Parshat Chukat: A Comparison of Spy Stories

BY: Miriam Jaffe

The background:

As parshat Chukat comes to a close, we find the ancient Israelites almost ready to enter their promised land. The Torah has progressed to the point in the narrative where the Israelites take over the land. In the last few chapters of Chukat, the Israelites begin their conquest of the land east of the Jordan River. Chukat first tells us of the Israelites' interaction with Edom; the Israelites request from the Edomites permission to pass through their land, the Edomites deny the permission, and the Israelites leave. Similar nonviolent interaction occurs between the Israelites and the Ammonites and Moabites, as recorded in Deuteronomy 2 and 3.

These stories have a certain level of inherent epic-ness. We know of the origin of the Moabites, Ammonites, and Edomites from Genesis, and after a few hundred years of the Torah focusing on the Israelites, we reunite with these familiar characters. Indeed, Rashi, in his commentary on Chukat, relates every detail of the Israelites' interaction with the Edomites to the two nations' respective origins. Chukat also tells us about the Israelites' conquest of the respective lands of Sichon and Og. These stories, too, carry with them a degree of epic-ness. The defeat of these two powers causes the nations of Canaan to be terrified of the Israelites (see Joshua 2: 9-11), and is considered by the Jewish people one of the great kindnesses done for their ancestors by God (Psalms 136: 19-22).

The foreground:

There are two stories of Israelite conquest in parshat Chukat that seem to lack the epic-ness of the surrounding stories. The first is in chapter 21 verses 1-3:

And the Canaanite, the king of Arad, who dwelt in the South, heard tell that Israel came by the way of Atharim; and he fought against Israel, and took some of them captive. And Israel vowed a vow unto the LORD, and said: 'If Thou wilt indeed deliver this people into my hand, then I will utterly destroy their cities.' And the LORD hearkened to the voice of Israel, and delivered up the Canaanites; and they utterly destroyed them and their cities; and the name of the place was called Hormah.

The second is in 21:32, "And Moses sent to spy out Jazer, and they took the towns thereof, and drove out the Amorites that were there."

In order to explicate these stories, I would like to invoke two earlier related stories - that of the spies and that of the ma'apilim. Moses sent spies to scout the land of Canaan, and the spies reported back that the land would be near impossible to conquer. This angered God; He desired to kill the people, and he decreed that they would not enter the land. Some people, the ma'apilim, recognized their mistake and, against Moses' warning, attempted to conquer the land immediately. In their efforts, they were killed in battle by the Canaanites and the Amalekites.

The actions of the Israelites in the battle against the king of Arad seem to reflect a change in behavior from the incident of the ma'apilim. The setting is actually quite similar to that of the ma'apilim; the king of Arad is dwelling in the Negev, where the Canaanites and Amalekites of the ma'apilim story had been dwelling (see Numbers 13:29). Rashi takes this a step further and says that the nation of the king of Arad were themselves Amalekians (21:1), and Chizkuni says that some people explain that the verse should be read "And the Canaanite, the king of Arad, and Amalek.” The setup may be the same, but the result is different. The Israelites do not begin an offensive against the king of Arad; they only attack as a response to his actions. Unlike the ma'apilim, who recklessly attacked against God's will, the Israelites recognized that they were not commanded to attack Arad, and therefore did not do so until it was necessary to restore a captive. (According to the commentary of the Ramban on 21:1, the second half of this battle did not occur until the people entered the land (Judges 1:16-17), but was just written here to finish the story. This strengthens the point that the people did not attack until they were already in the land and told to conquer it completely.) 

The other change of behavior that we see here is the Israelites focus on God's help. They call to God and make a vow displaying their outlook that God is the one helping them win the battle. With the ma'apilim, however, we had seen the opposite. The text tells us that when the ma'apilim went to fight, neither Moses nor the ark of God's covenant was with them, both of which symbolize God's lack of presence in battle. When the Israelites fight the king of Arad, the ark is with them from the start. Rashi explains the beginning of this story, "Israel came by the way of Atharim," that Israel came by way of the tayar hagadol, the great surveyer, the ark of the covenant. This time, God is with them throughout. At the end of the battle, instead of the Israelites being destroyed until Horma (Numbers 14:45), their enemies are (ibid 21:3).

After overcoming the pitfall of the ma'apilim, the Israelites are back to that of the spies. The conquest of Yaazer reflects a total change in attitude from that of the spies. Moses sends spies to scout out Yaazer, but it is a different method than the disastrous first spy mission. In the first iteration of spy sending, the story focuses on who the spies were and what qualities they had. Each spy has a whole pasuk devoted to him, and the list is introduced by, "And these were their names." The story tells of every place they passed through, and when they return, they list off five of the nations that they saw. In the story of Yaazer, none of these details appear. The verse says that "Moses sent to spy", but not that he sent spies to spy. The direct object of the clause is missing. Not only do we not have the identities of these spies, we barely have their existence. The text then does say that they took the "towns" and "Amorites that were there," both of which seem to be a shying away from direct content. In a standard war, the text might say that they took the land or the people, but the surrounding towns and the people "that were there" seem circuitous as though the text were trying not to say anything direct. The spy mission occurs so secretly that even the reader is not quite sure what happens. The spies who scouted Yaazer did not speak ill of the land; on the contrary, while the text is ambiguous, it appears as though they may have conquered it themselves. Rashi (21:32) cites a Midrash Tanchuma which paints this as a conscious decision on behalf of these spies to capture the land to be unlike the original spies who didn't have confidence. The city of Yaazer is later designated as a Levite city (Joshua 21:37), possibly because it is the opposite of the original spies, who represented each tribe except the Levites.

Thus these two stories, that of the king of Arad and that of Yaazer each comes to highlight an aspect of improvement within the Israelite people.

There is another completely different way of looking at these two stories, in which they are not uniquely important. They are both part of the conquest and are thus relevant to the general story of the Bible and are brought in this week's parsha because that is when they occurred. The fact that each of these stories is brief supports this view. Perhaps the Torah chooses not to focus on them because they are not important in and of themselves. But because they are part of the people's possession of the holy land, they become important.

There are probably other ways of reading these stories as well. Feel free to comment if you think of any!

(All translations of verses are from mechon-mamre.org.)