This is a fine book, splendidly written, stimulating, and readable throughout. Adriane Leveen's aim is to take the account in Numbers about the Israelites' forty-year journey through the wilderness and show how it invents a living tradition, one that harnesses memory and political appeal in persuading an audience to accept priestly guidance in its individual and collective life.
Detecting narrative and rhetorical techniques, Leveen proves adroit in making a case for the deliberate presentation of seemingly chaotic, diverse material. In highlighting the political principle that a “correct” reading of the past can lead to a desired future, she develops the thesis that in Numbers, the priestly exploitation of memory is an attempt to exert social control over the work's original addressees. It does this not just through narrative but also through ritual objects. At the same time, paradoxically, but accounting for the going back and forth between hope and despair, the role of memory is also seen to work against priestly control. The prime example is the Israelites' longing to return to Egypt because of the need to satisfy an appetite for decent food. About this negative role of memory, Leveen writes, “Memory subverts Moses' project of unification and control, undermining his authority and even threatening the very continuation of the people Israel. Indeed, by the end of chapter 25 all those liberated from Egypt and so carefully ‘counted’ at the beginning of Numbers are killed off and abandoned without trace in the bleak wilderness landscape” (67).
Leveen makes much of the fact that an entire generation, the one that is liberated so triumphantly from Egypt, is wiped out in “rather anonymous and abrupt fashion.” The generation dies in the desert, with the exception of Caleb and Joshua, and Leveen is at pains to argue that its members suffer the ultimate humiliation of not receiving burial. Their carcasses—the word is used contemptuously in Numbers 14:29, 32—are to fall in the wilderness. The evidence for the centrality of this dire development in Numbers, however eloquently argued, is not especially persuasive. Perhaps a wissenschaftsgeschichtlicher factor comes into play, namely, the omnipresent awareness in contemporary culture of the untold numbers of Jewish dead some sixty years ago in Europe. Any wiping out of a generation in a humiliating way is cause for special attention and a desire to explain. Hayyim Nahman Bialik's poem “Metei midbar,” about the dead in the desert in Numbers, depicted their demise as exemplifying how the ancient people of Israel failed “to grasp hold of the radical promise of nationhood in their own land” (5). This failure reflected Bialik's interest in Jewish nationalist striving in his own time and place. “Tradition may be used,” Leveen adds, “to ask questions about one's own time, a topic of great interest in the present work” (5). She presumably means those who edited the book of Numbers, but perhaps she reveals a comparable interest in recent history when claiming that Numbers makes central the death of the entire generation that came out of Egypt. It seems overstated to say that “positive memories of Egypt have so many destructive repercussions among the people Israel that the only way to curtail the damage is to destroy those who hold them” (13). For one thing, while the death of those who fled Egypt receives some attention in Numbers because it is a punishment, there is little or no interest in their postmortem state.
Two other points might be made. The first generation of Israel—its founding fathers, Jacob and his sons—go to Egypt, never to return, and Moses, the hero of the Exodus story, does not reach the land of Canaan. Yet there is little or no indication that these developments are dwelt on as even somewhat tragic. Another major consideration is that where we find such a negative development as the liberated generation being denied entrance to Canaan, we have to reckon with an exercise in apologetics on the part of biblical authors. They had to explain events that call into question the omnipotence, omniscience, truthfulness, or morality of God. Contrary to some promises, God for a long time after Joshua's death refrained from driving out the remaining nations from Canaan. His object was to “test” the people to determine whether they would prove steadfast (Judges 2:22, 3:1, 4). The forty years in the wilderness were not attributable to any lack of power on the part of God, but to the need to educate the people (Deuteronomy 8:2, 16); or, they were a punishment for the people allowing themselves to be misled by an unfavorable report about the promised land (Numbers 14:34). Leveen is aware of the work of Edward Shils and Eric Hobsbawm regarding the invention of tradition for power-political ends, but while recognizing the etiological dimension in the composition of Numbers, she may be engaging in her own etiological account by suggesting the centrality of the decimation of the wilderness generation.
Leveen's book is so stimulating partly because of her courageous attempt to make sense of the texts in Numbers as we find them. She sensibly assumes that scribes, in editing certain traditions and working them into a coherent whole, are not “mere compilers or anthologists but highly creative writers” (27). The sequencing of texts is driven by “strategies, rhetoric, and persuasive power of the priestly editors” (180). Alas, it is too general a point to claim that the placement of the rules in Numbers 15 about future life in the land of Canaan, which follow the narratives about the spies and the condemned generation (Numbers 13–14), can be accounted for because they constitute reassurance that the next generation will inherit the land. Nor does it help to say that the rule about inadvertent and intentional offenses is set down because the editor “glances behind him at the intentional collective wrongdoing of chapter 14” (106). To what do the unintended offenses refer? What prompted interest in them? Concern about them is, after all, taken up first in the rule. Leveen views Numbers as part of a larger body of material with links, for instance, to Genesis and Exodus, but she also treats Numbers as a separate composition and many of her arguments flow from this assumption. Might it not be the case, however, that the material in Numbers has been integrated into a larger work, such as the Pentateuch or Genesis through 2 Kings? Then one would have to draw different conclusions from the sequence of material in Numbers by inferring other strategies and rhetorical devices from the ones Leveen sees at work in Numbers. It is something of a trap for her to note that “Numbers ends in such a legalistic and dry fashion” (180), Numbers 36 adjusting the inheritance rule about daughters in Numbers 27. But rather too easily, she turns an apparent negative into a positive: entering its land, Israel will be governed by legal stipulations subject to review.
To criticize is to compliment, and Leveen's work deserves praise precisely because it engages one's critical faculties throughout. For her, Numbers captures the change that the Israelites have undergone in new circumstances because of exile—she speaks of them as “living in the Babylonian wilderness” (56)—and it frames that change within the realm of shared understanding. Her own work captures well contemporary changes in ways of reading biblical literature and skillfully applies them in enhancing our understanding of a truly remarkable body of material, the book of Numbers.
