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a question on this week's portion
If any of you have relevant knowledge or opinions, please chime in.
This week's portion is Sh'lach L'cha, which starts with the twelve men scouting out the land. In the end ten of them say this is a bad idea and the people believe them, which leads to that generation spending 40 years in the wilderness. The other two, Caleb and Yehoshua, say it's a good land and we should go, so they get to live to enter the land, but the rest of their generation won't make it.
At the beginning of the portion the twelve men are named with their tribes. In general these names follow the pattern "from the tribe of [tribe], [somebody] ben [somebody]", with (generally) the same trope (cantillation). There is one exception to the text pattern, and since tradition takes the precise wording of torah pretty seriously (and holds that there are no unnecessary words in torah), I wonder what it means.
The twelve tribes include the two "half-tribes" descended from Yosef. (Yaakov had 12 sons, but one is Levi who doesn't count in the 12, but another is Yosef whose portion split between his two sons, Efrayim and Manasheh, so 12 but not the original 12.) The text for the first is "from the tribe of Efrayim, Hoshea bin Nun" (he doesn't get renamed for a few more verses). The text for the second is "from the tribe of Yosef from the tribe of Manasheh, Gadi ben Susi". So why does Yosef get mentioned explicitly for one of them but not for the other? Is it just that Hoshea (Yehoshua) is a big name and everyone knows who he is? But this is about the tribe, not the individual...
By the way, these are the two who get non-standard trope, too. In the latter case there are extra words to be covered so the pattern used for the rest wouldn't work, but that's not true for Yehoshua. He gets different trope anyway. One might think it's foreshadowing of the outcome, except that Caleb doesn't get any special trope. (Poor Caleb; he's just as meritorious as Yehoshua, but Yehoshua gets most of the glory.)
This week's portion is Sh'lach L'cha, which starts with the twelve men scouting out the land. In the end ten of them say this is a bad idea and the people believe them, which leads to that generation spending 40 years in the wilderness. The other two, Caleb and Yehoshua, say it's a good land and we should go, so they get to live to enter the land, but the rest of their generation won't make it.
At the beginning of the portion the twelve men are named with their tribes. In general these names follow the pattern "from the tribe of [tribe], [somebody] ben [somebody]", with (generally) the same trope (cantillation). There is one exception to the text pattern, and since tradition takes the precise wording of torah pretty seriously (and holds that there are no unnecessary words in torah), I wonder what it means.
The twelve tribes include the two "half-tribes" descended from Yosef. (Yaakov had 12 sons, but one is Levi who doesn't count in the 12, but another is Yosef whose portion split between his two sons, Efrayim and Manasheh, so 12 but not the original 12.) The text for the first is "from the tribe of Efrayim, Hoshea bin Nun" (he doesn't get renamed for a few more verses). The text for the second is "from the tribe of Yosef from the tribe of Manasheh, Gadi ben Susi". So why does Yosef get mentioned explicitly for one of them but not for the other? Is it just that Hoshea (Yehoshua) is a big name and everyone knows who he is? But this is about the tribe, not the individual...
By the way, these are the two who get non-standard trope, too. In the latter case there are extra words to be covered so the pattern used for the rest wouldn't work, but that's not true for Yehoshua. He gets different trope anyway. One might think it's foreshadowing of the outcome, except that Caleb doesn't get any special trope. (Poor Caleb; he's just as meritorious as Yehoshua, but Yehoshua gets most of the glory.)
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I've often wondered about cantillation, since words are so carefully obsessed over. But to my knowledge the trope serves an almost purely grammatical function, no matter how weird it might sound.
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...except when it doesn't. There are definitely some times when it seems like the trope is making a comment on the text. For example, the shalshelet (sp?): rare trope, but where does it come up? When Lot is dithering about leaving Sodom (very appropriate). Also when Joseph is refusing Potiphar's wife. Anywhere else? I forget.
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So Hoshea gets a single clause and everyone else gets two, breaking on the tribe name (or second tribe name, in that one case). I don't know what it means, but there you go.
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The trend in the rabbinic midrash to condense all women named in the bible is a bit, disturbing to me. (Shifra and Puah? They're really Miriam and Yocheved! Abraham's wife Keturah? Really Hagar! Aren't there few enough women in Tanach already without condensing them further?) However, Hammer makes an interesting point that the Caleb story in Joshua 15:19 has an additional resonance if it's Miriam's daughter asking her father (Caleb) for wells of water as an additional dowry.
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The same trend occurs with men, but it's less noticeable b/c there's more men to start with.
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