Language Studies

Aramaic Thoughts

The Peshitta of the Old Testament - Part 11

Genesis 49 is a difficult chapter for translators. In part this is due to the fact that the chapter is poetry, and Hebrew poetry is more difficult to translate than is Hebrew prose. It is also the case that Genesis 49 is a collection of blessings, which means that there is a change of context every few verses, as the focus shifts from one son of Jacob to another. Third, as with other Hebrew poetry, there is the use of unusual vocabulary or of common vocabulary in unusual ways. As a starting point for the discussion of Genesis 49:4, here is a painfully literal translation of Genesis 49:3-4, the blessing upon Reuben.

Reuben, my firstborn you are, my power, and the beginning of my vigor, excellence of dignity and excellence of strength. Recklessness like water, you shall not excel, for you went up to the bed of your father. Then you profaned. My couch he went up.

Clear as mud, isn’t it? The general idea is clear—Reuben was the firstborn of Jacob, hence showing his power and excellence, but because he profaned his father’s bed (Genesis 35:22) he would not excel—but the details are murky. The worst part of it is the last two clauses of verse 4. Each clause consists of two words in Hebrew. The first is simply, “then you profaned.” The difficulty here is that the verb “profane” has no object, and on no other occasion does it occur without an explicit object. As a result, most translations have assumed that an objective pronoun has to supplied. The resulting translation is, “then you defiled it,” with the “it” referring to “the bed of your father.” This is how it is rendered by translations ranging from the ASV to the NIV, as well as Everett Fox’s very literal rendering in his The Five Books of Moses. Robert Alter, in his The Five Books of Moses takes a different approach. He takes the “my couch” from the last clause and makes it the object of “you defiled.” He then emends the last word from “he went up” to “you mounted” [i.e., went up].

The translation of the verse that I have provided above follows not only the words of the Hebrew text, but the accents as well. The scribes who developed the vowel system for Biblical Hebrew also developed a system of accents. This system serves three purposes. First, it indicates the accented syllable in each word. Second, it indicates how the text is to be chanted. Third, it functions something like a punctuation system, since some of the accents are disjunctive (that is, they indicate breaks between the words) and some are conjunctive (indicating that words go together). The last four words of verse four in Hebrew are accented in such a way as to indicate that the “then” and the “you profaned” go together, but that there is a disjunction between “you profaned” and “my bed.” Then, the “my bed” and “he went up” are marked to go together. Thus, Alter’s solution goes against the accents of the text, while the other approaches follow it.

In any case, while the details of the text are unclear, the sense of the passage remains clear, and for that we can be thankful.

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