After comparing Numbers 13 to features found in extra-biblical utopias –
Utopia, Herland, Erewhon, New Atlantis or “The Country of the Blind” – I have
found that this biblical passage is utopian to such a high degree that I am comfortable saying that it appears as an anachronistic utopia to the modern reader. In the following I will show an inner-biblical comparison, which comes to the conclusion, that it is a biblical proto-utopia too.
Nadav Na’aman links the outline of the boundaries of the Promised Land as described in Numbers 34:1-12 to passages in Joshua 15:1-4 and Ezekiel 47:15- 17.390 Ezekiel 47 is a part of the vision of the future Jerusalem, often understood as a utopian vision.391 Na’aman writes: “[…] I suggest that Numbers 34:1-12 depends on Joshua 15:1-4 and Ezekiel 47:15-17 […] and is secondary to all
390 Nadav Na’aman, “Lebo-Hamath, Subat-Hamath and the Northern Boundary of the Land of Canaan,” Ugarit-Forschungen 31 (1999): 433.
391 For example by Brodsky, “Utopian Map” and by Liss, “‘Describe the Temple to the House of Israel’: Preliminary Remarks on the Temple Vision in the Book of Ezekiel and the Question of Fictionality in Priestly Literatures.” Arguing that Ezekiel is properly utopian is not the purpose here, I presuppose this. The comparison that makes perfectly clear that Ezekiel is utopian is the following line of influences: the mythological and utterly unreal Atlantis in Plato’s dialogue
Critias is divided up in a strikingly similar way to the way Ezekiel describes the division of the
land and the organisation of the territory around the temple. More’s Utopia is explicitly and obviously indebted to Plato’s Republic, Critias is one of two dialogues that follow on from
Republic, Atlantis is a utopian island similar to More’s island of Utopia, Atlantis is organised
146 these texts.”392
Number 34 depends on a text – Ezekiel 47 and surrounding chapters – that is often described as a utopian vision of an ideal future state. Numbers 34 gives a more detailed list of border delineations and place names than Numbers 13. It actually outlines boundaries, whereas Numbers 13 does not mention explicitly that the places that are visited are located on boundaries. Only by comparing Numbers 13 with other passages that deal with boundaries explicitly, do we see that the places mentioned in Numbers 13 also appear in passages that speak about the boundaries of the future Promised Land, for example in Ezekiel 47 and Numbers 34.
Numbers 34:1-12 gives more place names than Numbers 13. Lebo-Hamath is mentioned (Num 34:8) as part of the border delineations of the northern boundary. Zin is one of the places mentioned to define the border on the southern boundary (Num 34:3). Kadesh appears, but only as the compound Kadesh-Barnea (Num 34: 4), of which it is said that the border shall run south of it.
The border description of Ezekiel has quite a few locations in common with Number 34:1-12, Lebo-Hamath being one of them. Lebo-Hamath is the only place name that occurs in Numbers 13, Numbers 34 and Ezekiel 47. A variation of Kadesh appears in all three passages too: in Numbers 13 as Kadesh, in Numbers 34 as Kadesh-Barnea, and in Ezekiel 47 as Meriboth-Kadesh. Milgrom sees Kadesh-Barnea and Meriboth-Kadesh as different designations for the same place, Kadesh.393
Na’aman makes assumptions about the intellectual horizon of the author, who is said to have used Ezekiel to write the border descriptions of Numbers 34: “The author of Numbers 34 did not comprehend Ezekiel’s description […],”[which “depends on the system of Babylonian provinces”].394
The author of Numbers 34, according to Na’aman, did not understand what he was reading in Ezekiel 47, because he was not familiar with the geography of a particular area:
The author was entirely dependent on written sources, and where sources were unavailable, he was unable to draw the boundary properly. All
392
Na’aman, “Lebo-Hamath,” 433. 393 Milgrom, Torah Commentary, 104. 394 Na’aman, “Lebo-Hamath,” 434.
147
demarcations of the eastern boundary of Canaan on the basis of Numbers 34 are guesswork.395
Numbers 34 may have been created relying on not much more than the utopian written source of Ezekiel 47. Does Numbers 34 have anything to do with Numbers 13? Numbers 34, as mentioned, gives a much more extensive collection of place names than Numbers 13. The place names that coincide are Zin, Kadesh and Lebo-Hamath. It is possible to say that if Numbers 34 draws on Ezekiel 47, and the author of Numbers 34 did not have knowledge of the actual locations of the places in Ezekiel 47, that Numbers 13 is similarly a description of vague places of which the author had no concrete knowledge. This would also support the observation made earlier that a focus on mapping and places can occur in texts when the author (or the audience) is not familiar with a place. Na’aman concludes that maps are not eternal and that there may have been “a break in the concept of Canaan’s northern borders between the Late Bronze and the late Iron Age.”396
Na’aman is a further voice supporting the conjecture that the author was not familiar with the environment described in the text, which supports my argument that Numbers 13 is a biblical utopia, because it has in common with classic utopian texts the feature of the invented map.
Secondly, maps and boundaries are subject to changes, so that even if an empirical place is referenced the map is subject to changes over time. As such, the described boundary is a representation that does not exist diachronically and thus cannot be taken literally independent of the age of the text in which it is described, and it cannot be located. It is thereby made utopian, both from the modern reader’s perspective, and also, according to Na’aman, from the author’s perspective.