After forty years in the desert, Miriam dies. In the very next verse, the Torah tells us [Bemidbar 20:2]: “And the congregation had no water to drink; so they assembled against Moshe and Aaron”. The traditional explanation is well known. The Talmud in Tractate Ta’anit [9a] teaches that a miraculous well that accompanied the Jewish People in the wilderness existed in Miriam’s merit. When Miriam died, the well disappeared. No well, no water. Yet if we read the text without that tradition in mind, another possibility emerges: Miriam died and there was no water. Plain and simple. Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. After all, the Jewish People were traveling through a desert. Deserts are famous for lacking water[1]. Why should we assume that one event caused the other? And yet, the vast majority of commentators follow the Talmud’s lead and connect the water shortage to Miriam’s Well, which, by the way, is not mentioned even once in the Torah. In fact, I could not find even one commentator who offered any other reason for the water shortage.

As a rocket scientist, I spend much of my life applying “Occam’s[2] Razor”, the principle that among competing explanations we should prefer the one that requires the fewest assumptions. If a sensor reports an anomaly, I do not immediately assume sabotage, software corruption, and mechanical failure occurring simultaneously. I begin with the simplest explanation that accounts for the data. In the case of Miriam’s death, when the causes are applied to the events themselves, the simplest explanation seems straightforward: There was no water because they were in a desert. No miracle is required. No hidden mechanism is required. Geography explains everything.

But there is another kind of Occam’s Razor. While scientists apply Occam’s Razor to reality, Torah scholars, particularly those who deal with biblical exegesis, apply it to the text. The scientific question is why there was no water. The Torah scholar’s question is why the Torah places Miriam’s death immediately before the report that there was no water. If the Torah is an........

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