Notes 37: The duda root (30:14-24)

SYNOPSIS: One day Reuben found some dudaim growing and brought them home to his mother Leah. Although uncertain, these are traditionally identified as mandrakes and were popularly thought to have aphrodisiac or some such properties. Rachel asks Leah to let her have some. They strike a deal: Leah gets to have sex with her husband and in return Rachel will get some of the dudas. The upshot was that Leah had two more sons with Jacob (Issachar 'payment' and Zebulun 'present'), and a daughter (Dina). And Rachel at last gives Jacob a child (Joseph, either 'removal' or 'addition').

• Text of the passage in Nawat

It is not certain that the translation of duda'im is 'mandrakes' although that is the tradition. Still more important for understanding the story than the identity of whatever Reuben found are questions such as: What effect were they supposed to have? Why were they so valuable to Rachel? In what way did she actually benefit from them, and how did that come about. In fact, Genesis is silent on all these matters and we are left guessing, which seems odd and leaves us with two hypotheses to speculate between: either it was considered such common knowledge that it wasn't necessary to say any more, or else something has happened in the history or the transmission of this text over time, and what we are reading is an altered, censored or otherwise manipulated version of the account. On the face of it, either things seems possible.

Mandrakes occupy a special place in other folk traditions (Shakespeare famously mentions them several times, sometimes calling them mandragora) and most of the lore about their special attributes falls squarely into the category of what we generally call magic. Some say they were believed to help a woman conceive (which was Rachel's problem), others that they were considered to act as an aphrodisiac (which wasn't!). They have also been described as having narcotic effects. It is not spelt out for us why Rachel wanted them. One way or another, the ones Reuben found did help Leah to conceive, whether or not by power of magic! And whatever the roots did or were thought to do, let us not forget that there is another curious dimension to this strange little passage, namely the wheeling and dealing that went on between the sisters in connection with their possession. If the setting were any different, such a story might not appear the least bit dignified, but Genesis seems to be able to get away with just about anything!

30:20 z'vadáni elohim oti zéved Tov / happá‛am yizb'léni ishi
Whatever we might make of the once all but unanymously accepted and now beleaguered Documentary Hypothesis, this verse provides evidence as strong as any for which one might wish that, at some point and on some level at least, Genesis derives from a composite of multiple sources. The same verse gives two different reasons, one straight after the other, why Leah supposedly named her sixth son as she did. Each explanation alludes to a distinct verbal root to provide an etymology: one to z-b-d 'to make someone a gift of something'; the other to z-b-l 'to exalt, make someone a lawful wife' (the glosses are from CHALOT). Both are hapax legomena, not just in Genesis but in the whole Hebrew biblical corpus. What is clear from the sentences in which they are used in this verse is that they mean different things and are not the same lexeme; so who could believe that the name z'vulun 'Zebulun' comes from both? Whatever these verbs meant, the first explanation is that (so to speak) "God zbd-ed me a good zbd", while the second says "this time my husband has zbl-ed me." Clearly not the same story! In this type of folk etymology, no matter how far-fetched, in terms of linguistic morphology the root consonants of the verb alluded to, at the very least, find a place in the name to be explained, but the first story even fails there, with d being the third consonant of the verb where an l seems to be required, unless, of course, the name was originally *z'vudun with a d and it has been corrupted in the biblical text... except that if that were the case, then the other etymology, which has l, would be the one revealing corruption. And actually the d seems at least as likely as the l as the original form of the name, for this combination of consonants is better attested (witness the New Testament name Zebedee, inter alia). Obviously there were once two independent traditions about the origin or meaning of this name (and perhaps two different pronunciations of the name itself), both of which were collated in the process of putting together Genesis. This observation doesn't throw a great deal more light on the name as such, but it does tell us something about the ways in which the Genesis material could have crystallized.

30:22-24
Enter Joseph (yosef), at long last, the much-delayed love-child of Jacob and Rachel who is going to dominate the concluding cycle of Genesis, its longest. Once again we are provided with two alternative explanations for his name, which can't both be correct and historically no doubt neither is, but hey. Each explanation alludes, as usual, to a verbal root, but the roots are different and their meanings opposed to each other: '-s-p 'gather, gather in, harvest, take in, take away, exterminate, draw back' in v.23 (wayyósef 'he gathered etc.'), versus y-s-p 'add, continue, do again' in v. 24 (participle: yosef 'adding, he who adds, will add'). By the first account Rachel exclaims asaf elohim et xerpati 'God has taken away my disgrace!'; by the second, yosef YHWH li ben axer 'The Lord will add to me another son!' (Eventually he will, but sadly Rachel will die in childbirth.)