partly-formed thoughts on a difficult torah passage

[cellio]

This week's torah study largely revolved around one verse from Va'etchanan, Deut 7:2: "When God your Lord places [the seven nations in the land] at your disposal and you defeat them, you must utterly destroy them, not making any treaty with them or giving them any consideration." (Translation from ORT.)

(There are, of course, other places where this subject comes up too; the book of D'varim is largely repetition. This is where our study group is now.)

This directive makes many people (myself included) uncomfortable. How can God command us to utterly destroy people, when elsewhere in torah we're given strong ethical directives about how we treat others, including non-Jews? This doesn't sound like treating your fellow as yourself or dealing kindly with the strangers in your midst. As with many things in torah, I think it depends on how you read it.

The thing I noticed immediately, when someone brought up the ethical laws, is that those laws talk about treating individuals but, perhaps, the current verse talks about treating peoples. The torah goes on to forbid intermarriage with these peoples, specifically because those nations will lure the Israelites into idolatry. It's not an idle fear, as the story of Pinchas illustrates.

I'm not comfortable reading "utterly destroy" literally. My instinct is to try to narrow the context to "in the land of Israel" -- that is, it might be fine with God if the Hittites et al go do their thing somewhere else, but the Israelites have to destroy their influence within Israel. It's tied to the conquest of the land, after all, so maybe "utterly destroy" means "destroy them as an organized presence in this land". The previous verse (which I didn't quote) says that God will drive these seven nations out; maybe we can read the present verse as closer to "and keep it that way". Israel is not being commanded to go out into the world, seek out every last Hittite, and kill him. That status seems to be reserved for Amalek.

My Hebrew probably isn't good enough for this analysis, but here I go. The phrase translated as "utterly destroy" is "hachareim tacharim", which repeats the same root in two different forms. (It's a chet, not a chaf; I really need to learn the right way to distinguish them in ASCII transliteration.) Repetition sometimes means emphasis; if that's what's going on here and if we take "destroy" at face value, then you could informally translate the phrase as "really, I mean it, destroy them", which to this English speaker is not quite the same as "utterly destroy them". (Granted, English is not the original language and all translations are imperfect.) By contrast, when God commands Israel to "obliterate" the memory of Amalek (Deut 25:19), which is quite definitely a call to more direct action, the verb used is "timcheh" (not the same root as the present case).

The difference in word choice piqued my curiosity, so off to BDB (the lexicon of choice for this, I'm told) I went. Chet-reish-mem (which you might recognize as "cherem", excommunication) seems to be closer to "prohibit", while mem-chet-hei is closer to "strike". So perhaps my instinct was right, that the text is telling us to take different kinds of actions in the two cases (seven nations versus Amalek). Ch-R-M doesn't imply a lack of violence, but the degrees might be different.

When encountering difficult passages, some Jews (especially liberal ones) fall back on the view that this was a text written for an earlier people and it needs to speak in their cultural context (and, hand-wave, this speaks to them and not to us). If you're going to take that approach, though, then why seriously study any of it? At best you can pick and choose the parts that still give warm fuzzy feelings millennia later. Whether you think the torah was written by God (for all time) or men, if you think it's important at all then I think you need to wrestle with all of it, not just the appealing parts. This is one of the reasons I'm so pleased with the (slow) speed of our torah-study group; we're not doing the weekly parsha but rather just a few verses at a time, in sequence. If you try to do several chapters in an hour, of necessity you're going to skip parts entirely.

I don't claim to be good at this wrestling; I could be (and often am) off base in how I read the text. This is why I ask questions and raise challenges in torah study and classes, make posts like this, and engage my fellow congregants in discussions when they seem willing. I hope to learn from the process, both in articulating what I think I understand and in hearing others' views. How else can I tease out a better understanding?

Comments

[geekosaur]

1. There doesn't seem to be a "right" way to distinguish kaf and chet in transliteration. I've seen 3 transliteration styles in use, only one of which manages it but has its own problem:
   1. "ch" vs. "h", which causes chet to conflict with he (so then they stop transliterating he, but that again can lead to ambiguities — I've seen some confusion over whether "aharon" means "Aharon" or "acharon")
   2. "kh" vs. "ch", which causes problems because kaf-heh sometimes occurs;
   3. "ch" vs. "ḥ", which works but requires a font which both has "ḥ" and makes it readable.
2. I seem to recall that at one point only six nations are mentioned, and Chaza"l claim that's because the seventh packed up and moved to Africa and therefore was no longer subject to the commandment of destruction.

[cellio]

Thanks. If I want ambiguity I'll just stick with a universal "ch"; I don't see how "h" makes things better (as you noted). I'd been thinking along the ch/kh lines since I can't always presume that the h-with-dot approach will work. I'm assuming that in that approach "ch" would be chet and "kh" would be chaf (er, khaf)?

According to Plaut (I didn't chase it further) this is the only place where all seven nations are mentioned together, so I would expect Chazal to have things to say about that (and the other cases). Thanks for the information about that interpretation.

[geekosaur]

Yes, in all those examples כ precedes ח.

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

Hebrew has a relatively wide variety of H-like phonemes. Chet is an unvoiced uvular trill, which is symbolized in the International Phonetic Alphabet by a lower-case Greek chi. Chaf is an unvoiced pharyngeal fricative; in IPA that's a lower-case h with a crossbar through the descender. So you might use an X and a (modified) h.

In Kirshenbaum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirshenbaum), an ASCII realization of IPA, they are r" and H respectively. But you'd probably have to specify that you're using Kirshenbaum.

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

I meant a crossbar through the ascender.

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

I don't have a Hebrew text in front of me, but my RSV uses the same translation in Deut. 4:26 in the warning to Israel of the penalty for acting corruptly / making graven images / doing what is evil in God's sight: "...you will soon utterly perish from the land which you are going over to the Jordan to possess; you will not live long upon it, but will be utterly destroyed." This is followed by an explanation of being scattered among the peoples, until they return to God's ways.

This tends to support the idea that the seven nations are to be driven out of the territory and their corrupting influence is to be eliminated therein. (As opposed to them being wiped off the face of the earth.) However, as I said, I don't have a Hebrew text at hand to compare the *Hebrew* terms being used in 4:26 and 7:2.

[cellio]

That passage uses yet another word -- shin-mem-dalet, which I don't know and haven't yet looked up.

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

Thanks. It was worth a try...

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

My recollection is that tradition holds that the tribes inhabbiting the land were given the choice between flight and destruction. This explains why in some places why one people (I believe the Yevusee, but really must check) is not listed. They fled.

Amalek is the only nation we are too destroy utterly. The seven nations are described as engaged in abominable practices so that the land "vomits them out." We were also commanded not to make treaties with them, as they would remain a constant moral hazzard.

Your reading is supported by the shoresh in Hebrew. Chet-Reish-mem. It more literally means "ostracize." For example, to place someone under a religious ban is to place them in "charem" (same root). Further evidence cmes from the "ta'ameh hamikrah" (the "trup"). The use of teh etnachta creates a break from "v'hikitam" and "hacharem".

I would therefore render v.2 as "and the Lord your God shall give them before you and you shall strike them; you shall utterly ostracize them and drive them out from your midst, showing no mercy nor making treaty with them."


This also fits better with following verses enjoining no marriage to them (often a form of subjegation in biblical times, to slay the men and take the women, thus absorbing the conquered nation into one's midst) or permit the marriage of their children with ours. CF. Shchem and Chamor to the people of Shchem.

[cellio]

Thanks for your comments. I completely failed to even look at the trope; I've got to develop that habit. The trope isn't mi-Sinai (unless I misunderstand the traditional view), but it's still significant, like any of our other commentaries.

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

Disclaimer: this is influenced by modern Hebrew (and probably Talmudic and/or others between Biblical and now):

To me, macheh = erase (i.e. completely destroy), charem = get rid of permanently (but can put elsewhere rather than destroying), and shamad = destroy but not necessarily completely (there can be ruins left, unlike with macheh).

[cellio]

Thanks -- that helps!

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

Well, I suppose this isn't an original notion, nor do I necessarily endorse it myself, but I imagine one could argue that "Thou shalt not kill" is to be understood with an implicit "unless I tell you to". I mean, look, you have to acknowledge the many other times that the Deut. 7:2 issue comes up. So it isn't "kill", it's "murder". We don't kill people on our own say-so, but if G-d tells us to, then it's our duty, and if he wants to use us as tools in "utterly destroying" a nation, then we're bound to hop to.

No, you're right, it makes me queasy, too, but just maybe that's what's actually meant here.

On another note: use a kh for chet and ch for chaf.

[cellio]

As you note, it doesn't say "don't kill" but "don't murder" -- HRG and RTzCh are different roots. Whether conquest is murder is, of course, a valid and complicated question; it appears that the torah does not consider it so.

Does God violate God's laws, or does God write the laws in such a way that the apparent violations are outside the scope of the laws? Good question. I look for interpretations that don't include the "except when I say otherwise" factor. "Look for" doesn't always lead to "find", but I do what I can.

Transliteration: thanks.