Notes 74D: Joseph and Benjamin's oracles (49:22-27)

Joseph

כב בֵּ֤ן פֹּרָת֙ יוֹסֵ֔ף בֵּ֥ן פֹּרָ֖ת עֲלֵי־עָ֑יִן בָּנ֕וֹת צָֽעֲדָ֖ה עֲלֵי־שֽׁוּר׃ כג וַֽיְמָרְרֻ֖הוּ וָרֹ֑בּוּ וַֽיִּשְׂטְמֻ֖הוּ בַּֽעֲלֵ֥י חִצִּֽים׃ כד וַתֵּ֤שֶׁב בְּאֵיתָן֙ קַשְׁתּ֔וֹ וַיָּפֹ֖זּוּ זְרֹעֵ֣י יָדָ֑יו מִידֵי֙ אֲבִ֣יר יַֽעֲקֹ֔ב מִשָּׁ֥ם רֹעֶ֖ה אֶ֥בֶן יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃ כה מֵאֵ֨ל אָבִ֜יךָ וְיַעְזְרֶ֗ךָּ וְאֵ֤ת שַׁדַּי֙ וִיבָ֣רְכֶ֔ךָּ בִּרְכֹ֤ת שָׁמַ֨יִם֙ מֵעָ֔ל בִּרְכֹ֥ת תְּה֖וֹם רֹבֶ֣צֶת תָּ֑חַת בִּרְכֹ֥ת שָׁדַ֖יִם וָרָֽחַם׃ כו בִּרְכֹ֣ת אָבִ֗יךָ גָּֽבְרוּ֙ עַל־בִּרְכֹ֣ת הוֹרַ֔י עַֽד־תַּאֲוַ֖ת גִּבְעֹ֣ת עוֹלָ֑ם תִּֽהְיֶ֨יןָ֙ לְרֹ֣אשׁ יוֹסֵ֔ף וּלְקָדְקֹ֖ד נְזִ֥יר אֶחָֽיו׃

22 ben porat yosef ben porat ‛ale ‛ayin; banot tza‛ada ‛ale shur. 23 waymararuhu warobbu; wayyisT'muhu ba‛ale xittzim. 24 watteshev b'etan qashto wayyafozzu z'ro‛e yadaw; mide avir ya‛aqov missham ro‛e even yisra'el. 25 me'el avikha w'ya‛z'rekka w'et shadday wivar'khekka birkhot shamayim me‛al birkhot t'hom rovetzet taxat; birkhot shadayim waraxam. 26 birkhot avikha gav'ru ‛al birkhot horay ‛ad ta'awat giv‛ot ‛olam; tihyena l'rosh yosef ul'qodqod n'zir exaw.
²² Joseph is a wild ass,
A wild ass by a spring
— Wild colts on a hillside.
²³ Archers bitterly assailed him;
They shot at him and harried him.

²⁴ Yet his bow stayed taut,
And his arms were made firm
By the hands of the Mighty One of Jacob —
There, the Shepherd, the Rock of Israel —

²⁵ The God of your father who helps you,
And Shaddai who blesses you
With blessings of heaven above,
Blessings of the deep that couches below,
Blessings of the breast and womb.

²⁶ The blessings of your father
Surpass the blessings of my ancestors,
To the utmost bounds of the eternal hills.
May they rest on the head of Joseph,
On the brow of the elect of his brothers.

This is difficult. Throughout, it is hard to know what is meant by what is said (that is, the poetic meaning); and in some places it is even difficult to know what is said (that is, the literal meaning). The translation (as often) looks less uncertain than the original because it is a translation, and because sometimes the translation tries harder to make sense than the original apparently tries to. "Joseph is a wild ass" sounds simple enough; but it was precisely of this verse that Speiser wrote that it "leads to more problems than any other passage in the poem."

Does anything in these nineteen lines (by JPS's count) have the slightest thing to do with anything that we know about Joseph from the story that Genesis has told us about him, and if so, what? Perhaps there is one thing that seems to "relate": the last half-line, n'zir exaw 'the elect of his brothers.' But even what this means is uncertain: KJV says 'separate from his brethren', EAS says 'set apart from his brothers' and so on, but these are all paraphrases of n'zir exaw 'the נזיר of his brothers', and what's a nazir? It means 'one consecrated; Nazirite; prince; unpruned vine', being derived from the verb root n-z-r 'single out, separate, consecrate oneself.' Not that Joseph was any of those things, except figuratively, perhaps, a prince of sorts, but he was special and did have a special role to play, so alright.

But a wild ass? Archers? What Joseph is this talking about? The one in our story? Were there other stories about him?

It isn't that I cannot conceive of there having been other folk sources, say, which told different tales or even had a different "take" on the character called Joseph. He might have once existed as a folk hero about which many stories were told; such is true of favourite personages in other mythologies, so why not?

But what puzzles me is how someone who had heard of the story of Joseph in Egypt could possibly come up with a "poem" like this one about Joseph without any allusion, no matter how vague and poetic, to a single shred of it. That wouldn't happen, and so I must conclude that the author of this poem about Joseph knew nothing whatsover about the story we've read (and which constitutes the literary centrepiece of the Genesis story). Whatever this poem is about, the rest of Genesis provides very little help in the form of background context from which to elucidate it, and doesn't really seem compatible with some of it at all. You can say anything uncomplimentary you like about the other brothers and nobody who has read Joseph in Egypt will be terribly taken aback: probably they deserved it. But Joseph a wild ass, and not a word about his dreams, his betrayal, his rise to power, his stewardship over the whole of Egypt and his rescue of his family...

In one sense, perhaps it is not. What this suggests to my mind is that even though the sons of Jacob are eponyms for the tribes of Israel, they are also different entities and the stories of the former do not necessarily connect up in narrative terms with the histories of the latter. Here we have a poem about the tribes which says virtually nothing about Jacob's sons as "story characters", and conversely, in the rest of Genesis we have the story of Jacob the son of Isaac and the members of his family from his grandparents' time to that of his grandsons. It is not required that this be cosubstantial with tribal history, and often there is no compelling reason for treating it as such or seeking out imagined tribal allusions by means of unproven hypotheses: it might just be a story after all! Nonetheless, that said, occasionally tribal events do seem to have impinged on that story, witness the Reuben-Bilhah affair or the story of Dinah in Shechem. How could such apparent crossovers between personal and tribal histories have come about? Well, one way is if the personal narratives do, at some points at least, incorporate allegorical allusions to tribal anecdotes. The difficult part is unravelling the threads, and I doubt we will ever manage to do that completely.

ben porat yosef ben porat ‛ale ‛ayin
It is not known what a porat or a ben porat is, so all we can do is guess or trust the earliest translations, but the latter seem to be having as much trouble as we are with this one. Now ben is a son, but it is also used in many idiomatic ways: consider how ben adam, for example, means a human, a man (lit. a son of Adam), and since most of the oracles begin by assigning an animal's attribute to each son, Speiser and the JPS translators took the line that perhaps that is what is being done here too, but what animal is this? They have put their money on something equine. The second part, ben porat ‛ale ‛ayin, which contains the archaic and poetic variant ‛ale of the preposition ‛al, means 'by a spring (or a well)', so it's an animal of some kind by a spring, though what that image refers to is unknown to us. An alternative tradition espoused by more mainstream translations make a ben porat a 'fruitful bough' (the fruitful part coming from an assumed derivation of porat from p-r-h; the bough seems to have materialized from nowhere). What a fruitful bough is doing by a spring is no more obvious than what a colt or a wild ass is doing there.

banot tza‛ada ‛ale shur
This is equally obscure and the translations are just as disparate. In the KJV and its imitators, it says that the branches [of the bough] run over the wall; according to Speiser and JPS, sticking with fauna, we here have wild asses or colts by a hillside now. Other translation attempts, if they can even be called that, tend to vote either for something horsey and a land feature or for something botanical at a wall: 'Joseph is a fruitful vine, a fruitful vine near a spring, whose branches climb over a wall' says one, 'Joseph is the foal of a wild donkey, the foal of a wild donkey at a spring--one of the wild donkeys on the ridge' says another


waymararúhu waróbbu wayyisT'múhu ba‛ale xittzim
(JPS) 'Archers bitterly assailed him; / They shot at him and harried him.' Whatever this is talking about, it seems unlikely to bear any direct relation to either a young donkey or a fruitful bough. It may, of course, have something to do with the Joseph tribes, though we stand little chance of guessing exactly what. Here is one conjecture from CB as to who the "archers" may have been: "Possibly Joseph here is the Northern Kingdom, and the enemy the Syrians of Damascus, with whom the kings of Israel waged almost constant wars from about B.C. 900."

wattéshev b'etan qashto wayyafózzu z'ro‛e yadaw
'Yet his bow stayed taut, / And his arms were made firm.' Question: whose bow is this? Joseph's? The preceding bit definitely sounded like it was Joseph being shot at by archers, so if qashto is Joseph's bow, maybe he is also an archer and shooting back at them? Some assume so; others think not, supposing instead that the singular possessor refers somehow to the aforesaid enemy archers generically (the enemy's bow sort of thing). The comical part is that nobody is certain what wattéshev b'etan and wayyafózzu mean, i.e. what the archer's bow and arms did, and so what translators have made them do here rather depends on which side the archer is on: if the archer is assumed to be Joseph, his bow stayed taut and his arms were firm, or were made agile or something nice, but if they are the enemy's, as Speiser thinks, then maybe the bow stayed rigid and the arms were unsteady. Most translators have voted for Joseph to have the bow.

mide avir ya‛aqov missham ro‛e éven yisra'el
'By the hands of the Mighty One of Jacob — / There, the Shepherd, the Rock of Israel — ' Despite the undoubtedly chaotic syntax, and all our doubts about the details with the bows and archers, we all seem to agree that God is on Joseph's side and he can't lose. And that is about all the sense I can make of this; for the rest, it's pretty much a jumble of words. But they are good words: Jacob (he has even put himself in his own poem!), shepherd (everyone likes a shepherd), stone of Israel. Not sure what the stone of Israel is doing here actually. Everybody changes it to 'rock' in translation because it sounds better. Says Speiser: "Literally 'stone'; if correctly transmitted, the epithet is an unusual one." As for avir, this is a rare word meaning 'mighty one' which only occurs in the collocations avir ya‛aqov and avir yisra'el. The alternating use of ya‛aqov and yisra'el as synonyms in parallel structures as here is clearly deliberate and conventionalized, e.g. in the preamble: hiqqav'tzu w'shim‛u b'ne ya‛aqov w'shim‛u el yisra'el avikhem (see also v. 7). Nobody has satisfactorily explained what missham is doing here; some suspect it should be vowelled as misshem 'from/by the name of ' whence 'on account of, because of'. There should be a parallellism between this and mide 'from/by the hands of', and since yisra'el parallels ya‛aqov, what is left in the middle is ro‛e éven parallelling avir: 'a shepherd of stone'?? I concur with CB's verdict: "None of these renderings makes sense"; but then neither does the Hebrew verse. We can try to find inventive "solutions" but (a) only by departing from the received text and (b) even then, the result will remain unsatisfactory, for nothing really convincing has been suggested. I conclude with CB: "It is doubtful what was the original form of this line [i.e. the last one in v. 24]; but, like the preceding, it must have expressed the idea that the deliverance of Joseph came from God." Or something like that.

me'el avikha w'ya‛z'rekka w'et shadday wivar'khékka
'The God of your father who helps you, / And Shaddai who blesses you.' The words are those of the translation, but unlike the translation, in the original the grammar is anyone's guess. The divine names are also unusually arranged: it is not normal to find el avikha 'El of your father' nor shadday without el before it. The verb forms are strange, with imperfects with w- following a complement; if this is not just miscopying (and that much miscopying seems unlikely), the construction is perhaps one with which we are unfamiliar. The prepositions mi and et appear to function as synonyms recruited to fill out the parallel structure, both expressing a causal relationship between the two divine denominations and the events of the preceding verse. The relative clauses in the translation, which are already found in the KJV, are nowhere to be seen in the Hebrew, ma se non è vero...

birkhot shamáyim me‛al birkhot t'hom rovétzet táxat
'With blessings of heaven above, / Blessings of the deep that couches below.' See ch. 1 regarding t'hom. The preceding line consists of a perfect parallel structure, notwithstanding the very odd construction, and this line constitutes another parrallellism, this time conveying an antithesis, except that the second part, instead of a preposition (mi in the first part), has the participle rovétzet. Thus we have birkhot shamáyim 'heavenly blessings' in one and birkhot t'hom 'abyssly blessings?' in the other; the former are located me‛al 'above', the latter rovétzet táxat 'lurk, or lie, below' (shouldn't it have been rov'tzot?). What this means is an open question, and it is only to be assumed, because of their adjacency and perhaps the symmetry of the parallel structures, that they are talking about things related to each other, though it is not obvious how, despite the link between wivar'khékka and the two occurrences of birkhot.

birkhot shadáyim waráxam
'Blessings of the breast and womb.' On the one hand, this is connected to the previous two bits by a third occurences of birkhot, but on the other hand, it presents in and of itself yet another antithetical structure: shadáyim waráxam 'breast and womb' (the second word is a pausal form of réxem), which in its entirety parallels the shamáyim me‛al + t'hom ... táxat sequence by virtue of its above-below structure. Perhaps shadáyim is connected to shamáyim and me‛al, while réxem is associated with t'hom and rovétzet táxat, or maybe it is nothing so profound, and the poet merely wanted to incorporate it all into a pleasing symmetry.

The EH points out (in a roundabout way) that the four blessings in this verse (shamáyim, t'hom, shadáyim, réxem) can all be interpreted as "water resources" (as it puts it) and hence may be thought of as symbols of life and fertility: rain for vegetation, the subterranean sea, the milk with which new life is nurtured and the reproductive fluids by means of which it is conceived and gestated, perhaps?

birkhot avíkha gav'ru ‛al birkhot horay ‛ad ta'awat giv‛ot ‛olam
'The blessings of your father / Surpass the blessings of my ancestors, / To the utmost bounds of the eternal hills.' This JPS translation coincides in essence with those given in the KJV and the Revised Version, of which CB declares: "This rendering is nonsense, and is not even a literal translation of the Hebrew text as it stands." Speiser is just as categorical: "This reading is hopeless on more counts than one", and he gives a long list of reasons why, which include that "the poetic meter is suddenly abandoned", "the prosaic content is even more disturbing", the term horay 'progenitors' (in JPS, 'ancestors') is doubtful - the normal word being avot, and the syntax is weird. To fix this, some textual distortion must be assumed (but is it the translator's duty to venture a resonstruction?).

Let's start with something  uncontroversial: the verb g-b-r 'to excell, to surpass' has occurred several times in the description of the Flood (see 7:18-24) where it referred to physical water levels. Referring here to birkhot, it must have a less material sense, maybe 'be more, be greater (than)' (cf. ‛oi in Hawaiian). So as the text stands this seems to mean that the blessing Joseph receives from his father (Jacob) is greater than or superior to that received by Jacob himself from his forebears (Abraham and Isaac). In what way it is greater or superior is not explained (it is the virtue of g-b-r, and ‛oi, that you don't need to); but the larger question of substance remains about whether Jacob really said that (Speiser's "troubling prosaic content").

We do find some significant semantic variation among translations, including ancient ones, and they can only mean one of two things: either they go back to a different original reading, or the variations were proposed because the translators were ill at ease with what the original seemed to them to say. The passage is also similar to one in Deuteronomy, ch. 33 and comparison supports an amendment to the text in Speiser's opinion.

To start with, regarding the thorny matter of horay (putatively 'progenitors'), some versions substitute 'abiding hills, eternal mountains' or something to that effect (not to be confused with the following giv‛ot ‛olam of similar meaning; thus there is repetition in such renderings). The LXX reads ὑπερίσχυσεν ἐπ᾿ εὐλογίαις ὀρέων μονίμων καὶ ἐπ᾿ εὐλογίαις θινῶν ἀενάων 'surpassed blessings of abiding mountains and blessings of eternal sandbanks', with 'parents' changed to 'abiding mountains', and so for example the International Standard Version's 'Your father's blessings will prove to be stronger than blessings from the eternal mountains or bounties from the everlasting hills' (cf. KJV 'The blessings of thy father have prevailed above the blessings of my progenitors unto the utmost bound of the everlasting hills'). How do you get from parents to mountains? By changing הורי horay (a term and translation about which doubts have been cast, remember) to הררי har're, perhaps.

Now har're is not 'mountains' but 'the mountains of' (it is the construct plural of הר), but we have an answer for that. The following word עד is read by the Masoretes as the preposition ‛ad 'until, as far as', but it could also be the noun ‛ad meaning 'continuing, future, eternal', and indeed the very phrase now reconstructed, har're ‛ad, occurs in Habakuk 3:6 where it is glossed 'everlasting hills' (lit. 'mountains of eternity'). Given that we have now reanalysed the ‛ad part and removed it from the last phrase in the verse, what remains of it is just ta'awat giv‛ot ‛olam 'bounty of eternal hills', a parallel construction with ta'awat 'bounty' instead of 'blessings', giv‛ot 'hills (construct plural)' for hor're 'mountains (construct plural)' and ‛olam and ‛ad as synonyms both meaning 'forever.' Thus we can reform the verse fragment to read birkhot avíkha gav'ru ‛al birkhot hor're ‛ad ta'awat giv‛ot ‛olam 'your father's blessings surpass the blessings of the eternal mountains, the bounty of the everlasting hills.'

Speiser still questions the 'father's blessings' part of this and posits a different reading and rendering (I will omit the details): 'Blessings of grain stalk and blossom (sic!), / Blessings of mountains eternal, / The delights of hills everlasting.' But leaving such speculations aside, other translators including Everett Fox also prefer to read hor're instead of horay. Those who find even that too adventurous have one more way out: they can follow the Vulg. which interprets this as benedictiones patris tui confortatae sunt benedictionibus patrum eius donec veniret desiderium collium aeternorum, or as it is put in the Douay-Rheims bible, 'The blessings of thy father are strengthened with the blessings of his fathers until the desire of the everlasting hills should come.' I don't think there is any real justification for translating gav'ru as confortatae sunt or 'are strengthened'; this looks more like making the text say what we think it should.

tihyéna l'rosh yosef ul'qod'qod n'zir exaw
'May they rest on the head of Joseph, / On the brow of the elect of his brothers.' The subject of the jussive tihyéna is all these birkhot: a blessing on your head. Since qodqod is the crown of the head (I think 'brow' of some translations must represent a poetic licence), this is a parallellism in which it corresponds to rosh and so n'zir exaw corresponds to yosef.


Benjamin

כז בִּנְיָמִין֙ זְאֵ֣ב יִטְרָ֔ף בַּבֹּ֖קֶר יֹ֣אכַל עַ֑ד וְלָעֶ֖רֶב יְחַלֵּ֥ק שָׁלָֽל׃

27 binyamin z'ev yiTraf babboqer yokhal ‛ad; w'la‛érev y'xalleq shalal.
²⁷ Benjamin is a ravenous wolf;
In the morning he consumes the foe,
And in the evening he divides the spoil."

Somewhat less endearing than we might have expected for Jacob's youngest son. But we must remember again that this is not about sons, it is about tribes. EH explains: "The belligerence of the Benjaminites resulted form their geographic situation. a narrow strip of land so strategically located that the important north-south central highway, as well as a main east-west road leading to Tranjordan, passed through it. As a result, the territory of Benjamin became an arena for wars." EH also suggests one way to make sense of the way the metaphorical ravenous wolf lived: the ‛érev and bóqer business "could also describe the wolf as prowling among the sheep at night, snatching its prey and returning to its lair to share it with its young, with enough left over for the morning."

Notes 73C: Zebulun, Issachar, Dan, Gad, Asher and Naphtali (49:13-21)

Zebulun

יג זְבוּלֻ֕ן לְח֥וֹף יַמִּ֖ים יִשְׁכֹּ֑ן וְהוּא֙ לְח֣וֹף אֳנִיֹּ֔ת וְיַרְכָת֖וֹ עַל־צִידֹֽן׃

13 z'vulun l'xof yammim yishkon; w'hu l'xof oniyot w'yarkhato ‛al tzidon.
¹³ Zebulun shall dwell by the seashore;
He shall be a haven for ships,
And his flank shall rest on Sidon.


While linguistically straightforward, CB expresses perplexity about the historical content: "This verse describes the position of the territory of the tribe as on the sea-coast; but according to Joshua... the territory of Zebulun did not touch the sea." And adds: "Apparently at one time Zebulun had territory on the coast, or bordering on the land of the maritime Phoenicians; but we cannot be certain when."




Issachar

יד יִשָּׂשכָ֖ר חֲמֹ֣ר גָּ֑רֶם רֹבֵ֖ץ בֵּ֥ין הַֽמִּשְׁפְּתָֽיִם׃ טו וַיַּ֤רְא מְנֻחָה֙ כִּ֣י ט֔וֹב וְאֶת־הָאָ֖רֶץ כִּ֣י נָעֵ֑מָה וַיֵּ֤ט שִׁכְמוֹ֙ לִסְבֹּ֔ל וַיְהִ֖י לְמַס־עֹבֵֽד׃

14 yissakhar xamor garem; rovetz ben hammishp'tayim. 15 wayyar m'nuxa ki Tov w'et ha'aretz ki na‛ema; wayyeT shikhmo lisbol wayhi l'mas ‛oved.
¹⁴ Issachar is a strong-boned ass,
Crouching among the sheepfolds.
¹⁵ When he saw how good was security,
And how pleasant was the country,
He bent his shoulder to the burden,
And became a tolling serf.  


xamor gárem
The word gérem 'bone' occurs a handful of times throughout the Tanakh. This is its only occurrence in the Torah, and the sense is uncertain: 'a bony ass'?? The bigger question, however, is, assuming it is some kind of ass (that much is given by xamor), what is meant by the metaphor, for as CB reflects: "The Israelites did not think of the ass as a foolish and absurd animal; on the contrary, nobles rode on asses on state occasions... The 'strong ass,' the patient, unwarlike beast of burden, is a figure for a tribe which preferred peace, and comfort, and plenty to independence at the cost of the risk and loss of war." EH does not share this generous viewpoint: "The tribe is not even mentioned in the list of Judg. 1, which indicates that it played an insignificant role in the conquest of the Land of Israel. Here it is chided for passively submitting to servitude as the price of peace with its Canaanite neighbors." And see next note.


rovetz ben hammishp'táyim
(JPS) 'Crouching among the sheepfolds.' For rovetz see note above. The translation of mishp'táyim as 'sheepfolds' is traditional but pure conjecture; another proposal is 'saddlebags' (see EAS). More to the point, perhaps, as Speiser adds: "It is apparent that this pronouncement is caustic rather than complimentary."

wayyeT shikhmo lisbol wayhi l'mas ‛oved
'He bent his shoulder to the burden, / And became a tolling serf.' Acc. to EH: "It would seem that until the final overthrow of the Canaanite city-states in the time of Deborah, the tribe was content to perform corvée labour for the local overlords in return for a quiet existence." It is curious that this bit is in the perfect tense. Perhaps this reveals a different origin for the fragment?




Dan

טז דָּ֖ן יָדִ֣ין עַמּ֑וֹ כְּאַחַ֖ד שִׁבְטֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃ יז יְהִי־דָן֙ נָחָ֣שׁ עֲלֵי־דֶ֔רֶךְ שְׁפִיפֹ֖ן עֲלֵי־אֹ֑רַח הַנֹּשֵׁךְ֙ עִקְּבֵי־ס֔וּס וַיִּפֹּ֥ל רֹֽכְב֖וֹ אָחֽוֹר׃ יח לִֽישׁוּעָתְךָ֖ קִוִּ֥יתִי יְהוָֽה׃

16 dan yadin ‛ammo; k'axad shivTe yisra'el. 17 y'hi dan naxash ‛ale derekh sh'fifon ‛ale orax; hannoshekh ‛iqq've sus wayyippol rokh'vo axor. 18 lishu‛at'kha qiwwiti YHWH.
¹⁶ Dan shall govern his people,
As one of the tribes of Israel.  
¹⁷ Dan shall be a serpent by the road,
A viper by the path,
That bites the horse's heels
So that his rider is thrown backward.
¹⁸ I wait for Your deliverance, o LORD!
 
dan yadin
The inevitable word (and sound) play: dan Dan, yadin 'will judge' which is the traditional translation, though Speiser and JPS opt for 'will govern', stretching the meaning a wee bit. Is it true though? Not particularly; Dan was not one of the stronger tribes. Perhaps the second part of the clause which is free of the constraints of cynghanedd, k'axad shivTe yisra'el 'as one of the tribes of Israel', is more to the point: the tribe of Dan survived as a real Israelite tribe, if no more (so CB).

naxash ‛ale derekh etc.
What about all the snaky stuff in v. 17? Acc. to CB's interpretation, all that is "a figure for the stratagems of guerilla warfare", which Dan would practise because "the tribe was too weak for open attack." Note that ‛ale is an archaic form of ‛al reserved for poetry.

lishu‛at'kha qiwwiti YHWH
'I wait for your deliverance, o Lord.' None of the commentators really seem to know what to do with this. I have stuck it onto the end of Dan's oracle but it is not certain that it forms part of it. But if not, what can it possibly be doing here?


Gad

יט גָּ֖ד גְּד֣וּד יְגוּדֶ֑נּוּ וְה֖וּא יָגֻ֥ד עָקֵֽב׃

gad g'dud y'gudennu; w'hu yagud ‛aqev.
¹⁹ Gad shall be raided by raiders,
But he shall raid at their heels.  


This is a real tongue-twister!


g'dud y'gudénnu
A g'dud is a 'raiding party' (CHALOT) or a 'marauding band' (EK), and this is a real word (not just a custom-made, purpose-built one). On the other hand, the verb form yagud, and with the object suffix, y'gudénnu, implying g-w-d, is nowhere else attested and is pretty obviously an ad hoc denominative from g'dud. The connection between g'dud (and g-w-d) and the name Gad is folk-etymological; in the narration of Gad's birth (30:11) the name was associated with a noun gad meaning 'luck.'

w'hu yagud ‛aqev
'And he will g-w-d [a] heel.' Anything that the translator does with 'heel' (such as 'at their heels', 'upon their heel', 'at the last'), the translator does out of desperation at an unhelpful text which says purely and simply ‛aqev 'heel' unless, as Speiser suggests, a following m has accidentally been amputated from it (so that it was really supposed to say ‛aqevam 'their heel'), which would help a bit. Handily, the next word (beginning of v. 20) starts with an m, me'asher, which to be honest it would be just as well without, giving asher sh'mena laxmo (in line with the reading implied by the translations found in the LXX, the Vulg. and the Syriac) and thereby keeping more in line with the rest of the tribes' oracles which start with the name sans prefix. So perhaps 'And he will g-w-d their heel.' What does their heel have to do with anything? Well, not much, except that heels also came up in Dan's oracle, except that there they belonged to a horse. Acc. to CHALOT, in Jeremiah 13:22 the word is once used as a euphemism for genitals, and to be honest, with that as inspiration one is ever so slightly tempted to propose something along the lines of 'and he will pillage their arse.' Restoring some decorum, one is still tempted to produce something like "Gad: pillagers will pillage him, and he shall pillage back" without making too much of the 'heel' part. As for the possible identity of these raiders, marauders or pillagers, CB, delightfully unfettered by latter-day political correctness, clarified that where the tribe Gad settled they had Bedouin neighbours.


Asher

כ מֵֽאָשֵׁ֖ר שְׁמֵנָ֣ה לַחְמ֑וֹ וְה֥וּא יִתֵּ֖ן מַֽעֲדַנֵּי־מֶֽלֶךְ׃

20 me'asher sh'mena laxmo; w'hu yitten ma‛adanne melekh.
²⁰ Asher's bread shall be rich,
And he shall yield royal dainties.  

me'asher
On the me-, see the comment on aqev in the preceding verse. We may choose accordingly whether to read here asher 'Asher' or me'asher 'From or of Asher', though it would not, it seems, radically affect the meaning of the present verse (or rather, what sense we can make out of it!), but it undoubtedly reads most smoothly if we assume the me- to be extraneous, borne of a mistaken word division by early scribes (changing עקבם אשר  to עקב מאשר), as suggested by Speiser (EAS, p. 363, note f).


sh'mena laxmo
(JPS) '[His] bread shall be rich.' The subject, léxem 'bread, grain, food, nourishment' and hence not, in either poetry or prose, always or necessarily bread per se, is here possessed by Asher (regardless of whether it's a prepositional me'asher or just a fronted topic, asher), represented by the resumptive possessive -o. But léxem is a masculine noun usually, yet the preceding adjective, sh'mena, is a feminine form. Assuming that léxem is here feminine, the clause means '(rich) [is] his (bread)' if we decide to translate léxem as 'bread' and if we decide to translate shamen as 'rich.' The latter is an adjective related to the qal stative verb sh-m-n 'to be or become fat', but like the better known cognate noun shémen '[olive] oil' and the like, it tends to be used in figures of speech denoting prosperity and abundance. So while the narrowest of interpretations of these words might be bread dipped in olive oil (a perfectly possible image where I live which might still suggest opulence), and from a gastronomic viewpoint that seems to me to make better sense than imagining a bread with a high fat content (wouldn't that be a sponge cake?), we are not constrained by the meanings of either word to stick to any such specific notion.


w'hu yitten ma‛adanne melekh
This noun, ma‛adannim, is a rare word denoting delicacies, or metaphorically, 'refreshment, delight' (CHALOT). Since the preceding clause contains a food reference, clearly that notion is present here too; in a poetic sense léxem and ma‛adannim are "synonyms" - which leaves to mélekh (here) 'royal' the job of responding to sh'mena: 'his bread [will be] well-buttered, he will yield tasties [fit] for a king', or as the Vulg. puts it, Aser pinguis panis eius et praebebit delicias regibus.


Naphtali

כא נַפְתָּלִ֖י אַיָּלָ֣ה שְׁלֻחָ֑ה הַנֹּתֵ֖ן אִמְרֵי־שָֽׁפֶר׃ 

21 naftali ayyala sh'luxa; hannoten imre shafer.
²¹ Naphtali is a hind let loose,
Which yields lovely fawns.

I think this is a riddle. While all the commentaries I have seen concede that the distich constitutes a difficult puzzle for the present-day reader, none of them say they view its ambiguities as intentional on the part of the author. They suggest that we, unfortunately, cannot be sure which is the correct way to read and interpret it, seeming not to have noticed that that is precisely the point - the duality of readings - sought by riddles, a genre which seems to have been around for about as long as human language. The meaning, acc. to Speiser (p. 367), "depends entirely on the pointing of two words, cons[onantal] 'ylh and 'mry." Unless, I would counter, what the meaning really depends on is the audience's appreciation of the fact that it could be "pointed" (i.e. the original consonant script could be read) in two acoustically very similar but semantically distinct ways. I suspect it is a bit like scholars a thousand years from now, faced with the English conundrum "When is a door not a door? When it is a jar", puzzling over whether or not one ought to consider "a jar" a typo for "ajar", and which one was "really" meant. "The meaning," a learned doctor of the thirty-first century will write, "depends entirely on the spacing between two words, a and jar." Indeed it does. So do you get it now?

A female fallow deer.
Source: "Silz daim1". Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
via Wikimedia Commons.

Naphtali was one of the northernmost tribes (together with Asher) in the parcelling out of territories among the post-Mosaic Israelites. Here Naphtali is spoken of as a doe or hind, i.e. a female deer. The word it uses is ayyala, the female of ayyal 'fallow deer' (CHALOT), 'hart, stag, deer' (EK), not to be confused with áyil 'ram' although EK says they probably both have the same origin. The ditty calls Naphtali ayyala sh'luxa, the second word being the passive participle of sh-l-x 'to send' and sometimes 'to release, let loose', so this is interpreted as a 'hind let loose.' We don't know why Naphtali is called a hind let loose.

Speiser's point, also made in CB, is that the H word for hind, אילה, is spelt (in the consonantal script of the original text) the same as the word for a kind of tree called a terebinth. The pronunciation is different (ayyala 'hind' versus ela 'terebinth') but they don't sound all that different and they looked identical until pointing came along. If the word meant were ela, then the following participle sh'lukha evidently wouldn't mean 'let loose', but the verb sh-l-k is conveniently polysemic so other senses can be found, such as 'a branching terebinth' as Speiser suggests.

Given the ambiguity about whether Naphtali is being called a deer or a tree, one place to look for an answer, since the ditty has two lines, is the second line, hannoten imre shafer 'that gives אמרי of beauty', so it all seems to hinge on what the untranslated word means, but disappointingly, we are once again faced with multiple readings, three in fact: this could mean either (1) 'fawns, baby deer' (changing the pointing slightly to read immare), which goes best with ayyala 'hind'; (2) 'crowns, crests, tops' (a better match for ela 'terebinth'); or (3) 'words, sayings' which is not a very likely thing for either a deer or a tree to produce, and yet which is oddly what is chosen by KJV ('Naphtali is a hind let loose; he giveth goodly words'), following the Vulg. (eloquia pulchritudinis) and is gaily followed by some of the later versions ('words of beauty', 'beautiful words', 'delightful words', 'eloquent literature' [sic]). Other ancient translations (Onk. and LXX) speak of offspring, and are followed by other modern translations who speak of Naphtali giving 'beautiful fawns'. Speiser's idea of a branched tree with lovely tops seems to have been overlooked by the translators, and we should also note that the Masoretes' pointing of the word as ayyala, not ela, is another voice in favour of the animal kingdom. But perhaps one of the best arguments for not making Naphtali a kind of tree is that several of the other oracles in this set compare the various tribes to animals of one sort or another (Judah is a lion, Issachar an ass, Dan a snake, Benjamin a wolf); none of them is a bush or a tree, so why not hind (and fawns) after all? But is the double double-entendre really just an unfortunate accident, or was somebody playing with words?

Notes 73B: Judah's oracle (49:8-12)

Judah

ח יְהוּדָ֗ה אַתָּה֙ יוֹד֣וּךָ אַחֶ֔יךָ יָֽדְךָ֖ בְּעֹ֣רֶף אֹֽיְבֶ֑יךָ יִשְׁתַּֽחֲו֥וּ לְךָ֖ בְּנֵ֥י אָבִֽיךָ׃ ט גּ֤וּר אַרְיֵה֙ יְהוּדָ֔ה מִטֶּ֖רֶף בְּנִ֣י עָלִ֑יתָ כָּרַ֨ע רָבַ֧ץ כְּאַרְיֵ֛ה וּכְלָבִ֖יא מִ֥י יְקִימֶֽנּוּ׃ י לֹֽא־יָס֥וּר שֵׁ֨בֶט֙ מִֽיהוּדָ֔ה וּמְחֹקֵ֖ק מִבֵּ֣ין רַגְלָ֑יו עַ֚ד כִּֽי־יָבֹ֣א שִׁילֹ֔ה וְל֖וֹ יִקְּהַ֥ת עַמִּֽים׃ יא אֹֽסְרִ֤י לַגֶּ֨פֶן֙ עִירֹ֔ה וְלַשֹּֽׂרֵקָ֖ה בְּנִ֣י אֲתֹנ֑וֹ כִּבֵּ֤ס בַּיַּ֨יִן֙ לְבֻשׁ֔וֹ וּבְדַם־עֲנָבִ֖ים סוּתֹֽה׃ יב חַכְלִילִ֥י עֵינַ֖יִם מִיָּ֑יִן וּלְבֶן־שִׁנַּ֖יִם מֵֽחָלָֽב׃

8 y'huda atta yodukha axekha yad'kha b'‛oref oy'vekha; yishtaxawwu l'kha b'ne avikha. 9 gur arye y'huda miTTeref b'ni ‛alita; kara‛ ravatz k'arye ukh'lavi mi y'qimennu. 10 lo yasur sheveT mihuda um'xoqeq mibben raglaw; ‛ad ki yavo shilo w'lo yiqq'hat ‛ammim. 11 os'ri laggefen ‛iro w'lassoreqa b'ni atono; kibbes bayyayin l'vusho uv'dam ‛anavim suto. 12 xakhlili ‛enayim miyyayin; ul'ven shinnayim mexalav.
⁸ You, O Judah, your brothers shall praise;
Your hand shall be on the nape of your foes;
Your father's sons shall bow low to you.
⁹ Judah is a lion's whelp;
On prey, my son, have you grown.
He crouches, lies down like a lion,
Like the king of beasts — who dare rouse him?
¹⁰ The scepter shall not depart from Judah,
Nor the ruler's staff from between his feet;
So that tribute shall come to him
And the homage of peoples be his.
¹¹ He tethers his ass to a vine,
His ass's foal to a choice vine;
He washes his garment in wine,
His robe in blood of grapes.
¹² His eyes are darker than wine;
His teeth are whiter than milk.

Judah gets five whole verses, but after all Judah is Judah; what audience doesn't cheer for the home team? Fourth in line for the top spot, Judah's triumph is justified by the default of the three early rivals, but also by its own excellence, naturally, and it is of the latter that these lines now sing. The only complimentary passage so far in the poem, this section is pretty much a song in its own right, the song of Judah.

atta yodúkha axékha
The popular etymology of Judah's name was that Leah praised God when she bore this her fourth son, although it is not clear whether she was thankful to Him for having now borne four children or whether she meant, that will do for the time being thank you very much; after all the verse (29:35) adds watta‛amod millédet 'so she stopped having babies.' The anecdote implies that the name she gave him, y'huda, comes from the hiphil verb root y-d-h 'to praise, to thank'. So when Judah's song begins with the words atta yodúkha axékha 'your brothers will praise you' (not 'thank you', I imagine), the allusion is obvious. And totally untranslatable. But even without the folk-etymological allusion, it might be possible to capture something of the word play here by focusing on the cynghanedd (sound play) of y'huda atta yodúkha (and perhaps also yad'kha which follows!).

yishtaxawwu l'kha b'ne avikha
'Your father's sons will bow to you.' This is parallel to the first phrase, atta yodúkha axékha.


kara‛ ravatz k'arye
The "naked" conjunction of two plain suffix-tense forms is odd. As for the verbs, the first generally means 'to kneel' but is translated as 'crouch' of lions according to CHALOT though I don't know whether that is an ad hoc hypothesis based on this very example; while the second is glossed as 'to lie down, couch' again of animals. This verb occurred in participial form in 4:7, in an obscure context, where rovetz is thought by some to be a name for a kind of demon; in any case the sense seems to be sinister there, whereas in another occurrence of the verb, in 29:2, it is used of sheep lying around and the context is quite idyllic. This is the first of three occurrences of r-b-tz in our passage: see also v. 14 (Issachar crouching among the sheepfolds) and v. 25.

lo yasur shéveT
'The staff will not turn away', or as the JPS puts it, 'The scepter shall not depart', using shéveT here in its original meaning of 'staff'. From this it acquired a secondary meaning of 'tribe' as in the twelve tribes of Israel, see vv. 16 and 28.

um'xoqeq
'Ruler's staff' (?). It isn't known just what this was supposed to mean; there is a word m'xoqeq but it is the poal participle of the root x-q-q (more familiar from the cognate noun xoq 'decree') and seems to mean 'leader', not something one would be likely to have between one's feet. But given the parallellism with lo yasur shéveT mihuda, it has been assumed that something analogous to sheveT is meant - though that is really only a guess.

‛ad ki yavo shilo
Meaning unclear, in particular what shilo is supposed to mean. Since this is obscure, it has invited all sorts of strange conjectures. Elsewhere in the Bible, shilo is the name of a place, Siloh, where there was a sanctuary, so that ‛ad ki yavo shilo looks like it means 'until he comes to (or enters) Siloh', but it is unclear how that fits into the sense of the verse. Any of the other suggestions that have been made involve unconfirmed speculations about other possible meanings of the mysterious shilo.

w'lo yiqq'hat ‛ammim
'And the homage of peoples be his.' This yiqq'hat is believed to be the construct of a noun meaning 'obedience' but it is too poorly attested to be certain of the real meaning of the whole sentence.

os'ri laggéfen ‛iro w'lassoreqa b'ni atono
'He tethers his ass to a vine, / His ass's foal to a choice vine': this is very obscure language and the translation is a conjecture. Each verse offers a different image: in v. 9 Judah is a lion, in v. 10 a stately ruler; now all of a sudden he is in a prosperous land surrounded by vineyards, awash with wine. There are so many vines around him that he even ties his donkey to one!

xakhlili ‛enayim miyyayin
'His eyes are darker than wine', but xakhlili is a hapax, and others suggest sparkling. The parallellism with the following phrase, ul'ven shinnayim mexalav, suggests in any case that the gist is that Judah is not only a powerful lion of a ruler but good-looking too, with handsome (wine-like?) eyes and teeth as white as milk.

Notes 73A: Reuben, Simeon and Levi's oracles (49:1-7)

Preamble

א וַיִּקְרָ֥א יַֽעֲקֹ֖ב אֶל־בָּנָ֑יו וַיֹּ֗אמֶר הֵאָֽסְפוּ֙ וְאַגִּ֣ידָה לָכֶ֔ם אֵ֛ת אֲשֶׁר־יִקְרָ֥א אֶתְכֶ֖ם בְּאַֽחֲרִ֥ית הַיָּמִֽים׃ ב הִקָּֽבְצ֥וּ וְשִׁמְע֖וּ בְּנֵ֣י יַֽעֲקֹ֑ב וְשִׁמְע֖וּ אֶל־יִשְׂרָאֵ֥ל אֲבִיכֶֽם׃

1 wayyiqra ya‛aqov el banaw; wayyomer he'as'fu w'aggida lakhem et asher yiqra etkhem b'axarit hayyamim. 2 hiqqav'tzu w'shim‛u b'ne ya‛aqov; w'shim‛u el yisra'el avikhem.
¹ And Jacob called his sons and said, "Come together that I may tell you what is to befall you in days to come. ² Assemble and hearken, o sons of Jacob; Hearken to Israel your father:

"Superscription, whereby the poem is attributed to Jacob" (EAS), and Speiser adds: "The heading does not necessarily stem from the compiler of the poetic sayings."

b'axarit hayyamim
Speiser rejects the traditional translation as 'in the end of days' (LXX ep' eskhatôn tôn hêmerôn, KJV 'in the last days', EF 'in the aftertime of days' but ESV 'in days to come').

ya‛aqov... yisra'el
On the co-ocurrence of both terms, see my note on Joseph (sub mide avir etc.).


Reuben

ג רְאוּבֵן֙ בְּכֹ֣רִי אַ֔תָּה כֹּחִ֖י וְרֵאשִׁ֣ית אוֹנִ֑י יֶ֥תֶר שְׂאֵ֖ת וְיֶ֥תֶר עָֽז׃ ד פַּ֤חַז כַּמַּ֨יִם֙ אַל־תּוֹתַ֔ר כִּ֥י עָלִ֖יתָ מִשְׁכְּבֵ֣י אָבִ֑יךָ אָ֥ז חִלַּ֖לְתָּ יְצוּעִ֥י עָלָֽה׃

3 r'uven b'khori atta koxi w'reshit oni; yeter s'et w'yeter ‛az. 4 paxaz kammayim al totar ki ‛alita mishk've avikha; az xillalta y'tzu‛i ‛ala.
³ Reuben you are my first-born,
My might and first fruit of my vigor,
Exceeding in rank
And exceeding in honor.
⁴ Unstable as water, you shall excel no longer;
For when you mounted your father's bed,
You brought disgrace — my couch he mounted!

The two verses seem to be antithetical, but Speiser regards v. 3 as constituting the address: by birth and so in principle, Reuben is the first and supreme, but his performance failed to live up to that standard and so...

al totar
'You shall excel no longer', more literally 'Surpass no more!' as EAS and EF (it is a negative imperative). The root, here a hiphil (cf. Speiser's note), is the same as that of yeter (a noun) twice in v. 3, and in the context might be read, with a bit of linguistic irony, as 'you, the firstborn, yeter this and yeter that - yeter no more!!' (or 'enough yeter-ing!'). It is a shame that JPS did not reflect this word play by rendering yeter as 'excelling' rather than 'exceeding.'

ki ‛alita mishk've avíkha
'For you mounted your father's bed.' Assumed to refer to the episode briefly mentioned in 35:22 (wayyélekh r'uven wayyishkav et bilha pilégesh aviw wayyishma‛ yisa'el 'Reuben went and lay with Bilhah, his father's concubine; and Israel found out.') What this could possibly mean when translated into tribal history is completely open to conjecture.

y'tzu‛i ‛ala
EH: 'This is an aside addressed to the assembled sons.'


Simeon and Levi

ה שִׁמְע֥וֹן וְלֵוִ֖י אַחִ֑ים כְּלֵ֥י חָמָ֖ס מְכֵרֹֽתֵיהֶֽם׃ ו בְּסֹדָם֙ אַל־תָּבֹ֣א נַפְשִׁ֔י בִּקְהָלָ֖ם אַל־תֵּחַ֣ד כְּבֹדִ֑י כִּ֤י בְאַפָּם֙ הָ֣רְגוּ אִ֔ישׁ וּבִרְצֹנָ֖ם עִקְּרוּ־שֽׁוֹר׃ ז אָר֤וּר אַפָּם֙ כִּ֣י עָ֔ז וְעֶבְרָתָ֖ם כִּ֣י קָשָׁ֑תָה אֲחַלְּקֵ֣ם בְּיַֽעֲקֹ֔ב וַֽאֲפִיצֵ֖ם בְּיִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃

5 shim‛on w'lewi axim; k'le xamas m'kherotehem. 6 b'sodam al tavo nafshi biqhalam al texad k'vodi; ki v'appam har'gu ish uvirtzonam ‛iqq'ru shor. 7 arur appam ki ‛az w'‛evratam ki qashata; axall'qem b'ya‛aqov wa'afitzem b'yisra'el.
⁵ Simeon and Levi are a pair;
Their weapons are tools of lawlessness.
⁶ Let not my person be included in their council,
Let not my being be counted in their assembly.
For when angry they slay men,
And when pleased they maim oxen.
⁷ Cursed be their anger so fierce,
And their wrath so relentless.
I will divide them in Jacob,
Scatter them in Israel.

axim
Jacob treats Simeon and Levi together, uniquely in the poem, addressing them as 'brothers' (v. 5) although the translation says 'a pair', in an attempt to make more sense of the statement inasmuch as they are all brothers, and in the case of several of them even full brothers, sons of Leah.

m'kherotehem
Of unknown meaning.

b'sodam al tavo nafshi
As elsewhere (12:13, 19:19-20, 27:4 and 27:25 etc.), nafshi clearly is a ceremonious (and here, poetic) equivalent to anokhi, while sod means 'confidential conversation, counsel', only here in Gen. but well-attested outside it. The verb form tavo is 3fs jussive, here in effect a cohortative owing to nafshi: 'May I not enter.' The use of 'my person' in the translation is unidiomatic and forced; some nuances just have to be let go in translation (if readers want the original, let them read it).


biqhalam al texad k'vodi
A perfect parallelism with b'sodam al tavo nafshi, which is useful because it helps us to gloss it (and the preceding clause), since they are synonymous. Thus we need not agonize over the meaning of k'vodi, or even the embarrassing point that it is given the wrong gender here (generally kavod is a masculine noun): like nafshi it stands for anokhi and like it, it need not (indeed almost cannot) be translated distinctively without damaging the text in other ways, and so 'my being' in this version is really as pointless as are 'mine honour' (KJV), and even worse (!!) 'my glory' (ESV). The verb, texad, is not quite a hapax but close, but its formation (root y-x-d) and meaning ('join, unite') are ensured by the parallelism, as is its grammatical function (jussive-cum-cohortative): 'May I not join their assembly' (or however we decide to translate qahal).

The second part of the verse confirms our suspicion that all this is in reference to the Dinah incident (ch. 34).

ki v'appam
The noun af is slightly schizophrenic; the same word has meanings ranging from 'nose' and 'face' all the way to 'anger', but I believe the latter is a secondary extension on the basis of the very common expression wayyíxar appo (e.g. 39:19) 'his face heated up' whence 'he got angry.' (The temperature metaphor may be universal: Basque haserre 'get angry' contains the element erre 'to burn', while Nawat kwalani 'ditto' is derived from the same stem, *kwala, as kwakwalaka 'to boil'...) By extension, then, b'appam lit. 'by their face' really means 'in their anger' or 'in fury' which fits the context well - they kill men in their anger - when we relate this to Dinah's story.

arur appam
Whence it follows that this does not mean, as it does literally, 'Cursed be their face', but rather 'Cursed be their anger.'

axall'qem b'ya‛aqov wa'afitzem b'yisra'el
This is the verdict, motivated by the failings described in the foregoing lines: if Reuben has lost the initial advantage given him by order of birth, so have Simeon and Levi on account of their own misconduct. They are to be divided and scattered within Israel, clearly an allusion to developments in Israel's subsequent tribal history which took place long after patriarchal times but whose historicity is borne out by the absence of these tribes from later events in Israelite history. Israelite audiences, upon listening to this oracle, were surely nodding their heads as they heard Jacob's rulings: Reuben debunked and Simeon and Levi divided and scattered. It all makes sense.

Notes 73: Jacob foretells the fortunes of the Israelite tribes (49:1-27)

SYNOPSIS: Jacob summons all his sons so that he can foretell the fortune of each, or rather of the tribes they represent.

I decided to leave this passage's commentary, and indeed its translation too, until the rest of Genesis was out of the way. I can give one reason for this by quoting directly from Everett Fox (EF, p. 207):

The chapter is among the most difficult in the Torah. Many passages are simply obscure, leaving the translator to make at best educated guesses.

Another reason is that scholars all agree that this text has a different origin from all the rest of the book of Genesis; in one sense, it is not part of the same book at all, but an independent poem that was inserted here. It is not the only part of Genesis widely thought to be of "extraneous" origin; remember ch. 14. The difference there is that, as texts go, this one is much harder to understand.

According to many scholars Genesis as a whole was pieced together by combining and incorporating a variety of source materials, but even accepting that, the sources used and the text that resulted (aside from this bit) make up a coherent entity in many senses, in terms of genre, theme and narrative continuity. Genesis minus ch. 49 is the story of the patriarchs; chapter  49 is a poem (or a collection of sayings in verse??) about the tribes of Israel. As regards dates, this poetic material is believed to be more archaic than the rest of the book.

As compared to the list of Jacob's sons,
in the list of tribes Levi is absent, while
Joseph is represented by his two sons,
Ephraim and Manasseh, thus maintaining the
total of twelve. Reuben's banishment to the
fringe area, Simeon's domination by Judah
and Levi's dispersal amongst the other tribes,
and on the other hand the rise to dominance
of Judah in the south and the Josephite tribes
in the north, are among historical developments
symbolized and motivated allegorically in this
cryptic poetic text. Map: Wikipedia

Its genre can perhaps be described as oracular poetry, whose subject matter is the prediction of the fate of each of the twelve tribes. The format into which this oracle (or these oracles) is cast is that it is supposed to have been recited by their eponymous father, Israel (alias Jacob). Although composed long ago (even in relation to the writing of Genesis!), the date of composition must have been late enough to be able to create an oracle a posteriori which "predicts" events known or supposed by the author to have occurred to these tribes. Not all of the author's knowledge about the tribes' histories is available to us today, but to the extent that we can understand them the "oracles" are largely compatible with what we do know.

Unfortunately, though, the information embedded in the poem is couched in a poetic, formalistic and symbolic language our command of which is limited; this is not a history of the twelve tribes but a poem about that history which is supposed to make sense to us if we already know that history! Not only do scholars not know as much as they would like, but I am not privy to most of what they do know, and my ambitions in the following comments are therefore modest, and as all my other comments, nearly always derivative from materials I have been fortunate enough to be able to read. For anyone interested in taking this further than I can take them, hopefully what I provide will serve as a point of departure.

To a limited extent, we can make some use of the rest of Genesis to clarify and contextualize this poem's allusions. So when the poem says of Reuben (v. 4) 'you mounted your father's bed' we know this is not a misreading thanks to another brief mention of the same incident in ch. 35. We are able to understand the motivation of Jacob's anger at Simeon and Levi thanks to our knowledge of the details of the story of Dinah narrated in ch. 34, and so on. Therefore, while the texts are autonomous, the background story-line is either directly shared or clearly related. But how? Is it just that they are both reflecting the same history or the same narrative tradition? Or, since the poem is the older text by all accounts, could it be that a part of Genesis grew out of the poem as an extended "novelization", rather as books about the life of Jacob, Moses, Jesus etc. are built by mediaeval or modern-day authors out of the biblical accounts, taken as a baseline; or to take another analogy, as some scholars suspect the Christian gospels themselves may have been elaborated out of sketchier primitive sources?

We might have expected to find stronger connections between this text and the chapter about the birth and naming of Jacob's sons by their (legal) mothers (ch. 30). The traditions look like they were independent and only overlap at all by chance. So for instance, when Gad was born his name was said to have come from the word gad meaning 'luck', but the present poem connects it instead to another assonating word, g'dud 'marauding band'.

The custom of referring to this poem as "The Blessing of Jacob" is a misnomer, for as Speiser points out (EAS, p. 370), these are not blessings but prophesies. Indeed, if the favourable prophesies made of some tribes were "blessings", the unfavourable ones about others would surely be curses! The external narrative framework in which the poem is presented uses the assumption or conceit that Jacob's sons all gather around him and he tells each in turn "what is to befall you in days to come." If there is a colophon at the end, it is verse 28: 'All these were the tribes of Israel, twelve in number, and this is what their father said to them as he bade them farewell, addressing to each a parting word appropriate to him.' I commented on the first part of this verse here.

There are some striking differences between the "oracles" dedicated to different brothers. One, obviously, is that while some are clearly complimentary (Judah and Joseph come to mind), most are not, and some at least are unabashedly derogatory. This may reflect the bias of the author or authors; it may also allude to historical circumstances of which we are only vaguely aware, if that. Another difference is that Reuben's and Judah's oracles (i.e. those of his firstborn son and of the one who attains leadership of the confederation) are expressed in the second person, and that fact is made all the more salient by the prominence of the pronoun atta in both their initial statements. The other oracles are in third person throughout except Joseph's, which is mostly in the third person but contains a second-person bit in the middle (v. 25).

Because of the length of my notes on this passage, I am going to publish the detailed comments separately and break them up into several posts, since some readers may find it hard to digest everything in a single sitting. Tomorrow we will begin with the oracles of Reuben, Simeon and Levi.

Notes 76: Joseph's death (50:22-26)

SYNOPSIS: Joseph lived with his family and lived to see his sons' grandchildren. On his deathbed, he told his relatives: "After I die God will look after you, and he will take you back from Egypt to the land that God promised your ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." He asked for his bones to be taken back to the land of Canaan.

• Text of the passage (in Nawat)

One more postscript remains: What happened to Joseph? One thing that this final paragraph seems to me to demonstrate beyond a doubt is that, whatever the process whereby the text of Genesis was brought into being, the final product is a work of art, chiselled out not only with an eye for detail, for that is also a feature of fine craftsmanship, but another eye on the aesthetics of the whole, the centrality of the message, the power of the image and the symbol, elegance, symmetry and (another feature of the best art) an outward-looking perspective: and what next? No wonder the ancients believed there was magic in every word, even every letter. That is rather too primitive a way of looking at it for my taste, but it is one way of saying that the author knew what he was doing. The last five lines of the book of Genesis could have been any old five lines, but they are not; there is nothing "any old" about them! And this is, in itself and on the level of literary analysis, a final message to the reader or listener, a warning even: Have you been paying attention to what I've been saying?

The last word of Genesis is b'mitzráyim 'in Egypt': a happy coincidence, or a one-word summary of where the story leaves us and the opening premise of Exodus, the book that follows?

Joseph, who has just reminded everyone that he is no god (v. 19), has a human lifespan of 110 years, an age which no person even today can complain about but which brings us within the realm of the possible and the normal; with him, we enter history. He lived to be a great-grandfather. Then he died.

Joseph is the last person we see and the last character who speaks, and so we may say that he speaks to us, the book's audience, as well as to the members of his family; we are all, you might say, gathered around him as he utters his last words, and they echo in everyone's ears. And the author of Genesis knew that. So what words does he place on the departing Joseph's lips? anokhi met welohim paqod yifqod etkhem w'he‛ela etkhem min ha'áretz hazzot el ha'áretz asher nishba‛ l'avraham l'yitzxaq ul'ya‛aqov 'I am dying, but God will look after you and will make sure you go from this land to the land he promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.'

The utterance ends on the names of the patriarchs' whose lives have been the main focus of the book that concludes here; the three Hebrew words sum up the family whose story constitutes the book's substance. The word sequence "Abraham, Isaac and Jacob" has subsequently become so familiar to audiences who know the rest of the story that it may easily slip past us that this is actually the first time the three patriarchs have ever been referred to this way.

These words also remind us of the main theme surrounding this family: the idea that God promised to them a land (that's the good news!); that promised land, however, is not the one in which they are now living (that's the not-so-good news!). That is a bittersweet part of this parting message. In other words, you have a destiny but you are not there yet. One day you are going to get where you're going, but not yet, so keep working at it.

But there is consolation: God will keep an eye on you, and he will get you there (eventually): w'he‛ela etkhem min ha'áretz hazzot 'he will lead you up from this land.' The road to Canaan is always "up" in Hebrew, hence w'he‛ela, but that doesn't stop us from reading another sense into the verb on a spiritual level: God will show you the way upwards, towards something better. Meanwhile, you are not alone: paqod yifqod etkhem 'he will watch over you.'

The point, my point at any rate, is that these are the words and the thoughts the author of Genesis leaves the audience with, and it is a fairly complete message to have encapsuated in a single sentence in a way which fits very smoothly into the narrative fabric so that it doesn't sound in the least bit like a lecture or a sermon. It is more like a parting melody, echoing in a simple phrase the entire symphony that has just been performed. And in retrospect, what a performance it has been! Bravo!!

Notes 75: Joseph forgives his brothers (50:14-21)

SYNOPSIS: Joseph and his brothers returned to Egypt. Now, with Jacob no longer alive, the brothers started to worry that Joseph would take revenge on them for what they had done to him years before. They went to talk to Joseph and told him that Jacob had instructed them to tell Joseph that he wished for him to forgive them for the injustice they had done. This caused Joseph to weep. The brothers offered to let him dispose of them as his servants. Joseph replied: "Do not worry. I am not God. You may have had evil intentions towards me but God had other ideas, and thanks to what you did we are all alive now. Relax!"

• Text of the passage (in Nawat)

In one of my blog posts I asked: What is Genesis? though whether I managed to answer my question is debatable. Now that we have read it, what would we say it is that we have read? How about: the story of a family. It is a story, and its subject is the lives and deeds of a number of related people covering a period spanning four generations (Abraham to Joseph). It begins with a preamble about the beginning of the world and the genealogy from Adam up to the first major protagonist, Abraham (alias Abram), with some interesting anecdotes and good stories along the way, but all in all that is not the main story of Genesis, which clearly begins with the momentous words (12:1): wayyómer YHWH el avram lekh l'kha me'artz'kha umimmoladt'kha umibbet avíkha el ha'áretz asher ar'ékka 'The Lord said to Abram: Go forth from you native land and from your father's house to the land that I will show you.'

The story that follows is the saga of a family, but like all great literature it manages to talk of many things and lets itself be read on many levels. The sentence just quoted speaks of a journey, and it is easy to think of the whole story that follows as a journey, beginning to the east of Canaan, in northern Mesopotamia, and ending (for now) in Egypt to the southwest. This story, which we might subtitle "From Haran to Goshen," can be interpreted as an allegory, a legend and a symbolic history, and of course it can be, and has been, told and retold, explained and re-explained, borrowed and usurped by other narratives and ideological projects.

But it is basically the story of a family, and here that story draws to a close. Jacob's death is doubly significant in this narrative, as the end of one of the main characters and the end of the last great patriarch in The Family. Now Jacob is gone, and in this epilogue the final loose end is tied up.


50:14 w'khol ha‛olim itto liqbor et aviw
'And all who had gone up with him to bury his father.' The phrase kol ha‛olim is not a noun phrase ('all the goers-up') but the nucleus of a participial relative clause, 'all the [people] who went up', and itto liqbor et aviw are adjuncts of the verb ‛-l-h.

axare qovro et aviw
'After burying his father.' This, on the other hand, is an adjunct of the preceding main clause: wayyáshov yosef mitzráyma 'Joseph returned to Egypt.'

50:15 kol hara‛a asher gamálnu oto
'All the wrong that we did him.' The verb g-m-l means 'perform, carry out.' So also v. 17, ki ra‛a g'malúkha 'because they did you wrong.'

50:16 avíkha tziwwa lifne moto
'Before his death your father left this instruction.' If we want to read this "historically", in search of "facts", that is a bit iffy. How convenient that Jacob didn't say this to Joseph but now that he is gone, Joseph's brothers suddenly have such information! On the other hand, maybe it was true, who's to say: it would have been easy enough for Jacob to say something when Joseph wasn't there, only couldn't they have told Joseph before Jacob died? Perhaps they never got the chance. On the other hand, it wouldn't be the first time Joseph's brothers had agreed on a lie, remember how Jacob was led to think that Joseph had been eaten by a wild animal, so why believe them this time? So if facts are what we want, it is true that the book says Jacob said this but it says so through the mouths of liars, so what does that prove? On the other hand, what's the difference? Whether Jacob asked Joseph to forgive his brothers or he didn't ask him, Joseph is going to forgive the brothers in any case, so what the brothers achieve by making up that story, if they made it up, is to show things that reflect on themselves and their own moral stature but hardly change the course of the story. Actually it doesn't seem to make much difference what any of them ever say or do, the story seems to proceed the way it wants to, whether because of them or despite them. So Joseph may have been as doubtful as we are about the truthfulness of this report of his father's instructions, but all he probably did was smile to himself. And weep (v. 17).

50:17 anna
Not the interrogative place adverb ána 'whither?', which may be spelt the same in Hebrew, but an interjection which expresses pleading: 'I beseech you.' EK proposes to derive it from the interjection ahah 'ah!' and the particle na 'please.' Only here in Genesis, but it occurs a dozen times in the whole Tanakh.

sa na pésha‛ axékha w'xaTTatam
'Please forgive the offense of your brothers and their guilt.' The verb n-s-' 'to lift' has here the meaning of 'to pardon', cf. (40:13): b'‛od sh'lóshet yamim yissa far‛o et roshékha 'In three days Pharaoh will lift up your head,' i.e. will pardon you. The noun pésha‛ 'rebelion, revolt' has occurred once before in Genesis, in Jacob's angry rejoinder to Laban (31:36): wayyíxar l'ya‛aqov wayyárev b'lavan wayyá‛an ya‛aqov wayyómer l'lavan ma pish‛i ma xaTáti ki daláqta axaray 'Now Jacob became incensed and took up his grievance with Laban. Jacob spoke up and said to Laban: What is my crime, what is my guilt that you should pursue me?'

w'‛atta sa na l'fésha‛ ‛avde elohe avíkha
'Therefore, please forgive the offense of the servants of the God of your father.' Now it is the brothers themselves speaking, with the self-reference as ‛avde elohe avíkha calculated to draw Joseph's attention to the bond they share. For as EH observes, citing Abravanel: "They do not appeal to the claim of brotherliness because they forfeited it by their own actions."

wayyevk yosef b'dabb'ram elaw
'And Joseph wept as they spoke to him.' Why did Joseph weep? Was it because of what his father had (supposedly) said to his brothers? Or was it because of what his brothers expressed, unknowingly no doubt, by the fact of their telling him this. The fact that this was Joseph's reaction also tells the audience a great deal about Joseph, of course.

50:18 wayyel'khu
In v. 16, on the other hand, it says: waytzawwu el yosef lemor 'they sent this message to Joseph'; here it says 'went.' EH suggests that this means the brothers first sent a message because they were afraid of his reaction; upon seeing that he was not angry, they visited him in person.

wayyipp'lu l'fanaw wayyom'ru hinnénnu l'kha la‛avadim
'They fell down (JPS 'flung themselves') before him and said: Behold, we are your servants.' As in Joseph's childhood dream. But displaying wisdom he had not yet acquired then, he now replies...

50:19 hatáxat elohim âni
'Am I a substitute for God?' Cf. 30:2, where Rachel complains to her husband Jacob that she had not conceived, and he angrily retorts: hatáxat elohim anókhi 'ditto.' It must have been a stock phrase. The contexts are admittedly different. Note that táxat 'under' often means 'instead of' as here. 

As for what Joseph's reply here means in moral terms, I suspect a whole book could be written on that subject. Fortunately, it is not my job to write it. But if we were intent on looking for a moral to this little story and the long story of which it is the conclusion, it might be this: No man is a substitute for God. If you call a man a god you do so at your peril; you also deny God by doing it. Do not treat a man as a god, do not expect a man's performance to match that of a god, and do not offend God by committing this error. Neither Adam nor Noah nor Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, nor Joseph nor the great Pharaoh himself, nor Moses nor King David nor even the Messiah to come is exempt from this. All sinned and erred, all had God's guidance and played their part in His game, as did all the other men and women in this story: none was perfect, yet they all teach us something about life; they all tried their hardest, they all failed some of the tests, they all glow in their constellations, they all have their mission, and they all know their place, or find out what it is sooner or later: and not one of them replaces God, so they can all say hatáxat elohim âni and the answer will always be: no. 

The authors of the Torah had a story to tell and they also had a point to make. The story, we have read. The point is this: sh'ma‛ yisra'el YHWH elohénu YHWH exad 'Listen Israel: YHWH is our God and there is only one YHWH.' Those before us had all sorts of gods. Some think that a piece of wood or stone can be a god; it isn't. Some think a man can; he isn't. God is God, and has no substitute, personification or intermediary. 

Joseph may have been using an ordinary, idiomatic catchphrase when he is recorded as saying to his brothers hatáxat elohim âni, but what he is saying, the last and lasting message of this book, is not trivialized or ridiculed thereby, it is merely worked artfully into the fabric or the narrative. 

Dreams have a way of coming true but they also have a way of having an unexpected meaning. The Pharaoh's baker and his cupbearer had very similar dreams on the same night, and they both came true yet their meanings were utterly different. What of Joseph's dreams about himself and his brothers, what did they mean and what surprise do they conceal? 

Joseph saw his brothers bowing down to him in his dreams. In the present passage, that is what they do: they not only prostrate themselves in front of him but they beg to become his slaves. And there were good reasons: Joseph had become one of the most powerful men in the world, and (on account of their own actions) they had every reason to fear him now! 

What Joseph's childish dreams hadn't shown was what happens next, and it is the essential point of this closing scene. Joseph weeps; gracefully tells them not to worry about all that; rejects their offer of service as unnecessary; and all this he does through a simple Hebrew phrase of three words by means of which he points out to them, and us, that neither he, nor (by implication) anything or anyone else, is, or ever will be, táxat elohim, a substitute for God.