Turn It Again: Torah Wisdom for Today

In Pirkei Avot, a book of maxims in the Mishnah, an ancient rabbi, Ben Bag-Bag said about Torah study, “Hafokh bah, va’Hafokh vah, d’khola bah.” Turn it over and over, for everything is in it. For two thousand years, that’s what Jews have done. Here is another turning.

Parshat Devarim 2024

Shifting Claims to Biblical Territory: Concepts of Land Ownership

In the Cave of the Horses (Cueva de los Caballos) in eastern Spain, ancient paintings depict humans armed with bows and arrows in coordinated military formations, hinting at prehistoric human warfare. Archaeological evidence supports this; in the Jebel Sahaba cemetery in Sudan, skeletal remains are pierced with arrowheads and stone knife points. This ten-thousand-year-old record demonstrates that land has been a source of conflict since before written history. The notion of indigenous peoples living in harmony with nature or with one another is hard to square with the factual record, which presents a mixed account.

Yet militarism is not the entire story either; territorial disputes were not always settled on the battlefield, as the Bible illustrates in this week’s Torah parashah.

In Deuteronomy 2:2-12, we read this account from Moses:

“Then YHVH said to me: You have been skirting this hill country long enough; now turn north. And charge the people as follows: You will be passing through the territory of your kin, the descendants of Esau, who live in Seir. Though they will be afraid of you, be very careful not to provoke them. For I will not give you of their land so much as a foot can tread on; I have given the hill country of Seir as a possession to Esau. What food you eat you shall obtain from them for money; even the water you drink you shall procure from them for money. Indeed, your God YHVH has blessed you in all your undertakings. [God] has watched over your wanderings through this great wilderness; your God YHVH has been with you these past forty years: you have lacked nothing.

“We then moved on, away from our kin, the descendants of Esau, who live in Seir, away from the road of the Arabah, away from Elath and Ezion-geber; and we marched on in the direction of the wilderness of Moab. And YHVH said to me: Do not harass the Moabites or provoke them to war. For I will not give you any of their land as a possession; I have assigned Ar as a possession to the descendants of Lot.

“It was formerly inhabited by the Emim, a people great and numerous, and as tall as the Anakites. Like the Anakites, they are counted as Rephaim; but the Moabites call them Emim. Similarly, Seir was formerly inhabited by the Horites; but the descendants of Esau dispossessed them, wiping them out and settling in their place, just as Israel did in the land they were to possess, which YHVH had given to them.” -The Contemporary Torah JPS, 2006

These verses offer interesting perspectives on land possession, even when we remove the religious components of this description. Being first to the land did not give a people any special rights to it, undercutting some contemporary legal notions of indigenous claims. The Emim, the Anakites, and the Horites all were displaced. The fact that different peoples, such as the Moabites or the Edomites, gained possession from earlier occupants justified itself as a legal claim because it demonstrated divine favor.

An additional fascinating window into ancient ways is how kinship, no matter how remote, was sometimes sufficient to prevent warfare. The territory of those tribes who were considered to be connected to Esau or Lot was viewed as off-limits by the early Israelites.

When we read historical records, it is easy to disregard practices that go against contemporary ethics, perhaps labeling them as primitive. Yet a careful reading highlights that things have not changed so very much. NATO can be considered our modern conception of kinship, while the Middle East, with its varying notions of who possessed the land first, doesn’t seem to matter when trying to determine who has a legitimate claim. This might feel disheartening, but it also provides us with a slice of optimism. If Israeli Jews and Palestinians could come to view one another as bound by the same sort of kinship restrictions, perhaps a way could be found to respect one another’s territory. Simultaneously, those ancient cave paintings remind us that the path to peace has never been easy, but that doesn’t mean the effort isn’t worthwhile.