Language tidbits

Learning about other semitic languages can help you understand the Torah

Hatan of blood

Today we read the Torah portion Shemot, which is the first portion in the book of Shemot, which is the book of Exodus in English.

There’s a fascinating episode that happens as Moshe (Moses) is on his way back to Egypt with his family. They stop at an inn, and God tries to kill Moshe. Moshe’s wife Tzippora grabs a sharp stone and circumcises their son Gershom, who had not yet been circumcized. This is presumably why God was trying to kill Moshe.

After removing Gershom’s foreskin, she throws it to the floor and says “You are a hatan of blood to me”. The word hatan means bridegroom, so this seems curious, at best. And there have been many attempts by commentators to explain it. I’d like to suggest a very simple explanation.

It occurred to me back in college, when I was taking Arabic, that Midianites were from northwest Arabia, and that their language was presumably some sort of proto-Arabic. So I checked in my handy Arabic-English/English-Arabic dictionary and found, not so much to my surprise, that the word ختن (hatan), while it may mean bridegroom in Hebrew, is the Arabic verb for “to circumcise”.

So what Tzippora was saying was “You are a circumcision of blood to me.”

And the story continues, by saying, “So He left him alone. Then she said ‘a hatan of blood’ about the circumcision/foreskin.” Which seems to be the Torah telling us what she meant by “hatan of blood”, in case we were unaware.

This isn’t the only place in the Torah where we have a Hebrew term juxtaposed to the same term in a different language. In Exodus 31:47, Yaakov’s (Jacob’s) father-in-law Lavan (Laban) has just caught up to Yaakov and his family, who had taken off in the dead of night with their flocks before Lavan could find another way to rob Yaakov.

Yaakov accuses Lavan of playing dirty with him, and Lavan protests that those are his daughters and grandchildren, and that he’d never harm them. And suggests that they set up a monument to record a covenant between the two of them, which they did. And verse 47 says, “And Lavan called it Yegar Sahaduta, and Yaakov called it Gal-eid.” Gal-eid is consonantally the same as Gil’ad (Gilead): גלעד, and this is presumably how that place got its name. But Yegar means a heap, as Gal means a heap (it also means wave, but in the sense that a wave is a heap of water), and Sahaduta, like Eid, means “witness”. Sahaduta is cognate to the Arabic shaheed, which means “martyr”.

Which itself is interesting. For Jews, a martyr is a Kadosh, from the word meaning sanctified. For Arabs, a martyr is a shaheed, or a witness to Allah. When we use translations instead of the original, we sometimes miss these nuances.

Molech

Which brings me to something that isn’t in today’s Torah portion. Molech. When we hear Molech, we think of an idol with a flame in it that people sacrifice babies to. I remember a newspaper comic strip that had a big head that looked like one of the heads on Easter Island, with a fire inside of its mouth. That was always how I imagined Molech.

And then I read about a kind of sacrifice they had in Carthage. For those of you who’ve only heard of Carthage in the context of the Punic Wars between them and Rome, Carthage was a city-state in what’s now Tunisia that ruled all of northern Africa. But it was founded by a Phoenician princess named Elissa (or Dido). And their rites were definitely Canaanite/Phoenician in character. And one of their rites was what scholars refer to as “mulk-offerings”. “Mulk” is a cheat of the sort that ancient historians are fond of. The word is the same as Molech, and there are no vowels present (just like there aren’t in a Torah scroll”, so they got to transliterate it any way it suited them. And how it suited them was to avoid any uncomfortable connections with the Bible. <shudder>

But the Torah talks about sacrificing to Molech, doesn’t it?

Not necessarily. It’s a language thing again. When God tells Avraham (Abraham), in the book of Bereishit (Genesis) to take Yitzchak (Isaac) and sacrifice him, He says (Bereishit 22:2), “And offer him there l’olah on one of the mountain’s I’ll tell you.” An olah is a completely burnt offering, and we’re told lots about them later in the Torah. But that verse could just as easily have been translated, “And offer him there to Olah on one of the mountains I’ll tell you.” Which would sound like there was some god called Olah that Avraham was supposed to sacrifice Yitzchak to. If we didn’t know what an olah was.

So in Vayikra (Leviticus) 18:21, it says, “And you shall not pass your seed through fire l’Molech, and you shall not desecrate the name of your God; I am God.” Here, the prefix “to” (ל) isn’t read the way it is in Bereishit. There, we read it to mean “as”. Here, we read it to mean “to”. But as I’ve heard it said, all translations are interpretations. And the Hebrew original is the Hebrew original.

I’d make the claim that molech is not the name of an idol, but rather the name of a type of sacrifice. Just like olah. And that a molech sacrifice is what historians have rendered as mulk-offerings in Carthage.

So what is a molech offering? We know from Carthaginian records that mulk-offerings were done only when things were dire. When they needed their gods to do something now. It was an attempt to coerce their gods. It was what we might call a “suasion offering”.

The root m-l-k in Hebrew generally means “king”, or as a verb, “reign”. But it has another meaning, which only really shows up in the nif’al construction. Nimlach means to change one’s mind. To be persuaded otherwise.

Now… why is the Torah so emphatic about banning suasion offerings? Well, the verse says it. Because it’s a desecration of God’s name. It lowers God to something that has to do what we want.

In Judaism, we rarely ever pray to God demanding that He do something. Rather, we use phraseology like, “May it be your will, God, that thus and such happen.” Because know that what matters is God’s will. Not ours.

The only real exception to this rule that I can think of is the Shmona Esrei (the Amida prayer that is the center of our daily prayers), and that’s a special case. (For other examples of phrases in the Shmona Esrei that we could otherwise not use, see Talmud Bavli Berachot 33b, 12th line from the bottom of the page.)

We say (Pirkei Avot 2:4) that among the teachings of Rabban Gamliel III (son of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi) was this:

“Make His will like your will, so that He will do your will as though it were His will. Nullify your will before His will, so that He will nullify the will of others before your will.”

This really deserves more than a passing mention. A whole article, to say the least. But the upshot is that we’re not supposed to judge God or force Him to do our will. People sometimes complain that they don’t think God hears their prayers. But He always hears our prayers. Sometimes the answer is just “no”. And that’s a hard pill to swallow. But it’s pretty much the core of Judaism. We follow God’s will. We don’t try and get Him to follow ours. It’s called the yoke of heaven, and we wear it proudly.

Get to the point, Lisa

Yes, the stuff about Molech flows from the stuff about “hatan of blood” and Yegar Shahaduta. But it was something I was already thinking about.

Someone I subscribe to on Substack, whose articles I value, commented on one of mine:

“The problem is the Knesset. NOT voting -- in numbers that show we're fed up with the abomination of democracy -- is the only way we'll convince Hashem to send us a king.”

And that, as understandable as it is, as emotionally satisfying as it is, is precisely the kind of thing I think that the Torah was talking about with molech offerings. It’s not our place to “convince God” to do anything.

I had a rabbi in high school who used to say, “Do your best; let HaKadosh Baruch Hu do the rest.” (HaKadosh Baruch Hu, or HKBH, means “the Holy One, Blessed be He”.) It didn’t really mean that much to me, because I didn’t get religious until I was in college, and I was deeply ignorant of Judaism. The kind of ignorant that doesn’t know how much it doesn’t know. But I get it now.

We have to do the best we can with what we have. We don’t get to cheat by calling in a ringer. Could God send mashiach and eliminate all of the pain of doing the work ourselves? Sure. That’s His business though. Not ours. Ours comes from another rabbinic statement that’s been one of my favorites since I was in college (Pirkei Avot 2:16). It’s something that Rabbi Tarfon used to say:

“It’s not on you to finish the work. But you’re not free to blow it off.”

What the other Substacker wrote came from a deep pain, and a sense that there is no way to fix this country ourselves. And maybe there isn’t. But that’s not for us to decide. We have to keep trying, even if it seems pointless.

If God thought we couldn’t do it, He’d step in. We know this.

Final thought

I grew up reading the novels of Robert A. Heinlein. In his book Space Cadet (written for kids), a handful of space cadets landed in a bad place on Venus (which people thought was habitable in those days) and lost their ship. They found another ship, an old one called the Astarte, and they thought to use it to get off of Venus. In chapter 17, there’s this piece of dialog that has never left my mind in the past 50 years. It’s too long for me to quote the whole thing, but it boils down to this. They can’t get the ship working well enough. They can start it, but it’s going to get “high enough to crash—no higher.” One of the cadets opined that they should sit tight, because the Patrol would be by eventually to rescue them. They have enough to eat and drink, and they can wait it out.

But a cadet named Oscar wouldn’t have it. He said, “She can’t fly, and we’ll try anyhow”. When challenged on this, he says:

“It’s agreed that the Patrol wouldn’t give up looking for us. Okay, if that’s the sort of an outfit the Patrol is and we are part of the Patrol, then when they find us, they’ll find us doing our level best to pull out unassisted, not sitting on our fat fannies waiting for a lift.”

That’s what Rabbi Tarfon was talking about. If God does send the messiah to rescue our sorry butts because we’d proved we couldn’t do the job ourselves, I would be mortified to have him find us sitting around and moaning, “We tried, but it was too damn hard.”

That’s why I’m not giving up.