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While linguistically straightforward, CB expresses perplexity about the historical content: "This verse describes the position of the territory of the tribe as on the sea-coast; but according to Joshua...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
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?
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| A female fallow deer. Source: "Silz daim1". Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. |
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?
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