What happened to the Fleshpots? Exodus 16.3

Ever hear that expression "the fleshpots of Europe?"  I always thought it referred to sin, as in sins of the flesh, as in, SEX!  I thought fleshpots were brothels or sleazy dancehalls or places to connect with a (probably paid) person for carnal purposes.  Carnal meaning sex.  Not meat (as in chile con carne).

Because I think "meat" is what those original fleshpots in Exodus referred to.

If only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread... (Ex 16.3, NRSV)

In Hebrew it is two words, pots of the flesh,סִ֣יר הַבָּשָׂ֔ר (sir habbasar) and clearly followed by "ate our fill of bread".  It is saying that we sat by the meat pots, the stew pots and ate our share of bread.  It has nothing to do with sex, just that the Hebrew word for meat (basar) can also be translated, "flesh".

Still... if I passed an establishment with a flashing "FLESHPOT" sign, I'm not sure I would go in and order a beef stroganoff.  The word seems to have acquired a life of its own.

Hardening one's Heart

I'm up to Exodus 9 so far, and I'm interested in the various words used to harden Pharaoh's heart.  Now the heart was the centre of will and decision-making for the ancient Hebrews, so the hardening of the heart is making the brain hard -- block-headed (thank you Ehud for this image!), stubborn.  Not evil -- but stubborn, obstinate, pig-headed.

Sometimes Pharaoh's heart is or remains hard.  Sometimes God hardens it for him.  Sometimes Pharaoh hardens it himself.  I searched "harden* + heart" in Accordance (my Bible software) and came up with 19 hits in the book of Exodus (from 4:21 to 14:17).

The most common verb used is חזק hh-z-q, which has "be strong" as its basic meaning.  To be strong, grow strong, or harden. (12 times)

The next word (which appears both in verb and adjective form) is כבד kh-v-d, which means to be honoured.  It usually has a very positive meaning.  But it also means to be heavy or... to be dull! Pharaoh dulls his heart. (6 times)

The final word is קשׁה q-sh-h which is the most straightforward, and just means to be heavy or hard.  It only appears once.

It's a shame that English translations don't make any distinction here.  

The Rainbow in the story of Noah: Gen 9:14-16

14 When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds,  15 I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.  16 When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”

The rainbow is not to remind US of the covenant, but to remind GOD not to destroy us!  I cannot tell you how many people seem to misread these verses.  The bow can comfort us that God has made a covenant, but bottom line, it is God's little Post-it Note to Himself in the sky:

Note to Self:  don't wipe out the Earth again.

Scolding God

Moses is pretty ticked at God at the end of Exodus 5.  This is the chapter where Pharaoh figures that his Hebrew slaves/forced labour don't have enough to do.  Since they want to go out in the wilderness and worship The Lord, they must have time on their hands.

So Pharaoh says that from now on, they must continue to meet their quota of bricks, but will not be given any straw with which to make them.  They will have to go and collect the stubble from the fields.

Needless to say, the Hebrews are not thrilled with this development.

Then Moses turned again to the LORD and said, “O LORD, why have you mistreated this people? Why did you ever send me?  23 Since I first came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has mistreated this people, and you have done nothing at all to deliver your people.”  (NRSV Ex 5.22-23)

How's that for chutzpah?!  YOU have done nothing, to deliver YOUR people.  I like Moses.  He's not always too keen, but he manages to be obedient, after negotiating terms with the God of the Universe.

Couple of cool things -- some denominative verbs.  These are verbs that are formed from nouns.  And you get them both in a verse:    לקשׁשׁ קשׁ, lekoshesh kash, in v. 12, means "to gather stubble".  Kash means "stubble" and kashash means "to gather stubble".  But they give you both the words.

I ran into the same thing with grain or wheat in the Joseph story in Genesis with the words for "grain" (שׁבר) shever, and "to buy grain" (שׁבר) shavar.

One funny translation:  in verse Ex 5:17, Pharaoh tells the Israelite foremen, "You are lazy, lazy!"  The Hebrew word is נרפים, nirpim, the Nifal form of the verb, "to grow slack".  So the translation, "You are slackers, slackers!" would be completely legitimate.

:)

Call the Midwife! Exodus 1

Exodus starts out on a strong note.  The names of the 12 sons/tribes are repeated, and then we read that Joseph and his brothers and their generation all die.  The Hebrews continue to multiply, and along comes a king of Egypt who doesn't remember Joseph.  The usual fears about a large ethnic group not under your religious/cultural control come to the surface and the Hebrews are put to forced labour.

Was this the corvée labour with which Egypt built the pyramids and other great public works?  Some say yes, but corvée was really a form of taxation - a class of people (peasants!) was forced to work for a certain number of days per year.  The next verses of Exodus put the kibosh on that.

Ex. 1:15   The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah,  16 “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.”

This was a guy who did not like having Hebrews around!  Especially strong ones!  The midwives are not going to play along and respond to the Pharaoh's questions by explaining that Hebrew women are so vigorous that they manage to give birth before the midwife can get there.  That's when the king tells all his people that every Hebrew boy born must be thrown in the Nile.

From a word-lover's point of view, we get to see a lot of the Hebrew root י־ל־ד (y-l-d).

In its basic (called the qal) form, it means to give birth, or to beget. (yalad)
The passive (nifal) form: to be born. (nolad)
The piel form: to help to give birth.  It is the feminine participle of this form that gives us the word for midwife: t®d;RlÅyVm (meyalledet, plural meyalldot)

There are other verbal forms, and of course the nouns, yeled (male child) and yaldah (female child).  There's even an adjective, yalod, but some interpret that as the participle of the qal passive verb.  If there is such a thing as the qal passive.  Which is debated.

But it's fun to read a chapter where you get a whole bunch of different forms of the same root.

Damn I love this stuff!!  :)

Genesis DONE! I did it!

That was a very satisfying exercise!   Finished off chapter 50 of Genesis (Joseph dies, extracts promise from brothers to take his bones home) and even figured out that little Hebrew verse at the end of the chapter in the BHS (Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia) which I am pretty sure says that I have just completed 1534 verses.  It is unpointed Hebrew (no vowel marks) and I suspect might not even be BH, since I couldn't find some words in HALOT.   Maybe it's Rabbinic Hebrew or Mishnaic Hebrew or one of the other Hebrew dialects?

Regardless.  I READ THE BOOK OF GENESIS IN HEBREW!!   ALL OF IT!!!

I am very pleased with myself and am looking forward to Exodus.

My study of Waltke & O'Connor is coming along nicely too.  The introductory matter is not all my cup of tea (history of the language), but some of it is exactly my cup of tea (writing systems, linguistics).  Fun, fun, fun!!

Verses that caught my eye in Genesis 49 and 50:

Verse 49:11, "he washes his garments in wine and his robe in the blood of grapes"
The word for robe (or garment) is סוּת.  Which is pronounced... er... "suit".  That struck me as really funny!

49:25, ...by the God of your father, who will help you,

by the Almighty who will bless you

with blessings of heaven above,

blessings of the deep that lies beneath,

blessings of the breasts and of the womb. 

The word for breasts is the root word for Almighty and the word for womb is the root for compassion/mercy.  Keep that in mind, Oh ye who think of God in purely masculine terms.

Chapter 50 surprised me with all the embalming going on, but I guess since they were in Egypt it makes perfect sense.

I also discovered (at Gen 49.23) a great expression for archers:  בַּעֲלֵי חִצִּם, ba'aley hhitsim, masters of arrows!

Amazing how much I learn when I give up daytime TV for Lent!

New York, family stuff, and Genesis 47

I haven't posted for a while.  I took a brief interlude in New York with my eldest child, wandering through the Cloisters museum, the Strand bookstore and the Palm Court in the Plaza Hotel.  We were in town mostly to catch The Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder at the Walter Kerr Theatre - an absolute gem of a musical, based on the same story as the classic movie Kind Hearts and Coronets.  Like Alec Guinness in the movie, Jefferson Mays plays 8 different characters in the play.  Such fun!!

The Strand bookstore was my daughter's choice, but we both lucked out there.  After lending out my copy of Rumer Godden's In this House of Brede more times than I can remember, and having replaced it twice, I found 2 copies of the original Viking Press hardback, one of them in pristine condition!!!  This was a major coup, as the new edition put out by Loyola Press was very poorly proofread, in my opinion.

The Cloisters Museum was a wonderful way to spend a cold and snowy morning.  This was my destination of choice, as I wanted to see the Merode Altarpiece (Annunciation from the workshop of Roger Campin, the Master of Flemalle).

I was able to spend a lot of time peering quite closely at the triptych, for which I am so grateful!  What a gift!  The Cloisters houses a great collection of medieval religious art and is also the home of a number of unicorn tapestries.

So with all this and travel (don't ask) I get home and my mother is hospitalized.  So I try to spend some of every day with her and my dad and Hebrew gets left by the wayside.  AND I get a cold!!  Airplane germs?  Hospital germs?  I don't know, but I'm quarantining myself for a few days and so I had some time to finally finish Genesis 47.

Egypt buckles under the famine, but Joseph buys up everyone's land and in fact everyone!  All Egypt is owned by Pharaoh, and Joseph doles out food in his name.  Israel and the clan settle in Goshen in Egypt and Jacob/Israel extracts a promise from Joseph to bury him among his ancestors when he dies.

This is a strange promise - a put your hand under my thigh kind of promise.  A strange custom, to be sure.

With Lent beginning this week, I am planning to spend a little more time with Hebrew - Hebrew Syntax!  I thought with a little discipline I might actually work my way through Williams' Hebrew Syntax.  Or maybe even Waltke and O'Connor's Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax.  I'll try them both out and see which is more accessible for an "independent scholar".

Genesis 44, 45, 46

My reading continues.  Not really a chapter a day -- but maybe a couple a week.  The Joseph story is fun to read.  The trickery, the reveal, sending the brothers back to get Dad-Israel-Jacob.  Lots of repetition, which is part of what makes it one of the easier stories to read.

They did x
He saw they did x
He told them he saw they did x

Like that.  But interesting too, as I really appreciated this time through some of the artistry of the prose.  Because I'm actually READING some of it (as opposed to deciphering it word by word).  Not all, but some.  Which is pretty cool.

I've just started in on 46 and I can see the end of Genesis sneaking up.  WHOO HOO!

In other news -- I have ordered a bow!  A gorgeous sky-blue SF Forged Plus Olympic recurve riser.  I don't expect to see it before the end of March (it's backordered), but here it is:

My first choice is the sky-blue.  Then the silver.  Then the royal blue.  Pretty, right??

Joseph is real: Gen 43

I know some people think they really know a character from reading about him or her.  I am pretty sure I would know Anne Shirley* or Jack Aubrey** or Dave Martyniuk*** if I met any one of them on the street.  Their creators have really defined their characters through their writing.  But I don't feel I know anyone from the Bible that well.

Okay, maybe Jesus.  Maybe.  But I'm not sure, because the one I think I read of is rarely the one I hear about in theology or in Church.  So maybe not.

But Joseph.  Joseph ben Israel is another thing.  His personality really comes through in the chapters of Genesis.

This last one is a great example.  The brothers come back to Egypt bringing Benjamin with them.  Joe has them brought to his house by his steward and you can feel their trepidation.  They are scared.  But Joseph comes in and asks, "Are you well? Is your father well?  Is he still alive?"  You can feel Joe's excitement.  And then he sees his little brother Benjamin, "his mother's son".  Joseph is so overcome that he must leave the room.  Literally, Joseph hastens away because his compassion for his brother makes him burn (excites him), and he wants to weep.  So he goes to a room and weeps there. And then HE WASHES HIS FACE!!

I loved that!  Such a real thing to do - something so human and vulnerable - not wanting the brothers to know he was crying.  Washing his face and then coming back in the room.

I loved Joseph then.



* in Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
** in Master and Commander (and a score of other novels) by Patrick O'Brian
*** in The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay

Genesis 42: Joseph incognito.

Back to the books!  Chapter 42 was fun - lots of easy vocab and lots of repetition.

One word that was not easy - but was not a totally new one - is the word נכר (n-kh-r).  I will use it as an example of how verb stems word in Hebrew.

The three consonants you see above make up the root.  Various vowel patterns and sometimes the addition of affixes to the root can change the stem of a verb.  There are maybe 8 common stems and a few obscure ones.

So here's how it works.

You have a root, and by using that root in a particular pattern (or stem), you change its meaning.  The meaning is often predictable.  One stem is causative (the causative of "ascend" for example is "cause to ascend", which means to "bring up";  causative of "go out" is "bring out"). Another stem turns the verb into its passive form ("go down" becomes "is gone down").  There is also a passive causative stem ("bring down" becomes "is brought down").  Some stems are reflexive or done to the speaker:  "he kills" might become "he kills himself".

Not the greatest explanation, but it gives you an idea.  And of course none of the stems are always the causative, the passive, the reflexive, etc.  But they tend to be.  Fun, right?   There's a reason people are still studying this stuff after 3000 years.  

So back to נכר.  It doesn't appear in the basic stem in the Bible but its basic range of meaning seems to revolve around disguise and recognition.  In Gen 42.7 it appears twice, in different stems.

When Joseph saw his brothers, he recognized them, but he treated them like strangers and spoke harshly to them. (NRSV)

The first occurrence is in what is usually the causative stem.  It means to recognize, to acknowledge or to investigate what is unknown.  It is, in fact, one of the words that connects the Joseph story with the Tamar story in Genesis 38.  The second occurrence is in a ... well let's be honest, a weirder stem.  I'm not sure quite how to describe it, but in the three instances in which this word appears in the Bible it makes it mean, "make oneself unrecognizable" (1 Kings 14.5), "act as a stranger" (here in Gen 42.7) and "make oneself known" (Prov 20.11).  The first 2 might mean the same thing, but how does that Proverbs reference get in here?

This also shows you a flaw in the NRSV translation - Joe doesn't treat this brothers like strangers -- they do not recognize him!  Not quite the same thing.

נכר is also the root of the noun, "foreigner" or "foreign country".  So maybe the basic meaning of the root has something to do with familiarity?

Who knows.  Not me, that's for sure.  But it's an example of the poetic nature of Biblical Hebrew prose.  I sometimes think of Hebrew as painting a picture rather than spelling it out in words.  You might get the image of foreign-ness, then a layer of reflexiveness or causativeness.  You can get the message, but might not be able to describe the picture.