Introduction
The episode of the wood-gatherer (
) in Num 15:32–36 is concisely narrated. The Israelites, in the wilderness, catch a man gathering wood on the Sabbath. They convey him to Moses and the congregation, evidently for judgment, but they cannot determine what his fate should be. A watch is therefore set over him until the matter can be clarified. Then God, presumably in response to an inquiry by Moses, informs him that the prisoner is to be stoned. The congregation forthwith executes the judgment. The story is sharply demarcated, on the one side by the law concerning unintentional and intentional sins (15:22–31)and on the other by the law of tassels (15:37–41). The present essay offers an interpretation of this story that situates it meaningfully in its current literary context and in the historical milieu in which it was redacted. I shall argue that the episode of the wood-gatherer addresses the force of covenantal law in the aftermath of national catastrophe.
The wood-gatherer's case is one of four stories in the Pentateuch whose commonalities were perceived already in antiquity.Footnote 1 The other three are the cases of the blasphemer (Lev 24:10–23), the second Passover (Num 9:1–14), and the daughters of Zelophehad (Num 27:1–11). In each episode, an event gives rise to a legal question of first instance, to which God responds. There is, however, an important difference between the story of the wood-gatherer and the other stories. In the other three cases, God not only tells the Israelites what to do in the given situation, but also converts his decision into legislation of general applicability, on blasphemy and other aggressive offenses (Lev 24:15–22), on the Second Passover (Num 9:9–14), and on inheritance (Num 27:8–11).Footnote 2 Indeed, these narratives seem fashioned for the specific aim of grounding the laws into which they lead.Footnote 3 The story of the wood-gatherer, however, issues in no general legislation. One is therefore left to wonder about the “point” of the story. The absence of new legislation seems, in fact, to undermine the basic narrative logic: If God has nothing new to legislate, the legal corpus already available to the Israelites should be sufficient to resolve the case, rendering oracular consultation unnecessary. Indeed, Moses could easily have concluded from prior laws that gathering material outside the camp constitutes forbidden Sabbath labor(Exod16:27–29)and that violation of the labor prohibition merits death (Exod 31:14; 35:2).Footnote 4
To this fundamental problem we may add two others. First, the story begins by informing us that the Israelites were in the wilderness (
“and the Israelites were in the wilderness”). This information seems altogether superfluous, as the entire narrative of the Pentateuch, from Exodus 15 onward, occurs in the wilderness, and, while the Israelites approach close enough to Canaan by Numbers 13 to warrant the dispatch of advance scouts, Num 14:25 clearly indicates that they afterward retreat into the wilderness.Footnote 5 Second, there is the problem of the story's position in the larger narrative.Footnote 6 Strong expectations of coherence are not always suitable for the heavily redacted book of Numbers, to which at least three distinct sources(JE,PandH)made important contributions. The wood-gatherer story, however, seems particularly out of place, as it is immediately followed by the law of tassels (Num 15:37–41), which evokes the narrative of the spies in Numbers 13–14.According to Num 15:39, the Israelites are supposed to see (
)the tassels, and, thereby recall God's commandments. They will thus avoid “scouting out” (
) or “straying” (
) adulterously after [with] their eyes (
). The tassels thus serve as an antidote to the sin of the spies, who, having scoutedouttheland(
),and having seen (
) tall men compared to whom they seemed, in their own eyes (
) as grasshoppers, discouraged the Israelites, who strayed (
) from God and were punished (Num 13:32–33; 14:33).Footnote 7 We may wonder what if any function the story of the wood-gatherer serves sandwiched between the story of the spies and the legislation that constitutes its antidote.
Literary Analysis
To a certain extent, these last two questions answer each other. The spies story is not merely one of many episodes that happen to take place in the wilderness. Rather, it assigns a new meaning to the wilderness period as a stage in Israelite history. Were it not for the Israelites' revolt in the aftermath of the spies incident, the wilderness would have been a waystation in the journey from Egypt to Canaan, as well as a siteof divine revelation. With thecrisis occasioned by thespies'mission, however, the wilderness acquires a darker valence, as a vehicle of punishment and death.Footnote 8 The Israelites, reluctant to confront the nations of Canaan, express the wish to die 
“in this wilderness” (14:2), and God, granting them this wish, decrees that they will indeed perish 
“in this wilderness” (14:29, 32, 35). In this light, the notice that the story of the wood-gatherer occurs when the Israelites are 
“in this wilderness” seems pregnant with meaning.Footnote 9
The Israelites respond to God's decree in a variety of ways. First they mourn it (14:39). Then they ignore it, and march, with unhappy results, on Canaan (14:40–44). I suggest that the story of the wood-gatherer should be understood as another response to the generation's punishment, one that, in the aftermath of the failed attempt to defy God's decree, emerges from the recognition that the Israelites of this generation are indeed “in the wilderness” and will not see the promised land.Footnote 10 This raises the question as to whether the wilderness generation now stands outside the covenant altogether. The wood-gatherer violates the law because he believes that the law no longer applies. Gathering wood on the Sabbath enacts the abrogation of the Sinai covenant especially vividly insofar as it suggests a reversion to the state of slavery in Egypt. Just as the Israelites in Egypt gathered straw to make bricks(Exod 5:7: 
“and let them gather straw”; 5:12: 
“to gather stubble for straw”), so now the wood-gatherer gathers (
) sticks, and he does so on the Sabbath, as though to confirm his status as slave to Pharaoh by denying himself the rest that he would be due as slave to God. With his forward movement toward Canaan stymied, the wood-gatherer symbolically turns backward to Egypt, just as the people advocated upon hearing the spies' report: 
“Let us appoint a leader and return to Egypt” (Num 14:4).
Moses and his compeers do not know what to do. Their doubt concerns not the content of the law, but its applicability: Does the law, which would mandate death for labor on the Sabbath, remain in force, and enforceable, or has the wood-gatherer correctly understood the implications of God's decree upon the wilderness generation? Does the total occlusion of Canaan indeed signal the end of Israel's obligations toward God?Footnote 11 In my analysis of the story, although the wood-gatherer acts alone, he gives expression, through his action, to the doubt of the entire people. Their uncertainty about the wood-gatherer's fate is equally uncertainty about their own circumstances. The Sabbath law, under which the wood-gatherer must die, is well known; the people wonder, rather, whether the wood-gatherer is correct in supposing that the law no longer carries force.Footnote 12
The extent to which the entire people are implicated in the wood-gatherer's act is clarified by a comparison with the case of the blasphemer, the wood-gatherer's closest analogue.Footnote 13 In Num 15:32, the wood-gatherer is introduced through the people's eyes. The reader does not hear first of the crime and then of its discovery, but only of its discovery: “And the children of Israel were in the wilderness, and they found a man gathering wood on the day of the Sabbath.” Indeed, this verse gives the impression that all Israel discovers the wood-gatherer. And if Num 15:33, in specifying “those who found him,” corrects this impression, its effect lingers, particularly since the same verse introduces the public again, this time in a judicial role:“And those who found him gathering wood brought him to Moses and to Aaron and to the entire congregation.” The doubt about his fate (Num 15:34: “for it had not been specified what should be done to him”) infects them all. In the case of the blasphemer, by contrast, the narrator reports the crime in his own voice: “And the son of an Israelite woman, who was the son of an Egyptian, went out” (Lev 24:10). According to Lev 24:11, he is brought not before the entire congregation, but before Moses alone. In the blasphemer story, moreover, the legal uncertainty is only implicit—it must be inferred from the stated aim of consulting with God (Lev 24:12: “And they placed him under watch, to obtain clarification for themselves by the mouth of the Lord”)—whereas in the wood-gatherer story, the people's doubt is made explicit (Num 15:34). While the blasphemer, an outsider by birth, becomes doubly an outsider by virtue of his crime, the wood-gatherer, in breaking the law, crystallizes the uncertainty of the congregation as a whole.
The wood-gatherer's representative role is confirmed by the episode's relationship to the material that immediately precedes it. In Num 15:22–31, God indicates the proper legal response (sacrifice or punishment) to unintentional and intentionalsin.Three scenarios are presented:unintentional communal sin (22–26), unintentional individual sin (27–29), and intentional individual sin (30–31). The fourth permutation, intentional communal sin, is strikingly absent. This omission is logical: there can be no law for a situation of intentional communal sin; force, not law, governs here. Law cannot contemplate radical disobedience. It can articulate it only, as in this pericope, by framing its absence, by detailing all situations short of it. At the same time, however, the presence of the other three permutations encourages us to understand the text that immediately follows them, the story of the wood-gatherer, as an instantiation of the fourth permutation, so as to fill out a structure of sin that is at once directly parallel (with respect to intent) and chiastically parallel (with respect to participation):
By filling the gap created by the laws that precede it, the story of the wood-gatherer becomes a portrayal of communal sin. Thus, structural analysis buttresses the hypothesized identification of the wood-gatherer and the people: if he sins alone, all Israel nevertheless become his accomplice, for they seriously entertain his view that the law no longer applies. Indeed, the wood-gatherer story, from this perspective, is a doublet of the spies story, which likewise depicts intentional sin at the communal level, and, this time coming before rather than after the law of Num 15:22–31, also provides the fourth permutation in direct and chiastic parallelism:
The missing permutation framed by the body of law in Num 15:22–31 is thus supplied, on either side, by narrative. Narrative here articulates directly what law can only silently gesture at: radical disobedience.Footnote 14
The “point” of the wood-gatherer story is that radical disobedience does not legitimate radical disobedience: though the Israelites are now, as a consequence of their revolt, “in the wilderness,” the law remains in force. God's decision does not generate new legislation, nor indeed, is it properly a legal decision at all. It is rather an act of force, a sovereign act. The wood-gatherer deigns to declare a state of exception, to suspend the law. God refuses to acknowledge his authority to do so. I am not denying that God decides a matter of law in Numbers 15; it is clear that he declares the wood-gatherer's act illegal, and punishable by stoning. My claim is rather that God's decision is meant to serve, performatively, as an assertion of sovereignty: God demands continued recognition of his legal authority not in so many words, but by acting as a legal authority in the concrete case before him.Footnote 15
The combined action of God and the people ultimately breaks the parallel between the story of the spies and that of the wood-gatherer. God, by commanding the wood-gatherer's death, and the people, by executing this command, transform the latter incident from a narrative of communal revolt, with which law can have nothing to do, to an ordinary legal narrative, a moment of individual transgression. The wood-gatherer episode,unlike the other three stories that it otherwise resembles, concerns not the origin of a particular law, but the perpetuation of law itself.
Historical Analysis
Walter Brueggemann eloquently defends the view that biblical texts are best appreciated through a practice of “double reading” that takes account of both the internal narrative world created by the Bible and the historical contexts in which this narrative world was produced and reproduced.Footnote 16 The purpose of this section is to situate the story of the wood-gatherer and the literary unit in which it occurs within the redaction history of the Pentateuch. I will first establish, through source analysis, that the spies story in Numbers 13–14 was likely reworked in the exilic period, and that the wood-gatherer story was introduced into Numbers 15 at roughly the same time. I will then show how this historical context makes sense of the concerns that I have claimed the latter story articulates.
The current and well-established consensus is that the story of the spies in Numbers 13–14 is a composite of an early pre-priestly base (probably J or JE) and later priestly material.Footnote 17 The existence of multiple layers is established by such patent internal inconsistencies as whether, among the spies, Caleb alone (as per 14:24) or both Caleb and Joshua (as per 14:30), are spared God's wrath. Of greatest interest here are the two accounts of God's decree, in 14:21–25 and 14:26–35. The second account bears such linguistic markers of the Holiness school (H) as direct address by God to Israel. This does not by itself allow us to designate 14:26–35 as postexilic; on both ideological and linguistic grounds, many of the texts associated with H must be judged to have been composed well before the Babylonian exile.Footnote 18
There is, however, a later, exilic stratum of H associated with the editing of the Pentateuch, and there are two strong reasons to assign 14:26–35 to it. First, the fact thatHherereworksanon-priestly(JE)textsuggeststhatwearewitnessin14:26–35 to the later, editorial activity of H.Footnote 19 Second, there are many linguistic parallels to Ezekiel. Thus, for example, the occurrences of 
(14:30) and 
(14:35) are unique in the Pentateuch, but the first phrase is frequently attested in Ezekiel, and the second occurs nowhere in the Bible except in Ezekiel, where it serves as a common refrain.Footnote 20
What is distinctive about H's account of God's decree—what distinguishes it from the parallel accounts in Num 14:21–25, Num 32:11–12, and Deut 1:35–37—is the centrality of the wilderness. In the other accounts, there is no special emphasis on the wilderness; what is important is simply that the sinning generation will not reach Canaan. In H's account, by contrast, the wilderness serves as a basic structuring device. God lays out the Israelites' fate in chiastic fashion:
(a) God will do (
) to the current generation as they spoke (, to kill them “in this wilderness” (). (14:28–30)(b) The children of this generation will reach Canaan. (14:31)
(c) This generation's corpses will fall “in this wilderness” (
). (14:32)(b) The children of this generation will wander for forty years in the wilderness. (14:33–34)
(a) God has spoken (
) and will act (), to kill this generation “in this wilderness” (). (14:35)
) to the current generation as they spoke (
, to kill them “in this wilderness” (
). (14:28–30)
). (14:32)
) and will act (
), to kill this generation “in this wilderness” (
). (14:35)
The phrase 
connects the opening and closing clauses and links them both to the center of the structure.
This emphasis on the wilderness suggests that the decree arising from the spies incident wasreconceived,in the light of the Babylonian exile,as a model for Israel's exilic condition. The late dating for the reworking of Num 14:26–35 is therefore buttressed by the explicit attestation of this phenomenon in other exilic texts, first and foremost Psalm 106. After the people, having heard the spies'report, reject the land of Canaan, God responds thus: 
“and he raised his hand (i.e., swore) concerning them, to fell them in the wilderness, and to fell their seed among the nations, and to disperse them among the lands” (Ps 106:26–27). Here, the children of the wilderness generation, condemned to wander in the wilderness for forty years, become a typological forerunner of Israel, dispersed among the nations in the Babylonian period.
The verses from Psalm 106 almost precisely echo Ezek 20:23: 
“I too raised my hand (i.e.,swore) concerning them in the wilderness, to scatter them among the nations, and to disperse them among the lands” (20:23).Footnote 21 According to Ezekiel, however, the decree comes not in response to any sin of the generation that left Egypt, but in response to the sins of the next generation. Ezekiel does not indicate what this sin was, and, as elsewhere in Ezekiel 20, it is difficult to correlate the prophet's recapitulation of early Israelite history with the account provided in the Pentateuch.Footnote 22 In any case, in this verse he clearly links the wilderness period with the future exile. This link is reinforced later in the chapter by the indication that God will gather Israel from the nations to which he had exiled them and judge them 
“in the wilderness of the nations” as he judged their fathers 
“in the wilderness of Egypt” (Ezek 20:35–36). Ezekiel seems elsewhere to construct the exile on the model of the spies incident specifically: according to Ezek 4:6, the period of sin for the “house of Judah” is forty years, which are symbolized by the forty days during which Ezekiel reclines on his right side, 
“a day for a year, a day for a year.” Both the phrase and the time period echo the punishment of the generation of the spies (Num 14:34).
Like Numbers 13–14 in its final version, Numbers 15 too is a product of H.Footnote 23 The direct address from God to Israel in the laws of 15:1–21, and the equivalence of native and stranger therein, establish their provenance in H. The law concerning sacrificial remedies for unintentional and intentional sins in 15:22–31 is a reworking by H of an earlier version of this law, attributable to P, in Leviticus 4.Footnote 24 The last two sections of the chapter, the wood-gatherer episode and the law of fringes, may likewise be traced, on linguistic grounds, to H.Footnote 25
The sacrificial law of 15:22–31 likely belongs, with its peculiar narratological properties, to a particularly late stratum of H.Footnote 26 Likewise, the wood-gatherer story, by virtue of its concern with the Sabbath and its reworking of other H material, may be deemed relatively late.Footnote 27 The explicit indication of the story's wilderness setting thus suggests, in light of the above analysis of Num 14:26–35, that it was composed, or at least acquired its current canonical form and setting, in the exilic period. We may suppose that the author of the wood-gatherer story used the wilderness tradition and the oracular model to pursue a set of questions that must have pressed upon the exilic community: What is the relationship of the people to God's law in exile? Does the law continue to command obedience, or should Israel's destruction and dispersal rather find expression in neglect of the law? If the former, does it fall to the individual to observe the law, or can the community continue to enforce the law against unwilling individuals?
Other biblical texts suggest that exile obviates the law, or at least, that systematic violation of the law is the exilic norm.Footnote 28 Deut 4:28 promises that Israel in exile “will worship gods there, the work of human hands,”and Jer 16:13 likewise indicates that the exiles “will worship other gods there.” It is difficult to know, in these two cases, whether the worship of foreign gods in exileis supposed to compound Israel's guilt, or whether foreign worship rather ceases to be sinful in exile (though it serves as a marker of Israel's shame and thus as a component of its punishment). The latter possibility enjoys considerable support in the case of Ezekiel 20. Here, Israel in exile is ascribed the desire to be “like the nations . . . to worship wood and stone” (20:32). God denies them this wish: “I will bring you out from the peoples and I will gather you from the lands in which you are scattered with a strong hand and an outstretched arm and outpoured fury . . . and I will bring you into the bond of the covenant” (20:34–37). The implication is that, until God so acts, i.e., insofar as they remain among the lands in which they are scattered, Israel stands outside the covenant and may worship idols as it wishes.Footnote 29 Ezekiel 20:39–40 buttresses this interpretation:
As for you, O house of Israel, thus said Lord YHWH: Each of you go worship his idols, and afterward, if you do not listen to me. . . . And you shall not desecrate my holy name any more with your gifts and your idols. For in my holy mountain, in the high mountain of Israel, declares Lord YHWH, there shall all the house of Israel worship me, all of them, in the land; there I will accept them, and there I will require your contributions and your choice offerings, with all your holy things.Footnote 30
>Idolatry is licensed in the present exile; worship of God is deferred to “afterward,” to when Israel is once again “there,” in the land.Footnote 31 The status of covenantal law in exile is also problematized by the “new covenant” rhetoric of the exilic period, insofar as the notion of a new covenant seems to imply the negation, presumably at the moment of God's chastisements, of the prior covenant and its attendant obligations.Footnote 32
Some scholars have suggested that parts of Leviticus 26, the concluding section of H, argue against this stance, and insist that the covenant survives the exile.Footnote 33 The same view emerges, on the analysis I am advancing, in another product of H, the wood-gatherer narrative. Here, the persistence of the law in exile is articulated through the vehicle of the Sabbath law.Footnote 34 Because the Sabbath is violated through labor, the crime works synchronically—as I have argued above—to figure a symbolic return to Egypt, the mythological locus of labor, and thus to mark the ironic fulfillment of the people's desire. This symbolic action would have been particularly visible within the ideological framework of H, which emphasizes, first, the Israelites' transformation, through the Exodus, from slaves of Pharaoh to slaves of God; second, the Sabbath as a sign of God's selection of Israel; and third, the prohibition of labor on the Sabbath.Footnote 35 Violation of the Sabbath could also have represented, at the diachronic level, the destruction of the Temple, insofar as H understood the Sabbath and the Temple, respectively, as chronological and spatial markers of the relationship between Israel and God.Footnote 36 By insisting that the Sabbath-breaker be punished, God asserts the continuity of this relationship. True, he has condemned the people to remain outside the land; but to be condemned to the wilderness does not mean to return to Egypt, and the legal bond between the people and God, once formed, will not now dissolve.
Conclusion
I have suggested that the story of the wood-gathererin Numbers 15 is not,ultimately, about a detail of the Sabbath law, but about the persistence of covenantal law even among a people condemned to wander outside the promised land. Ironically, the wood-gatherer's death conveys a message of survival. It signals the continuity of God's relationship with the wilderness generation, and thus also with Israel in the Babylonian exile. The three problems set forth in the introduction achieve, on this interpretation, a unified solution. The wood-gatherer episode occurs in Numbers 15 because it constitutes a reaction to the catastrophic events of Numbers 13–14. The text foregrounds the wilderness setting (15:32) because it is the wilderness decree of Numbers 14 that instigates the crime. Finally, no new law emerges from the incident because the logic of the incident requires that the wood-gatherer violate an already known law. It is impossible to say whether the above exegesis correctly divines the intent of the story's redactors, but the evident textual problems to which my account responds could, in any case, have led its earliest, exilic readers toward an interpretive solution along the lines that I have proposed.
), Meqerei Talmud 2: Talmudic Studies Dedicated to the Memory of Professor Eliezer Shimshon Rosenthal [ed. M. Bar-Asher and D. Rosenthal; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1993] 208–10) that R. Eliezer, who often preserves old, pre-rabbinic legal traditions, saw prohibited Sabbath labors as falling into two categories, one punishable by stoning and the other not subject to the death penalty. (On the common rabbinic view, by contrast, all prohibited Sabbath labors are punishable by stoning, and only additional rabbinic prohibitions are subject to lesser penalities.) If Gilat is correct, and if R. Eliezer's view was prevalent in the biblical period, we may suppose that the people knew that wood-gathering was prohibited on the Sabbath (contra Weingreen and Phillips), but did not know whether it was punishable by execution (i.e., stoning) or by a lesser penalty. God's response serves either to clarify the punishment for wood-gathering specifically, or, more fundamentally, to refute the view that lesser violations of Sabbath are not punishable by death. In any case, none of the above proposals explains why God's decision does not issue a general rule.
“in the wilderness” (Num 15:32); it was therefore conjoined to Num 14, in which the wilderness plays a central role. Is it just possible, alternatively, that the strikingly similar stories of the blasphemer and the wood-gatherer have been transposed? The characterization of the intentional sinner as 
“blaspheming” in Num 15:30 provides a perfect transition to the blasphemer incident, while references to various forms of Sabbath in Lev 24:8 and Lev 25 passim provide a natural context for the sin of the wood-gatherer.
“and all the land was of single tongue and single speech.” As in Num 15:32, the narrator states a fact that the reader would otherwise have taken for granted because it provides relevant background for the events that follow.
in Ps 106:27a is changed to 
. This emendation is supported not only by considerations of sense (
would better describe Israel's situation among the nations, and would offer a better parallel to 
) and by the fact that the error could be attributed to the influence of 
in 106:26b, but also by the frequent occurrence of the phrase 
in Ezekiel. See Ezek 12:15; 20:23; 22:15; 29:12; 30:23, 26; 36:19. In chapters 29 and 30, the refrain describes the exile of Egyptians; otherwise, it refers to Israel's exile. The emendation to 
may find further support in the Peshitta, which begins Ps 106:27 with wnbdr“and [that] he would scatter.” The relationship between Ezekiel 20 and Psalm 106 is murky, though the fact that the phrases 
and 
are both extremely common in Ezekiel (with the first particularly prominent in Ezekiel 20) suggests that Ezekiel 20 may have influenced Psalm 106. On the redaction of Psalm 106, see Frank-Lothar Hossfeld, “Ps 106 und die priestliche Überlieferung des Pentateuch,” in Textarbeit: Studien zu Texten und ihrer Rezeption aus dem Alten Testament und der Umwelt Israels: Festschrift für Peter Weimar zur Vollendung seines 60. Lebensjahres (ed. Klaus Kiesow and Thomas Meurer; Münster: Ugarit, 2003) 255–66.
) or loathe (
) them to destroy them.” For more on the dating of Leviticus 26 and the complicated question of the fate of the covenant in exile according to the priestly authors and the sixth-century prophets, see Milgrom, Leviticus 23–27 2337–46, 2363–65; 
in Ex 1:13–14 and Lev 25:43, 46, 53. On the Sabbath and its prohibition of labor as a sign of God's selection of Israel, see Ex 31:13–14, Ezek 20:12, 20. On these themes see further Knohl, Sanctuary 14–19, 44, 163, 187; Joosten, People and Land 93–101; Amit, “Creation” *13–*29. A particularly important discussion of the role of the Exodus from Egypt within the theology of H may be found in 
