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midrash, session 5
Since this is all one big block, I'll number the sentences and put in some transliterated guideposts. I'll also preserve punctuation.
As in the past, I'm trying for a pretty literal translation. If my goal were to publish an English version for its own sake I would take a few liberties with some of the phrasing, but since I'm doing this to improve my understanding of the Hebrew, I mostly haven't done that here. (There are some idioms where I didn't have a choice.) That said, in the future I might, without further comment, do something more informative with all the "amar lo"s ("he said to him"). I thought about that half-way through this entry and decided not to go back.
(1) "And he got up and he went" - (a) satan was before him on the path and he appeared to him in the form of an old man. (2) And he said to him: to where are you going? (3) He said to him: to pray. (4) He said to him: one who is going to pray, why does he have fire and a slaughtering-knife (ma-akhelet) in his hand and wood on his shoulder?
(Beginning of line 4:) (5) He (Avraham) said to him: lest we will linger (tarry) a day or two, and we will slaughter, cook, and eat. (6) He (satan) said to him: old man, was I not there when the Holy One, blessed be He said to you: "take please your son"? (7) Old man, he lost (avad) your heart! (8) A son was given to you at (lit "in") 100 years, you are going to slaughter him!
(Line 7, amar lo:) (9) He said to him: on this condition (idiom). (10) He said to him: and if he tests you worse than this (idiom?), will you be able to stand? (11) He said to him: the rest I will handle. (12) He said to him: For tomorrow he says to you "spill blood" (murder a person), you will murder your son (lit spill his blood of your son). (13) He said to him: (approximately: I'll do it?) ('al m'nat kein" -- what's "m'nat"?)
(Line 10, more than halfway:) (14) As soon as he was no help to him (that is, as soon as he didn't get what he wanted from Avraham), the satan went from above (?) him and he appeared as (lit "to") a young man and he stood upon the right for Yitzchak (that is, he stood at his right side), he said to him: [edit; dropped a line before] where are you going? He said to him: to learn torah. [end edit] He said: in your life or after your death? ( 15) He said to him: is there a man who will learn after death? (16) He (satan) said to him: oh, hapless ('aluv) son of a hapless woman! (17) How many fasts did your mother fast and how many prayers did she pray (note: inferring rather than really grokking verb forms; please help) until she did not give birth (?), and this old man has gone crazy [*] and he goes to slaughter you.
[*] The word is "nishtatah", nun-shin-taf-tet-hei, and we spent a while trying to parse this. We thought nif'al at one point and then hitpalel (irregular), and Rabbi Symons tried to explain how certain letters are sometimes transposed if the word would be too hard to pronounce with correct grammar -- I didn't completely follow beyond that it involved taf and shin being transposed. If that's not happening here then the root appears to be shin-taf-tet, "crazy", but we couldn't find this form in any of the verb books he had on hand. (If that sort of weird transformation is going on, we couldn't figure out the correct root.) We decided to each consult other sources. Y'all are my other sources; any ideas? :-) (Yes, I've already tried the resident one.)
Onward. We're six lines up from the bottom, near the end. (18) Yitzchak said to him: nevertheless (idiom: "af-'al-pi-khein") I will not cross against knowledge of my maker and against a command from my father. (19) He said to him: if so, all the fine tunics that your mother made, to Yishmael [who] hates the house [of Yerushah?] -- and (idiom) you don't consider it? (20) -- (idiom:) if all doesn't enter the mind, half does (lit if there is not a thing [nakhnis] all [nakhnis] half). (21) [Chazar]? Yitzchak and he said to his father: father! See what this [one] says to me? (22) Avraham said to him: (don't pay attention to him) (doesn't seem to be literal).
We ran out of time before we ran out of story, so this will pick up next time. (That's also why the last line or so is fuzzy -- we were rushing so I didn't completely get it. Maybe we'll review that first when we reconvene.)
The satan (it seems to be mostly an indefinite noun here) is really trying to stir up trouble here. First he eggs God on to get Him to issue the command, and now he's trying to get Avraham and Yitzchak to rebel against it. It's not that he wants a particular bad outcome; it looks like he wants trouble for trouble's sake. The satan here isn't a force for evil so much as a force for chaos. (This tracks with other times I've seen the satan show up in Jewish literature.)
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I think of "m'nat" as "condition," "on condition yes," even though I think the Hebrew feels more definite than this translation.
Yerushah is an inheritance. So the satan is pointing out that Yishmael hates the house of his inheritance, ie, his father's house. I think the next line is about Yishmael getting his (Yitzchak's) half of the inheritance, though that seems odd, given how Avraham doesn't split it that way at all (and has Yishmael been sent away yet?).
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Thanks for the help. In the lasd midrash before this one (end of previous session) we had Yishmael and Eleazar quarreling over the inheritance (since the heir apparent is up on the mountain getting killed). Yishmael has already been sent away at this point, so I think the satan is saying he's going to get everything when previously he wouldn't have gotten anything.
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2 grammar bits
Literally the lamed as prefix is usually "to" (bet is "in").
re switching letters in hitpa'el: zayin*, samech, tzade**, shin, and sin switch places with taf* so you get hei-root-taf-root-root. This may have happened b/c switching makes the syllables easier to say (or it may be easier, for me anyway, to say with the switch b/c I'm used to it).
*zayin has dalet instead of taf (which makes sense b/c zayin and dalet are the voiced equivalents of samach and taf) and tzade has tet instead of taf (I think their pre-Modern Hebrew pronunciations were both glottalized but in any case they shared the same feature then that both are missing now).
I'll see if I can look over the rest of this later when I've got more time... and thanks for posting these 'cause they're fun to read. *g*
Re: 2 grammar bits
Hitpa'el: thanks. I think I followed that. [Edit to remove comment that, on further reflection, didn't make sense.]
and thanks for posting these 'cause they're fun to read. *g*
Thank you for saying so! (I figure I've got about four people, give or take, who read these...)
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Root: שטה
Binyan: Hitpael (shin and tav swap in the hitpael if root is פ-ש)
Number: Pl
Person: First
Meaning: Fool, act the Fool.
The only sense I can make of it is that Satan is saying "let's fool him, or he will go and kill you."
In 21, חזר literally means returned, but here I think it means that he turned his attntion from Satan to his father.
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I'd translate it here more as nonsense. "Avraham is going to do something nosensical and slaughter you".
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I think "al manat ken" is something along the lines of "For the sake of that", meaning Abraham is responding, "G-d gave me Isaac in order to sacrifice him".
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