Is That A Huge Bunch of Grapes You’re Carrying…?

Or are you just excited to be in the land of Israel?

This week’s parashah is all about the spies that Moses sends into Israel to check out the land that the Israelites are supposed to conquer. There’s a similar spying theme in this week’s haftarah. And this week at MJL we featured an article about badass Israeli spy Eli Cohen on the homepage. Good times.

But I want to focus on one funny section from this week’s parashah: the huge bunch of grapes.

spies_grapes.jpg

In Numbers 13:23 we read, “They reached the wadi Eshcol, and there they cut down a branch with a single cluster of grapes—it had to be borne on a carrying frame by two of them—and some pomegranates and figs.†This is an image you’re probably familiar with from various wine bottles and Sunday school posters. But first of all, do you ever remember seeing any pictures of the pomegranates and figs? Whatever happened to them? All anyone every talks about is the big grapes.

Also, it turns out that the whole “it had to be borne on a carrying frame by two of them†is not as simple as it sounds. A more accurate translation may be that it had “to be borne on two poles and carried by them.†In fact, there are quite a few opinions on how the whole carrying apparatus worked. There’s a Talmudic discussion about this issue in Sotah 34a:

And they bare it upon a staff between two. From the fact that it is stated upon a staff do I not know that it [was carried] between two? Why, then, is there a text to state ‘between two’? [It means] on two staffs. R. Isaac said: [It means] a series of balancing poles. How was it? Eight [spies] carried the grape-cluster, one carried a pomegranate, one carried a fig, and Joshua and Caleb did not carry anything. If you wish I can say [that they did not carry anything] because they were the most distinguished of them, or alternatively that they did not have a share in the plan.

If you’re like the kind of guys I used to date in high school, you probably just thought to yourself, “Hey, I should try to make a diagram of that.” I’ve got news for you: it’s been done. Apparently the guys I dated in high school were a lot like medieval Bible commentators.

medieval_diagram.jpg
grapes_diagram_3.jpg
diagrams_of_graps.jpg

Hat tip to Dr. Hazoniel Touitou of Bar Ilan University.

I have another question: If the grapes were so huge they needed to be carried on a frame or poles, how could they be eaten? I mean, if you’re dealing with a grape the size of a bowling ball, how do you eat it? And for that matter, what happened to the grapes? Did the Israelites ever eat them? Did they go bad after the Israelites started whining? Did Joshua and Caleb get to have them for themselves?

Another possibility: the enormous grapes were used to make some really delicious Manischewitz wine…

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