Monday, 1 December 2014

Bad Reuben. Lots of dead people. Gen 35

What kind of guy sleeps with his father's concubine?   Reuben, that's who.  I have a feeling this will come back and bite him.  It's just related as a fact in Gen 35.22 and then is not mentioned again in the chapter.  The rest of the chapter tells of the death of Deborah, Rebecca's nurse, and then the death of Rachel, while bearing Benjamin (v. 18).

Benjamin is (בנימין) ”binyamin”, son of a right hand.  But Rachel on her deathbed named him Ben-oni (בן־אוני) ”son of mourning”.  Jacob/Israel wasn't having any of that and called the boy Benjamin.  I note the difference between naming ("called his name" in Hebrew) and calling ("called him').

And speaking of deathbeds.  When Jacob's father Isaac dies (v. 29), he doesn't just die.  In the NRSV he "breathed his last" and then died.  The word for this in Hebrew is גוע ('ava), according to HALOT, "essentially to gasp for breath," and later, "to pass away... to perish."  BDB has nothing about breath, but I like the way the NRSV translation tried to capture the fuller meaning.


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