Atheist Torah Study Parsha Beha’ alotcha

Good morning, and welcome to Atheist Torah Study. My name is Emma I’m here today to discuss Parsha Beha’alotcha, which is Numbers chapter 8 through Numbers chapter 12 in the Torah. Atheist Torah Study is an exploration of the Torah from my perspective as an atheist. It’s a year-long project where I go through the Jewish Torah one parsha at a time. A parsha is a section of the Torah. It’s usually two or three chapters, though sometimes it’s as many as five or six. I basically discuss the text from my perspective as an atheist, taking into account what I know and understand about Jewish tradition.

Today we’re discussing what is by far the most difficult parsha for me to pronounce. Since I don’t really speak Hebrew fluently, I always struggle with this one. It’s Beha’alotcha, spelled A-L-O-T-C-H-A. I knew what the name meant and then forgot. Let me look it up. It means “when you raise up” or “when you cause to ascend.” It’s about the menorah, that’s right.

Let’s talk about what goes on in this parsha, and then we’ll start reading it. In this parsha, the God character in the story tells Aaron to light the menorah. The Levites are formally dedicated to religious service, and that’s one of the tribes. The Israelites celebrate Passover and receive rules for those who missed it. A cloud guides the people through the wilderness. That’s actually one of my favorite parts. I kind of like the idea of following a cloud around. Silver trumpets are used to organize the camp.

I think where we’re actually going to start is with the people complaining, because that’s definitely the best part of the whole book. The people begin complaining. They miss the food they had in Egypt and grow tired of eating manna. Moses becomes overwhelmed by the burden of leadership and complains to God. Then they have this otherworldly experience of meeting God, which is why I want to focus on that section. It’s really interesting.

Two men, Eldad and Medad, begin prophesying outside the official leadership structure, causing concern. Moses responds by wishing that everyone could prophesy. Finally, Miriam criticizes Moses, apparently over his Cushite wife and his unique authority. God punishes Miriam with a skin disease, and she’s temporarily excluded from the camp. I think we’re actually going to start with that very last part, the story about Miriam, because it’s just so bizarre.

Where we are in the timeline of the story, at least as this part of the Torah is written, is that the redactors have the characters wandering in the wilderness and moving toward the Promised Land. They’re getting close. It’s only a couple hundred miles of walking, basically. Yet it’s taken them a year. It’s taken them a year to walk what is, relatively speaking, not a huge distance.

So let’s get into it. I’m going to find the section about Miriam because it’s really weird, and I love it. I really enjoy reading the Torah. I’ve been listening to Madalyn Murray O’Hair a lot this week, and I’ve really been enjoying it. I didn’t know enough about her before. One of the things I’ve been doing as part of my studies is learning more about the founders of atheism.

It started when I received a really good education about Democritus, because I didn’t know much about him. I’ve learned about the role Democritus played in creating a materialistic philosophy of the world and the universe. His ideas were just fascinating.

I have no doubt that there was Greek influence. When you look at the way Western culture eventually developed over the centuries, all of these different traditions rolled together. Greek traditions rolled into Western tradition. Middle Eastern traditions rolled into Western tradition. Eventually, Western tradition was deeply influenced by many different peoples: the Celts, the Visigoths, the Goths, cultures from the Northern Mediterranean, North Africa, and many others. All of these cultures helped shape Western tradition and found places within the broader society.

History is really a collage, a patchwork of influences. That’s one reason this text is so interesting to me. The Torah starts off very broadly mythopoetic. It begins with a broad creation narrative. Eventually, though, the text reaches a point where it wants to isolate a particular group of people. It wants to define them in relationship to their God. It also wants to define them in relationship to their national identity. The text strongly pushes this idea of distinctiveness.

I imagine this was pretty common. Part of what’s been driving my thinking during this Torah study is the question: What is this religion an analog of? I think this religion is an analog of a period in time when people lived in city-states and small territorial provinces. What we see in the Torah reflects a world organized around these smaller political units. In some ways, Jewish tradition is the memory of that system.

The Torah and Jewish tradition preserve the memory of a world that was organized very differently. There were basically two power systems operating at the time. There were small kingdoms, territorial entities like Israel and the neighboring countries mentioned throughout the Bible. Across the known world, there were many of these small kingdoms. At the same time, there were larger colonizing empires attempting to exert greater control. You had the religion of the small kingdom, and then you had the religion associated with the large imperial power.

These super-colonizing empires go back a very long way. Even in the days of Ur, you can already see this pattern emerging. I can’t remember the names of all the early empires that were expanding during the twenty-fifth and twenty-fourth centuries BCE, but the pattern was already there. Egypt is the easiest local example. Then you have the Akkadians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Hittites, and eventually the Greeks. Right after the Greeks came the Romans.

In my mind, Judaism is a memory of a particular kind of political organization. One of the things that makes Judaism distinct, and something it has carried from the past into the present, is that it preserves the memory of itself as a small territorial kingdom. It has carried that memory through time, across the diaspora, around the world, and eventually back to Israel after the land was taken from the Palestinians, conquered, or however one chooses to describe that process.

It’s preserved in the memory of the text. That’s what has held it together. The text has played an important role in preserving this fragment of an identity, which I think is a natural process. Although I don’t know if any of this is natural. It’s all very strange, honestly.

As part of my learning, I’ve been trying to learn more about Western atheism. I’ve always been an atheist, but I’ve never really known much about the foundations of atheism. As far as I know, atheists don’t really have organized institutions. We have some, but not in the same way many religions do. One of the people I’ve spent a lot of time listening to this week is Madalyn Murray O’Hair. I’ve known about her my whole life, but I didn’t realize what a dynamic speaker she was.

She was so cutting-edge for her time. Here’s this woman who was incredibly intelligent and doing the same kind of media spectacle that many politicians use today to gain influence. She was doing it in the promotion of atheism and the cause of atheism. Madalyn Murray O’Hair was responsible for keeping prayer out of public schools in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case in 1963. That’s exactly what’s being challenged right now. She was great, and I’ve been learning much more about her.

The person I’ve really been learning about over the last couple of weeks, though, has been Democritus. Democritus is amazing. He theorized that the world was made of atoms. It’s really interesting to learn how he arrived at that idea. Democritus lived on the outskirts of Greece, in a city near the border of the Greek world. He came from a fairly well-to-do family, so he had privilege, but the way he developed his ideas was by traveling throughout the known world.

He went to Egypt. He went to India. He traveled to many places in between and spent years studying with people he considered knowledgeable and learned. When he returned from his travels, he was deeply interested in philosophy. The elites in Greece studied philosophy, and Democritus eventually came up with an idea that almost nobody had imagined before: that the world is made of atoms.

It wasn’t just that the world was made of atoms. He believed that everything everywhere was made of atoms. The stars in the sky were atoms. The air was atoms. Everything that you are is atoms. He didn’t have electron microscopes or scientific theories to support his intuition, yet he arrived at this remarkably broad conclusion. Several ideas were foundational to Democritus’s materialistic view of the universe, and one of the most important was rejecting a supernatural explanation for existence.

He had to look at the world as it was. What’s interesting is that even within Greek culture, this wasn’t normally possible. Greek philosophy largely followed the traditions of Aristotle and Plato. They argued in favor of supernaturalism. Democritus went in the opposite direction. He argued that the universe was materialistic, fundamentally rational, understandable, and capable of being comprehended through observation and reason.

The other major aspect of his thinking was that the universe was the same everywhere. He didn’t limit his ideas to a small set of observations. He applied them to everything he could see. Anything he could observe, he believed was governed by the same atomic principles. It was revolutionary and radically different from the dominant ways of thinking. The idea has continued to undermine religious explanations of the world ever since it was first proposed.

He didn’t arrive at these ideas entirely on his own. Much of it came from his own thinking, but he also traveled widely and spoke with people from many different cultures. Some traditions claim he drew influence from thinkers on the Indian subcontinent. There were materialist schools in India, sometimes described as atheist traditions. I can’t remember their name right now. I could look it up.

There was a school of Indian thought that was fundamentally materialistic. Historians don’t know whether Democritus actually studied with those people. The tradition that he traveled to India comes primarily through later accounts and oral traditions. Still, there was a materialist school in India that rejected the gods, rejected claims of divinity, and argued that the universe was fundamentally materialistic. It’s an interesting possibility.

Anyway, let’s get back to the text, because I could talk about this for a long time. The section we’re turning to now is Parsha Beha’alotcha. The parsha is really intended to move the audience and the reader along. By the time the Torah was being compiled in the second or third century BCE, it was being assembled into a document intended to serve as a foundational text and belief structure for the community that preserved it.

The text is doing a whole series of things here. What it’s really trying to do is forge a mythic vision of the past. Similar to the Odyssey and the Iliad, the characters in this story — the entire people of Israel — are being brought on a mythic journey. The language in this particular parsha is intended to give the reader a sense of movement. It is also involved in the forging of a national identity. This portion is especially rich for atheists because it contains many of the same tools that continue to be used by religious people to this day.

The text presents claims about how people have intercessory experiences with the divine. There are many places in the Torah where it isn’t entirely clear what the mechanics of these supernatural experiences are supposed to be. Here, however, the text is doing something I’ve talked about before. In some ways it feels very modern. By this point in history, people already understood what texts could do. Texts were not a new invention. They had existed for thousands of years, and people had begun to understand how texts could influence mass psychology.

One of the things that is unique about the Torah, and part of why it became a blueprint document for religion, is that it shifted where religious authority resided. Before the Torah, religion belonged to the temple. It belonged to the king. It belonged to the pyramid. Nobody worships the pyramids anymore, but at one time whatever religion the pharaoh practiced was everybody’s religion. The Torah is different because it transfers much of that authority into the text itself.

The people still had a temple, and the temple remained important. Sometimes I wonder whether, if the Torah were being written today with knowledge of how world history unfolded, the authors would spend so much time on the temple. They might realize that the temple is not the essential thing. The text is. The whole point of the narrative is that you have someplace you are leaving and someplace you are going. You leave, and then you return. In a way, that’s one of the most basic ideas in the Torah.

It’s a simple idea. Everybody does it every day. You leave and you come back. Yet the Torah transforms that ordinary experience into a grand narrative that implicates everything in the universe. My point is that the text itself becomes the essential sacred object. I think the redactors already understood this. They understood something about human nature. They understood something about language. In that sense, they were essentially propagandists.

I don’t think they understood propaganda as we think of it today. What they understood was that language had power. Language originally developed as pictographs. Over time, language lost its direct connection to symbols and became sounds. Those sounds were reorganized into blocks of text that functioned almost mathematically. Those blocks of text became placeholders for the real world. Suddenly humanity possessed a new system for encoding information.

Once that happened, information became increasingly detached from direct experience. Even a pictograph is already an abstraction, but alphabetic writing became much more flexible and manipulable. Once people possessed those tools, they could do almost anything with language. We still can. We can invent complete fantasies and express them through language, then begin treating them as real. In many ways, we remain trapped within this world created by the written word.

As soon as we have writing, we can make enormous claims. Those claims are often difficult to verify, especially claims about God. Three thousand years ago, elites were already doing this. They had discovered the power of language. In fact, I suspect this process goes back even further. As soon as humans began building ziggurats, something like this was already happening. The ability to shape reality through language had already become a powerful social force.

It’s like a drug. It really is a drug. It’s the opium of the masses, but not just the masses. It’s the opium of everyone. Once people learned how to take this system for encoding information and turn it back upon itself, everything changed. Writing originally emerged from practical activities such as counting beans and keeping inventories. Marks on clay tablets evolved into something much larger and far more influential.

The pictographs attempted to represent as much of the world as possible in as little space as possible. By the time humans were doing that, we were already captivated by the possibilities of symbolic representation. Once language became separated from pictographic imagery, reorganized into alphabets, and projected back onto the world, the entire project was underway. By that point, language had become one of the most powerful tools human beings had ever created and what we could do with it is what the text is exploring. Even though this is all really amazing, there still are not a lot of people who can do it. Most people are not literate at the time the text is written. The ones who are literate are highly educated and indoctrinated. Indoctrination is a rite of passage. The word now has a pejorative meaning, and I’ve used it that way myself when talking about how I was indoctrinated into Western monotheism.

This whole project is my attempt to unscrew Western monotheism from my brain. Of course, I realize you cannot fully do that. Indoctrination is about something being imprinted in your brain before you have the ability to understand what is being imprinted. It is really terrible. It has been happening by this time in history. Anyone educated, anyone elite, anyone with access to language is also indoctrinated into whatever system is dominant in their culture.

The writers of the Torah are indoctrinated into this version of monotheism. But they are not only indoctrinated; they are also inventing new ideas. They are adjusting concepts and trying new things. This is where the Greek influence comes in. There is not a lot of Greek in the text, but there are Greek ways of thinking about language and meaning. This is why I think the Torah was written around the 3rd century BCE. I know my rabbi disagrees with me, but I am convinced of this.

This is happening at a time when Greek influence is shaping how people think about texts and ideas. The Babylonians attempted similar things, but they did not have the same creativity or method as the Greeks. What the Greeks brought was something new. That is why, in the West, when we study philosophy, we study Greek philosophy. The Greeks did something important: they separated themselves from the text.

Up until this point, people followed chains of text that shaped how they experienced reality. The text had fundamentally reorganized human perception of the world. It was driving world history. The redactors of the Torah understood this power. They understood what text could do. I do not want to blame them, because they also had interesting ideas, just like the Greeks did.

What the Greeks did differently was separate observation from text. They looked at the natural world and developed natural philosophy. They saw that the mind is related to text, but they tried to step outside of it through observation. The problem is that once you enter the text, you cannot fully escape it. It shapes everything about you. Even the Greeks could not escape it completely.

However, the Greek approach ended up being the one that carried into modernity. At the same time, the Hebrew textual tradition, including later Hasmonean developments, also contributed to modernity in a different way. The Hasmoneans understood that the text could take people anywhere. They used it to imagine a just world, one where human beings are valued and understood as significant in themselves.

They encoded that idea into the text. It has carried through into modernity and remains more meaningful to many people than anything science can offer. It provides a blueprint for the idea that human beings have inherent value. The Hasmoneans applied this primarily to their own people, but they created a concept of God that ultimately extends beyond them.

There are hints of this universality in the text, even though other parts contradict it. We are still arguing about ideas that were constructed thousands of years ago by these writers. And I have done my usual half-hour rambling before even getting into the text.

The people took to complaining bitterly before God. God heard and was incensed. A fire of God broke out against them, ravaging the outskirts of the camp. The people complained because they were dragged out of slavery in Egypt into the desert without what they needed.

In the tradition, this is framed as people needing to grow up. The God-creator figure is presented as a divine parent. The only path to maturity is to heed authority and accept God’s rule through Moses. The intent of the text is naked in its ambition. It explains its own function. The redactors assume certain things. By this time, they assume everyone understands what a god is, as the God of everything. There is cultural currency around monotheism. The text works with an idea that everyone is fundamentally religious. Human beings are seen as fragile, uncertain beings who require supernatural guidance.

This is why Democritus’ ideas were so radical. Democritus had lived and died at least 200 years before this text was redacted. Plato, after Democritus died, hated his ideas. Plato believed in a supernatural world of ideals. His ideas were carried through the West into modernity. Democritus’ ideas were also carried forward, though in a different way.

Democritus argued the universe is materialistic, made of atoms, governed by universal laws. He had no tools except reason. His ideas were rejected in his own time. They survived because Greeks preserved debates in written dialogues. They recorded both dominant and minority positions. Democritus wrote many books, but they disappeared over time. His ideas survived through later writers who argued against him. They were also preserved by a Roman poet-philosopher who translated his ideas into Latin poetry. That text was later kept in a German monastery for centuries.

During the Renaissance, an Italian humanist rediscovered this manuscript. He recognized its value and brought it back to Italy. It was copied and widely circulated. Democritus’ atomism became foundational to Renaissance thought and later scientific development.

The people were complaining bitterly before God. God heard and was incensed. A fire of God broke out against them, ravaging the outskirts of the camp. The people cried out to Moses. Moses prayed to God, and the fire died down. The place was named Taberah because a fire of God had broken out against them.

The people complained because they had been dragged out of slavery in Egypt into the desert without what they needed. In the tradition, this is framed as people needing to grow up. The God-creator figure is cast as a divine parent. The path to maturity is obedience to divine authority through Moses. The intent of the text is explicit in its function and ambition.

The redactors assume shared knowledge of what a god is, as the God of everything. There is cultural currency around monotheism, though the text itself contains traces of polytheistic thinking. It works with the idea that society is fundamentally religious. Human beings are imagined as fragile beings who require supernatural guidance. The text also constructs divine intercession, including transformation of food through manna. It presents a divinity that feeds, leads, and protects the people. The condition for survival is faith in the divine being and in Moses as intermediary. This authority structure is later read as a placeholder for priestly rule.

The redactors of the text are creating a mythic system that legitimates authority. In this reading, the Hasmonean priest-kings encode political power into narrative form. They present a world in which obedience to divine structure validates governance. This occurs in a context where church and state are not separate but unified. These ideas are extremely ancient and are being repackaged through narrative. The text functions as a tool for shaping belief over generations. It uses supernatural claims, divine authority, and mythic history to structure social reality.

The invention of language is not just about Israel, and it is not just about these people. It is a universal story. It happens over and over again in the Levant. Here, it was written down, and the people made a mythology that was compelling and that carried people through.

The riff-raff in their midst felt a gluttonous craving. The Israelites wept and said, “If we only had meat to eat.” They remembered the fish they used to eat in Egypt, the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic. Now their gullets are shriveled. There is nothing at all, nothing but this manna to look to. Manna was like coriander seed. Its color was like bdellium. The people would go about and gather it, grind it between millstones, or pound it into a mortar. They boiled it into a pot and made it into cakes. It tasted like rich cream. When the dew fell on the camp at night, the manna would fall upon it.

This is very creative. They are taking something supernatural, and the people are basically eating the supernatural. That is all I have time for. I hardly got to any text, as always, but I did say what I wanted to say, and that is the reason I am doing this. Thanks for spending another week with me on Atheist Torah Study. This was Parsha Behaalotcha. My name is Emma. I appreciate you spending time with me if you sat through the whole thing. I will see you next week. We are almost done. I am excited. It is June right now, and we go until early September, and then it is all over. It has been a fun exploration. Thanks so much for joining me.