midrash session 3
Mar. 1st, 2009 06:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellio"v'ha'aleihu sham l'olah 'al achad heharim" - amar l'fanav: 'al eizeh har?
"And raise him up there as a burnt offfering upon one [of] the mountains" - he said before him: upon which mountain?
amar lo b'khol makom shetireh k'vodi 'omad umamtin lkha sham.
He said to him: in every place where you see my honor standing and waiting (?) for you there. Colloquially, I understand this as "you'll know it when you see it". (Not sure about "every place" when we're just talking about one, but it does say kol.)
Next paragraph (and I just realized that I have no idea how to properly transliterate a mapik. I'll use a capital H for now.)
botaH sha'ah hirheir avraham b'livo vamar:
Lit. "in that hour"; idiomatically: Avraham thought quickly in his heart (or maybe: something suddenly came to him) and he said:
Grammar: "hirheir" is a four-letter root, hei-reish-hei-reish. The last four-letter root I saw was also patterned that way and hard to translate in context -- "galgal", gimel-lamed-gimel-lamed, which caused us some trouble in session #1.
mah e'eseh? im ani modi'a l'sarah - nashim da'tan kalah;
What will I do? If I cause Sarah to know -- women's intellect is soft (or colloquially, "the poor dears can't handle it"). I don't know if it's significant that it doesn't say "if I tell Sarah"; it's hifil (causitive) on da'h (know). Is "let her know" (let her find out) an appropriate take on this? I understand causitive verbs to be more active than that, but I'll be the first to admit that my Hebrew-grammar chops in any binyan other than pa'al are very weak. (Like, I only know it's hifil because Rabbi Symons said so, and that the mem and the yud (I know you can't see the yud in my transliteration) are markers of same.)
v'im lo odi'aH v'egn'venu keivan shelo tireh oto t'chaneik et-'atzmaH.
And if I will not know? her and I steal him as soon as she does not see him she will struggle? with herself. ("know? her" -- the word here is odi'aH, with the last part being a contraction of otaH. The rest of the word is: alef, vav (o), dalet, yud, 'ayin. So it's the same "know" word as before, but this time in first-person imperfect (future) with "her" as a direct object pasted on. But from context it's not "If I don't know her"; that doesn't make sense. It's about her knowing.)
Grammar gleanings: keivan-sh = "as soon as". 'AtzmaH = "herself" (is that just a word on its own, or should I be seeing a pattern?).
meh 'asah? amar l'sarah: taqni lanu maakhol umishteh vnismach hayom.
What did he do? He said to Sarah: acquire for us food and drink and we will rejoice today. (The root quf-nun-hei, here "takni", is "want" in modern Hebrew, in the shopping sense ("I want a [product]", said to a shopkeeper). Here it has more of a "go get" flavor -- satisfy that want, I guess.)
amrah lo: mah yom miyomim vmah tivaH shel simchah zo?
She said to him: what is today from days (why today?) and what good is for this celebration (why are we rejoicing)?
amar laH: z'kneinim k'moteinu nolad lahem bein b'ziknutam v'lo yismachu? halkhah v'tiqnah hamaakhol.
He said to her: elders like us give birth to a son in their old age and we shouldn't rejoice? (In their old age? That's what I get from the -tam in ziknutam.) She went (lit walked) and acquired the food.
b'tok has'udah amar laH: at yoda'at k'shehayiti ben shalosh shanim hikarti et-bori v'na'ar zeh gadal v'lo nechnakh,
In the midst of the festive meal he said to her: you know, when I was three years old I met my maker, and this boy is big and we have not educated him. (Aside: Avraham met his maker when he was three? Then what was "lech l'cha", God's apparent first contact to Avraham, when Avraham was 70 all about? Of course, there's no reason to presume that Avraham is telling Sarah the truth, as we will see.)
Grammar aside: that "ben" in "ben shalosh shanim"? Does not mean "son" despite it being identical to the "ben" that means "son". The way you say someone is X years old is to say "ben (or bat) X years". I gather that this is only for people (not, say, nations), but I vaguely recall hearing that there are two different versions of "Hatikvah" differing on the use of a "bat" when talking about the country, so perhaps this is controversial. Or, perhaps, I am misinformed about Hatikvah; I've heard this but can't find evidence now.
Yeish makom echad rachok mimenu m'am shesham m'chankhin hatinoqot, olikhenu l'sham. amrah lo: qachenu l'shalom.
There is a [one] place a little distance from here where they teach young children; I will walk us there. She said: go(?) in peace.
"Walk us" = olikhenu, root hei-lamed-khaf (walk) with an alef on the front ("I will") and a "nu" on the end ("us"). I don't know if there's a better-but-literal way to translate it; more broadly it would be "I'll take him there" or "we'll go there", but neither of those is strictly correct. As for "go in peace", I'm not quite sure how to get that from "qachenu" now, though it was obvious enough at the time that I didn't make notes about it. Hmm.
"v'yashkem avraham baboker" - v'lamah baboker?
"And Avraham got up early in the morning" -- why in the morning?
amar: shema (-alef, not -'ayin) tachazor sarah bdivuraH v'lo tanichenu,
He said: lest Sarah will (change? have misgivings?) in this thing (this matter) and (she will not let us go? from context, but I'm having some trouble with the Hebrew now).
ashkim v'eitze 'ad shehi y'sheina;
(I will get up?) while she is sleeping.
v'od, shelo yiru otanu b'nei-adam.
Additionally, that the sons of Adam will not see us (colloquially, so that no one will see us).
So according to this midrash, Avraham spun a tale for why he and his son should go off alone, and then he snuck off early in the morning before his wife could reconsider and anyone else could see. He knows he's doing something wrong so he sneaks off? Is that why God gives him three days of travel to think about it? It comes back once again to whether Avraham was "supposed" to say yes to God.
The thing I love about midrash is that it takes a plain narrative (though in this case one fraught with questions already) and, while trying to fill in the gaps, raises even more questions, making the narrative more complex and nuanced. Of course there are many midrashim, often contradictory, so any given one is hardly authoritative, but the point (to me) isn't to get the "answers" -- it's to raise and discuss the questions. Story-telling is a nifty way of doing that.
In the "can't hurt to ask" department: do any of you have a digital copy of Sefer Aggadah in Hebrew? Being able to paste in the Hebrew text would probably be clearer than my attempts to figure out meaningful transliteration for odd cases, but typesetting it would be really slow and painstaking. (I don't really have good software; what I have is a Firefox plugin that does Hebrew search, and it has a little keyboard and a buffer that shows about four words at a time. And it does not do nikkudot.) Scanning my scribbled-on photocopies probably wouldn't be too effective. If you have a digital copy, might you be willing to send me these few pages' worth?
Administrative note: there's no point in double-tagging these entries, so after this one I will drop the "study" tag. (I'm leaving it here for navigation.) Follow the "midrash" tag for all of these entries in the future.
various bits
Date: 2009-03-02 03:00 am (UTC)It's imperfect/future, 1st person, causitive, with her as direct object: "I (future) cause her to know"
(The root quf-nun-hei, here "takni", is "want" in modern Hebrew, in the shopping sense ("I want a [product]", said to a shopkeeper). Here it has more of a "go get" flavor -- satisfy that want, I guess.)
I've never heard q-n-h used as "want" but only as "buy" - maybe some modern Hebrew is leaving out an implied "wanna"?
and what good is for this celebration (why are we rejoicing)?
I'm not certain of this one, but I think "tiv" may be "nature" (i.e. type/kind) rather than "good" (which is tov or tuv).
amar laH: z'kneinim k'moteinu nolad lahem bein b'ziknutam v'lo yismachu? halkhah v'tiqnah hamaakhol.
He said to her: elders like us give birth to a son in their old age and we shouldn't rejoice? (In their old age? That's what I get from the -tam in ziknutam.)
I'd go with: "Old people like us a son is born to them in their old age and they don't rejoice?" (Ok, the word order is a little odd in English, but the 1st/3rd person matches the original.)
(Aside: Avraham met his maker when he was three?
There's a midrash that Avraham's father made idols and Avraham was 3 years old when he realized that those idols couldn't actually do anything and therefore weren't gods. The midrash continues with a story about Avraham demonstrating this idea to his dad by breaking all the idols except the biggest one and then blaming that one, and letting his dad make the statement that there was no way that could have happened since the idol couldn't walk, etc.
qachenu l'shalom
"Take him to (in) peace." (This is another one of those places where prepositions don't translate consistently.)
lest Sarah will (change? have misgivings?) in this thing (this matter) and (she will not let us go? from context, but I'm having some trouble with the Hebrew now).
"return" (also used for "review"), i.e. rethink and change her mind, and I think "allow us" (literally "give us" as in give permission) - I'm not entirely sure b/c I'm working from your transliterations, but that reads correctly to me. *g*
(I will get up?) while she is sleeping
Yup: "I will get up and I will go out while she is still sleeping."
Re: various bits
Date: 2009-03-05 03:19 am (UTC)It's imperfect/future, 1st person, causitive, with her as direct object: "I (future) cause her to know"
That makes much more sense; I didn't recognize the causitive pattern.
I've never heard q-n-h used as "want" but only as "buy" - maybe some modern Hebrew is leaving out an implied "wanna"?
Maybe. On further consideration, isn't rotzeh "want"? If so, I may have misunderstood something in our discussion.
There's a midrash that Avraham's father made idols and Avraham was 3 years old when he realized that those idols couldn't actually do anything and therefore weren't gods.
Yeah, I thought of that one too. That one just illustrates that he saw through the idols; it doesn't (as I recall) go on to suggest that he knew about God. On the other hand, there's the midrash of the tower ablaze (birah doleket), which is a parable suggesting that Avraham derived that the world must have a maker before God spoke with him. (But that midrash appears to cast him as an adult.)
Eh -- I haven't written off the possibility that, according to this midrash, he just plain lied to Sarah.
I'm not entirely sure b/c I'm working from your transliterations, but that reads correctly to me. *g*
Yeah, sorry. I hate transliteration too, but Hebrew typesetting is very very painstaking with the tools I have available (and anyway they don't include vowels), and so far I haven't gotten my hands on a digital copy. I'll ask the rabbi if he has one and, if so, if he'd be willing to share these few paragraphs as we study them. My (paper) copy is enlarged, photocopied, and scribbled-on, so scanning isn't the best option (though it may come to that).