The hornet – another animal in God’s service

As Moses’ farewell speech – the bulk of the book of Deuteronomy – continues, we recall that he resembled the Amorites (controlling the high grounds) who came out against the Israelites (in the aftermath of the traumatic fiasco of the ten spies’ report, originally told in Num 14: 44-45) to bees ( Deut 1:44), who are wont to chase those threatening their home.

This week in the Ekev portion, Moses assures his people – poised to enter the Promised Land – that God would surely dispatch hornets – whose sting is far worse than bees’ – against the people currently inhabiting the land. Moses assured the same thing much earlier noting that God would launch the hornet at the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite nations. To be sure, that is exactly what happened, even as the book of Joshua (24:12) tells us that “the hornet did expel” two Amorite kingdoms (perhaps in the region of Shechem); it was not the Israelite military power that did so, but God by launching the hornets.

This was not the first or last time that God summons animals to do His bidding – from a lion, through a donkey and a fish, to (venomous) snakes and a worm. “In Egypt, God employed frogs, lice, flies, and locusts en masse (through plagues) to disturb and annoy the Egyptians to coerce the pharaoh to let the Hebrew slaves go to the desert for a short religious holiday. Or, as the psalmist has it, ‘He sent among them swarms of flies, which devoured them, and frogs, which destroyed them’ (Ps 78:45). Or, as in Ps 105: ‘He spoke and there came swarms of flies and gnats in all their borders. . . . He spoke, and the locust came and the canker-worm without number’ (105:31–34)…

Though the New Oxford Bible translation supersedes ‘hornets’ with ‘the pestilence’, this word is still associated with living creatures, for such endemic is known to be transmitted by fleas that slaked off the blood of plague-diseased rats. This brings us to the calamity that befell the huge army of Sennach­erib, the Assyrian king who laid siege to Jerusalem in 701 BCE. ‘That very night the angel of the Lord set out and struck down 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians; when morning dawned, they were all dead bodies’ (2 Kgs 19:35).

Neither this account nor its other rendition (in 2 Chr 32:21) tries to explain this mysterious catastrophe the Assyrians suffered while Jerusalem was at their mercy … Hence, the colossal demise of the immense Assyrian camp might speculatively have been another case of God’s recruiting from his living handiwork to do His will.” (Quoted from my book: Taming the Beast: Human-Animal Encounters in the Bible (Wipf &Stock Publishers.)

This Torah portion also demonstrates the extent of the Israelites’ fear of animals, even as we are told that the capturing of the land would be bit-by-bit, rather than comprehensively and rapidly; or in Moses’ words, “Your God will dislodge these nations before you, little by little; you may not finish them off quickly lest the wildlife of the field become too many for you” (Deut 7:22 ). My book sheds light on this quandary; the current numbers of Israelites were “inadequate to effectively replace and inhabit every defeated and abandoned Canaanite town or settlement. Therefore, some of these would not be conquered [in one swing] lest the land become desolate. If the land was purged all at once, the Canaanite population would be replaced, not by Israelites but by numerous ‘wildlife of the field,’ perceived as more frightening neighbors than the morally odious and militarily feared Canaanites.

How much better it would be, then, for the new owners of the land, the Israelites, if Canaanite cities that the Israelites had not yet tried to capture were to be tolerated, if only temporarily, even though the presence of pagan Canaanites in the land was, in principle, proscribed. That would be a better alternative to animals of the land roaming in would-be prematurely vacant Canaanite towns. [To wit], human presence deters animals from inhabited areas, for it is the animal that fears humans, even as people are scared of animals too, albeit for an arcane prejudice” (Gen 37:20, 33).