Parashat Re'eh (Deut 11:26-16:17)

A Voluntary Tax

This week we have another example of the Christian and Jewish chapter divisions differing. The Christian Deuteronomy 16 goes on for another half dozen verses after the Jewish reading for this week stops, at Deut 16:17. Those first 17 verses are all about the three pilgrimage festivals; starting with v. 18, the chapter talks about establishing a justice system, which the Jews decided is a different subject.

Those 17 verses, however, are enough to give me a subject for this week. It’s in Deut 16:10, and it is the word מִסַּ֛ת missat — and it is a hapax legomenon.

Longtime followers know that I love the expression “hapax legomenon,” and by now they must realize that I love that subject as well. “Hapax legomenon” (ἅπαξ λεγόμενον) is Hellenistic Greek for a word that is “said [just] once.” It’s a word that is found just once in a particular body of material — a corpus, as scholars call it — like the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Homer, or the Hebrew Bible.

Most of the time when a word is a hapax legomenon, the emphasis is on figuring out what it means. Once you solve that problem you can go on with your life. It’s often simple enough to figure out what the word means, for one of three reasons:

• The context makes it obvious what the word must mean.

• The ancient translations all take it in one particular way and so we assume that's what the word did mean.

• The word is understood from a usage outside the Bible — in later Hebrew texts, in Hebrew inscriptions, or in a related Semitic language.

What you don't necessarily find in the case of a hapax legomenon is an explanation of why the author picked that word rather than some more common word. Once in a while, there is something that provides an obvious answer to that question. For example, in Isaiah 5:7, the end of the “Song of the Vineyard” that begins Isaiah 5, there's a phrase where the prophet/poet says:

He wanted justice [מִשְׁפָּט֙ mishpat]

But there was injustice [מִשְׂפָּ֔ח mispaḥ]

Equity [צְדָקָ֖ה tzedaka]

But there was iniquity [צְעָקָֽה tze’aka]

“Equity” and “iniquity” (as NJPS translates the second pair of soundalike words) are standard Hebrew, and so is mishpat — but mispaḥ is a hapax. In this case, I think it's a pretty good assumption that this is not merely a word that occurs only once in the Bible — it's a word that occurs only once in human history, because the author created the word for use in this poem. Presumably, it would have resonated with the ancient Hebrew ear in some way that also conveyed meaning; its poetic purpose was to pervert the sound of mishpat as well as the sense.

That’s not true with missat in our verse, where the source of the word, at least, is clear. Here (at long last) is Deut 16:10 as I would translate it. Remember that we're talking about the middle one of the three pilgrimage festivals:

You must make a Feast of Weeks [שָׁבֻעוֹת֙ shavu’ot] for your God YHWH, a missah that you will voluntarily give [מִסַּ֛ת נִדְבַ֥ת יָדְךָ֖] in accordance with how extensively your God YHWH has blessed you.

As you see from the Hebrew, there are three words in a row, all connected because the first two words are in the construct form. (For the grammar or a refresher on it, see “Hebrew’s Trailer Hitch,” Lesson 13 of my Hebrew course; remember that you can watch the first lesson of the course for free here.) Basically missat nidvat yadkha means something like “the missah of the nedavah of your hand.”

What is a nedavah? That’s a reasonably common word, appearing a couple of dozen times. A mitnadev is a volunteer in Modern Hebrew, and you can find some as far back as the time of Deborah, in Jud 5:9. So a nedavah is something that you give voluntarily, a “freewill” offering, a voluntary contribution. But missah complicates things.

We do have some idea what that word means. It’s reasonably common in Aramaic, and what it seems to mean there is “equivalence.” It is used more or less the same as the Hebrew word די ‘enough’ (as in the Passover song “Dayenu”). Earlier in this week’s reading, in Deut 15:8, we’re told that we must not harden our hearts when a poor person needs help; we should give him as much as he needs, and the Targum uses missah to translate that:

Hebrew: דֵּ֚י מַחְסֹר֔וֹ day maḥsoro

Aramaic: כְמִסַת חוּסרָנֵיה k’missat ḥusraneih

All this does, though, is give me two questions about our verse rather than one:

• Why couldn’t our author have used די again here, if that is what מסה means?

• What does it add to say “as much as” you want to offer freely?

Why did our author pick this strange word?

This is just a guess, but I think it might be because of what the sound of the word evokes to the Hebrew listener and reader. For me, at least, it brings two things to mind:

• The place name מַסָּה Massah or “Test” (see Deut 9:22), the place where the Israelites “tested” God.

• The word מַס mas, plural missim (so missah would simply be the feminine form of the same word). In Biblical Hebrew it means “forced labor,” but in Modern Hebrew it simply means “tax.” Much of the Bible takes place before there is a money economy, so your time and labor were taxed rather than your bank account. You’ll find the word in Exod 1:11; there’s a more detailed description in 1 Kings 5, where Solomon took the Israelites and sent them to Lebanon in shifts of 10,000 a month — one month in Lebanon and two months at home, all for the sake of building the Temple in Jerusalem. If you ever have wondered why there was a revolution against Solomon (see 1 Kings 11), now you know.

How does this fit into our verse? Why would you use a word referring to something that you are forced to do in a stressful situation to talk about a freewill offering?

I would like to suggest that it's part of Deuteronomy 's idea of how people should act. What Deuteronomy wants is for people to voluntarily do the things that they are obligated to do. Deuteronomy thinks that even though you're giving a freewill offering here, you're really obliged to give in proportion to how much God “has blessed you” — a religious way of saying how much wealth you actually have. It’s a tax that is also a test.

A missah is a kind of legal obligation; a nedavah is no obligation at all. But God’s blessing (says Deuteronomy) puts you under a moral obligation. Just as the old joke said that, come the revolution, everyone will eat strawberries and cream — whether they like strawberries and cream or not — here too we must be eager to fulfill our obligation and volunteer to pay our taxes.

That, I think, is why this unusual word was used here. Paradoxical as it sounds, they want you to feel forced to give the most generous freewill offering that you can — an oxymoron, perhaps, but a genuinely Deuteronomic one.

I’ll be back next week, not with a hapax legomenon and an oxymoron, but with something that never gets old, a Deuteronomic quarrel about the balance of power.