The Shabbat woodcutter at the end of Parashat Shelach is anonymous – at least in the text (later sources attempt to identify him). There are a few other anonymous characters in Chumash, also identified as “Ish” – the man who directs Joseph to his fateful encounter with his brothers; Moshe’s father (and mother) at their marriage come to mind. Why are they anonymous?
Larry Rublin suggests that in our story, the woodcutter is not the main character, he is just incidental – the real character is the Nation, and our attention is being drawn not to the act but to the reaction. Having just been sentenced to wander and die in the desert, they might be expected to lose interest in building a society faithful to the tenets of the Torah they had been given. However, to their credit, their commitment to these tenets appears unshaken. This also explains why this passage is placed shortly after the incident of the Spies.
In our other examples, clearly, Joseph’s interlocutor was not a character important to the story, he simply serves as a device to advance the narrative. I would add that similarly, the specific identity of Moses’ parents is not relevant to the story. One could conjecture that the message is that one’s lineage is not important in the service of God – or, more likely, that the important factor here was not precisely who Moses’ parents were, but rather that they came from a specific family – “Ish miBet Levi”, a man from the House of Levi, and “Bat Levi”, a daughter of Levi. This gives Moses a cachet of leadership – either prospectively, if the Levites were already in a leadership role, or at least retrospectively.
(Hat Tip – Ron Allswang, who is a week ahead of us as he lives in Israel)
