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"Yehosef"?
Toward the end of the morning service we recite a psalm; which psalm it is varies by day. In our morning minyan we read this in English.
A few weeks ago I happened to notice something that seemed odd in Psalm 81 (Thursday). The English said roughly "it is a statute for Israel, an ordinance from the god of Jacob; he appointed it to Joseph when he went forth against the land of Egypt". And I said Joseph? We routinely talk about the god of Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov, but Yosef isn't usually included. So why does he rate, I wondered?
After services that day I asked Joe (Joe knows practically everything) and he said "what does the Hebrew say?". (I guess I'm not the only one who doesn't automatically trust translations. :-) ) When we looked he noticed something different -- that "Joseph" (Yosef) was actually written "Yehosef" there. There was an extra letter in his name. So we speculated about that without any conclusions, and my original question fell by the wayside.
This morning's email brought this week's MiOray HaAish, which talks about Yosef's name change. (How handy!) The article gives three explanations from the rabbis:
A few weeks ago I happened to notice something that seemed odd in Psalm 81 (Thursday). The English said roughly "it is a statute for Israel, an ordinance from the god of Jacob; he appointed it to Joseph when he went forth against the land of Egypt". And I said Joseph? We routinely talk about the god of Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov, but Yosef isn't usually included. So why does he rate, I wondered?
After services that day I asked Joe (Joe knows practically everything) and he said "what does the Hebrew say?". (I guess I'm not the only one who doesn't automatically trust translations. :-) ) When we looked he noticed something different -- that "Joseph" (Yosef) was actually written "Yehosef" there. There was an extra letter in his name. So we speculated about that without any conclusions, and my original question fell by the wayside.
This morning's email brought this week's MiOray HaAish, which talks about Yosef's name change. (How handy!) The article gives three explanations from the rabbis:
- When Paro elevated Yosef to second-in-command, Paro's ministers complained and said that a slave wasn't qualified. He said "so find some royal characteristics", and it was decided that he should know seventy languages. He didn't, so the angel Gavriel taught them to him. He wasn't getting it, so Gavriel added a letter from the divine name to Yosef's name and he was able to learn. (Sota 36b)
- The extra letter is because God testified to Yosef's faithfulness in resisting Potiphar's wife. (Midrash Rabbah, Lev 23:10)
- The ephod (worn by the high priest) had stones that were to be inscribed with the names of the twelve tribes, but to make the letter count work out Yosef's name needed an extra letter. (Err, except Yosef isn't one of the tribes; his sons get that status instead. I actually ran into this discussion while chasing down last week's parsha bit; it's in Sota 36a. I found it a little confusing.)
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Can you think of any name changes that don't involve adding letters from the divine name? (Is this a pattern, or just a coincidence?)
(I'm not talking about wholesale change, e.g. Yaakov -> Yisrael. I mean the modifications to existing names -- Avraham, Sarah, Yehosef, Yehoshua...)
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As a side note, I can't remember specifically but I believe Joseph is understood to be shorthand for Ephraim, which itself is shorthand for the Northern Kingdom, and I think that's the meaning of it in the psalm. No doubt a part of why the Joseph story is so prominent in Genesis is historical myth relating to the rise of the Joseph tribes to be "first among equals" in the biblical kingdom of Israel. And I think the concern with Joseph is why the documentary hypothesis posits that one of the narratives of the Torah (E, if I recall correctly) is seen as a Northern creation.
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