The Staff Jacob Carried Across the Jordan Ended Up in Aaron's Hand

Most readers meet the staff of Aaron as a curiosity in the book of Numbers. Moses gathers twelve rods, one from each tribal prince, lays them in the Tent of Meeting overnight, and the next morning the rod of Aaron is the only one that has sprouted almonds. The rabbis of the later Jewish tradition could not leave the sprouting rod alone. They wanted to know where it had come from. They wanted to know what kind of wood it was. And they became convinced, over several centuries of commentary, that the staff had not been cut fresh for the occasion. They became convinced it was the same piece of wood that had been quietly moving through the hands of the patriarchs for four hundred years.

The Yalkut Shimoni, the encyclopedic thirteenth-century anthology of earlier rabbinic sources compiled by Rabbi Shimon ha-Darshan of Frankfurt, builds the whole genealogy out of the verses themselves. Its reading of (Psalm 110:2) is the pivot. The staff of your strength the Lord will send from Zion, the Psalm says. The staff. Definite article. The rabbis read the Hebrew and asked the question that everyone reading the psalm should have asked. Which staff. One specific staff is being pointed to, and the Yalkut Shimoni traces the pointer all the way back to its beginning.

The first owner is Jacob. When he returns to face Esau on the banks of the Jabbok in (Genesis 32:11), Jacob prays and says, with my staff I crossed this Jordan. The rabbis read that line and refused to treat the staff as incidental. It was the tool of the whole crossing. The younger brother, running from his older brother for twenty years, had one object on him when he went into exile and one object when he came out, and the object was the stick in his hand.

The Yalkut Shimoni then tracks the stick forward. Jacob's son Judah is next. When Judah gives pledges to the woman at the crossroads in the strange scene at Enaim recorded in (Genesis 38:18), one of the three pledges is his staff. The rabbis, reading this verse alongside the Jacob verse, conclude the staff is the same staff. Judah had inherited his father's walking stick the way a son inherits anything from a father, and he hands it over as collateral to a woman he does not yet realize is his own daughter-in-law.

The stick then disappears for a generation. It goes down to Egypt with the family. It comes out of Egypt four hundred years later in a very specific hand. Moses holds it up over the Red Sea in (Exodus 4:20), and the Torah calls it not just a rod but the rod of God. The Yalkut Shimoni, again, says it is the same wood. The walking stick Jacob used at the Jabbok is the rod Moses uses to part the sea. The same wood. Different hands.

And then the stick is passed one more time. Moses gives it to Aaron. Aaron lays it before the Tent of Meeting and it becomes the rod that buds with almonds, and the rod that is kept as a sign against the rebellious, and the rod the Talmud says will still be in the hand of the King Messiah when he comes out of the line of David at the end of days. The Yalkut Shimoni extends the chain through David as well, pointing to the verse in (1 Samuel 17:40), he took his staff in his hand, where the boy with the sling picks up a stick before walking out to face Goliath. The rabbis say that stick was the same stick. Jacob at the Jabbok, Judah at Enaim, Moses at the sea, Aaron at the Tent, David on the field of Elah. One piece of wood making its way through the history of the covenant the way a letter makes its way through a long postal route.

The reason the rabbis cared about the genealogy of a stick is not that they were sentimental about wood. It is that they were trying to explain what kind of man Aaron was, and the staff was the simplest visual argument they could make. He was a man who held what had been Jacob's. He was a man who stood at the inheritance of the patriarchs and held the object that symbolized the covenant's entire journey.

Louis Ginzberg, in the third volume of his Legends of the Jews, published in 1911, captures the emotional consequence of Aaron's stewardship of that inheritance by describing the day he died. The Torah says all the house of Israel wept for Aaron thirty days. Ginzberg, drawing on Bamidbar Rabbah, the Palestinian midrash on Numbers compiled between the fifth and ninth centuries, says the grief was deeper than the grief for Moses would later be. Men, women, children, the learned and the unlearned, every household in the camp sat shiva for Aaron. Ginzberg explains why. Moses had been their judge. Moses had sent men to their deaths. Moses had rebuked them in language nobody could forget. Aaron had done the opposite. He had loved peace and pursued peace. If Aaron heard that two men in the camp had quarreled, he would walk first to one and then to the other and tell each of them how broken the other one was about the fight, how the other was rending his garments in the night over what had happened. By the time the two men met in the street the next day, they were embracing.

Ginzberg also preserves the scene Israel could not forgive Moses for and was able to forgive Aaron for, because it proves how different the two brothers were in the eyes of the people. After the incident of the Golden Calf, Aaron spent the rest of his life in acts of repair. He went from house to house teaching the Shema, one family at a time, to the Israelites who did not know it. He taught people how to pray. He reconciled husbands and wives. Ginzberg says there was a stretch of weeks, after the calf incident, in which the people of Israel actually believed Aaron had surpassed Moses in the height of his spirit. A brother who had failed publicly, and then had spent every waking hour of the remaining decades reassembling the broken pieces of the community, had earned that kind of reputation.

The Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael, the early tannaitic midrash on Exodus compiled in the school of Rabbi Ishmael in the second century, adds one more detail that gives Aaron his final shape. The verse in (Exodus 18:12) says Aaron and all the elders of Israel came to eat bread with Jethro, Moses's father-in-law, before God. The Mekhilta asks where Moses himself was during the meal. Moses had greeted Jethro personally. Moses had told him the story of the exodus. Moses was plainly present. So why does the verse mention only Aaron and the elders at the table. Because, the Mekhilta says, Moses was not sitting. Moses was standing. Moses was serving. The greatest prophet in Israel's history was acting as a waiter while his father-in-law and his brother ate before God, and he was doing it because he had learned from Abraham at the oaks of Mamre that true greatness is not in being served but in serving.

Two brothers. Two halves of the same leadership. One of them stood with the staff that had come all the way from Jacob. The other of them stood beside the table with a towel over his arm. And when Aaron died, the rabbis said, the pillar of cloud that had led the camp through the wilderness lifted from above the tents, because the one whose merit had been holding it there was gone.

Centuries later, the Yalkut Shimoni still insists that the staff is not finished. It is waiting. The same piece of wood that Jacob used to cross the Jordan and that Aaron held in front of the Tent of Meeting will, the tradition says, be in the hand of the Messiah on the morning he arrives. The inheritance has not reached its last owner yet.