NOTES for Num 36:1-13

The preservation of the hereditary allotment is clearly given great importance in the Torah. For its sake, inheritance primarily through the female line is even possible, and the transfer of ancestral land from one clan to another is forbidden. There were, without doubt, historical reasons for this. Indeed, all land in the patriarchal-clan period was communal; it was divided among tribes and large clans, and later among small families as well, which gradually separated out from the clan. It was important to keep this land in the possession of the tribe, clan, and family, thereby preventing excessive stratification by property. At that point it no longer mattered through which line inheritance passed.

There was, however, another aspect of this problem, no longer clan-based but individual and personal. In those times a great deal was connected with a name, especially a clan name. Looking at how carefully and even jealously people guarded the honor of their clan and their clan name in those days, one might think that clan life for people of that time completely overshadowed their own individual and personal life. In reality, however, this was not so. For a person, the clan name was first of all a means of self-identification, self-identification precisely as a person, deeply individual.

Through the clan name a person in a sense concentrated within himself everything that his clan, his family, bears within itself and had borne over centuries or even millennia before him. Of course, there could be much here that was not only good, but also bad, for the issue is a fallen world. Applied to antiquity, one can even speak here of something magical or almost magical, of the bond that among all peoples produced, in one form or another, a cult or at least veneration of ancestors.

Yet God also knows a person by name, and a clan name for Him is not an empty sound, but the manifestation of the bond among those who bear it. Here, of course, there is no place for any magic or automatism; God never acts that way. He does not, however, want even one clan to disappear from His people, or even one clan name to be forgotten and lost. That is why the laws preserving the clan, the clan name, and the ancestral land are important to Him, the land He Himself distributed among the tribes, assigning each its own allotment.