The Nations Were Wrong About What It Means to Be Chosen

The nations surrounding Israel were watching. They had been watching for forty years, tracking the trajectory of a people who marched through a desert and did not die, who were fed from the sky and watered from a rock, who made their enemies disappear with borrowed weapons and divine timing. The nations had their own prophets and their own sorcerers and none of them had managed to stop what was happening. Balak had hired Balaam. Balaam had tried three times and produced three blessings instead of curses. The nations were losing.

And then Israel sinned at Shittim.

The account preserved in the Legends of the Jews, drawing from the Midrash Rabbah on Numbers compiled in 5th-century Palestine, records the reaction of the surrounding peoples with a precision that makes it something more than a detail of ancient politics. The nations rejoiced. They understood something had shifted. "The crown has been taken from Israel's head," they said. "They are no better than us."

This interpretation of their own argument is important. The nations were not simply pleased that their enemy had stumbled. They were making a theological claim. They had observed, or believed they had observed, that Israel's military invincibility and divine protection derived from their moral distinctiveness. God had chosen this people precisely because they were different, because they held to a standard the other peoples did not hold to. When that standard collapsed at Shittim, when Israel took Midianite women, ate their sacrificial food, bowed before their gods, the nations concluded that the covenant had been nullified. Not suspended. Nullified. Israel was now ordinary.

The Ginzberg tradition is interested in what the nations got wrong about this, and the answer is not simple. They were not entirely wrong about the mechanism: there is a real relationship between Israel's moral condition and divine protection. The plague that killed twenty-four thousand people confirmed this, not denied it. The sin had consequences. The nations had read the relationship correctly.

What they had misread was the permanence. They thought a catastrophic stumble ended the relationship. The Jewish understanding of the covenant is different. The covenant survives moral failure precisely because it was not conditional on moral perfection in the first place. It was conditional on return. The plague was not abandonment. The plague was correction, the covenant insisting on itself, God refusing to let Israel become what the nations expected them to become after the sin.

The Sifre on Numbers, the tannaitic midrash compiled in the 3rd century CE, frames this in terms of an analogy. When a parent disciplines a child, the parent is not ending the relationship. The discipline is the relationship asserting itself. A parent who simply watches a child self-destruct without intervening has already abandoned the child in the deeper sense. The plague was intervention. The nations, watching from outside, saw punishment and read it as rejection. They did not understand that it was the opposite.

There is something else worth holding here. The Shittim episode began not with violence or dramatic apostasy but with wine. Midianite women invited Israelite men to a feast. Food was shared. Wine flowed. The ritual portions of the meal were portions consecrated to Midianite gods, which meant that eating them was, by the logic of the ancient world, an act of participation in foreign worship. The seduction was gradual, social, festive. Not a sudden dramatic defection but a sequence of ordinary pleasures, each one a small step further from the camp, until the distance was catastrophic.

The nations who gloated saw only the endpoint. They did not see the mechanism, the slow drift, the accumulation of small departures. And because they did not understand the mechanism, they also did not understand the corrective, which addressed not just the visible sin but the architecture that made it possible. Phinehas's lance was the dramatic end of the episode. The priestly ban on wine used as pagan libations was the structural repair. The nations saw the spectacle. The tradition saw the engineering.

The Midrash Rabbah on Numbers, compiled in 5th-century Palestine, preserves another layer of this: when the nations gloated, they were not merely expressing schadenfreude. They were making a claim about the nature of divine favor. Their theology held that a god who punished his people had withdrawn from them, that chastisement was evidence of rejection, that a nation under plague was a nation abandoned. This is not the Jewish understanding of the relationship between God and Israel. The Jewish tradition holds that punishment is a form of continued engagement. You do not punish what you have abandoned. You abandon what you no longer care about. The plague was the opposite of abandonment. It was the covenant refusing to become a formality, insisting on its own terms in the most painful way available.

The crown had not been taken from Israel's head. It had fallen, briefly, and then been picked up. The nations read falling as ending. The tradition reads falling as part of a longer story whose ending is not yet written.