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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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