Midyan

מדין

One of the more problematic names in the Tanach, it was probably never a Yehudit word in the first place, but came into the language at some point, and so looking for a Yehudit root to explain its meaning may well be fatuous. If it was Yehudit, then it would come from the root Din (דין) = "strife", connecting it with the tribe of Dan, and possibly explaining thereby why territory b) - for which see below - was thought of as Midyanite. The name of his brother Medan (מדן) comes from the same root (again, see below).

In terms of the geographical location of Midyan, the Tanach is unusually unhelpful in this regard. 1 Kings 11:18 is about as near as it gets to defining boundaries precisely, simply placing it somewhere between Edom and the Wilderness of Paran - see the map. This lack of definition is probably because the early Beney Midyan were nomads, and the later Beney Midyan were sometimes ruled by Edom, sometimes semi-autonomous.

In rather vaguer terms, three different versions of their territory are given: a) the eastern coastline of the Red Sea, running south from Aqaba (the tip of the right fork); b) the northern slopes of Mount Carmel, running eastwards as far as Megiddo and along the Mediterranean coast as far as Acco; c) the Golan Heights, centred upon the town of Ashterot (possibly Ashterot Karnayim) and bordering Menasheh, save only the Beney Gil'ad between them.

Genesis 25:2 and 1 Chronicles 1:32 name him as a son of Av-Raham by his third wife Keturah (קְטוּרָה), his siblings were Zimran (זִמְרָן), Yakshan (יָקְשָׁן), Medan (מְדָן), Yishbak (יִשְׁבָּק) and Shu'ach (שׁוּחַ). Yitschak inherited everything (25:5); the five sons received gifts and decamped eastwards (25:6), becoming the various Arab tribes of the Hejaz, today's Saudi Arabia. This clearly identifies Midyan with a) above.

Genesis 36:35 has the Beney Midyan defeated in Mo-Av by Hadad ben Badad (הֲדַד בֶּן-בְּדַד), an Edomite king - clearly an attempted northern expansion by the inhabitants of territory c); but when in history this is supposed to have happened is not given.

Genesis 37 has the Beney Midyan retrieving Yoseph from the pit in which his brothers have imprisoned him (though verse 37 suddenly changes this to Medanim - מְּדָנִים), and selling him to the Beney Yishma-El for twenty pieces of silver, the latter then trafficking him to Mitsrayim (Egypt), where they sold him into the status of an "overseas out-source worker" in the home of Poti-Phera, the high priest of On (Heliopolis), whose wife would try to seduce him, and have him imprisoned for rape when he rejected her, and whose daughter Asnat he would later marry; a rather bizarre Yisra-Eli version taken from the Egyptian "Tale of the Two Brothers". All this again identifies Midyan with c); however the entire reference may be false, and the intention not Midyan but Middin, spelled exactly the same - מדין - which Joshua 15:61 tells us was a town in the tribe of Yehudah. This may also help explain some of the other Midyanite oddities that we will see as we go through them, and should be borne in mind throughout.

Middin may itself be a variant of Modin, a town never mentioned in the Tanach, but known from the Apocrypha (specifically 1 Maccabees 13:25) as the home of the Maccabees, the founders of the Hasmonean dynasty.

Exodus 2:15 finds Mosheh fleeing to Midyan after he kills the Egyptian slave-overseer; stopping at a well he protects the seven daughters of the priest Re'u-El (רְעוּאֵל) from male harassment, as a result of which he marries Re'u-El's daughter Tsiporah (צִפֹּרָה - the name means "little bird"), on whom he fathers Gershom (גֵּרְשֹׁם); all of which is then altered at the start of chapter 3, where Mosheh's father-in-law is now named Yitro (יִתְרוֹ - Jethro); this alteration (presumably by YHVH himself as he wrote the text and we have it in the form in which he gave it to Mosheh on Mount Sinai) is re-affirmed in Exodus 18:3, where we are told that Gershom was named as he was because "I have been a sojourner in a foreign land" (Ger - גר = "stranger"; sham - שם = "there"). Mosheh was tending Yitro's flock when the bush famously caught fire (Exodus 3).

Numbers 10:29 not only finds Re'u-El reinstated as Mosheh's father-in-law, but Mosheh attempts to persuade Tsiporah's brother Chovav (חֹבָב) to accompany the Beney Yisra-El on the final stage of their journey to "the place of which YHVH spoke"; the text is decidedly unclear as to whether he says no, and sticks to that, or says no, but changes his mind. His name does not recur until Judges 4:11, by which time he has been transformed (YHVH didn't write Judges so this must be a human error) into Mosheh's third father-in-law, though of course Mosheh may have taken another wife, which the text failed to mention, and she happened, by coincidence, to have a father named Chovav as well as a brother with the same name.

Going back to the Midyan-Middin repetition, for Mosheh to have fled from Mitsrayim all the way to Arabian Midyan seems highly unlikely; similarly, if Mosheh and the Beney Yisra-El really did cross the Red Sea, and if it were the right hand fork rather than the left hand fork of that sea (see the map, above), they would have arrived precisely in Midyan upon reaching the far shore, making Yitro's arrival with Tsiporah, and his guidance of delegating responsibilities, somewhat more plausible. If it was there, on that far shore, that they regrouped, then they would have had to march all the way back into Sinai, going by land now, so they were in the Negev desert already, practically in Kena'an, but going all the way back to where any survivors of Pharaoh's army would also have been wandering… take a look at the map and then ask yourself if the Red Sea story is any more credible from this right fork than it was from the left, where it is usually situated… and yet, staying with the right fork idea, it was back in Midyan that the Beney Yisra-El gathered at the end of Mosheh's life, to receive the Law for a second time, and... simply too many versions, all mixed up. Go back to my exegisis of the text if you want to follow this further. And in the meanwhile:-

Numbers 22 finds Midyan in league with Mo-Av against the Beney Yisra-El (this must have been very hard for Tsiporah - divided loyalties et cetera, and we have to imagine Mosheh was none too pleased either, especially after Yitro, in that version, had given so much good advice for the organising of the desert journey...and this was mishpucha, family, after all). The chapter tells the story of the failed prophet Bil'am (בִּלְעָם), usually called Balaam in English.

Numbers 25 tells yet another very bizarre tale, this time about the Beney Yisra-El, camped in a place called Shitim (שִּׁטִּים = acacia), where they take up the idolatry of Ba'al Pe'or and consort with local Midyanite women. One of them - Zimri ben Salu, a clan-chief of the Beney Shim'on - comes into camp with Kazbi, the daughter of a Midyanite clan-chief named Tsur; Aharon's grandson spears them both to death (25:7), much to YHVH's satisfaction (25:11). This action brings to an end a plague that hadn't been mentioned until that moment, but is now said to have killed twenty-four thousand people, and is attributed by inference to the whoring after Midyanite women (one has to wonder what Mosheh and Tsiporah were thinking through all of this). YHVH then instructs Mosheh to "harass" (tsarur - צָרוֹר - the verb links back to the clan-chief named Tsur) the Beney Midyan, which leads to the census of Numbers 26, the division of the future lands, the appointment of Yehoshu'a as heir-apparent (27:18), and then, at the start of chapter 31, the instruction to "Avenge the Beney Yisra-El against the Beney Midyan; afterward you shall be gathered to your people" - given the marriage traditions of those times, were the Beney Midyan not those people?


Whatever Mosheh may have done by way of vengeance was clearly not genocide, because Judges 6 finds the Beney Yisra-El, after the "conquest" (a relative term, as we shall see) and the death of Yehoshu'a, conquered and ruled by the Beney Midyan for seven years (the number seven seems to crop up in every story relating to the Beney Midyan - worth going back over the texts and seeing all the instances); in partnership with the Beney Amalek, who Sha'ul will later fail to wipe out in much the same manner (1 Samuel 15:7). Gid'on (גִּדְעוֹן - Gideon) becomes the head of the Beney Yisra-El and has his name changed to Yeruv-Ba'al (יְרֻבַּעַל), which adds bizarre to bizarre, given what happened to Zimri and Kazbi the last time the Beney Yisrae-El went Ba'al-worshipping; and like Ya'akov becoming Yisra-El, the name, which was presumably a king-name, is never actually used. Nevertheless he defeats the Beney Midyan in the valley between Eyn Charod (עֵין חֲרֹד) and Givat ha Moreh (גִּבְעַת הַמּוֹרֶה), after a man had a very Yoseph-like dream about a cake of barley (7:13), and then horns get blown in the manner of Yehoshu'a at Yericho (7:16), and 120,000 people die in the ensuing massacre.

Such was the scale of the massacre, indeed, it appears to have become part of Beney Yisra-El folklore, like Agincourt to the English. When the land is later threatened, and there are calls for the enemy to be confronted, it is Gid'on's rout of the Beney Midyan that is invoked, for example in Psalm 83:10 (9 in some translations), Isaiah 9:4 (5 in some translations) and possibly Habakkuk 3:7, though that latter is less explicit.

I have treated the complications with some irony, and this is in part because I have read many of the Rabbinical responsa to the Midyanite tales, all the way from Talmud to contemporary exegesis, and witnessed the tearing out of the hair and the rending of the garments, because there are elements of these tales which the Rabbis simply cannot cope with, starting with the Re'u-El/Yitro contradiction, and going right through the seeming genocide of his wife's tribe and family by a Yisra-Eli Prophet with a decidedly non-Yehudit name, and in the very land where the holiest of all holy mountains, Chorev (Horeb) itself, is supposedly located. Ultimate the Rabbis do have an answer, though it is one of those acts of convenience which people of faith can accept, but people of reason find somewhat more difficult; Numbers 31:12, they point out, notes that all the spoil was brought to the Beny Yisra-El camp "in the plains of Mo-Av", and so these cannot have been Beney Midyan from territory a) after all, but must have been a different lot of Beney Midyan, probably from the town of Middin; or maybe from territory c); or even, though YHVH alone knows how they got there, from territory b), which is on the Mediterranean coast, in what would become the tribal area of Asher. So that's alright then. Mosheh and Tsiporah can now sleep at night, comfortable in their consciences.

Isaiah 60:6 speaks of the "young camels of Midyan and Eyphah (עֵיפָה)" coming from Sheva, bearing gold and incense. Eyphah is listed in Genesis 25:4 as one of Midyan's sons, the others being Epher (עֵפֶר), Chanoch (חֲנֹךְ), Avi-Da (אֲבִידָע) and El-Da'ah (אֶלְדָּעָה). Sheva (שְׁבָא) is named in the previous verse as Midyan's nephew, son of his brother Yakshan (יָקְשָׁן). Some regard the tribe of Ghifar in the southern Hejaz as being Eyphah.

Which latter link opens an entirely different line of possibility with regards to Midyan, because it names Medina, which is the Arabic name for the central plaza in any walled city, and not simply the one originlly called Yatrib in Saudi Arabia. So Middin and Modin as variants on Medina, and the name could be anywhere, like Roman "castra". Entirely plausible.

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