Naphtali Left His Children No Silver, No Gold, Only One Command

When a father is dying, his children expect certain things. They expect the allocation of property, the distribution of flocks, the naming of what goes to whom. They expect the backward look: the account of what he did and what it cost him. They expect, at minimum, a blessing.

Naphtali gave his children none of these things.

In the hundred and thirty-second year of his life, the eighth son of Jacob gathered his family and issued what the tradition preserves as his final testament. He told them at the outset: I give you no commandment concerning my silver, or my gold, or any other possession I bequeath to you. And what I command you is not a hard matter, which you cannot do. I speak unto you concerning an easy thing, which you can execute.

His children asked him to speak. He said: I give you no commandment except regarding the fear of God, that you should serve Him and follow after Him.

The sons of Naphtali, the tradition records, immediately pushed back. Why does God require our service? What does the Maker of heaven and earth need from us?

This question is one of the most searching questions in all of Jewish thought, and Naphtali answered it as a patriarch answers it, directly and without ornamentation: He needs no creature, but all creatures need Him. Nevertheless He hath not created the world for naught, but that men should fear Him, and none should do unto his neighbor what he would not have others do unto him.

Two things woven together into one commandment: fear of God, and the principle that would be formulated centuries later by Rabbi Akiva as the great rule of the Torah. Naphtali speaks them in one breath, as if they cannot be separated, because they cannot. The man who fears God does not need to be told not to do to his neighbor what he would not want done to himself. He already knows.

Then the sons asked Naphtali something even bolder: father, have you seen us depart from the ways of the Lord? Are you warning us about something we have already done?

Naphtali answered carefully. He said God was his witness, and he too was their witness, that they had not yet strayed. But he feared the future. He feared that in times to come they would wander after strange gods, would walk in the ways of the surrounding peoples, would join themselves to the sons of Joseph instead of the sons of Levi and Judah.

This warning, drawn from the same account of Naphtali's death preserved in Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, contains within it the whole history Naphtali had watched unfold. He had seen what Joseph's descendants would become, had dreamed the visions of ships and storms and brothers scattered, had warned his children about the danger of following the powerful rather than the righteous.

The Testament of Naphtali, written between the second century BCE and the first century CE, adds the theological foundation for this warning in remarkable detail. Naphtali describes the moment when God descended from heaven with seventy angels, Michael at their head, to divide the nations of the earth and assign each one its guardian angel. Every nation chose its own celestial patron. Nimrod the wicked chose the angel who had taught him the language of Kush. Every other people answered the same way, picking the power they knew. But Abraham, when Michael asked him whom he would choose, said: I choose only Him who said and the world was. In Him I will have faith, and my seed forever and ever.

From that moment, God kept every nation in the care of its appointed angel, and Abraham and his seed He kept for Himself. This, Naphtali tells his children, is what is at stake in the choice between Joseph's path and Levi's path: the choice between following angels and following God directly.

The simplicity of Naphtali's final teaching is its strength. He does not leave his children a legal code or a theological system. He leaves them a principle small enough to hold in one hand: fear God, and do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself. Everything else, he tells them, is commentary.

Then he died as he had said he would, with his children around him and the feast of the night before still warm in memory. They carried him to Hebron, as he had asked, to lie near his fathers in the cave that had been holding the patriarchs since Abraham first bought it from the sons of Heth.

He left them no silver. He left them no gold. He left them the one thing he believed could not be stolen, could not be divided, and would not grow stale in any exile: the knowledge of whom to serve and how to treat the person standing beside you.