#parashat bəreishit

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How does the book of Genesis begin? In this first installment of One Word Torah, I take a deep dive into the first word of the Bible and wend my way thru questions of meaning, bias, and Biblical scholarship.

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Ben Bag Bag said to turn the Torah over, and then turn it over again, because everything is in it (Pirqei Avot 5:22). Surely that everything includes legendary, foundational gender-weird femboy twinks.

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Lot’s wife becomes a pillar of salt. What if this isn’t a becoming that is done to her, but a becoming she makes happen herself?

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In which I learn what a terebinth is, and also why it’s not worth spending much time figuring out what a terebinth is.

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The Biblical flood story and a Roman flood myth both happen to use the same word. What a fun coincidence . . . or is it?

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Parashat Vayeitzei: בָּגָד | bagad

If you turned this one-word Torah project into a parashah, you’d get parashat vayeitzei. The portion carries forward the narrative story of the Jewish ancestral families, yes, but it’s also obsessed with individual words and what they mean.

Specifically, it’s obsessed with names. Twelve of Ya’aqov’s thirteen named children are born in this parashah, and each time one of the sons is named, there’s a little explanatory gloss giving a reason that he was named what he was named. (The exception, of course, is Dinah, the only daughter, and the only child named without an explanation. There may be room here to expand on traditional trans readings of Dinah [a] to understand her as self-named, reserving the explanation of her choice to her own private thoughts. Goodness knows she deserves to have control over whatever she can in her own life, given everything she goes thru.)

[a] In Bərakhot 60a of the Babylonian Talmud, Rav explains that Dinah was originally conceived as a son, but then נֶהֶפְכָה לְבַת | nehefkhah ləvat | “was transformed into a daughter” due to Divine intercession.

These naming glosses are sometimes described as etymologies and then critiqued for their sometimes lack of scholarly accuracy, but etymology isn’t really the goal here as much as explanation. It’s like saying, “Oh, I call him Frankie because he’s honest to a fault” — you’re not explaining the philological origin of the name, you’re explaining what the name means to you and why you chose it in this context. And so it is with the names of Ya’aqov’s sons.

But curiously, one of these explanations is emended. We’ve talked about these emendations before — moments where the scribes who fixed the text in its final form looked at the text they had received and sought to fix a typo or the like. There’s one here when Lei’ah explains the name of Zilpah’s first son, Gad. In the emended version, she explains Gad’s name by saying בָּא גָד | ba gad | “Luck has come!” (Bəreishit 30:11). But the uncorrected text drops the silent alef and runs the two words together into one: בגד, which you could take as either a strict contraction bagad or perhaps as a more grammatically fragmentary bəgad | “With luck!” [b].

[b] There is some evidence for the existence of a g-d called Gad in the Ancient Semitic pantheon who had power over chance, fortune, and luck, which creates a slight ambiguity here as to whether the gad in the text is just the generic Hebrew word for “luck” or a proper name of a g-d of Luck, not wholly unlike how “hope” in English can be a generic noun for a feeling or a specific person’s name. Ryan Thomas argues (in “The [G-d] Gad”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 139 (2021): 307���16) that G-d isn’t really an independent deity at all but rather just a common epithet for the local g-d in charge — much as many contemporary Jews might refer to our G-d as “HaMaq-m” or “Sh-khinah” or the like.

This is all linguistically fairly uncomplicated. Two verses later, when Lei’ah names Asheir, she uses the same fragmentary בְּאׇשְׁרִי | bə’oshri | “With my happiness!” construction that the unemended consonants of verse 11 imply, so we might prefer “With luck!” to “Luck has come!” as a reading, but the emended version doesn’t pose any particular problems, and there’s lots of variety in the grammatical structure of the various naming explanations, so one structural parallel is hardly decisive.

Instead of teasing out a problem, I’m interested very specifically in the difference between these two versions in the Hebrew text. In this whole word-obsessed parashah, this is the only instance of this sort of emendation; it’s like a tiny sign saying “Hey, something happened here.”.

The difference is slight. Alef, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, has a numerical value of 1 — the smallest possible value in a system that deals only with integers — and is all but silent in pronunciation [c]. It is a sliver of a difference, the least amount of difference you can get, almost, before two things are just the same.

[c] Technically, it represents a glottal stop, the little hiccup that separates the two vowels in “Latin” when US English speakers say it in normal speech. This is already not a very pronounced sound, but people with US English as a first and primary language tend to drop a lot of these stops when they pronounce liturgical Hebrew; we like to run our vowels together. So alef is very frequently not just subtle but nonexistent, audibly, however up in arms prescriptivists might get over it.

Without the alef, בגד sums to nine in gematria; with it, בא גד sums to ten. Nine is the value of אָח | aḥ | “brother”. Ten is the value of בָּדָד | badad | “separation”. What can we learn from this?

First: Gad shares his brothers’ fate, and also doesn’t. According to the Biblical text, his eponymous tribe is one of the ten conquered by Assyria in 722 BC, whereupon those ten tribes are cut off from the rest of the Jewish people and separated from the rest of our history. So he is a brother to those other lost brothers, isolated from the chain of Jewish continuity by the ravages of empire. Perhaps Lei’ah’s gematrial “Brother!” was a plea that this fate be reversed, that the tribe of Gad persist down thru the ages as a brother to the tribes that escaped Assyrian oblivion, and perhaps the Masoretes’ “Separation!” reflects the sad reality of history as it ultimately played out.

But second: As I said, the difference here is very small. As small as it can be — no word can have a gematria between nine and ten; there is no such integer. And so too perhaps this teaches us that the difference between kinship and atomization is similarly small. Not just as a matter of perspective — Gad being both akin to some of his brothers and separated from others — but as a matter of instruction. Perhaps this, vayeitzei’s sole emendation, comes to teach us that there is not so great a distance between joining together with one another in bonds of trust and community and falling apart from one another in helpless individualized isolation.

And what’s more: This separation is distinguished from kinship not by subtraction, but by addition. It is not that we start out isolated and then add something to bring us together; we start out together and then something comes to drive us apart. And it is a very small something! A miniscule, inaudible something! Something as subtle as a slight hitch in the breath between one vowel and another.

From this we can learn: The roots of separation lie not in grand gestures of opposition, but in the thousand little moments of daily life, moments so small we may not even perceive them. A slight tensing of the shoulders, a subtle raising of the guard. A hitch in your breath when you start to call a man your brother.

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Parashat Vayishlaḥ: אִישׁ | ish

G-d speaks the world into creation at the beginning of the book of Genesis. The world is created thru words; to know the name of a thing — to know whence the name of a thing — is to know a little bit the source, the root, the spark of the creation of that thing. Or is it? And is that a good thing?

Before we talk about this week’s word, I want to talk about the structure of Hebrew words more generally.

A normal word in Biblical Hebrew is built around a root of three consonants. English words have roots too, of course — the omni- in omnipotent, the -itis in arthritis — but Hebrew roots function a little differently. For starters, you usually can’t stack roots together in Hebrew. English is perfectly happy to throw together conglomerations like unpigeonholeability, but outside of exceptional situations, in Biblical Hebrew, each word has one, and only one, root. Secondly, the consonants of a Hebrew root function something like pillars that frame the façade of a building while leaving plenty of room for other architectural details to fill in the gaps between them. The three Hebrew consonants גדל | GDL make a root having to do with being big, but in turning those consonants into full words, you often fit things in between them, as with גָּדוֹל | gadol | “large” or הִגְדִּֽילָה | higdílah | “she did great things”. If you aren’t familiar with all the rules (and, frankly, sometimes even when you are), these journeys from root to word can sometimes be hard to trace. נְטוּיָה | nətuyah, מַטְּךָ | matəkha, הַטֶּֽינָה | hatéinah, and וַיֵּט | vayeit all come from the same root, נטה | NTH, which has to do with extending, or stretching out.

This feature of Hebrew opens up many linguistic doors. Just by tweaking the vowels, you can shunt a word from being a noun to a verb, and the persistence of the consonants can reveal etymological linkages with striking clarity even between words with very different surface meanings. Small wonder that scholars and mystics across the ages have made a lot of hay out of tracing back the roots of scripturally significant words. Hold on to that thought.

In parashat vayishlaḥ, Ya’aqov wrestles with an angel. It’s a famous story; many of you probably know it well. Ya’aqov is waiting overnight to cross a river, an angel shows up and they wrestle, the angel can’t win so cheats by wrenching Ya’aqov’s hip, Ya’aqov refuses to let the angel go without a blessing, the blessing turns out to be a new name: Yisra’eil.

Except the Biblical text never actually calls Ya’aqov’s wrestler an angel. Ya’aqov seemingly ascribes divinity to it in Bəreishit 32:31, but the narrative is more laconic. It just says that Ya’aqov wrestled with an אִישׁ | ish — with a “man” (32:25) [a].

[a] As an aside, the verb for wrestle used here is יֵאָבֵק | yei’aveiq, a word that only shows up in this story, nowhere else. Altho the root is clearly אבק | ’VQ, it’s almost certainly used here as a play on יַבֹּק | Yaboq, the name of the river Ya’aqov is waiting to cross. (Yaboq probably comes from the unrelated root בקק | BQQ; for all that Hebrew root linkages illuminate the language on a deep level, Biblical writers sometimes do just follow sound instead of etymology.)

Modern translations often fudge this. It’s rare to find the ish of 32:25 translated directly as man — much more common is something like JPS’s “figure”. The usual explanation is that the narrative is giving us a tight focus on Ya’aqov’s perspective: He thinks he’s wrestling with some guy at first and only later realizes that something more than human is going on here. This is a pretty standard technique in Biblical prose, and on a factual level, this is a perfectly serviceable explanation. Which is why I’m going to ignore it and go haring off in another direction.

What’s the root of ish? At first blush, this might seem like a trivial question. Hebrew roots are usually three letters long, אִישׁ is three letters long, surely the root is just ish minus the vowels, אישׁ. But perhaps you know that a yod (י) in the middle of a Hebrew word is frequently not part of the root. And perhaps you also know that the plural of ish is אֲנָשִׁים | anashim, and that there’s another word in Hebrew for a human being, אֱנוֹשׁ | enosh, that looks pretty similar. You may even know that the Hebrew word for woman, אִשָּׁה | ishah, looks a lot like the feminine version of ish, and that the plural, women, is נָשִׁים | nashim. All of which might make you start to wonder whether the correct root isn’t | ’NSh, or maybe even something without that initial alef (א) at all.

And this is where it becomes very important to pay careful attention to morphological rules, because it turns out none of these words are etymologically related at all.

Like English male and female, Hebrew ish, enosh, and ishah, despite their similarity in spelling and closeness in meaning, come from different roots. They’re not the same substrate sprouting into varied forms; they’re rooted in disparate soils at the source [b]. Enosh and ishah come from two distinct אנשׁ | ’NSh roots [c] — the former perhaps having to do with sociability and the latter with softness — and ish comes from . . . well.

[b] In English, male comes from Latin masculus by way of French (which is how it lost the SC that masculine retains), while female comes from Latin femella — the earliest English spelling is femele, but the second E changed to an A due to the misleading closeness of male. [c] This isn’t all that an unusual thing for a language to do. In English, scale as in “we ask for donations on a sliding scale based on income” comes from the Latin scala, “ladder”, and is unrelated to scale as in “the little things that cover a snake or a fish”, which comes from Proto-Germanic *skæla, “to split, divide”. Languages are always sloshing around and playing tricks on you.

The Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon has a whole excursis about the etymology of ish, a rarity given its usual preference for concision abbreviated to the point of crypsis. The upshot is that “probability seems to favor” ish deriving from the root אישׁ | ’YSh, even tho the “existence & [meaning]” of this root are “somewhat dub[ious]”. BDB usually gives a meaning for the root itself, or at the very least a selection of meanings for equivalent roots in other Semitic languages; here, they can’t even really do that [d]. Ish definitely comes from somewhere, but where that place is and what it might mean are lost to the white-noise oblivion of time long past.

[d] Because, they note, there is a “lack of clear parallels for אישׁ in cogn[ate] lang[uages]”. You can’t offer a translation of a word that doesn’t exist!

I think that’s beautiful, especially here. Much has been written about the identity of the entity Ya’aqov wrestles with. Was it really an angel, or was it some shadow version of himself? Did Ya’aqov have to grapple with his past — his treatment of his brother, his dealings with Lavan — before he could move forward into his future? The Biblical text seems to get out ahead of all this furore by using the word it does in this moment. Ya’aqov wrestles with an ish. And what is an ish, at its linguistic heart [e]? A shadow, a ghost, a thing whose past is lost to us. In an ambiguous moment of an ambiguous story, an ambiguous word comes to name a critical, mysterious being. “Why would you ask my name?”, the being says, when Yisra’eil seeks to know who he’s been wrestling with. Yisra’eil’s question is one that can have no answer.

[e] G-d speaks the world into creation at the beginning of this very book. The world is created thru words; to know the name of a thing — to know whence the name of a thing — is to know a little bit the source, the root, the spark of the creation of that thing.

This teaches us that the past need not always preordain the present. Like ish, we all come from somewhere. We have a past that we were shaped by, and in knowing that past, there is a danger of being trapped by it — because thing A happened then, thing B must happen now. There is an easy inevitability to it, the ceding of agency to the momentum of history. It can be frightful to be known; knowing a thing can fix it in place with no room for growth, change, surprise. It can do that to a person, too; being known can be like being embalmed. But this is not the only way to be.

Ya’aqov/Yisra’eil is hemmed in by the weight of etymology; his names are freighted with meaning. He is the one who grabs his brother’s heel, the one who schemes, the name-giver to a nation, the one who prevails in wrestling with G-d and man. His is a nominative determinism that seems almost too much to bear. Perhaps he would have been better off simply being an ish, unburdened from the obligations of etymology, untethered from the demands of history, free to choose a future based on the needs of the moment, not the reverberations of the past. It is a terrible thing to lose one’s connections to the past, but it can be a terrible thing to keep them, too. Perhaps that is one of the duties of being human: to have a past, to be deeply shaped by it, while still being free to make a different future in spite of what has come before.

Or maybe that’s not us, not quite. Perhaps it is still night, and we are still alone, wrestling with an unmoored way of being in the world. Watch out for your hip; freedom likes to cheat.

This is the latest entry in my One-Word Torah series. You can read the rest on my website.

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Parashat Vayéishev: יְפֵה | yəfeih

It takes so much work to pretend that gender is real.

The Torah has some compliments for Yoseif in this week’s portion. Not only is he good at running a household, he’s also nice to look at. That’s almost literally what the text says in Bəreishit 39:6, where we read that Yoseif was יְפֵה תֹֽאַר וִיפֵה מַרְאֶה | yəfeih tó’ar vifeih mar’eh | “beautiful of shape and beautiful of sight”.

Translations get a bit swimmy here because these two phrases are so similar to one another — tó’ar and mar’eh aren’t all that clearly differentiated from one another; they both basically mean “something looked at”. The point, tho, is clear: Yoseif is easy on the eyes.

If you’ve been reading the Torah in the original Hebrew this cycle, this little descriptive clause might sound familiar. Indeed, it’s the exact same clause (other than a tweak of grammatical gender) that gets used to describe Yoseif’s mother, Raḥeil, in 29:17 — Ya’aqov’s favored wife is described there as יְפַת תֹּֽאַר וִיפַת מַרְאֶה | yəfat tó’ar vifat mar’eh | “beautiful of shape and beautiful of sight”.

You could be excused for not knowing this if you’ve been reading along in English instead. There’s a real resistance among English translators to translate these two identical clauses identically. Sefaria hosts twelve English translations of Genesis, and of those twelve, only one — the 1917 JPS translation (not any of the later JPS editions!) — uses the same English clause both times. Adding Robert Alter’s version brings us slightly up to two out of thirteen, but the KJV, Yale Anchor Bible, and Oxford Annotated Bible versions push us back down to two in sixteen. It’s a strong, clear, and persistent pattern: Almost every English translation I have access to masculinizes Yoseif with adjectives like handsome and well built while feminizing Raḥeil with adjectives like shapely and beautiful.

Now, a good translation usually shouldn’t be entirely mechanical. Natural language isn’t formal logic — words are fuzzy, and no two languages’ words are all fuzzy in exactly the same way. The English word set can be used of going down (as the sun below the horizon) and also of a collection of things (as in chess pieces). That’s not going to be the case in every other language; when translating out of English, it’s often necessary to use two different words to capture these two different meanings. Even in less extreme cases, the same word may sometimes be best translated differently depending on context, nuance, and valence. This can get very tricky if a text is using the same word in different senses to make a pun or a point or for some other artistic, philosophical, or idiosyncratic reason — if I say, “Zie couldn’t be elected because of hir convictions”, I may mean both hir beliefs and hir having been found guilty in a court of law [a], which is going to be difficult to translate succinctly into a language that doesn’t have a singular word with that same double meaning. Different translators make different choices and tradeoffs in navigating issues like this, and that’s one of the things that makes different translations interestingly different. That’s all well and good.

[a] Or even hir having found guilty in a court of law because of hir beliefs!

Nevertheless, I struggle to believe that these kinds of considerations are driving this pattern of differentiated translation. The clause in question is long enough to be its own self-contained grammatical thought; it doesn’t need to change to fit the syntax of the sentence around it. And in neither case is there punning wordplay going on; these words were doubtless chosen specifically, but all signs point to that choice being based on sense, not sound.

And that sense seems like it could well be important. We know Ya’aqov loves Raḥeil more than his other wives, just as we know he loves Yoseif more than his other sons. In both cases, this preference leads to problems, with rivalry, deception, and a long sojourn in a foreign land ensuing. And here we have Yoseif described with the exact same set of words as his mother. It’s a linguistic linkage that’s easy enough to preserve in translation. So why not keep it?

יָפֶה | Yafeh is an adjective that just means beautiful. It comes from a root that also just means beautiful. It’s not a particularly specialized type of beauty — it’s used of women and men, sure, but also of cities and trees and even, in Qohélet 3:11, of abstract things in their proper times. It’s not wrong to translate it as handsome, but neither is it obligatory to do so when yafeh is applied to a man.

These differing translations are not linguistically required. Instead, they reflect a retrojection of a contemporary gender framework back onto a text that doesn’t fully support it. The Torah is, to be sure, a deeply patriarchal document, but that doesn’t mean its patriarchal gender norms function identically to ours. The near unanimity of English translations in masculinizing Yoseif’s beautiful while feminizing Raḥeil’s betrays a deep discomfort with men and women being alike. I doubt this was a conscious thing for the most part, but the prior belief that men and women should be linguistically distinguished distorts the translations, occluding the identicality of the Hebrew text. A distinction between genders isn’t being found here, it’s being built.

Many people would have you believe that gender is a natural phenomenon, that differences between men and women are not created but discovered, things somehow baked into the fabric of the world and then subsequently reflected in culture at large. But here we can see very directly the work going on in the background to maintain this illusion. These differing descriptions of masculine vs feminine beauty aren’t in the original text; they’re not a Hebrew phenomenon dutifully carried over into contemporary English; they’re an invention, pushed onto the text after the fact.

This happens all the time, and is one of the perils of translation. Your own cultural assumptions can be as imperceptible as clean air on a calm day, and it is terribly easy to let them push your understanding of a different culture’s texts off kilter without even realizing it. This is especially true when those assumptions work in favor of preserving existing power imbalances. Resisting this is hard work, but it is work that must be done if we are to have any hope of grappling with texts like the Torah instead of with our phantasmagorical mis-imaginings of them. We must let Yoseif and Raḥeil be beautiful in the same way.