How the Scribe Addressed a Delicate Matter Concerning the Man of Elohim
A careful reading of the Hebrew Scripture shows that the Hebrew language has no particular words for matters private in nature. Instead, Hebrew uses euphemisms to only describe them in a figurative language, or to hint at, but never explicitly stated, in order that such things should be avoided when reading. In other words, Hebrew language being set-apart from all other languages has no particular names for the terms of intimate relation between a man and a woman. The use of euphemisms by the Torah is nothing unusual in such cases. Torah highly regards intimacy and carefully choose Hebrew words to describe things in a figurative manner to avoid direct language. This we studied in articles dedicated to how the language of Tanach addresses delicate matters of such nature. In the following, however, we will see how the scribes have delicately intervened in the Hebrew text to avoid its literal reading for the same reasons. This will be further explained in the following. With that being said, we now turn to the Book of Judges, wherein we find such an example.
“The surest way of misunderstanding Hebrew is to read a translation”. Navah
In the time of the Judges, there was no king in Israel and the tribe of the Dan was seeking a land for itself to dwell in, for until that day they had not yet conquered their allotted land as inheritance. The tribe of Dan, according to the last census in Num 26:42-43, numbered 64,400 males of twenty years and older. For a tribe of this size the land assigned by Yehoshua to that tribe was sufficient. But from Jdg 1:34 we learn that the Amorites forced the Danites into the mountains and did not allow them to come down into the plain and conquer the land. Feeling too weak to fight the Kana’anites and exterminate them, a part of the Danites preferred to seek an inheritance for themselves somewhere else. And the children of Dan sent five brave men to spy out the land of Layish, which the spies had intended to be a place well fitted for a settlement.
And the spies went to the north to find more suitable land for themselves, and they came to the house of a certain man named Michah to spend the night there. When they were near the house, they heard a voice of a man, and perceived form his dialect that he was not a native of this land. That man turned out to be a young Levite, who was hired by Michah to serve as his personal priest. When the spies learned this, they asked the Levite to inquire of Elohim so that they should know whether their journey would be prosperous. Upon receiving an affirmative answer, the five men left and came to Layish. There they saw that the people of Layish dwelt safely under the rule of the Tsidonians. The locals lived far from the Tsidonians. And the spies came back to their brothers and reported what they had seen in the land. And they took counsel to arise and go up against them, for the land was very good. And six hundred men of the clan of the Dan took their families and possessions and went forth armed for battle, and they came to the house of Michah. And the five spies took the ephod (the breastplate of a priest of Israel), and the teraphim, and a molten image of the Elohim of Israel they found in the house of Michah and persuaded the Levite to become a priest and establish a worship of their own for their new settlement, saying, “Come with us, and be our father and priest. Is it better for you to be a priest to the house of one man, or to be a priest to a tribe and clan in Israel?” (Jdg 18:19).
Then the Danites went to Layish struck the unsuspecting people with the edge of the sword and burned the city with fire. And there was no one to deliver them for they lived far from Tsidon. And the Danites rebuilt the city and called it the city Dan, after the name of Dan their father, but previously the name of the city was Layish.
And we now turn to the text in Judges 18, wherein we read,
And the children of Dan set up for themselves the graven image. And Yehonathan son of Gershom, son of Menasheh, and his sons were priests to the tribe of Dan until the day the land was taken into exile. (Jdg 18:30)
At the end of the story are we told the name of the idolatrous priest the Danites found and took with them. He was Yonathan son of Gereshom son of Menasheh.
In our Hebrew text, however, we read something peculiar,
וַיָּקִימוּ לָהֶם בְּנֵי־דָן אֶת־הַפָּסֶל וִיהוֹנָתָן בֶּן־גֵּרְשֹׁם בֶּן־מְנַשֶּׁה הוּא וּבָנָיו הָיוּ כֹהֲנִים לְשֵׁבֶט הַדָּנִי עַד־יוֹם גְּלוֹת הָאָרֶץ׃
The words in question read, ben Menasheh with letter nun (in red) suspended above the line. Who was “Yonathan son of Gershom son of Menasheh? This is hinted at in the apparently extraneous letter nun suspended above the line.
Yehonathan (in verse 30) can hardly be any other than the Levite (in verse 19) the Danites took with themselves and promised him a priesthood. This Yehonathan was a son of Gershom, son of Menasheh. What sense is there in saying, “Yonathan son of Gershom son of Menasheh”. Who were Gershom and Menasheh?
The Hebrew script of this line teaches what the Talmud hints at in the following. The Gemara (Bava Batra 109b) raises the difficulty concerning Yonathan, the son of Gershom, the son of Menasheh, he and his sons being priests to the tribe of the Danites (Judges 18:30). The Rabbis ask, “Is it so that he (Gershom) was the son of Menasheh. But was he not the son of Mosheh, as it is written: “The sons of Mosheh: Gershom and Eliezer” (1Chronicles 23:14-15)? The Gemara tries to tell us something beyond what is immediately obvious on the surface. We read in 1Chronicles 23 the following,
Now Mosheh, the man of Elohim, his sons were named after the tribe of Levi. The sons of Mosheh: Gereshom and Eli’ezer. The sons of Gershom: Shevu’el was the head. (1Ch 23:14-16)
Regarding Mosheh the man of Elohim, his sons were called after the tribe of Levi, meaning, they, were reckoned in the ranks of the Levites, not of the priests. We explained this in the article Why did the sons of Mosheh not merit any leadership? From verse 16 above, we may conclude that Gershom had other sons (indicated in the plural form used, perhaps intentionally), who are not mentioned here, but only Shevu’el who was the first born. Why was only Shevu’el listed in the genealogy, and not the other sons?
Another hint is found in the genealogy of Aharon and Mosheh in Num 3:1-3. It begins with the words, “These are the generations of Aharon and Mosheh” but goes on to list only Aharon’s son. Thus, for some reason Mosheh’s narrative in these short verses in Numbers fell short on listing his own children in the genealogy. But where were Mosheh’s sons, and why did he not list them in the genealogy?
The answer to these questions is found in the very text of Jdg 18:30. The careful reader will notice the suspended letter nun in the Hebrew text. This should immediately awaken the thought that the scribe, not the author of Chronicles has something in mind. What does this mean to the reader? This is a scribal technique to insert nun into the text so that it reads now the name ben Menasheh, “son of Menasheh”. But what was the original reading of the name מְנַשֶּׁה Menasheh? If the letter nun is ignored in the reading, our Masoretic text will read then בֶּן־מֹשֶׁה ben Mosheh, “son of Mosheh”, instead of בֶּן־מְנַשֶּׁה ben Menasheh with a hanging נ. Thus, “Yehonathan son of Gershom, son of Menashsheh”, turns into “Yehonathan son of Gereshom, son of Mosheh”; Gershom was the son of Mosheh from his wife Tsipporah, the daughter of Yithro (Exo 2:22, Exo 18:3, and 1Ch 23:14-15).
Grammar notes: For the sake of emphasis and further explanation we should add that the faithful reader of Time of Reckoning needs no reminding that there are no vowels in the Hebrew language. Hebrew is a consonantal language, and the vowels are inserted into the text, according to the oral tradition handed down from one scribe to another. It is the tradition of the scribes and grammarians, which decides the true reading of the Hebrew words. We now return to the text.
It is very difficult to imagine the thought which floated in the scribe’s mind, when he was copying this verse. The chronicler had indicated that Yonathan was the grandson of Mosheh, but the scribe had decided to studiously avoid calling Gershom “the son of Mosheh”, because he felt that it would have been disgraceful to the man of Elohim to have had an idolater in his lineage. But instead, he called him “the son of Menasheh”, raising the letter nun in “Menasheh” above the line to show that it might be inserted מְנַשֶּׁה (Menasheh) and omitted that he was the son of מֹשֶׁה (Mosheh). In order to read it this way, the letter nun must be written as in מְנַשֶּׁה as if it is a part of the name, which is not what it says. Perhaps, the last thing we would expect the scribe to copy would be in order to forge the text. In order to make this clear to the reader, the scribe suspended letter nun. It was incumbent on the scribe to preserve the original reading of Chronicles by hanging the letter nun above the line to read בֶּן־מְנַשֶּׁה in order to indicate to the reader that “Menasheh” was not the original reading. If the scribe had not informed us so, we may have thought that this “Gershom” had been an ordinary Israelite. Ben Mosheh is therefore unquestionably the original reading of the text, which the scribal intervention meant to avoid in order to read it as ben Menasheh, son of Menasheh, out of respect to Mosheh. The letter nun is thusly scripturally inserted into the name to indicate that it was actually not Menasheh, but Mosheh. The scribes added the nun with the purpose to avoid denigrating the name of Mosheh by disclosing that his grandson had become an idolatrous priest.
At the same time, in order to be fair to the Hebrew text, it does not follow with certainty from the reading Yehonathan ben Gershom that Yehonathan was actually a son of Gershom, as the Hebrew word ben frequently denotes a grandson or great grandson in genealogical accounts in the Tanach. If ben therefore is interpreted as “grandson”, there is very little probability of Yehonathan having been a grandson of Gershom, for the simple reason, that Yehonathan is described as נַעַר na’ar, “young man”, in Jdg 17:7, Jdg 18:3, and Jdg 18:15, and therefore would have been in his very early age, while if he was the son of Gershom and grandson of Mosheh would certainly have passed the age of youth.
There are questions to be asked here: What happened? How did Mosheh, the man of Elohim get to that point to have an idolater in his lineage?
We find the following difference of opinion. Some say that there are hints in the Torah that Mosheh himself was so preoccupied with serving the Eternal and leading the people to the Promised Land that he simply did not have time to attend to his family. For instance, when Yithro came to in the camp of Israel, he brought with him Mosheh’s wife Tzipporah and their two sons. They had not been with him until then and therefore had not witness what he had done for the children of Israel in Egypt and at the sea.
The commentators went further in speculating about the reason that Mosheh’s own brother and sister, Aharon and Miriam, spoke negatively about him, because of the Kushite woman whom he had taken, which led to Miriam being inflicted with tsarah. The Rabbis accepted the plain sense of the text and the statement that Mosheh married (as a second wife) a Kushite woman, but why did Aharon and Miriam speak against her? According to some Rabbis, the reason for this negative speaking against Mosheh was that he had physically separated himself from his wife. He had done so because he felt the need to be in a state of purity in order to have access all the time to the Supernal One, for he did not know when he would be called up. Therefore, Aharon and Miriam complained that their brother had neglected his own family. Other Rabbis hold the view that the reason was that Mosheh had taken a second wife. Either way, we understand that the greatest leader of Israel was preoccupied with the state affairs at the expense of the family.
These explanations address and resolve the two questions raised. The Rabbis found the way to restore the dignity of the man of Elohim. Shevu’el in 1Ch 23:16 or Shuva’el in 1Ch 24:20 is Gershom’s son Yonathan, which name the Rabbis translated as “return to Elohim”, from Hebrew shuv, “to return” and teshuvah, “repentance”. According to what the Rabbis actually imply with this interpretation of the verses in Chronicles, Yonathan the grandson of Mosheh eventually repented of his idolatry and changed his original name to Shevu’el to return to the faith. This is indeed a valid explanation that corresponds to the difficulty raised in the Book of Judges.
Suggested reading:
Why did the sons of Mosheh not merit any leadership?
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