Toledot 5786
Twins!
This week we are reading Parashat Toledot, Gen 25:19–28:9, and what I want to talk about this week is an exclamation point.
Biblical Hebrew has a complicated punctuation system, ⇥ see here for a bit about it and Lesson 34 of my Hebrew course for more ⇤ which does not include the kind of punctuation marks we use nowadays: commas, periods, question marks, or exclamation points. So how can there be an exclamation point in our text? Bear with me.
We’re going to start quite close to the beginning of this week’s reading, in Gen 25:21, where Isaac beseeches (וַיֶּעְתַּ֨ר va-ye’tar) God that his wife Rebekah should have a child. God, in turn is beseeched (וַיֵּעָ֤תֶר va-yei’áter) — an interesting call-and-response with an intriguing verb that perhaps we can look at another time. This time, what happens is indeed that Rebekah becomes pregnant.
The pregnancy turns difficult and she goes to get some answers from YHWH about what is happening to her. Stop, narrator! Tell us where she went and how she got her answer! (Another topic for another time.) In any case, she does get an answer of sorts:
Gen 25:23 Two nations are in your womb
Two peoples will separate from your belly
One people will overpower the other people
The older the younger shall serve.
Not to spoil things for anyone, but the “two peoples” are those descended from Esau and Jacob, the babies-to-be. The midrash (as my friend Andrew Greene likes to call it, a kind of rabbinic fan fic) has it that whenever she walked past a synagogue, future Jacob would raise a ruckus, and whenever she walked past a theater, future Esau would do the same. V. 23 is deliberately Delphic, an oracle that (like the famous New York Times crossword puzzle on Election Day in 1996) will come out right no matter what happens.
The next verse recounts the upshot of her pregnancy, and with it comes that exclamation point:
Gen 25:24 Her time to give birth came due, and there were twins in her womb!
Congratulations to Everett Fox of “the Schocken Bible,” translator of the only one out of fifteen or twenty English versions I looked at who also punctuated that verse with an exclamation point. As you’ve guessed, the Hebrew is using that word I translated as “Whoa!” a couple of weeks ago:
וַיִּמְלְא֥וּ יָמֶ֖יהָ לָלֶ֑דֶת וְהִנֵּ֥ה תוֹמִ֖ם בְּבִטְנָֽהּ׃
Fox writes:
When her days were fulfilled for bearing, here: twins were in her body!
“Here” is quite an awkward translation, but that was part, perhaps all, of Fox’s purpose. He was trying to make an English translation following principles similar to those used by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig in their early 20th-century German translation. The point was to make the words comprehensibly English but at the same time to make the flavor foreign, as Hebrew as it could possibly be. That way, if you don’t know any Hebrew, you can somehow approximate the experience of reading the original text.
And what word is “here” translating? Yes, it is hinneh. the word we talked about two weeks ago. This time, I spared you a translation like “Wow, it was twins!”, but “lo and behold” just doesn’t cut the mustard. That hinneh is being used, as always, to indicate surprise from a particular person’s point of view. Who is that person?
Rebekah can’t possibly be surprised that she is giving birth to twins. First of all, she has been carrying them for nine months; second of all, the oracle she got from YHWH was Delphic about the boys’ futures but not at all mysterious about how many of them there were. She knew quite well that she was going to have twins.
The surprised party is Isaac. Imagine having such a difficult pregnancy that you go to beg God for mercy — “If so, why do I exist?” as she says in the NJPS translation in v. 22. Then you find that you are going to have twins … but you do not tell this to the father.
That’s right. The woman who will take the fulfillment of the oracle (as she understands it) into her own hands, depriving her own first-born son Esau of the blessing his father, her husband, intends to give him, has begun keeping her own counsel already before the twins are born.
It’s quite a change from what we expected when we read Rebekah’s agreement (in 24:58) to go immediately with a stranger to the foreign land of Canaan to marry his master’s son, sight unseen. At that end of that story. we read this:
Gen 24:67 Isaac then brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah, he took Rebekah as his wife, and he loved her. And Isaac was comforted after the death of his mother.
For all we can tell from the story, Isaac kept that same love for Rebekah — filling, in his heart, the place left empty by the love he had had for his mother — until the very end. We readers know that Rebekah was the one who instigated Jacob to steal Esau’s blessing, but (as far as the narrative in Genesis tells us) neither Esau nor Jacob ever knew it.
The family that looks so happy on the outside has a secret that only the woman in the family knows — she and we, the readers. In fact, the Bible has prepared us for that event, still far in the future, with a single punctuation mark, one created by three letters in the Hebrew text: הנה. We’ll go on with the story of this remarkable family next week.