PARASHAT HASHAVUA: THE BLESSING OF CHILDREN, SPECIFICALLY FOR MENASHE – PART II

     We saw last time that if the increase of 20,5000 people in the Tribe of Menashe is due to the blessing of children to his father Yosef, it is surprising that Ephrayim did not record an increase as well. We also asked why Moshe made a major issue of the requests for land east of the Jordan whereas Moshe seemed to effortlessly give it to Machir ben Menashe. We add another question. In discussing the conquest by Yair ben Menashe, who named the area Chavot Yair, it says that this was the name “until this day” (Devarim 3:14). This implies that there were two stages in the settlement of the area of the Gilad.

These indications point to the following thesis. The sons of Yosef, who had a status in Egypt of princes, took forces to the Promised Land early in Bnei Yisrael’s stay in Egypt. Menashe’s forces conquered land in today’s Golan. Some of them settled in Chavot Yair. In Devarim, the Torah stresses that in Moshe’s time that settlement still maintained that name. The Sons of Menashe had a mini-kingdom, which had political relationships with local nations, which explains how Machir was begot from Menashe’s Aramean concubine.

Much later, when Moshe arrived in the region, these parts of Yosef’s family reunited with the rest of Bnei Yisrael and continued living, with Moshe’s blessing, in their region without the need for a special deal. The members of the tribe in that settlement, who had not been in the encampment when the first census was taken but were when the second one was taken, explain the discrepancy of some twenty thousand people.

This thesis breathes new life into Yiftach’s speech (Shoftim 11:26), in which he chided the belligerent nation of Ammon for not doing anything during 300 years of Jewish life east of the Jordan. The chronology of this event works out much better if it is being counted from the time of Yosef’s sons and not that of Moshe.

There was another force from the family of Yosef that came to the Land of C’na’an, from Ephrayim. They captured a region in the area of Samaria and of Beit Choron and settled there. It could be they were joined by some of the locals who latched on to the family of Yaakov after the battle with Shechem, as locals attached themselves to Avraham before him. This historiography is almost explicit in Divrei Hayamim (I:7:24). The connection between this group and the Jews in Egypt was complicated by the difficulty of free travel through the Plishti region. This group was reunited at the time of Yehoshua, not Moshe, as hinted in Yehoshua 24:24. For this reason they were not counted in the second census in the desert either, so that the Tribe of Ephrayim did not yet reflect in that census the true blessing of population growth promised to Yosef. This multitude of population, in the case of Ephrayim, did not result in a second region of settlement, like the one of Menashe previously discussed. This explains the basis for their complaint to Yehoshua over insufficient land at their disposal (ibid. 17:14-17).

This major thesis, that we humbly suggest, is another example of using comparisons between multiple parts of the one organic Tanach, to allow it to explain itself.

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