An implied defect
It’s more than a missing name. It’s glaring. Up and down the Torah people are mentioned anonymously. Almost always, they’re not important. Not so in this case. This wife without a name was married to a person whose son achieved something in Jewish history that no one else did, before or since. Something’s up.
In the founding line of the Jewish people, the wife without a name is an oddity. In the rest of the founding line of the Jewish people, the names of all the founders — male and female — are known. Why should this particular wife be anonymous? She was a critical link. Still more, there seems to be something different — perhaps unseemly — which would explain her anonymity, but if so, how could such a person be a founder of the Jewish people?
The mystery of this nameless woman needs to be investigated.
As I say, the rest of the founders are all known. Initially, they are all couples. Abraham and Sarah. Isaac and Rebeccah. Jacob and Leah and Rachel. It’s all straightforward. However, when we reach Abraham and Sarah’s geat-great-great- grandson Amram, things get interesting. Amram and his wife Jocheved give birth to the primary leadership line of the Jewish people: Moses, Aaron and Miriam. Each one married. Each couple’s names are known. Moses and Zipporah. Aaron and Elisheva. Miriam and Caleb.
The critical leader on whom we must focus is Aaron. Not much is heard of Moses’ or Miriam’s descendants, but Aaron’s descendants — the kohanim, the priests — are identifiable to this day. Despite this long lineage — some 3,000 years! — it is in Aaron and Elisheva’s line that the nameless wife resides.
There seems to be a precursor to this nameless wife, as the names of Aaron’s parents are hidden when the parentage of Moses is set down. Moses is born. Who are his parents? “A man from the house of Levi” married a “daughter of Levi” (Exodus 2:1). They are not named. Later we learn that the man was Amram, a grandson of Levi (the son of Levi’s son Kehat), who married his aunt, Jocheved, the daughter of Levi (Exodus 6:20) — but the parents of Aaron are unnamed as his younger brother Moses is born. In fact, Aaron’s own birth is recorded only long after the birth of his older sister Miriam and younger brother Moses, a disjunction that seems apt for a nameless wife amidst Aaron’s descendants. Something mysterious invades the longest known lineage of the Jewish people: the descendants of Aaron and Elisheva. The founding line begins with a knowledge gap.
Then, when Amram and Jocheved are named later, it is in the context of a brief genealogical listing of the sons and families of the first three of the 12 tribes, and, in this listing, all the names of these three sons are given. Even the next generation of one of Jacob’s sons — Levi — is also named. These are the four sons of Aaron: Nadav, Avihu, Elazar, Ithamar. Priesthood gets priority. Priests’ names are listed, even the next generation down. However, none of the wives of the four sons of Aaron are named. This would not be unusual this far down the founder’s line, if the state of all the wives were the same. It is not. The wife of Aaron’s son Elazar is identified as “one of the daughters of Putiel” (Exodus 6:25). Elazar and his wife bear a son, Phineas (Pinchas).
This should make Phineas a priest. Priesthood is patrilineal. Phineas is a son of Elazar, a priest. Phineas should be a priest, too. He is not. Why? Technically, it is because the initiation of the priesthood included only Aaron and his four sons (Exodus 28:1-2; 29:44), but this only begs the question: Why was Phineas excluded? If the priesthood is to be passed down patrilineally, beginning with Aaron, why wasn’t Phineas — a son of Aaron’s son Elazar — also named as a priest? The answer must be substantive, not technical. The substance points to Phineas’ mother. Something seems to be defective about her, she is identified only as a daughter of Putiel, and, at that, is the only wife of Aaron’s sons listed. Distinct, she is the unnamed wife. Her name is hidden, which suggests a source of embarrassment. What is going on?
A defect’s elusive source
Our investigation reaches a pivotal stage. Phineas becomes a priest only because G-d Himself bestowed this status on him. This was unique. An uninherited status as a priest never happened before or since. G-d rewarded Phineas for zealously halting the immoral orgy between the Israelite men and Moabite women (Numbers 25:1-9).
Even though Phineas was a son of Elazar, Phineas’ automatic, patrilineal eligibility for the priesthood was fatally flawed. I suggest that the substantive reason is because his mother was unlike the other wives of Aaron’s sons. His mother — Elazar’s wife, identified only as a daughter of Putiel — demands that we look to her father Putiel to see what diminished him to such an extent that his daughter’s marriage to Elazar denied their son Phineas the priesthood.
Who was Putiel?
Putiel was also called Jethro, who was Moses’ father-in-law (Exodus 18:1). Putiel and Jethro were the same person. This identification is apparently rooted in Scripture’s identification of “Moses’ father-in-law” with many names, including Jethro, and in rabbinic tradition (Mechilta 18:1), which lists seven names of Moses’ father-in-law, including Putiel. Jethro was a Midianite priest; his other name “Putiel” connotes (in Hebrew) “fattened calves for a god” (Rashi, Numbers 25:11). Jethro was an idolatrous priest.
The daughter of Jethro was stained with the spiritual corruption of her father, so much so that her child with Elazar was stained also.
This is puzzling, to put it mildly.
Moses himself married a daughter of Jethro. Moses was not stained, nor were his children.
Not to mention, Jethro himself was so swayed by Moses that he, Jethro, renounced his idolatrous ways and accepted the one G-d (Exodus Rabbah 1:32).
Yet, Elazar’s son was stained for his having married a daughter of Jethro.
One cannot say that there was no sin in Moses’ marrying Jethro’s daughter on the grounds that Jethro repented of his idolatrous ways. Jethro apparently wanted his daughter Zipporah to marry Moses the very day that Jethro met Moses (Exodus 2:21). It is highly unlikely that this was the occasion for a profound philosophical conversation or, if there were one, it is highly unlikely that Jethro, a longstanding idolatrous priest, changed his entire outlook in one day. Besides, it seems that only when Jethro visited his son-in-law Moses much later after Moses had returned to Egypt, and after G-d had wrought 10 plagues and split the Reed Sea, did Jethro swear allegiance to the one G-d. Upon meeting Moses then, Jethro exclaimed, “Now I know that Hashem is greater than all the other gods” (Exodus 18:11). Earlier, when Moses married Zipporah, her father was still an idolater. If Moses did not sin in marrying Jethro’s daughter Zipporah, how could Elazar’s son be stained via Zipporah’s sister — Elazar’s nameless wife?
Alternatively, we could exonerate Elazar himself and still be left with no explanation for his nameless wife. We could say that by the time Moses’ nephew Elazar married a daughter of Jethro, Jethro had repented, idolatry no longer plagued his line, and Elazar had not sinned in marrying Jethro’s daughter. If so, why is his wife nameless?
Still another possibility: We could say that Moses married Zipporah before the revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai, and only with the revelation was the ban on intermarriage imposed, and therefore Moses did not sin in marrying Zipporah, but by the time Moses’ nephew later married a daughter of Putiel, it was after the revelation, when it was forbidden to marry out. Moses did not sin, but Elazar did.
Whatever the circumstances surrounding Elazar’s marriage, we are left with no explanation for the stain that seems to attach to his wife and to their son.
True, we have a record of Jethro renouncing his idolatrous ways, but we have no such record for Jethro’s daughters doing so, with the sole exception of Moses’ wife Zipporah, who saved Moses’ life by hastening to obey G-d’s word to circumcise their newborn son (Exodus 4:24-26). It stands to reason that if the daughters of Putiel actually had repented, no stain would have passed from the unnamed wife of Elazar to her son Phineas.
We return to our puzzlement: If Elazar sinned in marrying out, why was it his son Phineas who was stained? Why was he denied the inherited priesthood? Or, if his unnamed mother, Elazar’s unnamed wife, did not diminish Elazar’s status, how could she diminish their son Phineas’ status? Whether or not Elazar married out, we are left with the same question: Why was it his son Phineas who was stained?
One might say that Zipporah influenced her sister. Just as Moses’ wife rejected idolatry, so did her sister, Elazar’s wife. But if so, why is Elazar’s wife singled out as a “daughter of Putiel,” of an idolater? Why do the commentators read “Putiel” negatively as denoting one who offers calves to idols?
An alternative, affirmative reading of “Putiel” has the name connoting Joseph (Jacob and Rachel’s son), who conquered his passions in his encounter with an Egyptian seductress (Genesis 39:-12; Bava Batra 109b). The negative reading of Putiel seems much more apt, for if Putiel actually were a spiritual hero, then why is his descendant not dignified with a name?
Still another alternative reading nonetheless leaves us with the same quandary. Some say that Jethro repented of idolatry even before he met Moses. Thus, when Moses married Jethro’s daughter Zipporah, Moses did not marry the daughter of an idolater. If so, Elazar also did not marry the daughter of an idolater. Then why is Elazar’s wife not named? Why is she a “daughter of Putiel,” of a (former) idolater? Why is her son not accorded the priesthood together with his grandfather Aaron, his father Elazar and his three uncles?
A generational defect
One cannot escape the powerful implication that Elazar’s wife was a source of spiritual contamination, passed to and undermining the status of her son Phineas. Perhaps a key to unraveling this mystery resides in a shadow within a shadow.
The initial shadow is an unnamed wife of a critical founder of the Jewish line —Elazar. He, with his brother Ithamar, picked up the pieces after their older brothers were consumed for violating G-d’s word on the very first day of the Tabernacle’s operation (Leviticus 10:1-20). Elazar then assumed critical ritual responsibilities. He later succeeded his father as the High Priest (Numbers 20:24-28) and went on to lead the Israelite nation together with Moses and then with Joshua into the Holy Land.
The shadow within the shadow is associated with this particular formation: “one of the daughters of Putiel.” We start with the obvious: this reference is not to the daughter herself, but to her father. It is he who is named. She is a “daughter of Putiel.” Perhaps taking its cue from this formulation, and in doing so, illuminating it, when the Talmud recreates the discussion between the elder Moses and the young zealot Phineas in advance of Phineas’ lethal strike against Zimri and Cozbi, Phineas does not speak with “Moses.”
Phineas speaks with “the brother of my father’s father” — with the brother (Moses) of my father’s (Elazar’s) father (Aaron).
Then, when the Talmud recreates the discussion between Zimri and Moses, as Zimri attempts to legitimize his lust for a Moabite woman, Zimri does not speak to “Moses.” He speaks to “the son of Amram,” and in making his case Zimri does not refer to Zipporah, he refers to “the daughter of Jethro.”
Then, when the Talmud recreates the discussion between G-d and the ministering angels, G-d does not refer to “Phineas.” G-d refers to “a zealot the son of a zealot” — to a zealot (Phineas), the son (the great-great-grandson) of a zealot (Levi, who, with his brother Simeon, wiped out every male of Shechem) (Genesis 34:25-26). In his zealotry, the Talmud calls Phineas “a deflector of wrath, the son (grandson) of a deflector of wrath” (of Aaron, who deflected G-d’s wrath against the Israelites triggered by Korach) (Numbers 17:11-13; Sanhedrin 82a).
The shadow within the shadow is this: Generations count. Generations are named.
Generations frame discourse. Generations transcend individual names, individual actors. Major actors in the Jewish leadership line are not just individuals. They devise and embody generational language, generational discourse: “son of,” “the daughter of,” “father’s father,” “great-great-grandson of.” Traits, both affirmative and negative, are passed from generation to generation – and not necessarily from one generation to the very next one; sometimes they are passed many generations down.
Phineas the zealot is not just an individual actor, and neither is Elazar’s wife, “one of the daughters of Putiel.” Even if her father, Putiel-Jethro, renounced idolatry, and, for that matter, even if his daughter (Elazar’s wife) also did so, the idolatrous strain and its spiritual stain remained in the line, at least potentially. Even if Elazar married a woman who, too, like her father, had renounced idolatry and thus did not marry out, the strain and the stain could pass to Phineas. That is why his mother — Elazar’s wife — is not named. It is not she as an individual who matters here. It is she who is a link in generations of idolaters. She is that link even if she herself was no idolater. Elazar may not have erred in marrying her, but the threat, passed to their son, remained.
It was Phineas’ unprecedented, bold, zealous killing of the reprobates Zimri and Cozbi that demonstrated that in him no strain or stain of idolatry resided. That is why G-d actuated his priestly status. Remember, the chief spiritual threat of the Israelite-Moabite orgy was not the orgy itself. It was the Moabite women’s goal, via their seduction physically, to seduce the Israelite men spiritually, to coerce them to worship Moabite idols (Numbers 25:1-8; Sanhedrin 106a).
‘Moses extends to every generation’
One matter remains to be clarified. If the fear of a generational transmission of idolatry is true for Aaron’s grandson Phineas, then why is it not equally true for Moses’ children? Moses’ wife was also a daughter of Jethro-Putiel. If the trait of idolatry could pass from him to one daughter, it could just as well pass from him to another daughter.
However, traits, affirmative or negative, are not necessarily passed to every generation in the line. Levi’s zealotry did not reappear until six generations down (Levi to Kehat, Amram, Aaron, Elazar, Phineas). Idolatry may have skipped those generations of Moses whose names we know — none are identified as idolaters — but clearly no one better than Moses himself knew that the generations of his wife, a daughter of Jethro-Putiel, were at risk for idolatry. As the biblical record amply demonstrates, the generations of all Israelites bore this risk. As the book of Deuteronomy makes clear, it was Moses’ final mission to warn against the perils of idolatry throughout the Israelite nation bequeathed by its founders. Generations even of the most pious must remain on guard lest negative traits invade their line.
The Zohar says, “itpashtuta de-Moshe be-khol dara, Moses extends to every generation.” Not only his unparalleled inspiration. Not only his unexampled example of holiness. Not only his eternal teachings. But his warnings, too, extend to every generation.
They extend throughout the generations.
The nameless wife validated them.
