Ishmael ben Nethaniah's Massacre of the Self-Gashing Pilgrims in Jeremiah 41

Ishmael ben Nethaniah’s mass murder of pilgrims on their way to the ruins of the Temple in Jerusalem c. 585 BCE (Jer. 41:4-9) has been taken to indicate that Ishmael wanted to become king over Judah and that the pilgrims’ self-gashing is evidence that such self-mutilation was still acceptable at this time in traditional Jewish circles. I will argue, instead, that Ishmael was an agent of the king of Ammon who sought the destruction of Judah and its religious center, and that self-mutilation was indeed prohibited in traditional Judean circles as in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

After the exile of 586 BCE, the Chaldean conquerors installed Gedaliah son of Ahikam son of Shaphan, a prominent Judean, as governor of the region.¹ While we do not know the exact year of the event studied here, we know that there were three exiles in 597, 587/6 and 582 BCE (II Kings 24:14, 16; Jeremiah 52:28-30), and that these events occurred between the second and the third exile. The numbers given for the three exiles imply that there were still many Judeans who remained in or returned to their land. The Book of Lamentations, Jeremiah 40:10-12 and Ezekiel 33:23-24 demonstrate that Jerusalem and Judah were not emptied of Judean inhabitants.²

Gedaliah encourages Judeans who have fled to Moab, Ammon, and Edom to return, and they do; with Mizpah as their new center, they begin to be prosperous. Indeed, though this is all in the aftermath of destruction and exile, the situation is stated in terms that seems idyllic, with an ingathering of refugees and a bountiful harvest: “All these Judeans returned from all the places to which they had scattered. They came to the land of Judah, to Gedaliah at Mizpah, and they gathered large quantities of wine and figs” (Jer. 40:12).

This hopeful period, however, ends quickly. Gedaliah does not believe the warnings to protect himself from Ishmael son of Nethaniah, who was of royal descent and one of the king’s commanders (41:1) and who is the agent of Ammon,³ “Do you know that King Baalis of Ammon has sent Ishmael son of Nethaniah to kill you?” (40:13). Gedaliah trusts Ishmael and refuses the offer to dispose of him. This is a naïve mistake, and Ishmael assassinates Gedaliah.

The news does not spread quickly, and men from Shechem, Shiloh and Samaria unknowingly make their way toward Jerusalem, in mourning for the destroyed Temple: “The second day after Gedaliah was killed, when no one yet knew about it, eighty men came from Shechem, Shiloh, and Samaria, their heads shaved, their garments torn, and their bodies gashed, carrying meal offerings and frankincense to present at the House of the LORD” (Jer. 41:4-5).

While it is interesting that the pilgrims are on their way to the “House of the LORD,” as if the Temple still stood, it is fair to assume that they were poignantly bringing offerings to the place where the Temple had been for centuries.⁴

Ten of the pilgrims try to save their lives by taking Ishmael to hidden resources in the field of wheat, barley, oil, and honey (Jer. 41:8). But how would pilgrims from the north know about these stores? One possibility is that the stores were placed there on previous pilgrimages, or that the knowledge of these stores was transmitted by pilgrims to each other. This pilgrimage from the north was not unique.

I will discuss two questions: What were Ishmael’s motivations that would lead him to kill the pilgrims? And how could they have gashed themselves in a manner prohibited by Israelite law?

Did Ishmael Want to Be King of Judah?

What were Ishmael’s motivations? Since he is of the royal house, many think that he may have aspired to the throne of Judah. There were two factions in both Judah and Babylon, one that had been led by King Zedekiah into a rebellious disaster, and the other anti-rebellion faction whose spokesman was Jeremiah. We may see Ishmael as a patriotic Judean who resisted Babylonian rule and wanted to restore Judean rule with himself as king. Ishmael may have fled to Ammon, become the vassal or agent of Baalis king of Ammon and then come back to Judah with a mission.

A recent commentator states: “Ishmael’s flaw seems to be his blind hatred of anything Babylonian and of those who do not share his opinion about Babylon. The two ingredients provide the recipe for the disaster at Mizpah.”⁵ One can readily understand why Ishmael would hate the Babylonians, and that he might kill Gedaliah as a Babylonian collaborator, but this does not explain why he has any interest in the pilgrims at all.

His murder of the pilgrims from the north may be the incident that demonstrates Ishmael’s motivations. If Ishmael wanted to become king, he would be interested in the eventual restoration of the Temple, to restore the Judean kingdom that had been centered by the Temple in Jerusalem for centuries. Since Ishmael attempts to take the survivors of his purge, including the king’s daughters (41:10), to Ammon (41:15), he may have been more an agent of Ammon than an aspirant to the throne of Judah, and thus wanted to destroy any power and prosperity in Judah.

There is another possibility, that Baalis and Ishmael had a two-stage plan: first to assassinate Gedaliah and take all important Judeans like the princesses to Ammon before the Chaldeans come in another invasion to punish the inhabitants for killing their governor; and then, after an interim period, Ishmael would return and become the king of Judah as a vassal of Baalis.

Either way, the tragedy of Gedaliah’s assassination includes the dimension of a Judean who betrayed his people.

The Development of the Prohibition Against Self-Mutilation

This episode from Jeremiah has been taken to show that since pious worshippers of the LORD gashed themselves, the prohibition against gashing must not yet have been in place. The biblical prohibition against self-mutilation seems to be so basic to Israelite law that it may be surprising to learn that there are relatively few references to this practice and that some of them even seem to condone it. The most important reference is this passage from Deuteronomy: “You are the children of the LORD your God. You shall not gash yourselves or shave the front of your heads because of the dead. For you are a people consecrated to the LORD your God; the LORD your God chose you from among all other peoples on earth to be His treasured people. You shall not eat anything abhorrent . . .” (Deut. 14:1-3a). The Bible proscribes self-mutilation for the dead in what is assumed to be a rejection of a long-standing Canaanite practice.

In a monograph about rituals revolving around death in Israelite religion that is often cited, however, Schmidt argues against the assumption that this prohibition is an early rejection of Canaanite practices and makes a case that it is a late, post-Jeremian development. In our passage from Jeremiah, Schmidt claims, the pious pilgrims gash themselves because there is no prohibition against self-mutilation. The practice was acceptable in earlier times and prohibited only later, after Jeremiah, in the Deuteronomic and priestly ideologies.⁶ Schmidt says that the prohibition against laceration and tonsure is late and that the law was originally only for the priests, as found in Leviticus: “The LORD said to Moses: Speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron, and say to them: None shall defile himself for any [dead] person, except for the relatives that are closest to him….. They shall not shave smooth any part of their heads, or cut the side-growth of their beards, or make gashes in their flesh” (Lev. 21:1-5).

The text is not as clear as one might assume. Does it mean that the priests shall not defile themselves and, separately, that they shall not cut their beards or gash themselves for the dead, or that the kind of defiling they must not do is beard-cutting and gashing themselves? The passage goes on to give other restrictions for the priests that have nothing to do with death. If 21:1-6 should be read together, then priests were allowed to cut their beards and lacerate themselves for their close kin! This is what Schmidt concludes, saying that the reference to the dead in 21:1 means that self-laceration is acceptable for mourning for close kin, and that this passage is later expanded to all the people (Lev. 19:27-28): “You shall not round off the side-growth on your head, or destroy the side growth of your beard. You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves. I am the LORD.”

I would argue that this is not development and expansion from priests to the Israelites but that the priests are specifically prohibited against this in a passage that relates to priests and the people are generally prohibited as part of a passage of laws for all Israelites. Both Leviticus 19 and 21 are part of the Holiness Code, which I hasten to say was early and not a late, post-Deuteronomic text as the Wellhausian source-critics might call it. Even these scholars posit the Deuteronomic reforms to the seventh century, so they are forced to say that Deuteronomy 14:1-3 was inserted even later than that. Critical scholarship often creates its own arbitrary schemes of evolution and development and then designates the sources of verses in an arbitrary chronological scheme to suit its purposes.

Schmidt attempts to refute the origin of the prohibition against self-laceration as an early, anti-Canaanite polemic by minimizing the evidence that we have about this Canaanite practice. Yet we do have sources for such Canaanite mourning practices as early as Late Bronze Age Ugaritic texts.⁷

There are several other biblical references to self-gashing, some of which are clearly presented as a foreign custom. Isaiah 15-16 is a sorrowful cry over terrible events that have befallen the Moabites, a neighboring people who had, at best, a checkered relationship with the Judeans. The passage is replicated in Jeremiah 48. “On every head is baldness, every beard is shorn; In its streets, they are girt with sackcloth” (Isa. 15:2-3), “For every head is bald and every beard is shorn; On all hands there are gashes and on the loins sackcloth” (Jer. 48:37).

There is a difference between the original Isaiah and the later Jeremiah parallel in that Isaiah does not have gashes and Jeremiah does, but it is not clear whether the first may have a scribal omission or the later one the addition of the gashing. This discrepancy has led some to the conclusion that Isaiah did not yet have a proscription of self-gashing and that the later Jeremiah did. Parallelism would indicate that the text in Jeremiah is preferable. The important point here is that this is about Moabites, not Judeans.

In a similar way, Jeremiah speaks about what will happen in Egypt: “Great and small alike shall die in their land, they shall not be buried; Men shall not lament them, nor gash and tonsure themselves for them” (Jer. 16:6). Jeremiah refers to this custom among the Philistines: “Baldness has come upon Gaza, Ashkelon is destroyed; O remnant of the valley, how long will you gash yourself?” (Jer. 47:5).

There may be a few references that indicate that some Judeans gashed themselves. Micah 4:14 states, “Now you gash yourself in grief, they have laid siege to us; They strike the ruler of Israel on the cheek with a staff.” This problematic verse does not fit in its context as it does not follow the very positive prophecy that precedes it. At any rate, such passages may be stated with sarcasm and condemnation and need not be taken as condoning or promoting the practice. Furthermore, a custom may be proscribed but this does not mean that all Judeans complied.

A more relevant biblical example is this important early passage about the confrontation between Israelite and polytheistic worship. In the famous contest at Mt. Carmel, Elijah opposes the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and four hundred prophets of Asherah in a challenge: whose god will send fire to burn the sacrifice and bring rain to end the long famine? The Baal prophets prepare the bull, invoke Baal by name from morning till noon, praying, “O Baal, answer us!” and do a hopping dance around the altar. After Elijah mocks them and their god, they go further and gash themselves: “So they shouted louder and gashed themselves with knives and spears, according to their practice (kamishpatam), and the blood streamed over them” (I Kg. 18:28).

Kamishpatam is a very important word here, and because it is mentioned casually, and not in a prophetic denunciation or a law, it is all the more convincing to reflect a reality within Baal-worship in the ninth century BCE.

What makes the passage in Jeremiah 41 more complicated than most have seen is that these pilgrims come from towns in the north, and we should not be so sure that they are “Judean.” Northern Israelite, and then Samaritan, religion may have incorporated such Canaanite practices. Notice that we do not see anything about anyone from the north returning to Judah in the preceding verses. The pilgrimage from the north may be different from, say, Gedaliah leading such a mission to the ruins of the Temple. We cannot take this passage as evidence that self-mutilation was practiced by pious Judean worshippers of the LORD. This remarkable story raises as many questions as it answers. My suggestions here are a response to the use of the story in ways that may not be true.

We can say that Ishmael ben Nethaniah’s barbaric actions, whether he aspired to be king, changed the history of this period in decidedly negative ways. It is an example of how, for all the external threats to our people, our own internal divisions can lead to devastating consequences. While the pilgrims to the site of the Temple may not have been traditional Judean worshippers, they were clearly sincere mourners for Zion and Jerusalem who did not deserve their tragic end.