Midrashic Memory: Pinchas

In the truncated lineage given in Va'Era, Eleazar, the son of Aaron, is said to marry one of the "daughters of Putiel" (Ex. 6:25). Rashi quotes the rabbinic tradition's explanation of the unusual interest in the lineage of Eleazar's wife:

From the seed of Jethro, who fattened (pitem) calves for idolatrous worship, and from the seed of Joseph, who made light (pitpet) of his temptations. (Rashi, based on Sotah 43a and elsewhere)

The pshat commentators are less keen on this: both ibn Ezra and Ramban assume that Putiel was a notable of some kind, the cause of his fame long lost to us.

The lineage issue comes up again at the beginning of parshas Pinchas. The verses are careful to refer to him as "Pinchas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest", and Rashi notes that this belies some contemporary criticism of Pinchas:

The other tribes were disparaging him, saying, "Have you seen this ben puti (son of a Puti), a child whose mother's father fattened calves for idolatrous worship, who has gone and killed a prince of Israel?!" For this reason, the verse has come to trace his lineage to Aaron. (Rashi to Num. 25:11)

Thus, we have three Tannaitic traditions relating to Putiel or to Pinchas: 1) that Putiel "fattened calves for idolatrous worship" (seemingly a baraisa, in Sotah 43a, Bava Basra 109b, Sanhedrin 82b); 2) that Pinchas descends from Joseph (introduced as a baraisa in Sotah 43a, mentioned in the other sources); and 3) that Pinchas was a "son of a Puti" (a baraisa in Sifri to Bemidbar, 131, end of Balak, quoted in all three sources; in Sifri, however, the text reads "the son of the daughter of a Puti"). The identification of Putiel with Jethro in Sotah 43a and Bava Basra 109b is Amoraic, and indeed, Rashi in Sanhedrin (ד"ה אבי אמו) is seemingly unaware of these Talmudic sources, relying instead on the very late Midrash Agada (although Rashi possibly means Shemos Rabbah) for this point! Shemos Rabbah to Ex. 6:25, which also identifies Putiel with Jethro, is likewise a late, post-Talmudic compilation.

What are we to make of the tradition's insistence on Pinchas' non-Israelite ancestry? Neither the name Putiel, nor the mere repetition of Pinchas' Aaronide bona fides, warrant this leap. This tradition suggests, as so many other midrashic readings do, a memory whose sources and reasoning are lost to us (per ibn Ezra and Ramban above). In earlier eras, the scholar would have been quick to dismiss this as another production of the "fantastic imagination" of the aggadah and midrash. The passage of time, continuing discovery of ancient materials, and new literary perspectives have all served to inject some humility into the equation, and provide the student of rabbinic texts with both hope and the motivation of potentially uncovering something interesting. It is with that hope and motivation that we proceed here.

We begin with the name Pinchas, which remained the province of speculation for some time. Thanks to our knowledge of the Egyptian language and ancient inscriptions, it is a mystery no more. The name pꜣ-nḥsj, or

, pronounced something like Pinehesy or Panehasy (nobody is sure of the vocalization), means simply "the Nubian", and we know of at least two Egyptians who bore this name: a priest of Aten who lived during the Amarna period (Eighteenth Dynasty) and a viceroy of Kush who lived during the Twentieth Dynasty and ruled Lower Nubia.

Whether this was his given name or a nickname, affectionate or otherwise, why was this Aaronide priest known as "the Nubian"? One simple answer would be that he was, in fact, of Nubian descent on his mother's side. The tradition of Pinchas' non-Israelite origins may now be seen as reflecting the memory of the meaning of Pinchas' name and/or his actual personal history. Indeed, if we may indulge in just a bit of speculation, it seems that the tradition has preserved the specifically Nubian origins of Putiel as well!

Let us look again at the three rabbinic traditions, starting with Pinchas as a בן פוטי, son of a puti, or a בן בתו של פוטי son of a daughter of a puti, as in Sifri. Who is a Puti, and what is the meaning of this epithet? A Puti is simply a person from Put:

And the sons of Ham: Kush, Mitzraim (Egypt), Put (פוט), and Canaan. (Gen. 10:6)

Context suggests that it is somewhere near Egypt, but where exactly is Put? Shadal mentions that "they say this is Lybia", but R. David Zvi Hoffmann shows, using a verse in Nachum, that it must be not Lybia but a neighboring land. No compelling identification has been given to date, but it is more than a little tempting to adopt the opinion of those scholars who see it as the Hebrew name of the ancient land of Punt. The location of Punt is itself not entirely certain, but most place it in the region of the Horn of Africa, by the southern extremity of Nubian territory. We do not propose to solve this problem, which we leave for historians and linguists, as our concern here is the rabbinic tradition. The tradition located Put--which it might have identified with Punt--somewhere near Egypt, possibly around Nubia. Pinchas the Nubian, this reading suggests, was called that because his grandfather, the oddly-named Putiel, was a Puti (which is to say a Nubian) himself!

An oblique echo of Pinchas' non-Israelite, Nubian origins may even be discerned in the tradition connecting him to Joseph. The linkage of Put with the verb pitpet is midrashic--nothing about the name or the text of the Joseph story indicates that he "made light of" his temptation. But if we examine this tradition, as well, from the perspective of memory, we shall see more than mere wordplay here. Joseph's seed is another example of a prominent family that has mixed with non-Israelites: Joseph marries the daughter of the only other individual in the Torah with potentially Putite origins, a priest from Heliopolis (called On in the Hebrew text, after the Egyptian) named פוטיפרע, Potiphera! If the midrash is reading the first component of the name as poti/puti, meaning "Putite", the implied etymology of the Egyptian name might be something like ptj-pꜣ-rʿ, "the Putite of Ra", or ptj-pr-rʿ, "the Putite of the House of Ra". Either would have been a fitting title for a priest from Heliopolis, the center of Ra and Atum worship, which indeed had a temple called the pr-jtm, or "House of Atum". Perhaps the tradition even saw this name as synonymous with the abovementioned Putiel, which it read Puti-El, the Putite of God. Whatever the tradition's implied Egyptian etymology might have been, and whether or not that etymology is linguistically sound, we can discern in the the lumping together of פוטי-אל and פוטי-פרע a memory of Putite origins.

What of Jethro? Here, the Talmud and midrashim might be abiding by a well-known law of rabbinic exegesis which we refer to as Conservation of Characters. The rabbinic tradition often reads multiple Biblical characters as one (cf. Rosh HaShana 3a-b for two cases) or identifies anonymous characters with known personalities (cf. Midrash Rabbah and Tanchuma to Gen. 48:1), and this could be such a case--considering the midrashic tradition that Jethro tried out every form of idolatrous worship (Mechilta and Tanchuma to Ex. 18:11), he would have been a natural candidate for the role of one who "fattened calves for idolatrous worship". This lineage would also make his act rather Jethro-like: just as Jethro was most impressed that the Egyptians were punished by the very thing through which they sinned (Ex. 18:11, following Onkelos and Mechilta and loc., and Sotah 11a), the Midianite princess was herself slain by a zealot of Midianite descent. (Interestingly, the tradition that relates Pinchas to Joseph picks up on the idea of a family tie-in--Pinchas is said (Sotah 43a) to be avenging himself against the Midianites for selling his ancestor.) It would also add a tinge of irony, which the Amoraim might have seen in the Sifri. After accusing him of being the son of a daughter of a Puti, the tribe of Simon repeats, "do we not know whose son he is?" The tribe of Simon's outrage is thus not only on account of the disparity in standing between Zimri and Pinchas, but also on account of the absurdity of a Midianite playing policeman in this instance.

Jethro might also have been a good fit for geographical reasons: although Midian has not been conclusively located, and the name might have referred to a tribal confederation more than any specific place, Jethro clearly resided in the Arabian peninsula near Egypt. Perhaps this was the land adjacent to Egypt known as פוט (indeed, some scholars have located Punt on the coast opposite Egypt across the Gulf of Aqaba).

Pinchas' non-Israelite background would likely have been at the forefront of any criticism directed against the killer of an Israelite prince. In the Talmud and midrashim, the tradition has retained that information over a span of many centuries and is able to make use of it as the backdrop for the Torah's insistence on tracing Pinchas' lineage back further than expected. By the time of the final compilation and redaction of these corpuses, it is information that nobody can extract from any existing written sources, which defy all attempts at decipherment until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone one thousand years later. To accomplish this feat of memory, the tradition relied on one of its most powerful tools, midrashic reading, which seizes on associations, puns, and any other potential hooks to keep the message anchored to the verse. We can only marvel at its enduring power.