can he capture Jerusalem.
Behind this odd legend lies a second corpus of texts with which the genocidal Deuteronomist is disagreeing. For the midrash imagines Abraham’s oath by synthesizing several biblical antecedents. It first conflates the Jebusites with the Hittites, from whom, back in Breishit, Abraham bought a burial cave for Sarah, emphasizing his status as a “resident alien” in the land, and exemplifying, as my co-panelist at the wonderful Halachic Left forum David Seidenberg argues, how the patriarchs lived peaceably in Canaan, without attempting to dispossess their neighbors. (The midrash is surely motivated by the fact that, in 2 Samuel, David’s acquisition of Araunah’s threshing-floor conspicuously echoes Abraham’s purchase of the cave—as if to underscore that even the Israelite king is still just one more guest in the land.) The midrash also stirs in Abraham’s non-aggression pact with the Philistine king Avimelekh, from which it derives the idea of an oath to dwell peaceably with non-Israelite neighbors. Against the Deuteronomic narrative of conquest, the midrash pits Breishit’s radically different version.
Through the image of the statues inscribed with Abraham’s oath, the midrash sharpens the conflict between Devarim and Breishit into outright warfare. When Re’eh enjoins the Israelites to expunge Canaanite culture, “obliterating their name” from the land, paradoxically, that includes erasing the memory of our forefather Abraham. To be sure, it would be silly to pretend that Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich—as we say, yimach sh’mam, may their names be erased—can adduce no prooftexts for their barbarities. Yet in attempting to annihilate the Palestinians, the ethnonationalists in Israel have nonetheless also trampled over our sacred stories of peaceable coexistence. So too, they have spitefully trashed the Jews’ multi-millennial tradition of stateless survival, what George Steiner called “the torment and the mystery of resilience in Judaism,” which “exemplify, enact, an arduous truth: that human beings must learn to be each other’s guests on this small planet.” The choice to negate our irenic inheritance is, of course, the fascists’ repellent prerogative—but as for me, I hold by the oath of Abraham.
Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents.
