The daughters of Tzelofhad…came forward…They stood before Moshe, Elazar the priest, the chieftains, and the whole assembly, at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting, and they said, ‘Our father died in the wilderness. He was not one of the faction, Korah’s faction, which banded together against the Lord, but died for his own sin; and he has left no sons. Let not our father’s name be lost to his clan just because he had no son! Give us a holding among our father’s kinsmen!” (Num. 27:1-4)
Moshe was getting ready to divvy up the Land of Israel, as the people reach the end of their wanderings in the desert and prepare to enter this new stage of their national existence. But in the system being established by Moshe, land will be given only to men and passed on through men. Having no brothers, the sisters realize that there is no one to inherit what would have been the portion allotted to their father; their immediate family will not share in the Land. And so they come forward to petition Moshe for a different outcome. Moshe takes their plea to God – Who responds: “The daughters of Tzelofhad speak correctly; you will surely give them a hereditary holding among their father’s kinsmen, transfer their father’s share to them.” (27:6)
God goes on to impart to Moshe a more broad principle that in any case in which a man dies without living male descendants, his daughters then become his heirs.
The daughters of Tzelofhad accomplish something quite significant; a change in the law going forward that gives women a degree of rights that they did not have before – though it is true that they inherit only when there are no sons. The daughters of Tzelofhad are bold in taking action and asking for what they want, and they most certainly make history in a positive way. There is an argument to make that the daughters of Tzelofhad are, in their way, quite “well-behaved.” They are, if anything, more well-behaved than the Israelite men, who have recently been acting rather inappropriately with those Midianite women.
The system Moshe is trying to establish for the Israelites is a society of God’s people in the Land. At this moment, one could argue (and certain rabbinic midrashim did) that these women have better values than the men to whom the land is supposed to go; they want their share of the Land more than the men do! They are not rebelling against the system, really; quite the opposite, one could say, they’re deeply committed to its values and want what the system wants, at least for its male members. And it’s this challenge of the system, coming from within the system and motivated by a commitment to the system and its ideals, that makes a historic change for the better.
It is interesting to note that when the daughters of Tzlofchad approached Moshe and asked to inherit their father’s portion of the land of Israel, the Torah tells us that Moshe did not respond to them immediately. Instead, he brought the matter before Hashem and asked what to do? Many suggest that Moshe simply did not know the answer and therefore sought Hashem’s counsel. The Chafetz Chayim suggests that Moshe did indeed know the proper answer, yet he felt that he could not be objective. When the daughters of Tzlofchad came to Moshe they described their father as having died in the desert as a result of his own sin, and that he had not been one of the followers of Korach. Rabbi Zwickler of NJ, comments: “Moshe was worried that perhaps his judgment of this case would be impaired because the episode of Korach was mentioned, and that situation touched him in a very personal way. There are times in life when are asked to give someone advice or judge a persons behavior and we are challenged with the question of our own objectivity. In such situations it is important to be honest with ourselves and learn from the lesson of Moshe.”
Prepared by Devorah Abenhaim
