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I was so fascinated by this post from Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg: Spy vs. Spy. It's about the bible story in Numbers 13-14 where Moses sends 12 spies to go look at the Promised Land, in preparation for the Israelites invading it and driving out the people who live there. (Ruttenberg's post repeatedly emphasizes that this conquest did not really happen, and that this story has been used to justify all kinds of terrible atrocities throughout history- but it's in the bible so Jews and Christians shouldn't just ignore it.) The spies come back and 10 of them say the people of the land are too strong, and the Israelites won't be able to defeat them. The other 2 spies (Joshua and Caleb) say God will help us, so let's go do it.
Most of the Israelites are convinced by the 10 spies, and they don't want to try to enter the Promised Land. God is mad about this and declares that the Israelites should wander in the desert for 40 years, until the whole generation has died, and the next generation will be the one to enter the Promised Land.
I'm very familiar with this story. Heard it many times, starting when I was a little kid in Sunday school. The point of the story, I always heard Christians say, is that the Israelites should have trusted God, instead of being too scared to enter the Promised Land. Yes, it was a horrible sin for them to not trust God, so God was right to punish them, to make them all wander in the desert until they died.
That's what I always heard about this story. I never heard any other interpretation. Which is why I'm so fascinated by Ruttenberg's post, and I'm sharing it here.
She lists several different interpretations. The first one is the one I had always heard:
As can all tales in Torah, this can be a message about obedience. It, for better or worse, can deliver an authoritarian model of Judaism (or Christianity, I reckon)– one in which failure to follow God (and, presumably, your religious leader, God's emissary here on Earth), engenders fatal consequences:
"People didn't trust God enough to go along with God's plan even when they were scared so they were punished."
Implied: You must follow my instructions if you would like to be Good, Safe.
There's also this "trauma-informed" reading of the story:
There is the reading that tries for a trauma-informed lens, that seeks a more compassionate rationale for such a harsh divine decree. Something like:
"After their whole lives enslaved, the generation that participated in the Exodus– which was traumatic enough, jeez– wasn't emotionally ready to do the next step of setting up a new, just society. They regarded themselves as inferior to others– it was their low self-esteem that caused them to regard themselves as 'like grasshoppers' rather than as empowered as full people. They couldn't have handled the responsibility of creating something new in the Promised Land. God finally recognized that and realized that only people who had grown up knowing freedom could best set up the future." (2)
Ruttenberg is not sold on this interpretation; she points out that it implies "Only healed people can be leaders." She says there are plenty of important leaders from history who experienced trauma before becoming leaders and doing great things.
I am also not a fan of this "trauma-informed" reading because, how do I put this, I think it's just silly. The way the story is written, God is telling them to enter the Promised Land, the Israelites refuse, and then God punishes them by making them wait 40 years. (Moses manages to talk God down from just smiting all the people right then and there.) To turn it into a cutesy little "oh God was just concerned about if they were emotionally ready or not... God was really doing what was best for them by giving them time to heal from the trauma of slavery rather than making them enter into a fight for the Promised Land"... come on.
God is not compassionately taking a realistic view of what the people are emotionally ready for. God is mad as hell in this story. In Numbers 14:36-38, the 10 spies who didn't trust God were "struck down and died of a plague before the Lord." Does that sound like God was just really concerned about being careful and understanding of trauma?
(I guess you could argue that the way the biblical writer wrote the story completely misrepresented what actually happened, and actually God told them to wander in the desert for 40 years for trauma-informed reasons, but then the biblical writer put a MASSIVE SPIN on it. I guess you could say that. But, why tho.)
Ruttenberg mentions another interpretation, which says the issue was how Moses asked binary questions- "Are the people who dwell in it strong or weak, few or many? Is the country in which they dwell good or bad? Are the towns they live in open or fortified? Is the soil rich or poor? Is it wooded or not?" Maybe more open-ended questions would have helped the spies think about the situation differently.
I'm also unimpressed with this interpretation- I mean, sure, there's a point you could make about how leaders have a responsibility for how they frame the tasks they give to their followers, and how binary questions can limit how people understand a situation, okay, sure. I just don't really think that interpretation is central to The Point Of The Story.
Here's another interpretation Ruttenberg mentions in her post, and this one is blowing my mind:
And what if the ten scouts were offering an accurate account of their experience? And what if they were being told by authority figures to ignore their take on the situation, because it didn't conform to the agenda of those in power?
And again, we over here at Life is a Sacred Text Inc. are open to looking at God, in these stories, as a literary figure with whom we can engage with curiosity-- and assume that doing so doesn't necessarily validate or disprove or anything about anyone's experiences of the living divine, or even about how Torah can engage with those experiences. Theology, and God, can be big enough to hold all of it.
What if we were willing to question all of our assumptions about who's right and who's wrong, just to see what might happen if we opened the story from the other side?
What if God and Moses were ready to launch Project Promised Land but their folks on the ground told them that it was, in fact, unsafe?
And if there were a couple of people willing to say what those with power wanted to hear, but the majority of voices– those warning against taking action were speaking not from warped perception, but actual concern?
How many times have experts warned that an outcome is not right, and been steamrolled or ignored, because a little truth happens to be inconvenient at the moment?
How often have those most impacted warned that an organization is not safe, to no avail? How often have people with some power– but lesser power– tried to speak out, and been punished for doing so?
And then derided as the narrative is fixed to paint them as the cowards or the troublemakers, not the brave heroes willing to comply with power's agenda?
It happens all the time.
What if we assume that the spies aren't working in bad faith? We could even posit that Promised Land 1.0 didn't, in fact, release at that time, so we will never know how it would have gone– and it's possible that it would have been a disaster, just as those ten spies warned us that it would have been?
What if God– or whoever was writing this story after the fact– even recognized this and used this 40 years "punishment" as a cover, so that time could be bought without making authority look bad?
Implied: History is written by the victors, and we must ask why the stories we have are written the way they are– including who is blamed, and why.
!!!!
Oh my goodness, this is huge.
What if the spies were actually right? What if "trust God" wasn't the right thing to do in this story?
I LOVE THIS. I love this because it's something that never in a million years would occur to anyone when you're inside an evangelical "biblical inerrancy" ideology. This is something I'm super-interested in- taking the bible stories about "bad" people who disobeyed God, and reframing them to show why those people were actually heroes. (See, for example, my bible fanfic Strange Fire.)
In Sunday school, it was always so obvious: Trusting God is the right thing to do. These spies- who didn't believe God would really be able to win battles- were wrong and sinful and bad and deserved to be punished. We never ever questioned that. (We asked ourselves, would we be able to trust God, if we were in this situation? Would we be able to ignore our own instincts, and have faith and rush in when God said to, even though it might feel like a terrible idea? We hoped we would be good enough Christians to do so.)
This is blowing my mind- what if the Israelites actually wouldn't have won, if they had invaded at this time? (I mean, this whole story didn't really happen, but I'm just thinking about this hypothetical within the universe of the story.) And, as Ruttenberg says, this biblical writer "used this 40 years 'punishment' as a cover"? This is incredible.
Here, take a look at this, from Numbers 14:39-45,
When Moses reported this to all the Israelites, they mourned bitterly. Early the next morning they set out for the highest point in the hill country, saying, “Now we are ready to go up to the land the Lord promised. Surely we have sinned!”
But Moses said, “Why are you disobeying the Lord’s command? This will not succeed! Do not go up, because the Lord is not with you. You will be defeated by your enemies, for the Amalekites and the Canaanites will face you there. Because you have turned away from the Lord, he will not be with you and you will fall by the sword.”
Nevertheless, in their presumption they went up toward the highest point in the hill country, though neither Moses nor the ark of the Lord’s covenant moved from the camp. Then the Amalekites and the Canaanites who lived in that hill country came down and attacked them and beat them down all the way to Hormah.
Omg, how was I so naive? I always read this as "no, they missed their chance, God told them not to go into the Promised Land, and now they're sinfully going in anyway instead of listening to God- see, it didn't work, because God wasn't with them."
I'm just marveling at how well Christians have spun this passage (and/or the entire bible), such that it never even occurred to me to think of this: Oh, this shows the 10 spies (who all suddenly died under mysterious circumstances?!!!) were actually right, and the Israelites actually weren't able to defeat the inhabitants of the land at this time.
Seriously. Every time I read this when I was evangelical, my thoughts were "ugh there they go again, not listening to God, of course it's not going to work, come on you guys, why can't you just obey God?"
I always imagined that, during the time of the bible, everything was so simple- you just follow God's rules, and then everything is perfect. Not at all like our world now, where it doesn't really seem like God is close, where you do your best to obey God but it's not really clear if it's working or not. But what if the reason they wrote these things was to get people to believe- because their reality did not feel like everything was this simple and straightforward. What if it was hard to believe back then, just like it was for us, and that's why the biblical writers wrote all these things?
Imagine what it would feel like for you, if you were a spy checking out the Promised Land, and it just feels so unbelievable that your people will really be able to defeat the people living there. What you can see with your own eyes, vs a promise from a God who may or may not actually have this kind of power.
Why were we always so sure it was right to trust in that God? Sure, he brought them out of Egypt and parted the Red Sea, but invading the Promised Land is a totally different situation. Why *should* they believe he had that kind of power?
Why were we so sure they deserved to die for not believing that?
And there's one more interpretation that Ruttenberg mentions in her post, about how this story was a way to explain the geography of the land at a later date when the story was actually written. Also very interesting!
Wow, I'm fascinated by this. Evangelicals have this idea that bible stories are all meant to teach us something about how to obey God, and I'm seeing now how that's so incredibly limiting. The stories mean so much more than that. They can be read in so many ways that go beyond that. And I'm most fascinated by an interpretation where God is wrong.
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