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)
Just a few more points in the same direction …
It is not unusually for the Torah to introduce unidentified characters. In addition to those that you mention, there are several other examples, such as “the refugee” that tells Avraham of Lot’s capture; “the men” that visited Avraham and then Lot; “the Egyptian man” that struck “the Hebrew man”, and “the two Hebrew men” that were apparent witnesses; the blasphemous “son of the Israelite woman and Egyptian man”; and “the man of Bnei Yisrael” that took the Midianite woman in the name of Ba’al Pe’or.
There are two general types of treatment that these individuals receive from the Torah narrative. When their identities are incidental, they remain anonomous. We do not need to know who told Avraham of Lot’s capture, nor do we need to know the names of those that visited Avraham and his nephew. They were merely messengers, and the message was not of their own making.
However, when the man has a significant role in the story, the Torah lets us know who we’re talking about. Moses’s parents are eventually named. The blasephemer is identified as the son of Shlomit bat Divri. Zimri ben Salu was the name of the man slain by Pinchus. The woodcutter is unique in the fact that even though he seems to have a central role in the story, the Torah clearly doesn’t treat him that way.
Regarding the proximity of the woodcutter to the return of the spies, Rashi and Eben Ezra assert that the story actually happened much earlier. The Ramban however, prefers a more literal chronology and places the event as per its place in the text. Rashi states that the story comes to censure Bnei Yisrael for the inability to keep the Shabbat as a people; based on the Ramban I prefer to see it as a story of encouragement and praise.
Shabbat Shalom.
Comment by Larry Rublin — June 25, 2009 @ 2:57 pm
Thanks Larry for the additions and clarifications! I hope I represented your ideas (transmitted through our mutual friend) well enough.
Comment by cyberdov — June 25, 2009 @ 3:02 pm
You are most welcome.
I should thank you for using the material – I’ve been giving a weekly dvar torah for over seven years and this is the first solid proof I’ve had that someone actually cared to remember what I’d said! 🙂
Comment by Larry Rublin — June 26, 2009 @ 6:40 am