“A People that Dwells Alone”?

Abstract

No Hebrew reader, at least no reader with some Hebraic literacy, would be able to ignore the strong national resonance of the biblical phrases that Amalia Kahana-Carmon—one of Israel's foremost writers, the recipient of the 2000 Israel Prize—inserted into the masterful opening of the title novella of her 1984 triptych, Up on Montifer. Indeed, the evocative power of these intertexts is inescapable. “עAm levadad yishkon,” a verbatim quote from Balaam's prophecy (Numbers 23:9), is one of the sources for the construction of the Israelite and Jewish national identity, connoting uniqueness, exclusivity, and chosenness. The slightly veiled phrases “עover(et) lifnei hamaḥaneh” and “hanshei ḥalutz kovshim” add allusions to the foundational myth of the conquest of Canaan. In fact, they invoke the story of the tribes Gad and Reuben (Numbers 32), whose role as vanguard, crossing the Jordan before the rest of the Israelites (actually, “before the Lord,” as the biblical text insists), no doubt stands behind the modern Zionist use of the biblical term ḥalutz (vanguard) as “pioneer.”