What Studying the Modern-Day Bedouin Reveals about the Ancient Israelites

Since the 19th century, many Westerners have claimed that today’s Arab nomads preserve aspects of the lifestyle of the ancient Hebrews who, led by Moses, traipsed through the Sinai desert on their way to the promised land. In Bedouin Culture in the Bible, Clinton Bailey, who has spent decades living with and studying Bedouin in Israel and elsewhere, presents an updated version of this thesis. Edward Greenstein writes in his review:

Bailey . . . suggests that the Israelites depicted in the Bible may have been Bedouin or of nomadic background. To be sure, one is impressed by the many ways in which the biblical milieu seems to be of a piece with that of the Bedouin. [He] describes and explains Bedouin practices, values, and sensibilities with unusual empathy. Although some of his explanations of ancient Hebrew manners and customs from the present-day Bedouin experience sound outlandish but plausible, others are either erroneous or improbable.

The concept of vengeance is an example of the former. In one of the most intriguing suggestions in the book, Bailey interprets the biblical law of talion (“an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”) not as a license to get even but rather as a constraint on excess: you may take an eye for an eye, but no more than that.

When Deuteronomy 6:9 and 11:20 enjoin the Israelites to “write [the divine teachings] on the doorposts of [their] houses and on [their] gates,” following a well-attested ancient Near Eastern method of proclamation, the educational purpose is plain: “recite [the divine teachings] to your children” (6:7) and “teach them to your children” (11:19). Bailey, however, goes far afield in comparing the Bedouin practice of daubing sacrificial blood on the entrance to their tents for the sake of divine blessing. The correspondence is superficial: writing on a doorpost here, daubing blood on a tent-flap there. A more obvious parallel to the Bedouin custom is the ritual of the Hebrews smearing the blood of the paschal lamb on the doorposts of their houses during the tenth plague in Egypt (Exodus 12:21–23), where the explicit purpose is to ward off the spiritual being enacting the plague.

Read more at Biblical Archaeology Review

More about: Ancient Israel, Bedouin, Hebrew Bible

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society