May 19, 2012
Parashat Behar-Behukkotai
Leviticus 25:1–27:34
Parashat B'chukkotai: Rabbi Pete Tobias
The section that begins the portion ’B’chukkotai (Leviticus 26:3ff) takes the form of a covenant or brit.
It was an agreement that was struck (literally ‘cut’, because it was
engraved in stone) between a powerful empire and its vassals: small
kingdoms, cities or other tribal groups. It set out the demands made by
the large empire for the smaller entity to supply crops, animals,
servants and soldiers. In exchange for these, the large empire would
offer protection from attack by any other powers. The flipside of a
covenant was what would happen to a small nation or kingdom should it
fail to meet its obligations. This was little more than an alarming
list of catastrophes that would befall the defaulters as a consequence
of their failure to meet their obligations.
The later authors of the Torah, the Deuteronomic
and Priestly sources, saw this covenant as a useful way of defining the
nature of the relationship between the people of Judah and their
God. Instead of demanding tributes in the form of property and
possessions, God’s requirement was for the people to establish justice
in their society. This was a useful model for a number of reasons. It
defined what the prophets and the priests regarded as the true nature of
divine demands: the establishment of a just society. It also gave them
an ingenious way of explaining the reasons for the political disaster
that befell the kingdom of Israel when it was destroyed by Assyria in
the year 722 BCE and prepared the people of Judah for a similar fate
when the Babylonians did the same to Jerusalem a century and a half
later.
After the Assyrian destruction, the ten tribes
of Israel simply disappeared. This was the result of a well-established
policy in the Ancient Near East that was operated by those large empires
who established covenants with their smaller subjects. If the
obligations were not met, the city or other habitation of the group that
had refused to meet its obligations would be destroyed, and the leaders
of that group would be relocated several hundred miles from their
erstwhile home. In this exile they would be told to forget their origins
and become assimilated into the conquering nations, adopting its
culture and its gods. The purpose of a god in the Ancient Near East was
to protect the people from enemy attack. If a nation was defeated, its
god was not powerful enough to protect the people, and was therefore
abandoned in favour of the gods of the triumphing nation. This would
explain the disappearance of the ten Israelite tribes, not to mention
the numerous other tribal groups (Ammonites, Hittites, Jebusites etc)
all of whom disappeared without trace during this periods of Assyrian
and Babylonian conquest.
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