Miketz 5786
RAQ or DAQ?
This week, we are reading Parashat Miketz (Gen 41:1–44:17), and I’m going to be talking about raq and daq. Not rock & roll or shake & bake but רק and דק.
Pharaoh, in this week’s episode of the story of Joseph, has two dreams. He dreams about fat cows and thin cows, and then about solid, healthy ears of grain and thin, scorched ears of grain. The narrator of the story describes the second set of seven cows in Pharaoh’s dream (who represent the famine years) as דַקּ֣וֹת בָּשָׂ֑ר daqqot basar ‘thin of flesh’ — “gaunt,” as NJPS describes them. The cows that are daqqot basar eat up the seven fat cows, Pharaoh goes back to sleep, and then he has a second dream, about ears of grain.
Sure enough, there are fat ears of grain and then there are ears of grain that are דַּקּ֖וֹת daqqot, not fat but thin. If they were mammals we could call them “gaunt” too, but since they are plants will just call them “thin” ears of grain. In any case, the set of seven bad cows and the set of seven bad ears of grain are both called דק daq.
Some of you may recognize this word from the story of Elijah on Horeb, the mountain of God, in 1 Kings:
1 Kgs 19:11 … And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake: 12 And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. [KJV]
The “still small voice” made famous by the King James translation of the Bible might also be translated, a bit more literally — and yet somewhat mysteriously — as “a thin silent sound,” thin being, you guessed it, דַקָּֽה daqqa, the same word used for Pharaoh’s cows and stalks of grain. In fact there are seven other occurrences of it outside our chapter as well, to go along with the six occurrences of the word in Genesis 41.
Now, when Pharaoh tells his dream to Joseph, he calls the ears of grain daqqot just as the narrator told us he saw them in his dream, but he calls the thin cows raqqot. We also understand that to mean “thin of flesh,” but it has an r sound, not a d sound. Twice he repeats that these cows are raqqot basar, not what the narrator told us, that they were daqqot basar. When Joseph repeats Pharaoh’s dream to him to explain the dream, in v. 27, he refers to the cows the same way Pharaoh did: raqqot, not the way the narrator did, daqqot. But he calls the stalks of grain not daqqot, which both the narrator and Pharaoh called them, or even raqqot. This time, Joseph calls them רֵק֔וֹת reiqot, which we would translate elsewhere as “empty.”
In the consonantal text of the Bible, of course, raqqot and reiqot both look the same: רקות. Hebrew had no vowel markings when this story was originally written. The Masoretes, the scholars who attempted to preserve the original pronunciation of the text for us by creating the vowel symbols some ten or twelve centuries ago, recorded this second appearance of רקות in v. 27 not as raqqot but as reiqot, “empty” ears of grain.
This word רק raq ‘thin’ doesn’t occur anywhere else in the Bible. The word רַק raq ‘only’ is very common, as it is in modern Hebrew, and רֵיק reiq ‘empty’, mostly spelled in the Bible without the י, is also a common word, but רַק ‘thin’ doesn’t occur anywhere else in the Bible except for the three occurrences in Gen 41:19, 20, and 27. So you might suspect that what has happened here is what has apparently happened elsewhere in the Bible, a mix-up between the letters ד and ר.
Those two letters look an awful lot alike, and they have looked that way for some 2,500 years, ever since we abandoned the ancient paleo-Hebrew script and switched to the Aramaic style of writing. Is רק instead of דק for “thin” just a scribal error? We have certainly found examples of that apparent switch elsewhere. In Num 2:14, the chieftain of the tribe of Gad is Eliasaph son of Reuel, while in Num 1:14 the same man is called Eliasaph son of Deuel.
That appears to be his real name, since it appears that way three other places in Numbers as well, leaving Reuel (with a ר) as a one-time occurrence, most easily explained as a scribal error. In Lev 11:14 one of the birds that you are not allowed to eat is a “kite” (per the NJPS translation), in Hebrew a דָּאָה da’a; the same bird in Deut 14:13 is a רָאָה ra’a. Since ראה means “to see” and דאה means “to fly” or “to swoop,” once again it seems that da’a with a ד is the original name of this bird.
I discussed one final example of this switch in my column on Gen 10:4, where one of Japhet’s grandsons is called דֹדָנִֽים Dodanim, as opposed to the repetition of that verse in 1 Chron 1:7, which says רוֹדָנִֽים Rodanim. To complicate the matter (as a commenter on that post pointed out), Rhodes is one of the Dodecanese Islands, and in fact the largest of them. Nonetheless, it’s pretty clear that Rodanim of Chronicles is correct and Dodanim of Genesis was a slip of the scribal quill.
That same slip is probably what created our word raq in Genesis 41, right? No, no, and no. First of all, remember that Joseph himself calls the ears of grain not daq, as Pharaoh and the narrator both call them, but reiq. If Joseph had not called the cows raqqot, there would be no reason for him to call the stalks reiqot.
Perhaps you think both the cows and the stalks were originally דקות and then some scribal error changed changed one of them to רַקּ֨וֹת and the other to רֵק֔וֹת? Let’s turn to the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, where you will find the following (heavily edited by me):
Ug. rq thin, slender, fine: lpš sgr rq a fine robe with a clasp; Akk. raqqu(m) slender, narrow, fine; Syr. raqqīq thin, fine; Eth. raqīq; so also Tigr.; and Arb. raqīq.
The point is that all these ancient Semitic languages (in which, as in Paleo-Hebrew, d and r don’t look anything alike) all have a word or root with ר and ק (r and q) meaning thin, slender, fine, narrow — perfectly appropriate for those cows. רק in our text certainly looks like a mistake, but since it matches those quite definitely real words in Arabic, Akkadian, Ugaritic, and the Semitic languages of Ethiopia, it’s not a typo at all.
Yes, I was sure I had pounced on another scribal mistake. I was wrong. This is a real word. Why was it deployed this way in the story of Pharaoh’s dreams? Perhaps the author of this fascinating, dreamy chapter intended it as a literary effect of some kind. In any case, it is not the work of some sloppy scribe, as we so often assume such things to be.