Concerning the Levite Massacres

27 April 2004
By Jim Weller

While reading through the five books of the Torah in their entireties for the first time, several episodes of extreme retributive violence by early Israelites troubled me deeply, and I have wondered what to make of them ever since.

The first of these is found in Genesis, chapter 34. Here, sometime in the 19th century BCE, Jacob, who is destined to be the progenitor of the nation of Israel, has arrived with his semi-nomadic family group at the city of Shechem, en route from his long sojourn in the land of Laban to his father Isaac’s home territory in Canaan. Shechem, the son of the ruler of this place, meets a daughter of Jacob, Dinah, and desires her, abducts and rapes her. Shechem’s father Hamor the Hivite, on his son’s behalf, pleads with Jacob to give Dinah in marriage, and for a treaty of intermarriage, kinship, and alliance among the two peoples.

Jacob’s sons (who will become the patriarchs of the tribes of Israel), outraged at the defilement of their sister Dinah, agree duplicitously to this treaty, on condition that Hamor and Shechem and every male of their city should be circumcised, like the males of Jacob’s tribe. Then, after Shechem’s people have complied and their men and boys are defenseless, recuperating from their wounds, Jacob’s sons Levi and Simeon attack them, murder all the males of the city, and retreat, taking Dinah with them. Following this, Jacob’s other sons plunder and pillage the place, taking all the women and children captive.

Jacob later chastises his sons Levi and Simeon for their savagery, but they are unrepentant, protesting, “Should our sister be treated like a whore?” Finally, on his deathbed, Jacob curses the lawlessness and relentless wrath of Levi and Simeon and condemns them to territorial disinheritance, vowing, “I will divide them in Jacob, Scatter them in Israel.”

Many generations later in the Hebrew Scriptures’ historical narrative, the brothers Moses and Aaron, descendants of Jacob’s son Levi, led the tribes of Israel out of enslavement in Egypt. Aaron and his progeny were divinely ordained to become the priests of the nation of Israel, and the other Levites (Levi’s descendants), similarly elected, became the functionaries, protectors, and preservers of the Aaronid priesthood. The Levites did not receive divinely granted apportionments of the Promised Land, as the other tribes did. Instead, they were assigned to “forty-eight towns, with their pasture” to occupy, “from the holdings of the Israelites.” Thus, they were indeed scattered throughout Israel forevermore.

I encountered the second story of mass murder and mayhem, one even more disturbing than the first, in the book of Exodus. It is part of the story of the “golden calf.” Here, in the 13th century BCE, some three months after having gone forth from the land of Egypt, the emigrating multitudes of the people of Israel had arrived in the wilderness of Sinai, and encamped below the mountain of God. God had appeared with thunder and lightning, in a cloud of smoke and fire before all the assembled people, and had commanded Moses at length, announcing the Covenant and giving them the Law including the “Ten Commandments.” Moses had ceremonially read aloud all that God had said, and the people had promised to observe it all faithfully. Moses had been summoned by God to ascend the mountain to receive on behalf of the Israelites “the stone tablets with the teachings and commandments which I have inscribed to instruct them.” He remained gone on the mountain forty days and forty nights.

In chapter 32, toward the end of Moses’ absence while meeting with God on the mountain, Moses’ second in command, his brother Aaron, was confronted with restive popular sentiment and discontented demands for “a god who shall go before us” – in other words, a religious object to be celebrated and to which sacrifices might be made. In response, Aaron collected gold rings from them, melted them and cast them in a mold in the form of a calf. The people exclaimed, “This is your God, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” Aaron built an altar before the golden idol, declaring, “Tomorrow shall be a festival of the LORD!” On the morning of the forty-first day of Moses’ absence, “the people offered up burnt offerings and brought sacrifices of well-being;” then they feasted and danced.

Observing this idolatry, God was offended. He said to Moses, “I see that this is a stiffnecked people,” and declared his angry intention to destroy them all. But Moses pleaded to God for mercy, and God “renounced the punishment He had planned to bring upon His people.” Upon his return down the mountain bearing the two tablets of the Covenant inscribed with God’s writing, Moses, enraged, smashed the tablets, destroyed the golden calf, ground it into powder, dissolved it in water, and made the Israelites drink it. At this point in the narrative, the truly horrifying episode ensued:

"Moses saw that the people were out of control – since Aaron had let them get out of control – so that they were a menace to any who might oppose them. Moses stood up in the gate of the camp and said, 'Whoever is for the LORD, come here!' And all the Levites rallied to him. He said to them, 'Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: Each of you put sword on thigh, go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay brother, neighbor and kin.' The Levites did as Moses had bidden; and some three thousand of the people fell that day. And Moses said, 'Dedicate yourselves to the LORD this day – for each of you has been against son and brother – that He may bestow a blessing upon you today.'"

I must say that reading this second instance, I experienced a strong sense of cognitive dissonance; and, even though I have discovered some scholarly explanations for the existence of this passage in the Hebrew Scriptures, I still wonder at its incongruity with what I think of as the generally humanitarian ethos of the Mosaic Law.

In the first instance, though I was uncomfortable with it, I accepted provisionally the Genesis story of Simeon’s and Levi’s slaughter at Shechem, and the sacking of the city by Jacob’s sons, as another of the innumerable instances of intertribal atrocity in the ancient world – and the rest of world history, for that matter. Moreover, in the context of the Hebrew traditions, that crime against humanity was condemned righteously by Jacob (though inconsistently, since he only penalized Levi and Simeon); and, perhaps significantly, it precedes historically God’s Commandments proscribing murder and prescribing justice toward strangers. On the other hand, since God later commanded the Israelites, under Moses’ leadership, to attack, destroy, and dispossess all the settlements of the people living in the “Promised Land,” which included Shechem, I supposed the precedent massacre could have been seen retrospectively as justified according to Scripture.

The most striking difference between the former episode of wanton killing and the later one at Mount Sinai, therefore, is that the Levitical massacre in Exodus 32 is carried out for purposes of political domination among the Israelites, not for filial vengeance against strangers. It is an internecine mass murder, a willful and indiscriminate act of domestic terrorism by a cadre of armed zealots on the part of a repressive, autocratic leader. Worse, the terrorists are lionized and blessed by their dictator for their bloody, relentless dedication to the letter of the Law, against “son and brother.”

It has been suggested that a political justification of this incident may be made on the principle that times of extreme social peril require extreme countermeasures, reasoning that the gory purge by Moses and the Levites prevented God’s even more destructive punishment. In the narrative context, this is plainly not so. God had already relented in deference to Moses’ argument for the preservation of Israel; and he reserved a penance for the people’s sacramental inconstancy anyway, keeping them wandering desolately in the wilderness forty years in consequence of it before finally delivering them to the Promised Land. Moreover, God imposed immediate punishment upon the Israelites as something of a logical consequence according to Exodus 32:35, which I shall mention shortly.

What are the explanations I found? The first is that chapters 32 and 33 of Exodus are attributed to a Levitical scribe known as E, a distinctively different source than that of the preceding chapters 25-31, and also distinct from that containing the Ten Commandments, chapter 20, the source of both of which is called P. The “Covenant Code,” chapters 21-23, is also due to E. Most of chapter 34, including another version of the Ten Commandments (as well as Genesis 34, the story of the Shechem massacre and plunder) are from a source known as J. Only the P source, in its version of the Ten Commandments (an historically later text than J and E), contains the familiar injunction, “You shall not murder” and the language of humanitarian mercy and relational honor.

The dominant scholarly paradigm regarding the primary source texts of which the five books of the Torah are comprised is referred to as the “Documentary Hypothesis.” I found extensive explanations of its application to my concerns in two books having to do with Biblical source criticism by Richard Elliott Friedman and Anthony R. Ceresko. According to these scholars, four primary textual sources have been distinguished, all of which contain separate written accounts and compilations, made at distinct times and locations and for diverse purposes, of older, mainly oral, communal traditions. It is to be recognized that, like all legendary material, these narratives and customs must certainly have been extensively “morphed” in retelling down through the generations, and adapted and exaggerated for literary purposes when finally set in sacred text. Nevertheless, it is an acknowledged truism that legends generally have some basis in historical experience as well.

The Yahwist or J source is considered the first written, dating from about 960-930 BCE. The author was most likely a Levitical functionary of the administration of King Solomon, second ruler of the monarchy of the House of David, of the tribe of Judah in its capital city of Jerusalem. In his age, the territory of the united tribes of Israel had its greatest extent and the power of the nation was at its height. The Yahwist text preserved the account of the devastation six to eight centuries earlier by the sons of Jacob, of Shechem, the city which became the original seat of the Davidic monarchy in about 1000 BCE.

The Elohist or E source is dated around 900-850 BCE. and is regarded as having been created as a parallel religious text for the northern kingdom of Israel, perhaps in Shechem, re-established as its capital following Israel’s separation from the southern kingdom of Judah after Solomon’s death and the dissolution of the Davidic union. The author of E may have been a prophetic Levite, alienated from the Aaronid priesthood of Jerusalem by the previous accession to power of Solomon’s chief priest Zadok, and the concomitant expulsion of Abiathar, chief of the priests of the northern holy city of Shiloh.

The episode of the golden calf seems to have been included in the E text in order to prefigure events in the history of the northern kingdom of Israel around 900 BCE, when its first king, Jeroboam, erected symbolic figures of two golden bulls in his new religious sanctuaries at the cities of Dan and Beth-El. Jeroboam then spoke (according to a later recounting of the event in the Deuteronomic history 1 Kings) the same words E later put in the mouths of Aaron’s impatient followers who idolized the golden calf at Sinai: “This is your God, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” According to the history, Jeroboam further “made cult places and appointed priests from the ranks of the people who were not of Levite descent,” which “proved to be a cause of guilt, for the people went to worship” at these new shrines.

The consequence of the “golden calf” offense, as alluded in the E text, is divine retribution, and a promise of unspecified future penance. Moses again pleads with God for forgiveness, and offers himself as a penitential sacrifice for the waywardness of his people. God again forbears, but warns, “When I make an accounting, I will bring them to account for their sins,” and delivers his immediate punishment (though perhaps it was a result of Moses having polluted the Israelite’s drinking water with heavy metals): “the LORD sent a plague upon the people, for what they did with the calf that Aaron made.”

Thus, we have a plausible explanation for the inclusion in this text of the Levite’s murderous rampage at Sinai. It may well have preserved a traditional account of an ancient historical or legendary incident, but E’s use of it here seems didactic. It seems intended as a contemporary prophetic assertion of the prerogatives of Levitical authority in the northern kingdom of Israel, directed against both the Aaronid priesthood of Judah and the upstart non-Levite priests appointed by King Jeroboam. This is Friedman’s sense of the matter, and several Bible commentaries tend to concur.

The Levites evidently had attained power, privilege, and perhaps despotic authority among the Israelites even before Moses’ time, in Egypt. The Encyclopaedia Judaica explains as well, “The story of the golden calf emphasizes the loyalty of the tribe to Moses. In this affair, too, as in that of Dinah, the Levites stand out as men of zeal who do not spare brother, friend or kin.”

As Ceresko illustrates, the J and E sources, respectively, represented the southern (Judean) and northern (Israelite) versions of the religious and historical narratives of their related peoples, in which ancient oral traditions were retold, revised, and reinterpreted. The P and D sources were subsequent, chiefly juridical formulations embodying competing sectarian ideologies and belonging, respectively, to 7th century BCE Judean priesthoods of the Aaronid lineage and the Mushites (Levites anciently of Shiloh claiming descent from Moses.) It appears that the originally separate J and E texts had been combined in a process of intercalation under the auspices of the Aaronid priests of Jerusalem, after the conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel and the dispersion of its Hebrew tribes by the Assyrian empire in 722 BCE. In the ensuing period, under Aaronid hegemony in the time of King Hezekiah, P was written as an alternative to JE. D, in turn, was introduced by Mushite partisans three generations later, during their brief ascendancy in the time of King Josiah, to displace P.

Very little in the field of cultural anthropology can be known with much certainty, especially concerning a prehistoric people (the time of Jacob, Simeon, and Levi would have been around 1800 BCE; the earliest Hebrew texts probably weren’t written until well after Moses’ time, circa 1300 BCE), but I am inclined to adduce that the tribal culture of Moses’ Levite group and its antecedents was particularly aggressive, hostile to foreigners and repeatedly murderous. In her book A History of God, Karen Armstrong writes that the deity introduced into Canaan with the emigrants Moses and his successor Joshua led was “a brutal, partial, and murderous God, a god of war who would be known as Yahweh Sabaoth, the God of Armies.”

The Levite priests of Shiloh who, according to Friedman, produced the E text in the 9th century BCE, with its old account of the massacre Moses ordered at Sinai, were the predecessors of the 7th century BCE author of the Deuteronomistic historical narrative (the fourth, or D source), in which Joshua lead the migrating people of the Exodus into Canaan, to slaughter, destroy, and utterly dispossess its natives. The D source is not alone in the 7th century in glorifying the Israelites’ massacres of the 13th century BCE Canaanites. The book of Numbers, Chapters 31 and 32, which are portions of the P text, recount the same story in equally horrendous detail, for instance:

"Moses dispatched . . . a thousand from each tribe . . . against Midian, as the LORD had commanded Moses, and slew every male. Along with their other victims, they slew the kings of Midian . . . The Israelites took the women and children of the Midianites captive, and seized as booty all their beasts, all their herds, and all their wealth. And they destroyed by fire all the towns in which they were settled, and their encampments."

Perhaps those disturbing tales of Israelite mass murder and mayhem were made by their Levitical authors, as it were, from whole cloth, literary inventions designed to serve as horror stories for the purpose of establishing and reinforcing priestly authority in their respective socio-cultural milieux. Perhaps they were legendary reflections of a brutal, nomadic tribal past reconstituted in monarchic times for socio-religious purposes to meet with contemporary historic exigencies.

I suppose I must conclude that, along with the ethic of merciful justice and temperance attributed to the Yahwist God in J’s account of a theophany to Moses (“a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness”) , there is also in the Hebrew Scriptures a violent, implacable, obdurate religious tradition as well, particularly but not only exemplified in the D and E texts (which contain no recital of the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of murder.)

This conclusion comes as no surprise, of course, humankind’s unending capacity for inhumanity toward its own kind having been amply demonstrated in every generation and in every religion, coexisting salvific ethical traditions notwithstanding. As Walter Cronkite used to sign off his nightly television news program, “And that’s the way it is.”

But then still, there is hope, for as the Scottish religious leader Mary Webb (1881-1927) observed wryly, “The well of Providence is deep. It’s the buckets we bring to it that are small.”