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."