Leviticus and Numbers

9 Numbers 25 and Beyond

9 Numbers 25 and Beyond Phinehas and Other Detestable Practice(r)s Anthony Rees This Music: Beginning with Ezra In Ezra 9, having returned to Jerusalem from captivity in Babylon and finding that the “holy seed ha[d] mixed itself with the peoples of the lands” (Ezra 9:1), Ezra is appalled (9:4). His response takes the form of a lamenting prayer (vv. 6-15), which is really a sermon, addressing what he perceived as faithlessness on the part of the returned exiles and those who had not been deported. Ezra 9 three times uses the word to‘ebhah, “abomination,” or as the NIV renders it, “detestable practices.” Ezra makes clear his view on the state of Judahite society and institutes a series of social reforms to purify the nation once more. The story we read in Numbers 25, which tells of an Israelite man and a Midianite woman speared through on the occasion of their marital embrace, is in effect an illustration of Ezra’s reform. It is clear through the way the story is told who we are to believe the detestable practice(r)s are. While Ezra’s words, as translated by the NIV Translation Committee, are the inspiration for the title of this paper, it should be clear that I am interested in reading against the colonial ideology brought to bear. The paper itself is guided by a story told by an Australian aboriginal elder. Indeed, it is a story told to him by his mother. The story is brutal, bringing together three images of abuse and violence committed against Australian aboriginal people in the first half of the nineteenth century. These three images will be put in dialogue with three biblical texts with which there are clear resonances. This methodological practice is not without precedent, or problems. In some respects, it is contrapuntal, a musical term borrowed by Edward Said (Said 1994: 59) to describe the practice of reading two texts together, from both sides 163 of the colonial collision. This practice is consistently championed in biblical studies by R. S. Sugirtharajah (Sugirtharajah 2012: 143). Of course, using the Bible in such a way presents its own unique problems, it being in some way the great legitimating tool of colonialism while itself being a witness to the experience of colonization. The Ezra text already cited gives expression to this dilemma: Jerusalem has been razed by one empire, and another empire appoints Ezra to rebuild. The citizens of Jerusalem continue to have foreign rule imposed on them, Babylonian rule having given way to Persian, whose own practices are said to be detestable. This imposition of foreign rule is, in some sense, the very definition of colonialism. In contrapuntal music, different musical lines are woven together, with themes developed side by side. Melodies appear time and time again, perhaps disguised by different timbres or registers, perhaps played by a different instrument; but as the music progresses, the melodies converge: after all, contrapuntal music—in the manner of its great master, J. S. Bach—is consonantal, the tension of dissonance always and only temporary, a part of the building of drama that will be resolved in the end. Perhaps, then, contrapuntal may be an inappropriate term for reading colonial texts. Are we necessarily reading for consonance? For resolution? Of course, these questions assume the consonance that ultimately characterizes contrapuntal music, but such an assumption need not be made. Indeed, the word itself lends itself to the expression of dissonance, in that one “point” (puntus) is pitted “against” (contra) another. A Cross-Textual Approach and the Reading “I” Perhaps it may be better to describe this approach as “cross-textual,” a term favored by Archie Lee, who articulates the goal of such an exercise as “each text . . . illuminat[ing] the other” (Lee 1999a: 199). That is, each text brings new ways of understanding the underlying complexity that gives rise to each; reading two texts together allows each to (in)form how we read the other. Rather than working in counterpoint, we look at one text from the vantage of another, before leaping (crossing) the divide and peering back to where we jumped from. So in this model, the texts continue to exist independently from each other, even as they come together in the creation of a new (con)text. Lee’s project is to read Asia (a social “text”) with/against the Bible (Lee 1999: 161). The present essay reads a variety of biblical texts with/against the...