Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- ONE Desert Bound
- TWO Weaving by Design
- THREE Priestly Purposes
- FOUR Variations on a Theme: Shaping Memory in the Wilderness
- FIVE Crisis and Commemoration: The Use of Ritual Objects
- SIX Falling in the Wilderness: The Politics of Death and Burial
- SEVEN Inheriting the Land
- APPENDIX A The Priestly Sphere of Activity in the Book of Numbers
- APPENDIX B The Use and Variation of God's Address to Moses and to Aaron
- APPENDIX C Death Reports
- APPENDIX D Proper and Improper Treatment of the Dead
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Scriptural Index
- Selected Hebrew Index
SEVEN - Inheriting the Land
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- ONE Desert Bound
- TWO Weaving by Design
- THREE Priestly Purposes
- FOUR Variations on a Theme: Shaping Memory in the Wilderness
- FIVE Crisis and Commemoration: The Use of Ritual Objects
- SIX Falling in the Wilderness: The Politics of Death and Burial
- SEVEN Inheriting the Land
- APPENDIX A The Priestly Sphere of Activity in the Book of Numbers
- APPENDIX B The Use and Variation of God's Address to Moses and to Aaron
- APPENDIX C Death Reports
- APPENDIX D Proper and Improper Treatment of the Dead
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Scriptural Index
- Selected Hebrew Index
Summary
… the viability of a culture inheres in its capacity for resolving conflicts, for explicating differences and renegotiating communal meanings.
The way a story is told is a clue to its meaning.
We project ourselves … past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle.
Finally we come, at the end, back to the beginning. In the beginning there were multiple traditions: fragments of legends, tabernacle lists and tribal ones, marvelous poetry, tales of wilderness thirst and hunger, rebellious confrontations, and memories of dangers and desires. And someone (or, more likely, several anonymous figures over time) deftly ordered those diverse texts and impressions into a whole. In so doing the editor(s) produced a memorable narrative of a wilderness journey that lasted forty arduous years.
At journey's end our last glimpse of the new generation of Israelites is a positive one. At the edge of the promised land, they are busying themselves with tribal boundaries and allotments of territory as well as issues of inheritance. Most important, they have a plan for what to do once in the land. They possess a calendar of yearly sacrifices and festival celebrations, events that require the supervision of the priests, sons of Aaron. In other words, even before the new generation enters the land, it finds itself dependent on priestly arrangements, obligated to perform sacrifices in the years ahead under the direction of a clearly demarcated and hierarchical priestly class.
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- Information
- Memory and Tradition in the Book of Numbers , pp. 166 - 182Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007