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.