Noach: Searching for Meaning in the Post-Diluvian Genealogy
I set out to write an article on a small question but ended up writing one about how to find meaning in the sections of Torah which appear to be meaningless, as explained by Rambam and Shadal.
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Noach: Searching for Meaning in the Post-Diluvian Genealogy
How to Approach Seemingly “Useless” Passages in Torah
If I asked you which part of this week’s parashah the Rambam identifies as one of the “mysteries of the Torah,” you might assume he is referring to the decree of the Flood, or to the covenant made with Noach and the survivors, or to the rainbow, or to the cryptic narrative of the Tower of Bavel. Nope! Rambam (Moreh 3:50) writes:
There are things that belong to the “mysteries of the Torah” which have caused many people to stumble which therefore ought to be explained. These are the stories recounted in the Torah the telling of which is thought to be useless, as for instance, the account of the branching out of tribes from Noach and of their names and dwelling places; likewise, the sons of Seir ha’Chori, the account of the kings that reigned in the land of Edom, and the like.
The “stumbling” caused by such apparently “useless” passages is epitomized by Menashe, as Rambam continues:
You know the saying of [the Sages] that the wicked [King] Menashe occupied his vile council with nothing but criticism of such passages. They say: “He used to sit there and interpret Scripture with blasphemous aggados (homiletics). Thus he said: “Moshe did not need to write, ‘and the sister of Lotan was Timna’ (ibid. 36:22)” and so on.
Menashe’s erroneous view is the antithesis of the principle of Torah min ha’Shamayim (Torah from Heaven), so much so that the Rambam incorporates it into his formulation of Torah min ha’Shamayim in Perek Chelek:
In the eyes of the Sages, there was no greater heretic and rebel as Menashe, for he believed that in the Torah there are grain and chaff and that these accounts and narratives have no value at all, and that Moshe said them on his own. And this is the meaning of the statement “the Torah is not from heaven” which the Sages understand to refer to one who asserts that the whole Torah in its entirety is from Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu, except for a particular verse which (he maintains) was not uttered by Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu, but by Moshe himself, and concerning such a person it is said, “For he has despised the word of Hashem” - may He be exalted over the speech of the heretics - but rather, within every letter of the Torah there are wisdoms and wonders for him to whom God has given understanding.
Torah min ha’Shamayim is not merely a belief in the Divine origin of Torah but also in its Divine character. Just as every aspect of the natural world uniformly manifests chochmas Hashem (Divine wisdom), from the largest galaxy to the smallest particle, the same is true in Torah. It is in this respect that the Rambam writes:
there is no difference between, “the sons of Cham were Cush and Mitzrayim and Put and Canaan” (Bereishis 10:6) or “his wife’s name was Meheitavel, the daughter of Matred” (ibid. 36:39) and “I am Hashem” (Shemos 20:2) or “Hear, O Israel, Hashem is our God, Hashem is One” (Devarim 6:4) – all is from the mouth of the Almighty and all of the Torah of Hashem is perfect, pure, holy, and true.
Before offering his explanations of these “secrets of Torah” in the Moreh ha’Nevuchim, Rambam translates Torah min ha’Shamayim into a heuristic for finding meaning in these seemingly “useless” Torah passages:
Know that all the stories you will find mentioned in the Torah occur there for a necessary Torah-related reason: either to affirm a true idea which is one of the foundations of the Torah, or to rectify some action so that a mutual wrongdoing and aggression should not occur between men.
Torah is not a history book. It is a regimen designed to promote tikun ha’nefesh (improvement of the intellect) and tikun ha’guf (improvement of individual character traits and interpersonal relations; see Moreh ha’Nevuchim 3:27 for the Rambam’s extensive treatment of this concept). Everything in the Torah serves one of these two purposes – even passages such as these, which ostensibly have nothing to do with such lofty objectives.
Application to Noach’s Genealogy: Rambam and Shadal
Bereishis Chapter 10 (referred to by some as “the begats”) chronicles the genealogy of Noach and his offspring: “These are the descendants of the sons of Noach: Shem, Cham, and Yaphes; sons were born to them after the flood” (Bereishis 10:1). The names of seventy descendants are listed, and much ink has been spilled in an effort to correlate these names to the nations we know about today (see Abravanel ibid. for a comprehensive attempt).
But Rambam doesn’t care about such questions. He’s interested in how this list either reinforces one of the foundations of Torah or promotes righteous conduct in society. In that vein, he offers the following explanation:
As it is a pillar of the Torah that the world was created in time, that at first a single individual of the human species – namely, Adam – was created, and that approximately two thousand five hundred years elapsed between Adam and Moshe Rabbeinu, men, if they were given this information only, would rapidly have begun to have doubts in those times. For people were to be found scattered up to the ends of the whole earth; there were different tribes and very dissimilar languages. These doubts were put to an end through an exposition of the genealogy of all of them and of their branching by mentioning the names of the famous men among them – such and such, the son of such and such – and their ages and by giving the facts regarding their habitats and the reason that necessitated their being scattered up to the ends of the earth and their languages being different in spite of their having at first dwelt in one place and having had all of them one language, a fact that was a necessary consequence of their being the children of a single man.
In other words, if the Torah had only taught its doctrines about Maaseh Bereishis (creation ex nihilo) and the creation of man and left it at that, people would be perplexed as to how all these different nations and languages developed and spread to the far corners of the earth. This perplexity might lead them to question, doubt, or even deny the Torah’s account of creation. For this reason, Hashem saw fit to include Noach’s complete family tree. This list has functioned as a silent bulwark against the denial of Maaseh Bereishis for millennia. [1]
Shadal (Bereishis 10:1) offers a different explanation– one which might be characterized as “more Maimonidean than Maimonides.” He begins by acknowledging the limitations of our knowledge and then states his theory:
We cannot know what the traditions of the peoples were concerning these matters, and what their corrupted beliefs were, so we cannot fully understand the benefit to be derived from the detailed recounting of these descendants. We do know, however, that many of the ancients said that their ancestors were born out of their soil by means of a miracle performed by one god or another, or that they were born of the gods themselves. The intention of the Torah here is to refute these tales and to establish the true belief that we are all the children of one man, and all the work of one God.
According to Shadal, this genealogy is part of the Torah’s polemic against avodah zarah (idolatry) and its mythos.
Shadal’s polemical approach makes its first appearance in his commentary on the story of Noach’s drunkenness in the previous chapter. Like most commentators, Shadal maintains that “the Torah sought to teach of the evils which result from wine, for Noah, who was the most just and upright man among his contemporaries, met with [moral] stumbling-blocks because of drunkenness” (ibid. 9:20). Shadal then cites two theories from his students:
Perhaps the Torah hastens to mention this because the Gentiles worshipped the god Bacchus as the god of wine, and so the Torah sought to make it known that Noah was only a man like any other (my student, R. Judah Aryeh Osimo). Another reason may be that the Egyptians said that wine was the invention of the devil (R. Abraham Hai Mainster).
Shadal offers a similar explanation of the verses about Nimrod (ibid. 10:8):
According to Petavius, Nimrod is Belus, the first king of Assyria. It seems likely that he is mentioned here because he was worshipped as a god. We find that Assyria is called “the land of Nimrod” (Micah 5:5); the Tower of Babel to this day is called after Nimrod, Birs Nimrud. In that tower, or temple, was the chief worship of the god Bel … Perhaps the nations under his rule called him “Bel,” i.e. ba’al, “lord” or “master,” while those not under his rule called him “Mored” (“rebel”) … Because Bel was quite a famous god, the Torah tells us that he was only a “mighty hunter.”
Some of these polemics have nothing to do with avodah zarah, but are geared towards cultural ends:
Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu wanted to let Israel know that the Philistines, near whom they were about to dwell, were descended from the children of Egypt, so that the Israelites would separate themselves from them and their ways; for there is no doubt that the Israelites in the time of Moses hated the Egyptians, under whom they had been enslaved.
Rambam and Shadal enable us to glimpse how these “dry” sections of Torah might have been read by those for whom they were intended. For them, this genealogy would be rich with revolutionary meaning.
A Lesson in Humility
After explaining these passages in the Moreh, Rambam expresses a yearning for lost anthropological knowledge:
To sum up: just as, according to what I have told you [in earlier chapters], the doctrines of the Sabians (a culture of ancient idolators) are remote from us today, the chronicles of those times are likewise hidden from us today. Hence, if we knew them and were cognizant of the events that happened in those days, we would know in detail the reasons for many things mentioned in the Torah.
This is the same message with which Shadal opened his commentary on our chapter: “We cannot know what the traditions of the peoples were concerning these matters, and what their corrupted beliefs were, so we cannot fully understand the benefit to be derived from the detailed recounting of these descendants.”
To my mind, Rambam and Shadal are highlighting an important takeaway: although every single verse in the Torah contains wisdom and meaning, this doesn’t mean that the wisdom and meaning are for us. The Torah was written to guide human beings throughout every epoch of history. Mankind has needed different forms of guidance at different stages of its development. For example, Hashem gave us specific mitzvos to uproot specific avodah zarah practices and beliefs, such as the prohibitions against consulting an ove and yidoni or shaving our peos (sideburns). These mitzvos were crafted with wisdom and served their purpose at an earlier stage of humanity, and although they are still halachically binding for us today, we were not their intended audience. The same is true of these narrative portions of the Torah: they were included in the Torah for specific polemical reasons – some of which we can know, and some which are only known to God – and it is quite possible that they have served their purpose. We must have the humility to recognize that the Torah was written for a broader audience than ourselves.
[1] Modern readers are faced with a similar perplexity: How do we reconcile the Torah’s account of the generations from Adam to Noach and Noach to Avraham with modern anthropology? This is an important question for a different time.
What do you think of the approaches advocated by Rambam and Shadal? What do you think of my take-away? What meaning have you found in the post-diluvian genealogy?
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Very much enjoyed. Relatedly, R Avraham ibn Ezra, if memory serves, often says about a word's meaning that it was known to the generation that received the Torah. I believe that in creation and flood stories of other cultures the gods motivations were far from noble (eg world created from a dead god's cadaver and that the gods wanted to have humans to do their work for them and that the flood was initiated because the humans were making too much noise, again, if memory serves), as opposed to in the Torah where these events occur in the service of virtue and justice. To bring it full circle, Shadal, when commenting on Lemechs children's names, says: Adah bore, etc. In my opinion, the reason that the text records the names of the men who invented some of the trades is that these men were worshipped as gods in those times, but the Holy One, blessed is He, wanted to let Israel know that they were only men, and to identify their parents. . .
Tubal-Cain. Apparently identical with Vulcan [the Roman god of metalworking]. It should be noted that kinaya in Syriac and Arabic denotes a goldsmith or silversmith, or a craftsman in iron. Also, tu pal in Persian means a piece of gold, silver, or copper; this led Gesenius to say that this name is of Persian origin. Whatever the case may be, there is no doubt that many vain things were said in ancient times about these persons, and the Torah refined these stories of their impure elements.
. . . Naamah. She, too, apparently, was worshipped. Perhaps she is identical with Venus, in which case her name [lit “pleasant,” “lovely”] would be descriptive of her.
All the best and Shabbat Shalom