The Jordan as the Nation’s Border

The reader of Numbers and Deuteronomy cannot help but notice how the narrative, structured as the itinerary of Israel’s odyssey from Egypt to Canaan, has one penultimate destination in sight and toward which it ineluctably advances – namely, “the plains of Moab across the Jordan from Jericho” (Num. 22:1).Footnote ¹ This location is the final camping place for the Israelites, from which they send out spies to reconnoiter Jericho, cross the Jordan, and eventually take possession of the Promised Land (Josh. 2:1, 3:1). It is also where Moses, in Deuteronomy, delivers his valedictory address to Israel.Footnote ²

The line demarcating the Pentateuch from the Former Prophets (Joshua-Kings) is drawn precisely at this point in the narrative, where the nation crosses the Jordan and commences the conquest. By severing the first five books from those that follow, the Pentateuchal laws and promises can continue to have validity long after the loss of the territorial sovereignty that Israel secured during the days of Moses and Joshua. The Pentateuch sets forth the command to conquer the land, as well as the criteria for maintaining possession of it. Following it, the Former Prophets tell how it was conquered but then later, because of the nation’s wrongdoing, forfeited to foreign control. In this canonical structure, the Prophets witness to the abiding veracity of the Torah.Footnote ³

The division of Pentateuch and Prophets may be compared to the way this literature maps territory. Just as the Jordan marks the canonical boundary between the Torah and the Nevi’im, it also constitutes the territorial border to what is referred to as “Canaan” (Num. 32:32; Josh. 22:9, 10) or “the territory that Yhwh has given the Israelites” (Num. 32:7). Likewise, the texts often draw a distinction between the inhabitants of the Transjordan and those of the Cisjordan; only the latter are consistently designated “Israelites.”Footnote ⁴

The book of Numbers identifies the Promised Land in two different ways. A host of texts include the Transjordan within Israel’s borders. While the Israelites do not initially plan to occupy this country and ask for permission to travel through it, as we saw in Part I, they end up conquering it after its rulers, Sihon and Og, deny them passage (Num. 21; see also Num. 32). The block of material related to the seer Balaam and his subverted curses (Num. 22–24) presupposes Israel’s presence in lands east of the Jordan.

In contrast to this view, most other texts in Numbers confine the wars of conquest to Canaan. When Moses sends out the first group of spies to reconnoiter the land, they go up from the south toward Hebron and northwards; nothing is said about the Transjordan (Num. 13:21–24). Later in the book, after the death of the exodus generation, Moses delineates the nation’s borders (34:1–12), and when he does, he defines the eastern boundary as running along the Jordan from the eastern slopes of the Sea of Galilee (Kinneret) down to the Dead Sea:

A brief caveat (34:13–15) that follows this passage addresses the situation in the Transjordan. Moses now asserts that his earlier directions apply only to nine and a half tribes, since two and a half tribes (Reuben, Gad, and the half tribe of Manasseh) had “already taken their inheritance beyond the Jordan at Jericho eastward, toward the sunrise.” If the passage originally did not include this caveat, we could explain the way verse 12 reads like a conclusion (“That shall be your land as defined by its boundaries on all sides”), while what follows feels like an afterthought and addendum. That the Jordan is Israel’s eastern border is assumed also in Numbers 32, a text that we will consider in Chapter 4.

With few exceptions, the same view is adopted in Deuteronomy. Throughout the book, the Jordan looms large on the horizon. It’s in anticipation of crossing this river that Moses delivers his protracted prebattle speeches and proclaims a prodigious new law code. Israel is warned that it will forfeit its right to remain in its homeland if it fails to heed the code, and this threat relates solely to the territories west of the Jordan:

Yhwh’s marching orders, with which the book begins, do not even mention the Transjordan when laying out an expansive description of the land that he promised to the nation’s ancestors:

Moses later orders the nation, as soon as it crosses the Jordan (27:1–8), to write the Laws on plastered stones atop Mount Ebal (located in the heart of the West Bank at Nablus/Shechem).

In these texts, we cannot help but wonder about the tribes in the Transjordan. Are their territories not also part of Israel’s homeland? Are the communities that take up residence there not equally members of the nation? While Moses keeps his gaze firmly fixed on the Jordan and the country that lies west of it, he does at least refer to Israel’s wars on the eastern side of the river. The significance of these events, however, has little, if anything, to do with the territories themselves. Their enduring meaning is to be found instead in the lessons and motivation they provide for the nation as it prepares for the campaign that really matters – the one undertaken in Canaan, on the western side of the Jordan.Footnote ⁶

The Wadi Arnon in Deuteronomy

As our study will continue to demonstrate across a wide span of texts, biblical war commemoration is characterized by a plurality of competing perspectives. Thus, as Moses reflects on Israel’s recent history in the second chapter of Deuteronomy, he diminishes the significance of the Jordan as a boundary. According to the view advocated in this passage from the book, the wars of conquest began not at the Jordan, but at a wadi in the Transjordan called the Arnon (today called Wadi el-Mojib).Footnote ⁷

The book of Numbers presents the Israelites conquering and occupying the kingdom of Sihon in the area from the Arnon northwards to the Jabbok (the Zarqa River).Footnote ⁸ Their reason for doing so is that Sihon had attacked them, as we saw in Part I. When Moses retells the story in Deuteronomy, he claims that after all the warriors of the exodus generation were dead, Yhwh delivered to him these marching orders:

Later in his address, Moses claims that Yhwh reissued the same orders:

Nowhere in Numbers are we told that Yhwh issued such a command. Moreover, Numbers 32, which we study in Chapter 4, recounts how two of Israel’s twelve tribes petition Moses to settle in the very same region. Far from being a command from Yhwh, their desire to live there initially presents a major moral problem, and Moses harangues them at length for even contemplating it as an option. In the end, he accedes to the tribes’ entreaty, yet the length and complexity of the text leave no doubt that its authors were troubled by the presence of an Israelite population in the Transjordan.

The natural borders demarcated by rivers and bodies of water frequently serve also as political borders. In ancient battle accounts, a military engagement officially commences when a belligerent crosses a waterway. (For armies from Mesopotamia, the crossing of the Euphrates conventionally marked the launch of a western campaign.Footnote ⁹) Yet why were the scribes who reworked this first speech in Deuteronomy so deliberate in memorializing the nation’s history in this way? They could have had Moses ignore the wars in the Transjordan or at least interpret them as a prelude to the conquest. By doing so, his address would have been more in harmony with what we have seen to be the dominant view in these texts. How then are we to explain the fact that the speech now shifts attention from the Jordan to the Arnon?

As a battle orator with a clear political agenda, the Moses of Deuteronomy is not unique. The naming of wars, and the status of battles in relation to these wars, are often highly contentious matters.Footnote ¹⁰ In our case, the reason why scribes shifted attention from the Jordan to the Wadi Arnon is, I suggest, twofold. First, in keeping with the rhetorical function already noted, the crossing of the Arnon anticipates the Jordan. This speech, with its counterpart in the framing sections of Deuteronomy, is a kind of eve-of-battle address that aims to boost national morale. The recounting of past triumphs against two Transjordanian kings, Sihon and Og, serves as a demonstration of Yhwh’s power in assisting Israel for the larger campaign in Canaan (3:21).Footnote ¹¹

Yet the success after crossing the Arnon does more than merely foreshadow the victories east of the Jordan. In addition to this rhetorical purpose, there’s a second, polemical reason for the shift. The emphasis on the command “begin” (hāḥēl rāš [lārešet ’et-‘arṣô] in 2:24, 31) reflects a larger ideological concern that prompted scribes to revise history. By including the battles against Sihon and Og among the monumental wars of conquest, and by shifting the boundary from the Jordan to the Arnon, these parts of Moses’s speech elevate the importance of the eastern territories and ascribe to them the status of the Promised Land.

The Transjordan is the setting for the final passage of Deuteronomy, and thus of the Torah. It is there that Moses, in his dying days, ascends Mount Nebo and surveys the land promised to the nation’s patriarchs. Notably, the first region that Yhwh shows him is Gilead, a prominent eastern region:

At this lookout point, Moses meets his death and is buried by Yhwh. A series of competing Pentateuchal texts present his death and burial outside the land as punishment for his sins in the events surrounding the first spy mission (Num. 14:20–25) or alternatively for his wrongdoing in striking the rock (Num. 20:12). These explanations evolved with the Pentateuchal narrative and reflect its shifting emphases. The earliest texts simply locate Moses’s death (at the consummate age of 120 years), along with the place where the deity buries him, in the land of Moab, without identifying either as divine retribution (see Deut. 31:1–6). Indeed, the claim that Moses was buried – by Yhwh himself – in the Transjordan may represent an attempt to validate the presence of communities in the region that affiliated with Israel.Footnote ¹²

The Transjordan in Joshua

The book of Joshua, as a whole, severely undercuts the significance of the Transjordan, directing readers’ attention from the eastern to the western bank. The narrative begins with Yhwh’s directions to Joshua: “Moses, my servant, is dead. Now prepare to pass over this Jordan.” Soon thereafter Joshua sends out spies to reconnoiter Canaan. Later the nation crosses the river, and the ceremonious entrance into Canaan is reported in great detail. Upon setting up camp, the Israelites construct a monument that connects the parting of the Jordan with that of the Red Sea. In this way, the authors build a literary bridge from one event to the other, dissociating all the events “in the wilderness” from those in the Promised Land.

Once the nation has crossed the river, the men perform rites of circumcision, an act described as the repudiation of the Egyptian reproach they had borne in their flesh up to this point. At this time, manna also ceases and the nation celebrates Passover. In keeping with Canaan’s special status, the captain of Yhwh’s (heavenly) armies appears to Joshua on the eve of battle after crossing the Jordan. Finally, after Israel’s first victories, Joshua builds an altar on Mount Ebal and, in keeping with Moses’s exhortation, inscribes the Laws on them.Footnote ¹³

The book presents these and many other momentous events as happening in Canaan, not in the territories of the Transjordanian tribes. Their special character reinforces the Jordan as the border of the Promised Land.Footnote ¹⁴

Like other biblical books, Joshua is neither neat nor simple. It contains a set of strategically placed texts that depart from the focus on Canaan and call attention to the tribes of Israel living beyond the Jordan:

• 1:12–18 – A reminder to Reuben, Gad, and the half tribe of Manasseh to cross over and fight for the other Israelites.

• 4:12–13 – A short notice that these two and a half tribes did cross over armed for battle.

• 12:1–7, 13:7–33, 14:3–4 – References to the lands east of the Jordan that these tribes occupied.

• 22:1–34 – A complex account of the Transjordanian tribes being relieved of their military duty and returning to their wives and children.

• 24:8 – A brief reference to the settlement of the Transjordan by the nation as a whole.

This series of texts was likely added in the final stages of the book’s composition. Most scholars today agree that the earliest editions of Joshua consisted solely of material from chapters 1–12. Without the paragraph in 1:12–15, the notice in 4:12–13, and the revision of chapter 12, these early editions of the book would have completely ignored the eastern territories. As for the second half of the book, the historical review in chapter 23 never refers to the eastern territories. To the contrary, it explicitly names the Jordan as the eastern border:

The following chapter contains a second address from Joshua, and this time the commander retells Israel’s history of conquests by beginning with Israel’s battles against the Amorites on the eastern side of the Jordan:

The two speeches thus present competing views of the nation’s past. While the first ignores the territories east of the Jordan, the second is more expansive in its historical purview.Footnote ¹⁵

The core narratives of Joshua are circumscribed by two frames: an outer one relates to Torah observance for the nation as a whole (1:1–9 and chaps. 23–24), while an inner one treats the issues posed by the eastern tribes and their allegiance to the Torah (1:10–18 and 22:1–34). The book also consists of two equal parts: whereas in the first half all Israel comes together to fight as a united nation, in the second half they disband in order to take possession of their respective tribal territories. The sequence of assembling and dispersing is repeated in chapters 23–24, where the tribes come together one final time to declare the Torah to be their perpetual point of unity, before Joshua sends them back to their respective territories.

Thus, in its final form(s), the book still presents itself as a history of the invasion and occupation of Canaan (i.e., the territory west of the Jordan), yet it widens the pool of protagonists to include the Israelite tribes that reside in the Transjordan. What unites the latter with “all Israel” is affirmed at both ends of the narrative (1:12–18 and 22:1–6) – valorous service for their Cisjordanian kin (“brothers”) and allegiance to the laws of Moses. The former is a “fraternity in arms,” while the latter is loyalty to shared statutes, resembling what is called in German political theory Verfassungspatriotismus (lit. patriotism to the constitution). I will expand on these points in the coming chapters.

Contested Territory

Our survey thus far has focused on the Pentateuch and Joshua, yet, throughout the wider biblical corpus, many texts identify the Transjordan as not only an integral part of Israel’s homeland but also as the site of crucial events in the nation’s history – and in the lives of the patriarch Jacob, the judge Jephthah, and the prophet Elijah, to mention only the most obvious examples.

Competing maps, which exclude the Transjordan from that nation’s sacred homeland, were widely embraced in the Second Temple period.Footnote ¹⁶ For example, Ezekiel’s “Temple Vision” (chaps. 40–48) has expansive portions of the southern Levant as part of Israel’s territory, but when it comes to the eastern border, it draws a line “between the Gilead and the land of Israel, with the Jordan as a boundary … ” (47:18).Footnote ¹⁷ Similarly, the Nehemiah Memoir identifies the prominent Transjordanian leader Tobiah as one who possesses property in the temple at Jerusalem, has many allies (through connubium et commercium) in Judah, and bears a name that reflects reverence of Yhwh. Yet the Memoir also maligns this figure as a foreigner (an Ammonite) who opposes the restoration of “the children of Israel” (Neh. 2:10). From the Hellenistic period, the book of 1 Maccabees portrays Gilead as a home to Jewish communities, even though it is not a hospitable place: after hearing of the Maccabees’ triumphs, “the Gentiles of the Gilead” assault “the Israelites who lived in their territory” (1 Macc. 5:9, emphasis added). In response, one of the brothers, Simon, undertakes a rescue operation and escorts these communities to Judah.Footnote ¹⁸

Also, many of the rabbis denied the sacred status of the Transjordan. Thus, in a commentary on Deuteronomy, Rabbi Simeon excludes the Transjordan from the law of first fruits. The reason is that the law begins, “When you arrive in the land that Yhwh your god is giving you” (Deut. 26:1–2, emphasis added); in the narrative, Israel had yet to cross the Jordan. The Transjordan represents territory that “you conquered by yourself” (see Num. 21:23–35), rather than received from Yhwh as a part of the promise made to the patriarchs (Sifre 299 and 301). His scriptural argument thus draws directly on our texts. Despite a long history of Jews dwelling in the Transjordan, the modern state of Israel, for both political and religious reasons, ultimately did not lay claim to territories in this region.

Hitherto, our study has examined how biblical scribes engaged in war commemoration to address political issues posed by the nation’s neighbors. The battle accounts in Numbers 21 trace Israel’s territorial claims in the Transjordan to the time of Moses, and what prompted the composition of these accounts were, inter alia, disputes with neighboring polities that laid claim to the same territory.Footnote ¹⁹ In keeping with the polemical-apologetic character of these passages, the enemies are consistently depicted as initiating military aggression, which in turn leads to Israelite occupation.Footnote ²⁰

In the remaining chapters of Part II, we explore a different use of war commemoration. Our investigation will show how biblical scribes made a case for the belonging of disputed members of the nation by constructing memories of their exceptional wartime service. While the accounts in Numbers 21 appeal to memories of foreign aggression to argue for the nation’s longstanding territorial claim in the Transjordan, the texts that we are about to study construct war memories to advocate full-fledged membership for the communities that occupy the Transjordan.

Our objective is to discern the various ways these texts construct the bonds of filiation that hold together the communities from both sides of the Jordan. As we shall see, their authors sought to transcend territorial divisions by affirming that the nation is united not only by fraternity but also by fidelity to one deity, to the laws revealed by that deity to one prophet (Moses), and to worship of that deity in one place.

The Narrative of Numbers

In Numbers 21, Israel not only vanquishes the enemies who assault them but also settles in their territories. With respect to Sihon and the Amorites, for example, we are told:

Settlement is also reported for Jazer and its villages (21:31) as well as the realm of King Og of Bashan (21:35). Given that the reader has already been told that Israel took up residence in these Transjordanian towns and villages, the account in Numbers 32 presents three difficulties: First, it does not presuppose that the nation is already living in the region. Second, only two of the twelve tribes wish to settle in this region. Third, their desire to settle there enrages Moses. The battle accounts in chapter 21 depict the settlement as having already taken place; moreover, it was undertaken by the entire nation and didn’t face opposition from Moses.Footnote ¹

To address issues posed by Israelite communities in the Transjordan, the authors of Numbers 32 had no other choice than to tell the fuller story, as it were, of how part of the nation came to possess homes beyond Canaan’s borders. In this new account, Reuben and Gad seek permission to settle in the conquered territories of the Transjordan, yet instead of shirking their duties to the nation, they agree to fight in the vanguard when the Israelites cross the Jordan and invade Canaan.Footnote ²

The detailed itinerary recorded in Numbers 21:10–20 brings the Israelite camp all the way to the vicinity of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho and the place where Moses dies (Deut. 34:1). From here, they can move on to the plains of Moab (Num. 22:1) and to Shittim (Num. 25:1) and then, after the death of Moses, cross the Jordan in order to commence the conquest of Canaan (Josh 2:1, 3:1).

As observed in Chapter 3, the narrative is moving with an ineluctable force toward this final rest stop before Israel crosses the Jordan. One therefore has good reason to conjecture that the narrative’s oldest substratum consists of a basic itinerary connecting Egypt to Canaan with a minimal number of episodes in between. Seen in this way, much of Numbers and Deuteronomy represents a massive yet secondary block of material that has been interpolated, piecemeal, into the older narrative.

The Transjordanian battle stories in chapter 21 and the Balaam material in chapters 22–24, while relatively early texts, were probably not included in this older narrative. Yet even if the battle stories in chapter 21 appear to be supplementary, they are presupposed by chapter 32 and therefore must predate the latter. Most scholars agree that the remaining texts, which separate the battle stories in chapter 21 from the lengthy account in chapter 32, represent either supplements to an independent “Priestly source” (see the discussion later in this chapter) or additions made in the Pentateuch’s final compositional stages.Footnote ³

Composition of Numbers 32

Coming now to the composition of chapter 32, a number of clues indicate that the account has evolved from an older and much smaller core. Provided below is a literal translation of the text, arranged to show the results of my analysis. The indented material is what I identify as supplementary layers of the account, while the nonindented parts in boldface are what I ascribe to an older substratum. Isolated insertions are marked in italics:

According to my analysis, the earliest edition of the account was only a quarter of the size of the present text. Such dramatic growth for a biblical text wouldn’t be surprising, but what evidence is there to justify reconstructing the text as I’ve done?

A still popular approach in biblical studies attributes the remarkable length of this account not to textual growth but to the combination of independent documentary sources. Supporting this approach are a number of ostensible repetitions or doublets. For example, there seem to be two beginnings to the story: the first in verses 1a and 5, and the second in verses 2–4.

In conducting my analysis, I tested this approach and was initially convinced of its merits. I even published a piece arguing that the account is a synthesis of two independent versions.Footnote ⁴ But further analysis has revealed a different composition process: instead of weaving together separate narrative threads, the scribes produced the account by adding lines to a base text. What propelled this activity of supplementation – often referred to using the German term Fortschreibung – was the scribes’ concern 1) to expound upon what they deemed to be the text’s salient points and 2) to correct lines that, in their estimation, might leave the reader with a false impression.

The account begins by setting the context for the tribes’ petition to settle east of the Jordan. The unstated question addressed in the first lines is: What was it about these two tribes in particular that occasioned their petition? Why wouldn’t the other ten tribes have wanted to settle there? In response, the narrator sets forth two historical “facts” that the reader needs to know: 1) the Reubenites and Gadites boasted large herds, and 2) these eastern territories were ideal for cattle.

If this first verse (or at least the first half of it) was part of the original account, it would be difficult to explain why the scribe in the very next verse renames the subject, instead of including the simple formulation “and they said” (a single word in Hebrew and the most common in biblical narratives), as in verse 5. According to the prose style of biblical narratives, the renaming of a subject is repetitive unless the intervening details cause confusion about the subject’s identity. In this section, we were told who the actors are just two lines earlier, and they are still the ones performing the action in the directly preceding line. But if the account had originally begun in verse 2, there would have been no way for a later scribe to compose a new introduction without first identifying the subject, even if it produced an infelicitous repetition with what follows.

Notice that in verse 1a the scribe changes the order of “Reubenites and Gadites.” This order runs contrary to the remainder of the account, yet it conforms to the canonical order of the tribes. The introduction in verse 1a likely belongs to a late, if not the latest, compositional stage. (Given what we observe in other biblical and ancient Near Eastern texts, this assertion is unsurprising.Footnote ⁵) Notice also that the tribes only have cattle in verse 4, whereas they have “a very large number” of cattle in verse 1a.

The Shifting Contexts of the Account

The earlier supplement in verses 2b–4 harmonizes the account with the expectations of Priestly circles. Here, as so often in the Pentateuch, these circles wanted their readers to understand that – in keeping with the theocratic model of governance they promoted – the tribes knew their petition needed to be presented not only to Moses but also to the priest Eleazar and leaders of “the congregation.” The Priestly imprint can be felt not only here but also in Moses’s initial denunciation (vv. 7–14), in his later consent (vv. 20–23), and in his instructions to Eleazar and Joshua (vv. 25–32).

Now, if Priestly circles went to great lengths to bring this account into conformity with their theocratic agenda, it follows that these circles did not draft its earliest iteration. This is a consequential point. There can be no doubt that much of the Pentateuch derives from (Priestly) scribes working in the employ of the temple. They began their work perhaps shortly before the destruction of the Judean kingdom in 587 BCE, but they appear to have flourished during the Persian period, when a new temple assumed a central role in Judah’s governance as an imperial province. One of the earliest products of their literary activity is what scholars have long identified as a brief, yet highly nuanced, narrative of Israel’s early history. This narrative was likely not a supplementary layer but an independent source, which was eventually added to older materials to create the Pentateuch.Footnote ⁶

If the first drafts of our account are not the product of Priestly circles, where would they have originally appeared in the narrative of Numbers? According to my reconstruction, the account begins with two tribes approaching Moses and presenting a petition: “If we have found favor in your sight, let this land be given to your servants for a possession; do not bring us across the Jordan.”Footnote ⁷ To what place are the tribes referring when they speak of “this land”? The additions explicitly name the desired territory because over time it had become necessary to do so: as the account grew, so did the rest of the book, and the massive amount of supplementary material in the preceding ten chapters distanced it from its original setting.

As noted above, what may be an older narrative thread, consisting of a brief travel itinerary, locates Israel in “the plains of Moab on the other side of the Jordan [and] Jericho” (Num. 22:1). This is where Moses dies at the end of Deuteronomy and where the conquest of Canaan will commence in the book of Joshua. The continuation of this travel itinerary specifies the place as Shittim (“And Israel dwelt in Shittim,” Num. 25:1a); this place is not mentioned again until the conquest of Jericho (Josh. 2:1, 3:1). If these lines in Numbers 22:1 and 25:1a are older, then the location would have changed between Numbers 21 and Numbers 32, and we would expect the narrator to have renamed the territory instead of referring simply to “this land.” This observation may indicate that the author of our account didn’t see a problem with linking “this land” to “the plains of Moab on the other side of the Jordan [and] Jericho.” Alternatively, it may indicate that something is missing in our analysis.Footnote ⁸

A possible solution presents itself in Numbers 32:1b: “They looked at the land of Jazer, and at the land of Gilead, and behold the place was a place for cattle.” The last (and likely oldest) reference to Jazer in the wider narrative appears in a brief paragraph at the end of chapter 21, which describes Israel taking up residence “in the land of the Amorites” and Moses sending out a battalion “to spy out Jazer.” In carrying out their mission, the unnamed subjects capture its villages and dispossess the Amorites who were living there (see vv. 31–32). Footnote ⁹ If chapter 32 originally began in verse 1b, the account may have been conceived as the direct sequel to the conquest of Jazer described in chapter 21.

The problem with this suggestion is the presence of what some scholars deem to be older lines from the travel itinerary in 22:1 and 25:1a, yet it’s possible that these lines represent (early) additions that function as literary links to the accounts of Moses’s death and the conquest of Jericho. The statement in 25:1a that “Israel dwelt in Shittim” is in tension with the similar statement in 21:31 that “Israel dwelt in the land of the Amorites.” The matter is further complicated by 22:1, which reports that “the Israelites journeyed, and they camped in the plains of Moab on the other side of the Jordan [and] Jericho.” The first clause is formulated with late (Priestly) language, but without it, Israel would still be dwelling “in the land of the Amorites.” Moreover, in the account of Moses’s death in Deuteronomy 34, what is likely the oldest line (v. 5) describes the location as “the land of Moab,” whereas what many deem to be an editorial line (v. 1) uses the language of Numbers 22:1 (“the plains of Moab” and “Jericho”). Therefore, while Numbers 22:1 and 25:1a may be relatively old, their formulation renders them unreliable as fixed points in any attempt to discern the stratification of the exodus-conquest narrative.Footnote ¹⁰

There’s plenty of room for debate on these matters. The distance separating the tale of the Transjordanian tribes from the conquest accounts in chapter 21, and the tensions between these texts, are problems that face all diachronic approaches. Any reconstruction involves huge blocks of diverse materials spanning the books of Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua, and it’s unlikely that the original threads connecting early episodes in the sources were transmitted for centuries without being altered. The older edition of the tale appears to have been very concise and probably does not belong to a source – or at least not to one of the conventionally demarcated documents (Yahwist, Elohist, etc.). It’s more likely that this older edition was composed as a supplement to the conquest accounts in chapter 21 and stood in close proximity to them before the intervening materials were composed.Footnote ¹¹

Tribes Before Kings

Numbers 32 features many finely nuanced details (especially with respect to geographical details) that we must necessarily pass over in this book. But several are eminently relevant to our interest in the politico-theological dynamics of war commemoration.

In the earlier version, we are not told why the tribes make their petition. The Priestly expansions to the introduction answer that question with the two “facts” that we discussed above (i.e., the country was well suited to cattle, and these tribes had cattle). In making these claims, the scribes drew information from the older edition of the story, which presents the eastern tribes declaring that they will “build sheepfolds for their flocks and towns for their little ones” before they march off to battle for the nation (vv. 16–19). Later, Moses reiterates their declaration when accepting the proposal: “Build towns for your little ones, and folds for your flocks; but do what you have promised” (v. 24).

What might have prompted Priestly scribes to ascribe large herds to the two tribes? At the most basic level, the additions fill a conceptual gap in the text: the tribes’ petition makes better sense now that we know they left Egypt with a lot of cattle. Moreover, the Song of Deborah in the book of Judges refers repeatedly to herds and flocks when it formulates an indictment against the Transjordanian tribes, and this indictment, as we shall see, bears remarkable affinities to the question that Moses asks the tribes in our text.Footnote ¹²

But there is likely more going on here. Without the additions, the account would leave the reader wondering about what motivated the tribes’ petition. Were they trying to shirk their wartime obligations in the same way they turned a deaf ear to Deborah’s call-to-arms? This, indeed, is the first thing Moses asks when he begins his indictment in verse 6. The Priestly scribes effectively exonerated the tribes of this dishonorable intention, first by reframing the petition (vv. 2b–4) and then by prefacing a new line to the introduction (v. 1; drawn perhaps from Deut. 3:19).

We have to take a step back to appreciate the historical fiction: the kings of Israel had conquered territories east of the Jordan, and over time these territories came to be thought of as places where early Israelite communities had once lived.

The Mesha Stele, arguably our most important extrabiblical artifact bearing on the history of the Hebrew Bible, provides invaluable clues for understanding ancient Israel’s political relationship to the Transjordan. Discovered in 1870, the inscribed monument was set up in circa 840 BCE to commemorate the military triumphs and building projects of the Transjordanian ruler Mesha as he enlarged his kingdom of Moab.

In the Bible, Gad is the name of one of Jacob’s twelve sons whose descendants occupied territory in the Transjordan. According to Mesha’s account, however, the people of Gad had dwelt in a territory called Ataroth from time immemorial. Later, Mesha claims, a king of Israel (likely Ahab’s son Jehoram) came and laid claim to this territory, fortifying its chief city Ataroth (Khirbet Ataruz), but, with the help of his national deity, Mesha captured the city and “killed all the warriors of the city for the welfare of the god Chemosh and Moab.” (Recently, an altar was discovered at Ataroth bearing an inscription that may bear on these events.) On the basis of Mesha’s account, it seems likely that the territory and people of Gad came to be identified with Israel in the ninth century, when rulers of the Omride dynasty conquered the region and fortified Ataroth.Footnote ¹³

The book of Samuel dates Israel’s first appearance in the Transjordan to the inaugural moment of Saul’s reign, more than a century before the reigns of Omri and Ahab. An Ammonite king had attacked the Transjordanian town of Jabesh-Gilead. Desperate for help, the inhabitants of this town seek military assistance from their Israelite neighbors across the Jordan, and in response Saul ventures across the river to rescue them (1 Samuel 11). Read on its own, the account suggests that these inhabitants were not Israelites.Footnote ¹⁴

A biblical manuscript discovered at Qumran, as well as the retelling of the events by Josephus, reveal how later scribes attempted to reconcile the account in Samuel with the book of Judges, which describes the razing of the city. In the “new and improved” versions of the story, Saul embarks on a mission to save “the Israelites who lived beyond the Jordan.” These Israelites are identified explicitly as members of the tribes of Gad and Reuben, and they flee to Jabesh-Gilead for refuge after the internecine warfare depicted in Judges 21 had depopulated the town.Footnote ¹⁵

The evidence from Qumran presupposes the work of earlier generations to integrate the Transjordanian communities into the nation’s narrative. The ancestral stories in Genesis identify Gad and Reuben as the names of two of Jacob’s twelve sons; as such, they are the ancestors of two tribes, also called Gad and Reuben, that were part of the people of Israel during the exodus. The account in Numbers creates a clever fiction to explain how these tribes came to settle in the Transjordan instead of crossing over the Jordan with the rest of the nation: during the nation’s tenure in Egypt, Gad and Reuben had developed into tribes that possessed large herds, and since the land in the Transjordan was exceptionally suited to cattle, they had petitioned Moses for permission to settle in this territory. With respect to Ataroth, the account claims that the Gadites built this city at the time of the conquest – centuries before the reigns of Israel’s kings.

The Nation’s Avant-Garde

When the Transjordanian tribes respond to Moses in the older version of Numbers 32, they promise to lead the way into battle, serving in the perilous role of the vanguard: “But as for us, we will march as shock troops before the Israelites until we have brought them to their place.”

The vanguard battalion or “avant-garde” conventionally consists of the most skilled, fearless, determined, and loyal units of an army. In many ancient Western Asian armies, leaders were called ālik pani (lit. the one who goes at the front). The title could be borne also by the king and/or a deity (often in personal names), as a reflection of the unmatched martial valor attributed to royal and divine warriors. Vassal kings and their troops frequently were expected to take this position at the front as a way of demonstrating their willingness to die for the suzerain, demanded of them in many vassal treaties.

In our account, the eastern tribes vow to leave their flocks, children, and women behind and cross the Jordan armed for battle (v. 17). The primary purpose of these statements about flocks, children, and women staying behind is neither to address logistical matters nor to gender the battlefield as a space for the performance of manhood.Footnote ¹⁶ That these three groups would not participate in combat goes without saying for the scribes who composed these lines.Footnote ¹⁷ The statements concern rather the motivation for the tribes’ participation: By leaving their flocks and families back in the sheepfolds, houses, and towns of Jazer and Gilead, they demonstrate that they didn’t have their eyes set on the lands and houses they would receive as a reward for their wartime service. Instead of being impelled by a material incentive, they risk their lives out of solidarity with their Cisjordanian kin, who did not yet have properties and houses of their own.Footnote ¹⁸

When they render service during the invasion of Canaan, the eastern tribes do not need to be coerced with the threat of corporal punishment or harsh penalties – the common mechanisms of conscription in the ancient Near East.Footnote ¹⁹ In Joshua 1, where anyone who fails to perform military service is threatened with the death penalty, it is not the officers of the troops who pronounce this judgment, but rather the members of the Transjordanian tribes, who speak for themselves. Collectively, “the Reubenites and the Gadites” express their solidarity, affirming that everyone will bear arms across the Jordan.Footnote ²⁰

A similar objective informs the composition of Joshua 22:1–9, which tells how the eastern tribes collected the reward for their service. As they return to their homes and families, Joshua not only blesses them; he also loads them down with “much wealth, very much livestock, silver, gold, bronze, and iron, as well as a great quantity of clothing” (22:7b–8). By presenting the war spoils as an added bonus rather than as a condition of the pact made with Moses, these texts, as we shall see in Chapter 5, eliminate any basis for assuming that the Transjordanians fought for financial gain, and they make it clear that Joshua formally recognized the Transjordanians as full-fledged members of the nation: they had contributed selflessly to the campaign and hence deserve a handsome share of the booty seized from their own enemies (Josh. 22:8).

Kinship and Command

When dramatically amplifying the account in Numbers 32, the Priestly circles continued to affirm the Transjordanian tribes’ membership among the people of Israel. Yet in making a case for them, they did something surprising: they expanded Moses’s indictment into a lengthy and shrill denunciation of the tribes’ petition.

The older version of the account begins with Reuben and Gad expressing their desire to dwell in the Transjordan. Moses responds to their petition with a single accusatory question: “Shall your brothers go to war while you dwell here?” (v. 6). The narrative continues, in verse 16, with the tribes “drawing near” to Moses and explaining their petition.Footnote ²¹ In the expanded Priestly versions, Moses is enraged by their petition and proceeds to harangue them at great length (vv. 7–15) for “discouraging the people from passing over into the land that Yhwh gave them.”

In his new, lengthy indictment, Moses evokes the pivotal moment in the nation’s past when the spies discouraged the Israelites from entering the land. “And now you, a brood of sinners, have risen in the place of your ancestors, to increase Yhwh’s fierce anger against Israel! If you turn away from following him, he will again abandon them in the wilderness; and you will destroy all this people” (vv. 14–15, emphasis added). The comparison serves a clever rhetorical function. By accusing the two tribes of the same sin that an early generation of Israelites had committed, Moses’s fulminations remove any room for doubt that the Transjordanian communities are descendants of the exodus generation and thus full-fledged members of Israel. Both share culpability with respect to the conquest of Canaan. Whereas a new generation of the nation is poised now to take possession of the land west of the Jordan, these two tribes persist in the sins of a generation that was consigned to death in the wilderness.

Moses’s accusations – both in the older version and in the later Priestly editions – reflect what appear to have been widely shared misgivings toward the Transjordanian tribes (and the various communities represented by these tribes in the narrative).Footnote ²² The scribes who created Numbers 32 addressed this sentiment in their ranks by taking it seriously and having Moses himself share it. Ultimately, however, they undermine it by having the tribes vigorously repudiate Moses’s charges.

The older version of the account never even mentions Yhwh and emphasizes national solidarity. Responding to Moses’s question, the tribes declare that they will not abandon their “brothers” and will serve as a vanguard for the nation. The Priestly expansions assume an ethos of fraternity, yet they highlight a different purpose for fighting: The tribes now serve as a vanguard for Yhwh, and they do so in conformity with Moses’s command. Failure to participate in the war effort constitutes a violation of Mosaic authority.

The Cisjordanian campaign has now been redefined as a holy war. Yhwh conquers “the land” for himself by “driving out his enemies before him.” What was originally an offer of the tribes to fight as the nation’s avant-garde now begins as a command by Moses and ends with a pact obligating these tribes to participate. Military service is no longer a gesture of fraternal solidarity but an act of obedience to Yhwh, with the nation’s deity assuming the place of its members. The Transjordanians now fight as Yhwh’s vanguard.

In his negotiations with Reuben and Gad, Moses stipulates that because they participated in the Cisjordanian campaign, the territories they occupy in the Transjordan will have the status of “possession before Yhwh” and the tribes themselves will be “exempt of obligation to Yhwh and to Israel” (vv. 20–23). The word for “exempt” is nāqî (lit. clean), a technical term that appears elsewhere in contexts of military and civic obligations owed to the state.Footnote ²³ Here, it appears in a context that describes failure to fight “before Yhwh” as “sin” against the deity: “But if you do not do this, you will have sinned against Yhwh – be sure your sin will find you out!” (v. 23).

The account does more than strike a balance between the competing views of the Transjordanians; it also fuses fraternal obligations with the law laid down by Moses: “Your servants shall do as my lord commands” (v. 25), and “whatever Yhwh has spoken to your servants, that we shall do” (v. 31). Fidelity to Mosaic law comes to supplement, rather than supplant, kinship obligations.Footnote ²⁴ What makes Israel a people is a shared sense of kinship, while what unifies them as a nation and guarantees their longevity in their homeland is compliance with the divine commandments.Footnote ²⁵

The authors of our account rediscovered and reaffirmed a basic insight that guides the compositional history of the Pentateuch and Former Prophets: A feeling of fraternity and national belonging frequently fails to provide sufficient motivation for collective action. In any large and diverse community, bonds are easily formed between subgroups, while loyalty to the larger body is more difficult to inspire. (Thus, notice in Num. 16:1 the presence of Reubenites in Korah’s rebellion against Moses’s authority.) The ancient scribes who composed our account were convinced that a common deity, and a common law code that represents the will of that deity, had the capacity to surmount primordial rivalries and provide a broader foundation on which their communities could coalesce into a thriving nation.

Performing Peoplehood

When the communities of Israel and Judah were reconstituting themselves under foreign rule, they rarely had opportunities to take up arms for their native interests. Yet through war commemoration, biblical scribes could continue to tap the potential of armed service as the most basic mode of what I call “performing peoplehood.” To belong to a people, one must fight in their ranks, and it’s the task of war commemoration to identify who rendered this service and sacrifice, as well as who dodged their duties to the nation. This is precisely what the older version of Numbers 32 does.

After empires subjugated the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, new modes of national participation emerged. Among the most basic were communal construction projects, and this fact explains the prominence of building accounts in the Pentateuch (the tabernacle) and Ezra-Nehemiah (the temple and city walls).Footnote ²⁶ Alongside building projects, activities that we might call cultic or religious – worship of Yhwh and fidelity to Mosaic law – became paramount, and in Numbers 32 we can witness how Priestly scribes affirmed this point as they embellished an older war memorial.

Numbers 32, therefore, serves two purposes. The first is the negotiation of belonging via war commemoration. This purpose informs the account’s foundational stratum, which is past- and narrative-oriented. The second purpose, which was introduced in the Priestly reworking of the account, is didactic and normative, with Yhwh and his commandments affirmed as the basis of Israel’s national identity. These two purposes correspond not only to the two basic strata in the composition of Numbers 32 but also to two fundamental stages in the formation of the biblical corpus. They are the subject of more focused attention in the following chapters.

Moses’s Memory in Deuteronomy

As Israel prepares to cross the Jordan in the book of Deuteronomy, Moses recalls the deal he made with the tribes of Reuben and Gad. He claims that he assigned the Transjordanian territories to the two tribes at the time Israel conquered them (as if Numbers 32 stood in immediate proximity to Numbers 21). He says nothing about the dispute with these tribes and neglects to mention his directions to Eleazar, Joshua, and the tribal heads.Footnote ² He also reminds the tribes of their obligation to march as a vanguard for their Israelite kin, not specifically for Yhwh (as in the Priestly editions of Numbers 32):

This paragraph belongs to a section (vv. 12–20) that retells, at length yet with many modifications, the events from Numbers 32. The entire section appears to be a supplement. Notice how the reference to “these two kings” in verses 21–22 forms the direct continuation of verses 8–11 (see also 2:24–3:7). The literary join is severed, however, by the section related to the Transjordanian tribes:

In verse 21 Moses exhorts Joshua to be fearless, beginning with a reference to Sihon and Og: “Your own eyes have seen everything that Yhwh your god has done to these two kings; so Yhwh will do to all the kingdoms into which you are about to cross.” After the lengthy and detailed paragraphs treating the allocation of the Transjordanian lands in verses 12–20, the formulation “these two kings” in verse 21 is too far removed from its antecedent. According to conventional biblical narrative style, we would expect the scribe to have repeated the names “Sihon and Og” after so many verses. Instead, we read “these two kings,” and the reason is likely that this line originally stood in close proximity to verse 8, which it naturally follows.

It seems quite probable, then, that earlier editions of Moses’s speech in Deuteronomy 1–3 commemorated the conquest and settlement in the Transjordan, but had nothing to say about the Transjordanian tribes. If such is the case, the authors of these first iterations of Moses’s speech may not have known Numbers 32, which in turn lends weight to the impression that the remaining references to the Transjordanian tribes are late additions to their contexts (e.g., Deut. 4:41–43).

At the other end of the book, Moses mentions the Transjordan as he exhorts the nation to remain faithful to the covenant they made with Yhwh. The conquest and settlement of this region is the final of three moments (or stages) in the nation’s past when Yhwh performed wondrous feats (the other two being the exodus from Egypt and the wilderness wanderings). If Yhwh has hitherto blessed Israel and granted it victory over its enemies, the nation’s future prosperity requires fidelity to the covenant:

The distribution of the eastern territories among the Transjordanian tribes is memorialized here as both an important chapter in the nation’s history and concrete historical proof of the covenant’s validity. From this point until the final episode in Joshua 22, the NTT will add to Reuben and Gad the half-tribe of Manasseh, which was supplied secondarily to Numbers 32:33–42. Likewise, it will continue to cite Moses’s orders to these tribes to cross the Jordan and participate in battle.

Affirming Allegiance in Joshua

The composition of the NTT has dramatically shaped the contours of the book of Joshua. In the opening chapter of this book, Joshua addresses the nation on the eve of the invasion, and as he does, he reminds the Transjordanian tribes of their obligation to pass over the Jordan and fight in the vanguard of Israel (in keeping with the older version of Numbers 32). Here, Moses’s successor reiterates the instructions he delivered in Deuteronomy 3:18–20, making only slight changes:

As so often in the NTT, the eastern tribes affirm their commitment to obey the commandments issued by Moses and Joshua. Now, however, they announce that the death penalty awaits anyone who defies their orders:

This lengthy episode of the NTT is easy to identify as a supplement to the book’s older introduction in 1:10–11.Footnote ⁴ Its presence at the very beginning of the book witnesses to the importance of the Transjordanian issue. It also obviates the need to interpolate multiple references to the eastern tribes throughout the narrative. Even so, several chapters later the narrator confirms that they crossed the Jordan in the vanguard of the nation. The second line underscores the large number of warriors who took part, yet instead of marching as a vanguard for the nation, they cross over “before Yhwh,” as in the Priestly edition of Numbers 32:

The short passage may be the work of two different scribes, since the second line (v. 13), when read independently of the preceding line (v. 12), could be interpreted as referring to the number of Israelite troops in general. However, the formulations “shock troops” and “before Yhwh” appear frequently in reference specifically to the eastern tribes in our texts, and therefore it’s more likely that the second line was composed at the same time as, or after, the first.

The Division of the Land

At its core, the book of Joshua commemorates “the conquest” as the wars Joshua conducted in Canaan, i.e., in territories on the western side of the Jordan. As such, this work points up the absence of a corresponding book that celebrates the nation’s triumphs in the Transjordan. To compensate for this absence, later scribes expanded the book with a number of prominent passages, such as the ones we discussed in the preceding section. We find other important supplements in the numerical accounts found in chapters 12–14.

In keeping with the polemic against kingship in this work, the scribes drafted two registers of vanquished monarchs, the first relating to the conquests of Moses in the Transjordan (12:1–6) and the second to the conquests of Joshua in the Cisjordan (12:7–24). While the second lists the names of thirty-one kings (explicitly tallied in the final line, v. 24b), the first consists of only two: Sihon and Og. These enumerations presuppose and systematize all the battles reported in the narrative up to this point, and an earlier edition of the book may have terminated here. We are told in 12:7 that Joshua divided the conquered territories in the Cisjordan among “the tribes of Israel,” and the formulation of the verse leaves the impression that its author did not have the other accounts of tribal allotments contained in the following chapters. Moreover, it seems reasonable to assume that a different scribe added the first list (recording the Transjordanian conquests) at a later point: 12:7 leaves the impression that all “the tribes of Israel” settled in the Cisjordan (see already 11:23); the first list ends, however, by reporting that “Moses, the servant of Yhwh, gave [the land] to the Reubenites, Gadites, and half-tribe of Manasseh as their possession” (v. 6).Footnote ⁵

The latter half of Joshua, beginning in chapter 13, recounts the division of the land among the nation’s twelve tribes. The narrator goes to great lengths to clarify that the conquered land was being divided solely among nine and a half tribes, since Moses had already assigned territories to two and a half tribes on the east side of the Jordan:

The remaining twenty-five verses of chapter 13 describe precisely what lands the two-and-a-half tribes inherited collectively and then separately.

The first lines of chapter 14 form what appears to be an older introduction to the following tribal registers, and it appears to have been expanded with a reminder that two and a half tribes had already received their territories from Moses. Notice how the italicized portion severs the sentence that frames it:

Aside from sporadic (secondary) references throughout the remaining registers, the next time we hear about the eastern tribes is in chapter 22, the final episode in the NTT. The account tells how these tribes, after serving alongside the Cisjordanian Israelites in battle, provoke the latter to rise up in arms against them. The casus belli is a massive altar that they had built near the Jordan. Deeming the construction to be “treachery” and potentially rivaling Yhwh’s tabernacle, “the Israelites” mobilize for military action, planning to lay waste the Transjordanian territories. Because of its length and importance, this episode merits more attention.

Honoring Wartime Service

Joshua 22 describes little action, while devoting a lot of space to verbal exchanges. In this respect, the authors adopted the same narrative strategy as employed in Numbers 32. In each case, representatives of Israel begin with lengthy indictments that appeal to key moments in the nation’s past.Footnote ⁷

The account begins inauspiciously with the nation’ s leader summoning the eastern tribes for the purpose of discharging them to their homes across the Jordan. As he does, he pays tribute to their exemplary wartime contributions during the conquest, commending them for their obedience and allegiance:

According to Joshua’s evaluation, the tribes have fulfilled their military obligations during the conquest of Canaan. In the opening chapter of the book, he reminded them of Moses’s commands, and here he commends them for both heeding those orders and fulfilling their duty to their brethren. As they now prepare to return to their homes across the Jordan, Joshua enjoins them to continue to heed the charge they had received from Moses, which has been reformulated in Deuteronomistic diction: They must love Yhwh their god, walk in all his ways, keep his commandments, and serve him with heart and soul. The profusion of these tropes affirms devotion to Yhwh and the Torah as the foundation of Israel’s national identity, especially for them as members of communities residing beyond the nation’s borders. What’s notable is how the address connects this theme of law to kinship: the Transjordanians demonstrated their fidelity to Yhwh’s law by contributing to a war effort for their Cisjordanian “brothers.”

Before departing and leaving “the Israelites” in the land of Canaan, the eastern tribes receive unexpected and rich rewards for their service:

The first versions of this account likely concluded with this joyous farewell.Footnote ⁸ Providing a beautiful example of biblical war commemoration, the authors of the NTT have called attention here, one last time, to the service rendered by the eastern tribes during the conquest of Canaan.

From Celebration to Crisis

The lengthy continuation (22:10–34) is easy to recognize as a later composition. While verses 1–9 are loaded with the lexicon of Deuteronomy, this second part has a pronounced Priestly imprimatur and portrays a dramatic shift from celebration to crisis.

On their way home, the eastern tribes build an altar by the Jordan. Its construction provokes outrage among the Israelites, who prepare to wage war against them:

Gathering at the holy city of Shiloh, the Israelites decide first to dispatch emissaries to the Transjordan. Just like Moses in the first episode of the NTT (Num. 32), the delegation doesn’t wait for an explanation and launches an elaborate excoriation that appeals to the nation’s past:

When the accused are finally allowed to speak, they protest even more vigorously than they did in Numbers 32, insisting that they have, once again, been misunderstood. Instead of a place for sacrifices that would compete with Yhwh’s one true altar, they constructed this replica to serve as a memorial witnessing to future generations:

As in Numbers 32, the remonstration of the eastern tribes absolves them of any wrongdoing in the eyes of their accusers. The delegation responds by declaring that they now know that Yhwh is in their midst and that these tribes had, in fact, “saved the Israelites” – not from their Canaanite foes, as these tribes had done before, but from their own god, who was about to punish the nation:

The emissaries then return to “the Israelites in Canaan,” and after hearing their report, the Israelites relinquish their plans for punitive action against the land occupied by the tribes:

In the end, a civil war is avoided, but the reader is left wondering: What exactly is the relationship between the Israelites and the Transjordanian tribes?

Nation Versus Territory

The first thing to notice about this final episode in the NTT is that it insinuates that the Transjordan does not belong to Israel’s god and is (ritually) unclean. In the first section of the chapter, which celebrates the Transjordanians’ contributions, the territory of the eastern tribes is designated as the land of their “holding” (’aḥuzzāh; see vv. 4, 9). This technical term refers to territory they receive from Yhwh as an award for their military service, as reiterated throughout Numbers 32. In contradistinction to these texts, Phinehas asserts in this polemical account that if the eastern tribes consider the land they “hold” to be “unclean/defiled” (ṭāmē’), they should cross the Jordan and take up residence in “the land of Yhwh’s own holding, where the tabernacle of Yhwh dwells, and acquire holdings among us” (v. 19, emphasis added; cf. Num. 32:30).

At the beginning of the account, we are told that the altar stood “opposite the land of Canaan, in the region of the Jordan, across from the Israelites” (v. 11). Similarly, when the tribes explain their motivation for building an altar near the Jordan, they mention the fear of discrimination and exclusion for future generations: “In time to come your children might say to our children, ‘What have you to do with Yhwh, the god of Israel? For Yhwh has made the Jordan a boundary between you and us, O Reubenites and Gadites!’” (vv. 24–25). We learn in the conclusion that the Israelites were preparing “to ravage the land in which the Reubenites and Gadites dwelt” (v. 33, emphasis added).Footnote ⁹

From these and similar statements, we see how the account distinguishes between the country east of the Jordan, which may be just as unclean as other foreign lands, on the one hand, and the communities living in that country who belong to the people of Israel, on the other hand.Footnote ¹⁰ The nation is therefore larger than, and transcends, its territorial borders.

Although the Transjordanians are distinguished from the Israelites in this account, their offenses have direct ramifications for the welfare of the nation as a whole. In setting forth their charges, Phinehas and the tribal chiefs compare the sin in building the altar to the transgressions of Peor (Num. 25). Aside from reminding the reader of the debacle that occurred in what became the territory of Reuben, the point seems to be that the sin of one member brings punishment upon all members. As noted with respect to Moses’s accusations in Numbers 32, the comparison does more than simply inculpate the Transjordanians; it identifies them as full-fledged members of the nation. Israelites in the Cisjordan must concern themselves with the actions of these Transjordanian communities (who are not called “Israelites”) because they have direct implications for their own well-being: “If you rebel against Yhwh today, he will be angry with the entire congregation of Israel tomorrow” (v. 18).

A similar point is made by the intrabook reference to the sin of Achan after the battle of Jericho: “Did not Achan ben Zerah break faith in the matter of the devoted things, and wrath fall upon the whole congregation of Israel? He did not perish alone for his iniquity!” (v. 20). The account of Achan’s transgressions in Joshua 7 is a tale of collective responsibility, the punishment of the entire community for the sin of one of its members. As the sociologist Émile Durkheim observed, the problems presented by collective punishment pertain ultimately to larger questions of belonging, and they have extraordinary pedagogical potential inasmuch as they provoke reflection on “the ties that bind” and the mutual obligations that shape a community’s identity. In the various ways societies confront these problems, they express competing ideals of communal solidarity and social cohesion.Footnote ¹¹ The case of Achan dovetails with the larger concerns in this account raised by the Transjordanians’ relationship to the Cisjordanians. By asserting that their actions will bring judgment on all Israel, the emissaries identify the eastern tribes as integral parts of the nation.Footnote ¹²

With respect to the altar itself, the eastern tribes repeatedly insist that they did not build it to be used for actual sacrifices or offerings – although their statement in verse 27 is confusing. As a replica of Israel’s one and only divinely sanctioned altar that stood before the tabernacle, it was to serve as a monument reminding future generations that the communities on the eastern side of the Jordan “have a portion in Yhwh.”

The account not only witnesses to a conflict over the status of the populations in the Transjordan, and to the existence of groups in the Cisjordan who argued that Yhwh made the Jordan a boundary to the land of Israel. It also shows that some factions in this dispute (such as the authors of our text) appealed to Yhwh veneration as the basis for this unity. Such veneration, our account argues, must honor the one divinely sanctioned altar, which was part of the tabernacle before being erected in Jerusalem. The eastern tribes had thus built a memorial in the likeness of the nation’s physical point of unity.

One Yhwh, One Israel

Our text belongs to a program of national unification and cult centralization that produced the foundational creed for Israel’s corporate identity: “Hear O Israel, Yhwh is our god, Yhwh is one!” (Deut. 6:4). By proclaiming the unity of the various Yhwhs worshiped in diverse communities, this groundbreaking declaration laid the theological and cult-historical cornerstone for efforts to transcend political and territorial differences in favor of national unity: One Yhwh, one Israel.Footnote ¹³

The same goes for the identification of other deities with Yhwh. Abundant archeological evidence reveals that the cults of El, Elyon, Shaddai, and other deities were more deeply rooted in the Transjordan than that of Yhwh. The composition histories of the Balaam account, the Elijah cycle, and other biblical texts witness to a redactional process by which these deities came to be identified with Yhwh, with their names now being understood as alternative designations for this deity.Footnote ¹⁴

In past scholarship, the unification of Yhwh worship and the identification of other deities with Yhwh has, for the most part, been treated as a preexilic, Iron Age phenomena. However, this theological-political project continued to be pertinent in the postexilic period, when Jerusalem competed with communities in Samaria, the Transjordan, and elsewhere. In Joshua 22, the Transjordanians finish their retort by affirming their allegiance to the one altar of “Yhwh, our god.” In the final line of the account, they name the altar “Witness,” because “it is a witness between us that Yhwh is God” (v. 34). The altar here represents not only fidelity to the nation’s one god but also cultic unity. We saw how the first part of the chapter, where Joshua celebrates the contributions of the eastern tribes, emphasizes love for Yhwh and his commandments. By contrast, the second part introduces a crisis as a way of championing the cause of priests in Jerusalem, for whom worship at Yhwh’s one altar was the condicio sine qua non of Torah observance.

In his Memoir from the mid-fifth century BCE, Nehemiah reports that the family of a prominent Transjordanian figure named Tobiah had not only intermarried with priests in Jerusalem but also possessed a pied-à-terre in the temple precincts there (see esp. Neh. 13:4–9). On the basis of this text, some scholars claim that Tobiah – whose name expresses devotion to Yhwh – may have worshiped at Jerusalem and that he recognized the altar there to be the only authorized one. If so, he would have adhered to the priestly expectations expressed in the second half of Joshua 22.Footnote ¹⁵

It’s noteworthy that this Transjordanian figure is Nehemiah’s archnemesis. (When Nehemiah arrives in Jerusalem, the first thing he does is expel Tobiah from the temple precincts.) In the Judah-centric program promoted by the Nehemiah Memoir, religious devotion to Yhwh has little meaning in and of itself; what’s more important is that the people of Judah develop a sense of kinship and practice the special obligations that ensue from it. In Chapter 6, we conclude Part II by considering the role of kinship in relation to law and narrative.

From State Diplomacy to National Belonging

The themes of fraternity and wartime service, which we discovered in the substratum of the NTT, run hand in glove throughout a long history of social-political discourse extending from antiquity to contemporary times.Footnote ³ A paradigmatic case is found in 1 Maccabees, which cites a letter that Jonathan (the Judean high priest and military commander who succeeded his father Judas) sends to the Spartans requesting their military assistance. Rather than formulating his request directly, Jonathan claims to be interested merely in renewing, after many years, the old “friendship and alliance” (philia kai symmachia) and “family ties/fraternity” (adelphotetos) between the Judeans and their brothers, the Spartans. He refers to an earlier letter, from the end of the fourth century BCE, sent by the Spartan king Arius to Jerusalem, apparently also petitioning for military assistance:

In response, the Spartans send a letter in which they claim to have researched and discovered in the written record that indeed “the Spartans and the Judeans are brothers (adelphoi) and of the family of Abraham (ek genous Abraam).”Footnote ⁴ The correspondence differs from earlier agreements with Rome in which “the assembly” (plēthos) of the Jews becomes “friends and allies” (symmachoi kai philoi) of the Romans, without saying anything about brotherhood (see 1 Macc. 8:17–32).Footnote ⁵

Though most likely fictive, the Spartan correspondence superbly illustrates a typical scenario of statecraft: 1) one party faces a military threat and needs the assistance of another; 2) the political exigencies lead to an alliance; 3) and the alliance directly fosters fraternity between the two parties as they construct – with the help of careful research – a narrative of their shared past and heritage.

In his commentary on these letters, Jonathan Goldstein compares the statement that the Spartans share property with the Judeans – and hence are implicitly willing to contribute their resources to the Judean war effort – to two biblical texts referring to shared resources and fraternity.Footnote ⁶ In 1 Kings 22, a king of Israel urges Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, to go to war with him against the Arameans in order to take back Ramoth-Gilead, a strategic site in the Transjordan. In response, Jehoshaphat affirms, “I am as you are. My people are as your people. My horses are your horses” (v. 4). Similarly, in 2 Kings 3, King Jehoram mobilizes his troops to reassert Israelite hegemony over the Transjordanian kingdom of Moab. He sends Jehoshaphat a letter, asking him to join him on his campaign, to which the Judean king responds once again: “I will go: I am as you are. My people are as your people. My horses are as your horses” (v. 7). These declarations play on the double meaning of “people,” which in Hebrew, as in many other languages, can bear the meaning of not only population or subjects but also troops or nation in arms.

Other texts use the language of unity. For example, the Hittite ruler Muršili II (1343–1295 BCE) writes to Talmišarruma of Aleppo, “May all of us together and our house be one [gabbani u bītni lū ištēn]!” Most often, such declarations of oneness are found in the context of preparations for a joint military operation.Footnote ⁷ Terms of fraternity and oneness belong to the vernacular of ancient international diplomacy. One of the most consistent features of the Akkadian treaty tradition is the expectation that partners will participate in each other’s war efforts and come to each other’s defense. The treaties and official correspondence are suffused with the rhetoric of “brotherhood” (aḫḫūtu) and “close friendship” (rā’īmūtu).Footnote ⁸ Thus, when the Hittite king Hattušili III (1267–1237 BCE) writes to his Kassite ally Kadašman-Enlil II of Babylon, he refers, as does Jonathan in 1 Maccabees, to a past history of friendship and fraternity: “When your father and I established close friendship and became brothers, we spoke thus: ‘We are brothers: We should be the enemy of one who is an enemy to anyone of us, a friend to the one who is a friend of anyone of us.’” One should not dismiss this talk of brotherhood as mere rhetoric. A letter from Šaušgamuwa, the king of Amurru, to Ammittamru II, king of Ugarit (1260–1235 BCE), asserts, “My brother, see, we, you and I, are brothers, sons of one and the same man; brothers we are!” Šaušgamuwa would have likely protested any etic distinction between “constructed” kinship and “real” consanguinity.

Fraternity between two separate polities/peoples brings with it obligations and a moral imperative, just as it does within a political community. The obligations differ only in degree, not in quality. In both cases, they are understood to derive from a kinship that long precedes the moment in which a contribution or action is called for. This explains why treaties are understood to reaffirm bonds that are already long-standing. Moreover, the ratification of international treaties in the ancient world was often accompanied by blood rites, commensality, and intermarriage, which otherwise characterize familial/national bonds.Footnote ⁹

Throughout the biblical corpus, we can study how scribes applied standard diplomatic parlance of states to their project of creating a form of peoplehood that is capable of withstanding the loss of statehood. The actors are no longer kings and diplomats but rather groups and communities within a political community. In forging this new concept of peoplehood, the biblical scribes drew heavily on official diplomatic language between kings. Thus, the story of Ruth uses language that is much the same as King Jehoshaphat’s formal declarations cited above. Establishing a point of departure for the narrative, Ruth proclaims to her mother-in-law:

Using the rhetoric of vassalage, the Moabite protagonist makes a pledge to join the people of her mother-in-law. As in the book of Genesis, the story of Ruth directs attention away from rulers and diplomacy to humble, quotidian matters in the private lives of families and widows. It portrays how personal relationships built on ḥesed (generosity, hospitality, or loving kindness) redound to the strength of the entire nation.Footnote ¹¹

The biblical writers developed the principles of kinship and national belonging in sundry and impressive ways. Thus, what the authors of Genesis achieve through narrative (creating a family from what were originally unrelated clans), the authors of the Holiness and Deuteronomic codes express through divine command: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself – I am Yhwh!” (Lev. 19:18).

In the book of Joshua, Israel is a united people in arms, with a common history that precedes military action. Canaan, on the other hand, is inhabited by numerous city-states ruled by monarchs; with their professional armies, they form coalitions with other kings solely for the purpose of fighting Israel. This polarity – Canaanite states versus the Israelite nation – must be borne in mind when interpreting the NTT as a whole, which repeatedly presents the eastern tribes affirming their primordial fraternity with the people of Israel as they prepare for war against the kings of Canaan.Footnote ¹²

Constitutional Patriotism

The authors of the NTT addressed long-standing issues of belonging posed by the Transjordanian communities by commemorating their service on the front lines, and in so doing, they synthesized narrative, kinship, and law – the three defining features of the national identity articulated throughout the biblical corpus. The story told by these scribes (narrative) depicts Transjordanians fighting for their Cisjordanian brethren (kinship) in keeping with the Mosaic commandment (law). In the framework of their impressive narrative, fidelity to the law doesn’t supplant fraternal solidarity; it supplements it.

The tension in the NTT between fraternity/kinship, on the one hand, and fidelity to (divine) law, on the other, brings to mind the notion of constitutional patriotism (Verfassungspatriotismus), which the political scientist Dolf Sternberger and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas formulated in the aftermath of the terror perpetrated by the Third Reich. According to this postnationalistic conception of citizenship, what must unite citizens of a state is their allegiance to a collectively ratified constitution, not culture, language, descent, kinship, or ethnicity. It’s the constitution, not a primordial ethnic community, that is the object of identification, affections, and obligations.

Even though Sternberger formulated the concept in 1979, in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of the new West German constitution, the underlying notion can be found at work already in other times and places. As Sternberger himself pointed out, both Switzerland and the United States are ethnically diverse states (the former with four official languages) that celebrate, in annual civic rituals, the signing of formal declarations. (In the United States, it’s the Declaration of Independence of 1776, and in Switzerland the Bundesbrief of 1291.) Habermas traces the origins of this concept beyond the social contract theories of Hobbes and Rousseau back to Aristotle’s republican thought, without acknowledging that the concept is treated extensively in the Hebrew Bible.Footnote ¹³

Constitutional patriotism, however, has serious limitations as an alternative to a historical or cultural basis of identification. Josef Joffe, publisher-editor of Die Zeit, observes that a legal document can hardly “deliver a reason for attachment to a particular country, let alone obligation to that state.” Although Sternberger points to the example of the United States, American identity has commonly appealed to a collective experience in the past – liberation from monarchic oppression – to foster a sense of solidarity and mutual obligations (on this point, see the discussion of Whitaker’s war sermon in Part III). “Constitutional patriotism is the interchangeable loyalty to rules that can be demanded by every liberal constitutional state. Affection, however, is the answer to the question: Why am I living under this law and not another?”Footnote ¹⁴

Joffe’s observations with respect to history are perceptive. The law means little if it is not embedded in a shared past that the members of the community create through a collaborative effort of political imagination. Law requires a story; nomos needs narrative. Hence the title of Rogers Smith’s superb study Stories of Peoplehood.Footnote ¹⁵ A people needs a past, and especially stories about that past. Without narration, there is no nation.

How Does a Text Become Sacred?

While the biblical scribes developed, with staggering sophistication, the notion of fidelity to a body of written law, they appear to have realized what the citizens of many countries today are still learning – namely, that when a constitution is not accompanied by a sense of kinship, it’s empty and ineffective, and that the best way to foster a sense of kinship is through a narrative that preserves and honors the diverse stories of its members.

If it’s difficult for a modern democratic constitution to inspire its citizens’ affection and devotion, as Joffe pointed out, how much more so for a declaration of the singular deeds of a dead monarch or defunct dynasty? Consider the epilogue to the famous Code of Hammurabi:

Although Hammurabi’s laws are majestic in their formulation, and although they champion ideals of social justice, they were completely forgotten until modern historians rediscovered them among the ruins of ancient societies. Why so? They fell into oblivion because, like so many other monarchic display inscriptions from the ancient Near East, they are all about the king and his unparalleled achievements and status. The laws are embedded in a narrative, but that narrative is all about royal power. It’s not the story of a larger people, as we find in the Bible. The audience it addresses is the community of (present and future) kings, not a national community.

Steven Grosby notes that this monarchic text, like so many others of its kind, “exists today as an objective symbolic configuration … . It is not ‘animated’ by being constantly ‘reactivated’ in the minds of a number of individuals … . It is not ‘alive’ by being part of the shared ‘mental environment’ of each of many individuals.”Footnote ¹⁷ Even though Hammurabi’s laws were exceptional in the ancient world for their wide reception and their potential for “activation,” Grosby’s observations about this text’s inability to awaken and strengthen a corporate consciousness are to the point. Without being anchored in a people’s common story, the laws failed to create, let alone sustain, a reading public that claimed fidelity to them and placed them at the center of its collective life.

But what about the countless cuneiform and hieroglyphic texts from the ancient Near East that claim to contain the very words of the gods or that were once deemed to be sacred themselves? Our knowledge of these texts today is due solely to the valiant efforts of archeologists to excavate them from layers of destruction and of philologists to decipher the dead languages in which they are written. Why is that so?

Reviewing a scholarly publication in the Wall Street Journal, Sarah Ruden notes that what really matters is not a text’s claim to be holy but the its ability to convince a reading community that it is indeed holy:

If a text manages to win a community’s broad assent to its own claim to be holy, to contain the very “Word of God,” and if the members of that community make the text the center of their familial and collective lives even in the absence of a king or state authority that ensures such broad and robust assent, then there must be something in those holy words that the members of the community deem relevant to their own concerns. And indeed the kinds of stories, laws, proverbs, prophecies, psalms, laments, and love poetry that we find in the biblical corpus bear directly on diverse matters of both communal and individual life.

One would be hard pressed to find a more dramatic illustration of “the broad assent that the text can win for its holiness” than the account in Nehemiah 8–10. After defeat and destruction, the inhabitants of Judah (“all the people”) come together and express their longing for “the book of the law of Moses.” Later, the nation’s story is recounted in one of the longest prayers in the Bible, and, in response to the past portrayed in that prayer, all members of the community “join their kin” in a covenant to follow Yhwh’s commandments. In these scenes, there is no king who looms above the crowd – only a scribe who has devoted himself to studying Yhwh’s law and teaching it to the nation (see Ezra 7:10).Footnote ¹⁹

A Normative Past

Another question that has to be considered is authority. Hammurabi’s laws are not legally binding or absolute; rather, they are one piece of a larger royal performance of power. By contrast, biblical law and its supporting narrative are about the activation of a national community. What must ultimately prevail, according to the dominant political theology articulated in our biblical texts, is the divine will as expressed in laws revealed to the nation (not the king) after it had been liberated from tyranny. Without memories of that liberation, generated and sustained by the collective imagination, the law loses it plausibility and authority. Owing to this intuition, biblical law is transmitted and interpreted in the framework of a narrative of national liberation, in contrast to the legal corpora collected and displayed by Mesopotamian kings.

Stretching from the creation of the world in Genesis to the destruction of Jerusalem in Kings, the biblical narrative establishes the veracity of the Torah’s claims about itself – that the nation will suffer defeat and the loss of its homeland if it fails to abide by the Torah’s instructions and implement its vision of a flourishing society. However, the narrative’s raison d’être cannot be reduced to an attempt to construct a “normative past.”Footnote ²⁰ Its purpose is more ambitious – namely, to foster a sense of kinship and solidarity among the nation’s members and to inspire affection for, and loyalty to, a god who liberated and blessed them with a homeland.

Beginning with the stories of two kingdoms that were once one, scribes, working across a span of centuries, created a narrative that now begins with the story of a family that evolved into a nation. That narrative existed and evolved for generations before it came to serve as a framework for Yhwh’s instructions to the nation in the form of divine laws. Even if these laws are not coeval with the surrounding narrative, Yhwh is central to the latter, which, in its final forms, tells the story of a long and intimate relationship between him and his people. Antecedents to this narrative may have been nontheological, but the formation of the narrative, evolving from the combination and synthesis of older works, presupposes Yhwh’s perspective.

As the covenant between Yhwh and Israel becomes ever more central to this narrative, the deity develops a more robust personality. This personality is on display from the very first chapters of Genesis, which portray Yhwh struggling with his creation in a series of trials and errors. He eventually decides to take a new route, working through an aged couple to bring a people into existence. History becomes the story of the relationship between this nation and its deity, and that relationship is conceived of as a love affair: Yhwh is the husband, Israel his wife, and the covenant their marriage contract. Hosea presents the restoration of this relationship after a divorce. The couple reunites, and this reunion is accompanied by a change in Yhwh’s heart: he declares his intention to take her to a place of solitude and pursue her with tenderness. “Therefore, I will now allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her … . There she shall respond as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt” (Hos. 2:14–15).

Here and throughout the prophets, a future is imagined in which the nation and Yhwh return to the early, innocent, happy days of their life together. Those days exist only in the minds of a community that imagines them, and inasmuch as the past is mythic, then the return to it is nothing less than the beginning.Footnote ²¹