The Space Between
Why “In the Wilderness”? That is a fundamental question when thinking about the biblical story. Recall that Jewish time began with the call of God to Abram to leave his land, his birthplace, and his father’s house and travel “to the land I will show you” (Gen. 12:1). Seven times in Genesis, God promises the land to Abraham, once to Isaac, and three times to Jacob. Yet it is a consummation that seems almost endlessly to be delayed.
Abraham does indeed leave his land, his birthplace, and his father’s house and arrives in the land of Canaan. It is natural to assume that this is the end of this particular story, but it proves to be only the beginning. No sooner does he arrive than there is a famine in the land and he has to leave and go to Egypt (Gen. 12:10). There is another famine in the days of Isaac, forcing him too to leave, this time to stay among the Philistines in Gerar (Gen. 26:1). Jacob has to leave home not once but twice, once for fear of Esau’s violent reprisal for the loss of his blessing, a second time due to famine and the desire to be reunited with his long-lost son Joseph in Egypt. There he dies.
What then has happened to the promise of the land? As if to reassure us, Genesis draws to a close with two confident predictions. Jacob, about to die, tells Joseph, “God shall be with you and bring you back to the land of your fathers” (Gen. 48:21). Joseph, before he dies, tells his brothers, “God will surely come to your aid and bring you up out of this land to the land He promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Gen. 50:24).
Yet it does not happen – not immediately. As Exodus begins, far from being brought back to the land, the Israelites find themselves enslaved. God calls on Moses to lead the people out, which he does, to the accompaniment of signs and wonders. Yet the return, which should have taken no more than a few weeks, becomes – in the middle of the book of Numbers – extended to forty years, so that the people who left Egypt were not the people who entered the Promised Land, with only two exceptions, Joshua and Caleb. Why the long delay? Why did the road to the holy land have to pass through Egypt, and through forty-two stopping places on the way back? Why is there so much wilderness in space and time in the story of Israel’s beginnings?
To understand the answer, it is helpful to turn to the work of two anthropologists, Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. A key concept in their work is the idea of liminal space, the place that is neither here nor there, neither starting point nor destination, but the space between. That is what the wilderness was. It was not Egypt, not Israel, but the no-man’s-land between them. Liminal space is important not for what it contains, nor how large it is, but rather, because of what happens there. It is the place of transformation.
Arnold van Gennep introduced the term in his classic work, The Rites of Passage.1Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
In it he argued that societies develop rituals to mark the transition from one state to the next – from childhood to adulthood, for example, or from being single to being married. They involve three stages. The first is separation, a symbolic break with the past. The last is incorporation, re-entering society with a new identity. Between the two is the crucial stage of transition when, having cast off one identity but not yet donned another, people are remade, refashioned, reborn.
Van Gennep used the term liminal, from the Latin word for “threshold,” to describe this transitional state when you are in a kind of no-man’s-land between the old and the new. That is what the wilderness signifies for Israel: liminal space between slavery and freedom, past and future, exile and return, Egypt and the Promised Land. The desert is the space that makes transition and transformation possible. It is a no-man’s-land. It has no settled population, no cities, no civilisational order. There the Israelites, alone with God and with one another, could cast off one identity and assume another. There they could be reborn, no longer slaves to Pharaoh, but instead servants of God, summoned to become “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6).
This analysis helps us understand certain details of the narrative in the book of Exodus. We now see the significance of the Israelites’ daubing of the doorposts with blood (Ex. 12:7). Recall that “liminal” means “threshold,” and passing through a door on your way to a new life is often an essential element of transition rituals, a symbolic farewell.
Likewise the division of the Red Sea. The division of one thing into two, through which something or someone passes, is a symbolic enactment of transition, as it was for Abraham in the Covenant between the Pieces (Gen. 15:10–21) when God told him about his children’s future exile and enslavement. Abraham divided animals, God divided the sea, but it was the walk between the two halves that signalled the rite of passage, the existential change between one mode of being and another. Both the daubing of the doorpost and the journey through the sea were separation rituals – bidding farewell to a past before entering liminal space.
The book of Deuteronomy, on the other hand, is about incorporation. It is, essentially, a book of instructions as to how the Israelites should live as a nation in the holy land and as an actor on the stage of history. The central theme of Numbers is the middle stage, transition, which involves a journey that is less geographical than existential. Those who left Egypt had to become different kinds of people before they could enter the land. They had to cast off the mindset of slavery and become free.
One of the key messages of Numbers, delivered through an agonising set of stories about complaints, rebellions, and failures of nerve, is to educate us to understand how long and hard a journey that is. In the final analysis, as shown in the story of the spies, it turned out to be too hard, too demanding, to be the work of a single generation. It was not those who left Egypt who found the strength to face freedom without fear, but their children, who were born in the desert and who – unlike their parents – had never developed the mindset of slaves.
Victor Turner adds one significant element to van Gennep’s analysis.2Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969); Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974).
He draws a distinction between society and communitas. Society is always marked by structure and hierarchy. Some have power, some do not. There are classes, castes, ranks, orders, and other gradations of status and honour. Communitas is different, and it is this that makes the experience of liminal space vivid and transformative. In the desert, there are no hierarchies. Instead, there is “an intense comradeship and egalitarianism. Secular distinctions of rank and status disappear or are homogenised.”3Turner, The Ritual Process, 95.
People cast together in the no-man’s-land of the desert experience the “essential and generic human bond.”4Ibid., 97.
That is what he means by communitas, a rare and special state in which, for a brief but memorable period, everyone is equal.
No sooner have we seen this than we understand one of the critical axes of tension throughout the book. On the one hand, the wilderness was the supreme bonding experience between the people and God. They were close – closer than humans came to God before or since. They ate His manna, “bread from heaven” (Ex. 16:4). They drank, often miraculously, from water He provided. His Sanctuary was in the middle of the camp. His presence was tangible. The people were surrounded by His clouds of glory. The tribes were equidistant from the place of His presence. They had a unique insight into one of the Torah’s most revolutionary ideas: the equal dignity of all under the sovereignty of God.
But there were limits. The people needed structure. Without it, they were capable of making a Golden Calf. The book of Numbers describes many hierarchies. There were the princes of the tribes who took the census and brought offerings at the inauguration of the Sanctuary. There were the seventy elders who helped Moses with the burden of leadership. There were the Levites who carried the Sanctuary and its sacred objects. There were the priests who officiated at its service, and the high priest, Aaron, Moses’ brother. There were the spies, and so on. That is why a recurring theme of Numbers is the nature of, and challenges to, leadership in the context of the intense togetherness – the communitas – of the wilderness.
Which then is to prevail, the egalitarianism of community or the hierarchy of society? We hear two quite different approaches in the book. One occurs when Moses gives voice to a pure egalitarianism. Eldad and Medad begin prophesying within the camp, an event that Joshua sees as a threat to Moses’ position. “Are you jealous on my account?” says Moses. “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets” (Num. 11:29).
Yet when a similar sentiment is expressed by Korah – “All the congregation are holy and the Lord is in their midst. Why then do you set yourselves above the congregation?” (Num. 16:3) – Moses takes it as a threat to his leadership and crushes the rebellion. There is a significant difference between these two contexts, as we will see. Between them, there is no contradiction. Yet liminal space is where the possibilities and limits of equality are tested.
Evidently there are limits to communitas – a society of equals who share responsibility for the fate of the nation as a whole. Yet the tension remains and will do so throughout the whole of the biblical era. We see this most clearly in the deep ambivalence of Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, about the institution of monarchy. On the one hand stands the statement of Gideon when offered the crown: “I will not rule over you, nor will my son rule over you; the Lord will rule over you” (Judges 8:23). On the other is the closing sentence of the book of Judges: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).
Ideally, Israel would have no king other than God Himself.5Hence the significance of the line in the Avinu Malkeinu prayer: “Our father, our king, we have no other king but You.”
Realistically, however, it had to settle for the checks and balances of the division of power between king, priest, and prophet: the king to lead the nation politically and militarily, the priest to connect it to a holiness that transcends history, and the prophet to criticise priests and kings when they become corrupt. We will encounter this division of powers in the fifth and last of the Mosaic books (Deut. 17). Numbers sets out the problem to which Deuteronomy will provide an answer.
We can, however, now see the significance of the way Numbers begins. Immediately after the census we read of how the twelve tribes were encamped, each equidistant from the Sanctuary. Each tribe was different, but (with the exception of the Levites) all were equal. They ate the same food, they drank the same water. None yet had lands of their own, for the desert has no owners. There was no economic or territorial conflict between them. Each, in chapter 7, brought the same offering at the dedication of the Tabernacle.
Each of these accounts, with their emphasis on equality, fits Turner’s description of communitas, the ideal state that people experience in liminal space when they have left the past (Egypt) behind but have not yet reached their future destination (the Promised Land). They had not yet begun building a society with all the inequalities to which society gives rise. For the moment, they were together, their tents forming a perfect square with the Sanctuary at its centre.
The poignancy of the book of Numbers lies in the fact that this communitas lasted so briefly. The serene mood of its beginning would soon be shattered by quarrel after quarrel, rebellion after rebellion, in a series of disruptions that would cost an entire generation their chance of entering the land.
Yet a positive dimension of that memory remained. The wilderness years were the time when the distance between heaven and earth was never shorter. In those arduous yet memorable years the people went through their rite of passage from slavery to freedom to become a nation unlike any other, forged in fire, formed in covenant, a tiny people that had greatness thrust upon it, sometimes seemingly against its will.
That is why the journey to the Promised Land had to pass through the experience of slavery in Egypt, so that the people would never forget what it feels like to lose their freedom. It is also why it had to pass through the liminal space of the wilderness, so that they could undergo the transformation from a nation of slaves to a people ready to shoulder the responsibilities of freedom.
We now realise that Abraham’s journey, continued by his children, was never meant to be a physical one only, from one place to another, from here to there. It was a spiritual and psychological one also, one so profound that it would affect not only those generations but their offspring for all time, inscribed in their memories, engraved on their hearts. Abraham’s children were to become the people who learned through their own hard experience that “liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.”6Thomas Bender, introduction to Democracy in America, abr. ed., by Alexis de Tocqueville, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1954).
The wilderness was the liminal space where Israel, “the holy nation,” was born.