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.

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.

Go to Joseph - Genesis 41

This was a loooooong chapter!  A hefty 57 verses in which Pharaoh has the dreams (skinny cows and ears of corn eating up fat cows and ears of corn), tells the dreams, gets Joseph to interpret the dreams (7 years of famine following after 7 years of abundance), appoints Joseph as administrator, the abundance comes and goes and Joseph sells his stored grain during the subsequent years of famine.   Lotta story there!!  And of course, Christmas and family and holidays keeping me from focusing on more than one or two verses at a time.

Some nice word play too.  Some of it I had to read over 2 or 3 times to see what I was missing -- the word for "seven" and the word for "abundance" vary by a single DOT!

שׁבע שׁני השׂבע (sheva shney ha-seva) = seven years of the abundance

But if you notice the red letters, the first one (far right) is a letter shin (dot over the right arm) and the one that is 3rd from the end (left) is the letter sin (sot over left bar).  I don't always pay attention to vowels, because they can change a lot depending on whether a word has additional syllables added (for example, the definite article, or an object or possessive suffix).  But I can usually read the letters themselves okay.  This time I read "seven years of the seven" over and over!  Such a little dot...

An expression that really jumped out at me was in verse 40a.  In English (NRSV) it reads

"You shall be over my house, and all my people shall order themselves as you command;"

But the Hebrew says, "You shall be over my house, and all my people shall kiss your mouth"!

"Kiss" is the most common meaning for the verb נשׁק (nashak), but according to HALOT it can also mean "to be armed".  So the verse gets interpreted, "You shall be over my house, and all my people shall be armed according to your mouth" or, order themselves according to the words of your mouth.

Gotta love those interpreters.

Genesis 38 and 39

I did read Genesis 38, the story of Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar, which interrupts the Joseph story.  I even wrote part of a post about it, but it seems to have disappeared.

It encouraged me to go and reread the beginning of Robert Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative, which explains why the story is not randomly placed, but purposefully set after the introduction the Joseph story.

I moved on to Gen 39, the meeting of Joseph and Mrs. Potiphar, so wonderfully portrayed by Donny Osmond and Joan Collins in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

What I particularly noticed in the Hebrew of Chapter 39 is the use of words that kind of sound the same.  The word for "beside", אצל (etsel) occurs 4 times.  Also with that "ts-l" combination of sounds is the word for "succeed or prosper", מצליח (matsliach), which appears 3 times.  I don't suppose it's significant -- just struck me as interesting -- and it would sound nice, read aloud.  

Go, go, go, Joseph! Genesis 37

Ah, the great novella begins at last.  I do love this story.

Some odds and ends - obviously 2 sources here - one calls Joe's dad Jacob, one calls him Israel.

A couple of times (v. 5 and v. 8) we are told that his brothers "hated Joseph even more".  You might recall I posted about the meaning of Joseph's name a few weeks ago.  Joseph (יוֹסֵף) yosef, is connected with the verb meaning to add or increase or do again (יספ) y-s-f.

Well, when we are told that the brothers hate Joseph even more, we hear vayosifu (וַיּוֹסִפוּ), "they do again/increase yet to hate" -- in other words, they hate him even more!!  And it sounds just like Joseph's name.

The traditional coat of many colours is probably an ornamented tunic of some kind.

And Potiphar!  What is Potiphar's job?  He is a eunuch or courtier (סְרִיס) seris, and his title is "sar hattabbachim".  Sar (שַר) is usually chief or prince (think of sarah, princess), but t-b-ch (טבח) is slaughter!  Which means the word gets used for both cooks and butchers, and guards and executioners!!!

According to Speiser, sar hattabachim (prince of cooks) is chief steward, whereas rav (captain or official) hattabbachim would be the captain of the guard.  I was unconvinced until he mentioned that a title (including "eunuch" of course) can be 'as far removed from its original connotation as, say, "Lord Chamberlain".' (p.291-2, Genesis)

Interesting.

The story of Joseph appears to pause in Chapter 38 for the story of Tamar - but if you've read The Art of Biblical Narrative by Robert Alter, you might see it a bit differently.  Will I have the energy to re-read his chapter on Tamar before reading Genesis 38 in Hebrew?  Stay tuned....

Genesis 36: In which I meet Mehetabel.

Chapter 36 is a list of names.  All the descendants and tribes of Edom, that is those descended from Jacob's brother Esau.  One of the names (in v. 39) is מְהֵיְטַבְאֵל (meheytavel) or Mehetabel.

This name reminded me of Mehitabel, which must be simply an alternate spelling.

And Mehitabel reminded me of Archy (the cockroach) and Mehitabel (the cat), about whom I had not thought in many, many years.

I googled around and was reminded that I had met them at school, in the poetry of Don Marquis.

Which led me to a Wikipedia page for Shinbone Alley -- the MUSICAL!!!! based on the poems about Archy and Mehitabel and was written by (among others) MEL BROOKS!!!!!! and whose original Broadway cast included (among others) MISS EARTHA KITT!!!!!!

This all kind of blew my mind, as you might guess from all the exclamation points.

I remember liking the poems a great deal as a girl - of course I didn't know what a cockroach was at that time.

I love musicals.

I revere Mel Brooks.

And EARTHA???  Words cannot express.

See where the Bible will lead you?

:)

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.

Dinah: Raped or not? Genesis 34

This is a chapter that has had quite a bit of analysis thrown at it lately.  I imagine feminist interpretations abound.

But it's kind of an interesting story.  Dinah (she of the 12 brothers) wanders off in Canaan to hang with the local girls ("daughters of the land").  Shechem, a local prince sees her, takes her, lies with her and ... and here's the trick ... defiles/degrades her.

Now is that rape, per se?  Or has he defiled/degraded her by sleeping with her before her family has consented to a marriage?  She is, presumably, a valuable property.

Shechem loves her.  And he wants to marry her.  He asks his dad to set things up.

But we never get to hear Dinah's side of the story.  Only her brothers' side of things.  Simeon and Levi trick Shechem and the Shechemites.  They will have to be circumcized if they wish to marry Israelites.  So they AGREE!!!!  All the males in Shechem town AGREE!!!!!!

And on the 3rd day of their pain... Here come the bad boys of Israel with thirsty swords. They slaughter the men (who are helpless with the pain of the circumcision) and plunder the women, the children the property.

The text is not approving of this.  Shechem is painted as the good guy, and Simeon and Levi as bad guys.  Dinah, of course, gets little mention at all.

A few interesting words -- but the best one was in the Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible.  Not content with the modern "whore" that most English translators use in Gen 34.31 they go with "strumpet".  Strumpet.  What a wonderful word!

The Hebrew is זֺנָה (zonah) which HALOT defines as "woman occasionally or professionally committing fornication".  From the verb, zanah, to commit fornication.

Jacob and Esau meet. Genesis 33

Jacob anticipates trouble, meeting the brother he tricked after 20 years apart.  He splits his families and flocks (so that he won't lose *all* his "property").  But Esau is a forgiving sort and meets Jacob with open arms -- falls on his neck (love this expression!) and kisses him.

Jacob offers gifts, Esau refuses, Jacob insists, Esau accepts.  Rabbi Friedman points out that "Jacob and Esau are going through the classic Near Eastern conventions, which continue to this day." (p. 115, n. 33:9)  That's interesting.  To me it really looks like grovelling.  I just don't trust Jacob, and do you blame me??!!!  Esau is VERY big-hearted.

Jacob says he will go slowly (because of the children and the animals), follow Esau and meet him in Seir, but he in fact goes first to Succoth and then to the city of Shechem, where he buys a plot of land.

Shechem, is the son of Hamor.  I assume that we will soon have an explanation of why the city, Shechem is named for the man, Shechem.  Jacob buys land from the sons of Hamor.  And Shechem (the man) will play a big role in the next chapter.

If it matters (and I don't know if it does), Hamor's name means donkey, and Shechem's means shoulder.

Genesis 32

I'm not sure I'm very fond of old Jacob.

Genesis 32 is kind of transitional.  Jacob has all his wealth on the hoof, and when he hears that Esau is coming to meet him with 400 men, he sends a pretty generous gift and does some serious grovelling (via servants/slaves).

This is also the chapter where he wrestles with God/an angel and has his name changed to Israel.  And the whole dislocated hip thing?  Not sure what's going on there.  Do the children of Israel not eat the sciatic muscle of animals?  Would they want to?

But Jacob is still a sneak.

I think this is a chapter whose main purpose is etiological:  explain why we don't eat the sciatic muscle.  Why Peniel and Mahanaim are so named.  Where the name Israel itself comes from.

Not exactly action-packed.


Interesting word, מלאך (mal-akh), meaning angel or messenger.  There is no way of knowing which meaning is intended when you see the word in Hebrew.

In verse 32.2 (32.1 in English), Jacob is met by the angels of God, מַלְאֲכֵי אֱלֹהִים (malakhey elohim).  Then just two verses later, 32.4 (Eng=32.3), he sends messengers to his brother Esau!  Messengers!!  מַלְאָכִים (malakhim)!!  Very confusing.

What's in a name: Joseph

There are two Hebrew verbs that I often get mixed up:  אכפ (aleph-samekh-peh) which has a basic meaning of "gather, take away, assemble, withdraw;"  and יספ (yod-samekh-peh) which means "add, continue, do again, increase."   Because aleph and yod are both weak letters, they can drop out or change depending on the particular conjugation or meaning of the verb, so there are forms of each that look very much alike.  As well, yod is the verbal prefix for a certain type of verb.

 I confess, I almost always have to look them up.  Or go from context.

So which one is the source of Joseph's name?  Gen 30.23-24 from the NRSV:

23 She conceived and bore a son, and said, “God has taken away my reproach”;  24 and she named him Joseph, saying, “May the LORD add to me another son!”

Both!  I don't know if this is a combination of 2 separate traditions? or if they were just covering all their bases.  Or maybe the 2 verbs were originally the same word?  Hard to know.

Goodbye Laban! Genesis 31 (and 32:1)

In the Hebrew, Laben kissing everyone goodbye and hitting the road is the first verse of chapter 32, but obviously, it ought to be numbered 31.55, as it is in many English Bibles.

I HATED this chapter.  Very long and boring and repetitive.  More about sheep and goats.  Rocks and pillars.  And sneaky Miss Rachel (men do choose wives like their mothers!) who steals her fathers household gods/teraphim (images? statuettes? masks?) and then stuffs them in a camel saddle and plonks herself down on it -- "don't ask me to stand up, Dad, it's that time of the month!"

Hmph.

Things I liked:  in verses 20 and onwards we hear of Jacob deceiving Laban.  There is a very pretty expression used here for deceive: וַיִּגְנֹב יַעֲקֹב אֶת-לֵב לָבָן (vayyignov yaakov et-lev lavan): Jacob stole Laban's heart.

That's what the NRSV says, anyway.  The JPS (Jewish Publication Society) Tanakh and the New Jerusalem Bible say that Jacob outwitted Laban.  The Revised English and the New American Bibles say he hoodwinked him.  Both good choices, and better than deceived, I think.

It's easy to forget that lev (heart) in Hebrew is the area of the person where the will resides.  It is where decisions are made.  A Hebrew "hard-hearted" Pharaoh might be what we would call a block-head.  Stupid.  Or stubborn. Hard of mind. But not cruel, necessarily.

So when I read that Jacob "stole Laban's heart," I try to think about stealing or sneaking away with his mind, his thinking.  Taking away his decision making ability.  I think "outwit" wins the prize.


The other cool word I came across was the verb כסף (k-s-f) meaning "long for, long greatly for"  It only shows up 4 times in the Bible, but it is the same root as the word for silver or money.  Root of all evil, indeed!!

Speckled and Spotted and Black, Oh My!! Genesis 30

Well THAT was more information about the copulation of sheep and goats than I really needed to know.

After his 14 years of service for wives Leah and Rachel, Jacob wants to quit his job herding his father-in-law Laban's flocks, and go home to his own people (remember Isaac and Rebecca and brother Esau?).  But Laban is not keen to lose such a good worker - his flocks have done VERY well since Jacob took over.

He asks Jacob, what shall I pay you? and Jacob replies that he will take all the spotted and speckled sheep and goats and every black lamb from Laban's flocks, and Laban can keep the rest.  Sneaky old Laban (remember the wife switcheroo?), promptly takes all the speckled, spotted and black animals and sends them off with his own sons.

So Jacob gets a little weird.

He takes fresh (moist!) branches from different trees, peels away the bark, and leaves the stripped rods in the animals' water trough.  Presumably the rods thus stripped are speckled and spotted, because the animals then come to drink, and they mate in front of the rods, and their offspring are speckled and/or spotted.  Also striped.  And remember, Laban took away the black lambs?  I think he must have left the black sheep, because Jacob had his own flocks face (really?) Laban's black animals so that they would breed black lambs too.  He bred the strong animals in front of the magic rods for his own flocks and the feeble animals he left for Laban's flocks.

Now I know I'm not the only dirty mind who sees phallic imagery here.

I have E.A. Speiser's Genesis commentary from the Anchor Yale Bible series, and he points out that the story is mentioned again in the next chapter from another point of view (E -- this one is J).  In Gen 31.38, the time that Jacob has spent in Laban's service is 20 years - 14 for the women and 6 for the flocks.  So this breeding plan did take a little time to become successful.

...Jacob finds a way to outwit his father-in-law, through prenatal conditioning of the flock by means of visual aids - in conformance with universal folk beliefs. (p. 238)

Universal folk belief?!?!!

Richard Elliot Friedman in his Commentary on the Torah notes

Jacob sets up the peeled (phallic?) sticks where the animals mate. When they mate in front of the sticks, they have offspring that have patterns like those on the peeled sticks. It is unclear if this was believed to work genetically, or was thought to be a practice of sympathetic magic, or was thought to be miraculous. ... (p. 103-4, n. 30:39)

This was a hard chapter to read.  Lots of words that I had to look up and probably won't ever need to know again.  Peeled poplar rods anyone?  Sometimes it's hard to take the time to really READ the words when I just want to get to the story.

I did like the beginning of this chapter, when Reuben went off to get the mandrake love fruits for his mother Leah.  The word for the love fruits is דודאימ (dudayim).  It has the same ד ו ד (dalet - vav - dalet) root as the words for beloved, kinsman (or -woman) and of course, David.

Found a great photo of the fruit and an article about them at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at the Cloisters Museum and Garden blog:

The trickster is tricked

Jacob, Jacob, Jacob... all that scheming with your mother to steal Esau's birthright and you thought you'd get away scot-free?  I don't think so.

Genesis 29 is the story of Jacob's wooing of Rachel and then having Leah slip between the sheets instead. Fourteen years total he worked for Rachel, and he ends up with her, Leah, and two bonus slavegirls thrown in for good measure:  Zilpah and Bilhah.

God knows that Leah is hated, so he opens her womb and Rachel is barren.  Hmph.

Word play I liked:

Jacob met Rachel at a well (such a fertile place to meet future wives - see also Abraham's servant looking for a wife for Isaac and meeting Rivkah/Rebecca at the well in Gen 24).

She is there to water the flock.  So Jacob steps up and waters it for her.  וישק (vayyashke).  He watered.  And in the next line, he kisses her!  וישׁק -- exactly the same consonants, but with vowels it is (vayyishshak). He kissed. 

What fun it must have been to try to figure out what that passage meant before the Masoretes added the vowels to the text in the Middle Ages.

The other word play that piqued my curiosity is this:  what the heck is wrong with Leah?  Her eyes are weak? tender? lovely? (Gen 29.17) Which does your Bible use?  HALOT says weak, as does the Greek Septuagint (LXX), which was translated from the Hebrew in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE.

But what caught my eye is that in verse 33, Leah says that God has looked "on my affliction".  And I always confuse the word for affliction עני (aniy) with the word for eye, עינ (ayin).  Connection? or coincidence?  Who knows?

Jacob's ladder? or ramp! no, escalator!!

Today I read Genesis 28, about Jacob, his dream of angels going up and down something or other, and choosing a God (or not).

The word that is usually translated "ladder" in Gen 28.12 is סלם (sullam). It's a hapax legomenon, that is, it only appears this once in the Bible.  I checked HALOT just for the fun of it (Koehler & Baumgartner's The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament), and they gloss the word, "stepped ramp, flight of steps."

I checked similar words and sure enough, the word סללה, (solelah) is the word for an assault ramp, like the one at Masada, and is attested to almost a dozen times in 7 different biblical books.  It certainly looks like the same root as the unique סלם word, so ramp or something ramp-like would be a good translation.

Come to think of it... that makes the Simpsons' escalator to heaven a fair image!

From the always entertaining Simpsonswiki

Anyway.  After his dream, Jacob decides that the LORD might just be the God for him.  Maybe.  He has a few conditions:

If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the LORD shall be my God (Gen 28.20b-21)

I can relate.  We'd all like to make sure God's the real deal before we hook up. Of course God might feel the same way about us ...

Gen 27: Motherly Love

I am trying to read a chapter of Hebrew every day, and I just realized that I have finished HALF of the book of Genesis!!  In Hebrew!!!

Today I finished up Genesis 27, where we see Jacob pulling the fast one on Esau.  And that sneaky Rivkah - talk about playing favourites!!  No doubt who her golden boy is.

And no surprise that birthright בכרה (bekhorah) and blessing ברכה (berakhah) are practically the same word - just flip a couple of letters.


I also wondered about a word origin/mnemonic:
If English camel comes from Hebrew גמל (gamal) does the English kid (of a goat) come from גדי (gedi) ?