Surf The Site
Genesis: 1a 1b 1c 1d 2a 2b 2c 2d 3 4a 4b 4c/5 6a 6b 7 8 9 10 11a 11b 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25a 25b 26a 26b 27 28a 28b 29 30a 30b 31a 31b/32a 32b 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44a 44b 45 46 47a 47b 48 49 50
Genesis: 1a 1b 1c 1d 2a 2b 2c 2d 3 4a 4b 4c/5 6a 6b 7 8 9 10 11a 11b 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25a 25b 26a 26b 27 28a 28b 29 30a 30b 31a 31b/32a 32b 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44a 44b 45 46 47a 47b 48 49 50
Lot's Portion
13:5 VE GAM LE LOT HA HOLECH ET AV-RAM HAYAH TSON U VAKAR VE OHALIM
וְגַם לְלוֹט הַהֹלֵךְ אֶת אַבְרָם הָיָה צֹאן וּבָקָר וְאֹהָלִים
KJ (King James translation): And Lot also, which went with Abram, had flocks, and herds, and tents.
BN (BibleNet translation): And Lot also, who travelled with Av-Ram, had flocks, and herds, and tents.
There is a feeling throughout these references to Lot of something tagged on, as if the approvals committee had someone on it who kept nagging "don't forget my ancestors, the Beney Mo-Av and Beney Amon"; to pacify him, at the end of every few verses, they agreed to add in a phrase that said "oh and Lot was there too by the way."
Where did Lot get his wealth? Unless Av-Ram gave him a share of what he got for selling Sarai, we have to assume that Av-Ram and his people really went to Egypt to trade, and that they came out of Charan with considerable flocks, herds and/or goods.
13:6 VE LO NASA OTAM HA ARETS LASHEVET YACHDAV KI HAYAH RECHUSHAM RAV VE LO YACHLU LASHEVET YACHDAV
וְלֹא נָשָׂא אֹתָם הָאָרֶץ לָשֶׁבֶת יַחְדָּו כִּי הָיָה רְכוּשָׁם רָב וְלֹא יָכְלוּ לָשֶׁבֶת יַחְדָּו
KJ: And the land was not able to bear them, that they might dwell together: for their substance was great, so that they could not dwell together.
BN: But the land was unable to sustain both of them living together; for their substance was great, so that they could not live together.
Why not? Can two rich sheikhs not dwell side-by-side, given that they are uncle and nephew? How big were there tribes? Or is it a matter of pasture land and water being insufficient for their flocks and herds? Or simply the constant need to impose a historical narrative with chronological continuum on otherwise disparate tribal legends; and this provides a way of getting al-Lat into the family, humanised, masculinised, and any second now instated in his/her proper location?
But see also my note to NIYNI at Genesis 21:23.
But see also my note to NIYNI at Genesis 21:23.
13:7 VA YEHI RIYV BEYN RO'EH MIKNEH AV-RAM U VEYN RO'EH MIKNEY LOT VE HA KENA'ANI VE HA PERIZI AZ YOSHEV BA ARETS
וַיְהִי רִיב בֵּין רֹעֵי מִקְנֵה אַבְרָם וּבֵין רֹעֵי מִקְנֵה לוֹט וְהַכְּנַעֲנִי וְהַפְּרִזִּי אָז יֹשֵׁב בָּאָרֶץ
KJ: And there was a strife between the herdmen of Abram's cattle and the herdmen of Lot's cattle: and the Canaanite and the Perizzite dwelled then in the land.
BN: And there was strife between Av-Ram's cattle-herders and Lot's cattle-herders. And the Kena'ani and the Perizi dwelt in the land at that time.
RO'EH MIKNEH: (רעי מקנה): cattle; but this is surprising; would they have been this nomadic, tending cattle; surely sheep and goats is much more likely? RO'EH TSON would normally be used for shepherds.
The reference to Perizi seems out-of-place in the sentence. Who were the Perizi anyway (they lived in precisely the region of the western Negev that would become Shim'on's tribal territory later on, centred on Be'er Sheva, is the answer to that)? But it is the fact of mentioning them in the sentence that is odd; why not mention any of the dozens of other tribes, many of whom lived far closer to Av-Ram and Lot than these did? The probability, from the meaning of their name ("dwellers in the open country") is that Kena'ani is used here to mean "city-dwellers", and Perizi to mean the rural remainder, not including the Bedou, which was Av-Ram and Lot and any others. Again it helps us witness the process described in the note to verse 6; by mentioning them, we have a context to restore Lot to his proper geography, and of course a foreshadowing of his story later on.
13:8 VA YOMER AV-RAM EL LOT AL NA TEHI MERIYVAH BEYNI U VEYNEYCHA U VEYN RO'AI U VEYN RO'EYCHA KI ANASHIM ACHIM ANACHNU
וַיֹּאמֶר אַבְרָם אֶל לוֹט אַל נָא תְהִי מְרִיבָה בֵּינִי וּבֵינֶיךָ וּבֵין רֹעַי וּבֵין רֹעֶיךָ כִּי אֲנָשִׁים אַחִים אֲנָחְנוּ
KJ: And Abram said unto Lot, Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen; for we be brethren.
BN: And Av-Ram said to Lot: "Please, let there not be any quarreling between me and you, or between my herdsmen and your herdsmen; for we are brothers.
Uncle and nephew, actually – according to the story. Mythologically, if Av-Ram is understood to be a variant of the sun or sky-god, and Lot is really al-Lat, one of the three moon-daughters of al-Lah (the sun or sky god in the pre-Islamic Arabian world), but now masculinised, then – yes: uncle and nephew it is.
MERIYVAH: One of the challenges facing any translator, whether of the Bible or any other piece of text, is how to convey the nuances specific to the language of origin in the language of arrival, whether it be a cultural or an inherently verbal nuance. Here it is cultural: no Beney Yisra-El hearing this verse is going to miss the word MERIYVAH, because it was at MERIYVAH that Mosheh struck the rock without YHVH's permission (Exodus 17:7), and provided drinking water for his people, the sin which led to his being prohibited from crossing into the Promised Land with them. The word means "strife", and is correctly translated here as "strife", but imagine a reference in a tale to "9-11" or a place named "the Bay of Pigs", and immediately an American's ears are going to wonder if an allusion is coming. In fact, no such allusion comes on this occasion, but the word is fixed with that connection for all time.
13:9 HA LO CHOL HA ARETS LEPHANEYCHA HIPARED NA ME ALAI IM HA SMOL VE EYMINAH VE IM HA YAMIN VE ASME'IYLAH
הֲלֹא כָל הָאָרֶץ לְפָנֶיךָ הִפָּרֶד נָא מֵעָלָי אִם הַשְּׂמֹאל וְאֵימִנָה וְאִם הַיָּמִין וְאַשְׂמְאִילָה
KJ: Is not the whole land before thee? separate thyself, I pray thee, from me: if thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left.
BN: "Is the entire land not before you? Please, move away from me; if you prefer to go left, I will go right; or if you prefer right, I will go left."
Note that it is Av-Ram who tells Lot to go; but then he is the uncle and thus senior.
Beautiful use of language with these rights and lefts functioning as verbs, unparallelable in English (it would have to be done as "if you will left then I will right").
However, one slight anomaly. What if Lot had chosen left instead of right, would Av-Ram then have gone to Sedom and Lot to Chevron? And if so, what of the promise made earlier by YHVH? This is one of many occasions in the Tanach when the notion of "fate and destiny" is upheld, but simultaneously shown to be nonsense; a matter of which came first, the butterfly or the caterpillar? Did YHVH promise Av-Ram a certain portion of land, and then manipulate Lot's free will to ensure that Av-Ram received it (that is how it would be done in a Greek equivalent); or did Av-Ram end up by pure hazard at Chevron, and determine that it must have been predestined, that this was how it was meant to be, and so ascribe a promise by YHVH (this is generally the Jewish answer today, but was it then?)?
And then a second minor problem. Is not the whole land before you? Well, no, it isn't – and precisely because, as the previous verse informed us, the Kena'ani and the Perizi were then in the land... so there was a strict limit to where they might settle, and even then there were likely to be squabbles with herdsmen both of cattle and of flocks, as we will see later on with Yitschak; and this is why they were mentioned: to enable the tale to get Lot into the area of the Five Cities, which wasn't actually his origins; al-Lat comes from the other side of the Dead Sea, from the Hejaz; but the Dead Sea is the nearest point of Kena'an to the Hejaz.
And then a third problem. We have just been told that both men are rich in cattle, and therefore they need rural space; yet Lot will next be seen living in a town. He cannot be both rural cattle-farmer and town-dweller; so the pretext in the tale fails, and alerts us to it being merely a pretext. See verse 12.
13:10 VA YISA LOT ET EYNAV VA YAR ET KOL KIKAR HA YARDEN KI CHULAH MASHKEH LIPHNEY SHACHET YHVH ET SEDOM VE ET AMORA KE GAN YHVH KE ERETS MITSRAYIM BO'ACHAH TSO'AR
וַיִּשָּׂא לוֹט אֶת עֵינָיו וַיַּרְא אֶת כָּל כִּכַּר הַיַּרְדֵּן כִּי כֻלָּהּ מַשְׁקֶה לִפְנֵי שַׁחֵת יְהוָה אֶת סְדֹם וְאֶת עֲמֹרָה כְּגַן יְהוָה כְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם בֹּאֲכָה צֹעַר
KJ: And Lot lifted up his eyes, and beheld all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered every where, before the LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, even as the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt, as thou comest unto Zoar.
BN: And Lot lifted up his eyes, and beheld all the plain of the Yarden, that it was well-watered everywhere (this was before YHVH destroyed Sedom and Amorah), like the Garden of YHVH, like the land of Mitsrayim in the direction of Tso'ar.
Very complex!!! Let us take it by step:-
i) Lot ceases to be a Beney Yisra-El after this story; we will be told that he is the father of the Beney Mo-Av and Beney Amon, which is correct for al-Lat, who was indeed one of the three "mothers" of precisely that region, precusely to the east of the Dead Sea where the Five Cities are about to be destroyed. If all the land was promised to Av-Ram, presumably it should have included the territories taken by Lot. So are Mo-Av and Amon included in the covenant? Or can we treat the covenant as a late addition to the text?
ii) The implication of Kikar Ha Yarden etc is that, after the destruction of Sedom and Amorah, it ceased to be well-watered; those who know it will acknowledge its dryness and its abundance in salt, potash and bitumen. So is another myth at play here: the previous paradise (the phrase used is GAN YHVH - the Garden of YHVH, and Gan remembers Gan Eden, the Garden of Eden) and the Fall of Sedom and Amorah (equivalent to No'ach's Flood or Chavah's "sin") which led to the loss of Eden? A third alternative Creation/Fall tale? And indeed a Beney Mo-Av, or Beney Amon, or even perhaps a Perizi Creation myth (we will see when we get to the end of the Lot story that it is indeed another Creation myth, one that parallels the ending of the No'ach version)?
We will also see in the Book of Exodus that "the burning bush" (Exodus 3), "the pillar of fire by night and the pillar of cloud by day" (Exodus 13), as well as the earthquake that took the rebels under Korach (Numbers 16), are likely to have been reminiscences of volcanic activity in the very same region. Can we read the destruction of the Cities of the Plain as further reminiscences of the same? They are in precisely the same region, and a major volcanic eruption would easily explain how the fertile Kikar ha-Yarden ended three hundred feet below sea level as a crater full of potash, bitumen and salty water.
iii) Why the reference to the land of Mitsrayim (Egypt), comparing it to Paradise, which would not have been the first piece of association in the minds of most Beney Yisra-El, or later Jews?
iv) Why the abstruse reference to Tso'ar (צער) - Zoar in most English translations - which happens to be the very place in which Lot and his daughters will find refuge, after the destruction of the Cities of the Plain; and that not in Mitsrayim at all, but very close to Sedom. Probably it is mentioned because, to anyone living after the destruction of the Five Cities, it was the main point of inhabited reference in the area.
The English mis-writing as Zoar is unfortunate, because it allows an assumption that this is the word Zohar (זֹהַר), meaning "splendour", the Zohar also being the central text of Cabbala (or Kabbalah if you prefer); which might then suggest that the city would have been a centre of sun-worship, and, as we know that both the Beney Amon and the Beney Mo-Av were sun-worshippers rather than moon-worshippers like the Beney Yisra-El, this could mis-lead us entirely in interpreting the mythology of the tale. This break-up of Lot and Av-Ram is not a separation of cults.
As noted above, it is to Tso'ar that Lot will flee with his daughters after the destruction of the Cities of the Plain (Genesis 19), and there that his daughters will get him drunk (echoing No'ach's drunkenness immediately after the Flood), and then "lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father" (Genesis 19:32), which does not quite echo the latter part of No'ach's story but does provide a sort of mythological parallel; indeed, it makes rather more sense than the male No'ach version.
In fact, Lot as al-Lat makes the third of the trinity of "Graces", with al-Lah providing the father-deity; this is the Beney Yisra-Eil bowdlerisation, and if you want to follow through the originals, you will need to look in the pre-Islamic sources, because the three daughters were expunged by Muhammad from Islam as much as they were from the cult of the Beney Yisra-El by Ezra, and by Christianity reduced to such tales as Cinderella and her two step-sisters (British mythology before Shakespeare had already renamed them as Goneril, Regan and Cordelia), or remodelled in the style of Canova as "The Three Graces" (see photo, above left).
At least one scholar claims that the mentioning of Tso'ar is a Mosaic touch, that Tso'ar is not the town near Sedom at all, but that of an ancient Egyptian frontier fortress. He argues that the wording of "bo'achah Tso'ar" (באכה צער) is the give-away; who is being addressed and from which direction would they be coming? "Like the land of Egypt" implies knowledge of that land, so the addressee must be coming up from Egypt. (One cannot help but admire the contortions of logic that some scholars will go through to prove what is so desperately unimportant! And then to fail to prove it! Me too, I know. Me too.)
SEDOM AND AMORAH: Better known as Sodom and Gomorrah, but we need to accustom ourselves to using correct names based on correct pronunciation in order to evince full meaning. Many Yehudit words beginning with Ayin (ע) end up in English with a G; possibly because the very back-of-the-throat sound which an Ayin makes, almost a cluck, but aspirate, is very close to a G in English, and even more so in its Arabic equivalent. But a Yehudit G is Gimmel (ג) not Ayin (ע). And no, the town of Amorah and the people called the Emorites (incorrectly rendered as Amorites in English) are not connected; the former has an Ayin (עֲמֹרָה), the latter an Aleph (אמורי)
13:11 VA YIVCHAR LO LOT ET KOL KIKAR HA YARDEN VA YISA LOT MI KEDEM VA YIPARDU ISH ME AL ACHIV
KJ: Then Lot chose him all the plain of Jordan; and Lot journeyed east: and they separated themselves the one from the other.
BN: So Lot chose for himself all of the Yarden valley; and Lot set off eastward; and they separated themselves, each man from his brother.
VA YISA LOT MI KEDEM: Translated as "Lot journeyed east", but due east from Beit-El takes you to Yericho (Jericho), not Sedom; in fact you have to go virtually due south to get to Sedom, with a touch of east, but not more than a few degrees. This makes even more nonsense of Neville's scholarship in verse 10.
But it also says MI KEDEM, which surely means "from the east" and not "to the east", which is generally KEDMAH or EL KEDEM? From the east would bring him out of the Hejaz, out of what is now Saudi Arabia, out of the land of the three daughters of al-Lah!
KIKAR HA YARDEN: The notes here are really the wrong way round, but you need the previous one first in order to appreciate this one fully. If Lot's tribe took KIKAR HA YARDEN, which is essentially the land of Edom, then this becomes historically interesting, both because that adds Lot to the list of Kayin, Esav and Yishma-El who allegedly founded Edom – and because all are outcast, supplanted, rejected kinsmen.
13:12 AV-RAM YASHAV BE ERETS KENA'AN VE LOT YASHAV BE AREY HA KIKAR VA YE'EHAL AD SEDOM
KJ: Abram dwelled in the land of Canaan, and Lot dwelled in the cities of the plain, and pitched his tent toward Sodom.
BN: Av-ram dwelt in the land of Kena'an, and Lot dwelt in the cities of the plain, and moved his tent as far as Sedom.
Lot cannot personally have dwelt in all the Cities of the Plain, and even more so if he is living in a tent, which means still nomadic; so either he moved a good deal, or Lot implies a tribe, or even the spread of the worship of a deity to those cities, while the deity of Av-Ram was spreading to the more westerly cities of Kena'an. If Lot is a tribe, so must Av-Ram be. Again an attempt to show that Av-Ram = Ivrim, and he the eponymous ancestor. And if Lot's tribe did move in to the Cities of the Plain, then we are witnessing a historic moment: the return of Av-Ram's people to city-dwelling (yes, return - if he did indeed grow up in Ur and then Charan, both major cities). But this statement also raises a complex question. It is very unusual for sedentary people to become nomads; so is it possible that Av-Ram travelled nomadically, but was not actually nomadic in the strict sense; merely a refugee who had to earn a living, or a travelling merchant, and did so nomadically only until he found a permanent home?
Nor did Av-Ram dwell in the land of Kena'an. Look at a map and see where he wandered – Beit-El, Be'er-Sheva, Chevron, down to the Cities of the Plain – and he never really gets out of the Negev desert except on that one brief excursion to what was not yet Yeru-Shala'im, and the wars he supposedly fought all over the Middle East.
In fact, the probability is that neither Lot nor Av-Ram were ever much in the vicinity of the Five Cities, but the Redactor needed to incorporate various myths, and this is where he chose to fit them into the artificial historical narrative. Rather cleverly in fact, disposing of the hugely important triple goddess by masculinising her into Lot and his two daughters, and then assimilating Lot as Av-Ram's nephew.
13:13 VE ANSHEY SEDOM RA'IM VE CHATA'IM LA YHVH ME'OD
KJ: But the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the LORD exceedingly.
BN: Now the men of Sedom were grievous and wicked sinners against YHVH.
Yes, sinners and wicked men they may well have been, except that they were unlikely to have been worshippers of YHVH, and therefore his view of their moral standards was of no relevance... and don't forget your rainbow, YHVH, don't forget that you made a promise... a covenant, noch... never again to destroy Humankind...
Ezekiel 16:49 tells us that their sin was "pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness in her and in her daughters; yet she did not strengthen the hand of the poor and the needy", which reads like the most straightforward pre-Marxian indictment of Capitalism yet encountered, and a suggestion that an American cannot be both a Christian and a Republican, or indeed a Jew and a Republican; and the same applies by equivalence to most of western Europe, including the UK (cf Matthew 21:12, John 2:15). In the verses preceding this, Yechezke-El (Ezekiel) speaks of Yisra-El as having a Beney Chet (Hittite) mother and an Emorite father (v45), with Shomron (שֹֽׁמְרוֹן֙ - Samaria) for an elder sister, and Sedom for a younger (v46). This is worth some thinking about in the light of Sarah and Av-Raham.
RA'IM VE CHATA'IM LA YHVH: Meaning what exactly? What we can say for certain is: the long-held assumption that the inhabitants of Sedom practiced sodomy, and the inhabitants of Amorah something equally bestial, is simply invention. There is in fact no statement anywhere of what the sin was, except in this verse, and the Yechezke-El quoted above. So let me ask, again: meaning what exactly? It wasn't YHVH of course, which complicates matters. And all natural disasters, until the 20th century CE, have always been regarded as the consequence of sin; as "acts of god" indeed, in the parlance of the insurance companies. The language once again repeats that of No'ach and the Flood, so that we are yet again in Creation and Re-Creation territory. Can we safely assume that the inhabitants of Sedom and Amorah were no different from anyone else in terms of their goodness and badness, and that what happened there was simply a natural disaster, probably volcanic, possibly techtonic? The only other reasonable conjecture is that this is a way of saying that they worshipped other gods; which of course they did.
13:14 VE YHVH AMAR EL AV-RAM ACHAREY HIPARED LOT ME IMO SA NA EYNEYCHA U RE'EH MIN HA MAKOM ASHER ATAH SHAM TSAPHONAH VA NEGBAH VA KEDMAH VA YAMAH
KJ: And the LORD said unto Abram, after that Lot was separated from him, Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward:
BN: And YHVH said to Av-Ram, after Lot had separated from him, "Lift up your eyes now, and look out from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward.
There is no logical link from the last verse to this one, except for the need to bring the devastation of the cities into Av-Ram's story; and to establish an apparently logical link to the next verse – but see the note there.
13:15 KI ET KOL HA ARETS ASHER ATAH RO'EH LECHA ETNENAH U LE ZAR'ACHA AD OLAM
KJ: For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever.
BN: "For all the land which you see, to you will I give it, and to your seed for ever.
The second covenant with Av-Ram. Thinking back to the notes to verse 10, is the previous covenant annulled or supplanted by this one, like the codicil to a will? He actually gets a good deal less than No'ach got.
These lines are being written on the day after Yitschak Rabin was assassinated, so it is extremely relevant to wonder out loud, precisely which of the Biblical covenants granting the land do Jews mean when they talk about Biblical Yisra-El and Biblical justifications etc etc. The first covenant with Av-Ram made a general remark about "land which I will show you" (as he is doing now) but never specifying what land until now; we are left to presume the whole of Kena'an, but really that is our modern sense of nationalism, with geographical borders being imposed on a world in which nations were mostly tribes, and boundary markers were mostly stones and streams, or garrisons.
What we can say is that Av-Ram and Lot have separated, and Av-Ram is on a mountain between Beit-El and Ai, which is to say, on the same line of latitude as modern Yafo (Jaffa - Joppa). Whatever he can see is his. What could he see? From there, on a clear day and with fantastic eyesight, maybe fifty miles in each direction: easily as far north as Shechem; perhaps as far south as Chevron (the hills of what is not yet Yeru-Shala'im will block the view, and Beit-Lechem will be too low in the valley beneath it to be visible); west towards the coast around what is today Rechovot, where Yitschak will one day get into precisely the sort of squabble over a well that the separation of Av-Ram and Lot was designed to avoid - Genesis 26:22); east over the Yarden into the desert; essentially the kingdom of Yehudah and not much more, though it would have included virtually all the West Bank if that had not just been given to Lot - and it would exclude the whole of Galilee, east and especially west. Ironic! Not really. The entire Tanach, with very few exceptions, is set in the tiny geographical area that I have just outlined, Yehudah and Bin-Yamin and not much more, and the Pelishtim occupied a good part of its western side.
13:16 VE SAMTI ET ZAR'ACHA KA APHAR HA ARETS ASHER IM YUCHAL ISH LIMNOT ET APHAR HA ARETS GAM ZAR'ACHA YIMANEH
KJ: And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth: so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered.
BN: "And I will make your seed like the dust of the earth; so that if a man could count the dust of the earth, so would your seed too be counted.”
A grandiose claim. Today, there are 13 million Jews, maybe 20 million if you include all the Diasporal Jews who have not joined a synagogue or bought a grave plot in a Jewish cemetery or signed up with their Jewish community school or federation - and you can count more grains of sand than that in a bag of rough from Home Depot bought for mortaring your patio, let alone the contents of Netanya Beach. And as to "make your seed as the dust of the earth" - oh many times, many many times have we seen that seed reduced to dust.
The inference of course is less about the land than about the success of a fertility cult; and that is highly ironic, and highly significant, in light of the story about to be told of Sarai's "barrenness", and the births of Yitschak (Isaac) and Yishma-El.
13:17 KUM HIT'HALECH BA ARETS LE ARKAH U LE RACHBAH KI LECHA ETNENAH
KJ: Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee.
BN: "Get up, walk through the land, the length of it and the breadth of it; for to you will I give it."
But stay away from the cities; stay carefully in the countryside; because the Beney Kena'an and other city-peoples have not heard about our covenant yet, and they may not be so keen as you are to fulfill it!
Does the covenant signify his dream of conquest/occupation, or mark its achievement?
13:18 VA YE'EHAL AV-RAM VA YAV'O VA YESHEV BE ELONEY MAMRE ASHER BE CHEVRON VA YIVEN SHAM MIZBE'ACH LA YHVH
KJ: Then Abram removed his tent, and came and dwelt in the plain of Mamre, which is in Hebron, and built there an altar unto the LORD.
BN: So Av-Ram moved his tent, and came and lived by the terebinth oaks of Mamre, which are in Chevron, and built an altar to YHVH there.
Why the plains of Mamre, and why Chevron? Wasn't it previously Moreh, not Mamre? Nonetheless this is the start of the history of the Beney Yisra-El as a tribe of Kena'an proper. The terebinths again inform us that the area was a grove sacred to the polytheistic fertility cult. Why leave the Beit-El shrine for this one? (To which the answer is the one I gave to verse 15 - the "whole land" appears to have been a tiny corner of Kena'an - so tiny that a switch from the north to the south would indeed take him to Chevron - Beit-El was about 15 miles north of Beit Lechem, Chevron about 30 miles south).
MAMRE: see Genesis 14:13, which will tell us that "there came one that had escaped, and told Av-Ram the Ivri (הָעִבְרִי); now he dwelt by the terebinths of Mamre the Emori, the brother of Eshkol, and the brother of Aner; and these were confederate with Av-Ram"; this indicates that Mamre was the name of a man, or a deity, and only secondarily the name of the place. The name is given as Emorite, so there is no point looking for a Yehudit root to explain the meaning of the name; except that Av-Ram is also given as an Emorite, so perhaps Yehudit started as an Emoritic language and... the root is in fact MEMER (ממר), which means "sadness", and is itself derived as a Pi'el (intensive) form of the base-root MAR, which means "bitter", which we have already seen as the root of both Mir-Yam (Miriam) and Mor-Yah, the latter being Mount Moriah in Yeru-Shala'im, and the source of the name Maria or Mary in the Christian myth. Do I need to go through the full explanation yet again... sun-god, moon-goddess, ever-dying ever-reborn son, and the bitter waters that are at once purgation and the journey into She'ol... but it is worth pointing out that the separation of Av-Ram and Lot has one going to the "bitter waters" of Mamre, while the other goes to the bitumen and asphalt of the Dead Sea.
CHEVRON: Hebron, in most English renditions. Surely Chevron already existed as a shrine, and didn't need an altar? (And again, it wasn't to YHVH, because Av-Ram never worshipped YHVH until the Redactor changed the text; he worshipped El-Shadai.) Indeed Josephus says that Chevron was "as old as Memphis in Egypt", and suggests of the oak-tree there that "report goes that this tree has continued since the creation of the world". Which probably indicates a symbolic world-tree rather than an actual tree (see notes to Asherah), because oaks live a long time, but not long enough for Josephus to have seen this one himself.
Once again, note that all this story is Yahwistic, not Elohimnik; can we state that Av-Ram is YHVH and Av-Racham Elohim, thus making them two amalgamated versions of the same story/character, or even the amalgamated versions of two different stories/characters? Probably not, but it may well be on the right track. Which is to say, like Beit-El, like al-Lat, like the real story of Chevron which comes later, it is en route to the absorption of all non-Yahwistic cults into the Yahwistic, around the time of Ezra.
VA YAV'O: One last thought. The text says YAV'O = "came", rather than "HALACH" or "NASA", either of which would have served for "went". The difference indicates the location of the narrator, not the protagonist. At what point of history might the narrator have been located in Chevron, and recounting the tale there? The Davidic seems logical.
End of fragment three; end of Chapter 13.
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Genesis: 1a 1b 1c 1d 2a 2b 2c 2d 3 4a 4b 4c/5 6a 6b 7 8 9 10 11a 11b 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25a 25b 26a 26b 27 28a 28b 29 30a 30b 31a 31b/32a 32b 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44a 44b 45 46 47a 47b 48 49 50
As noted above, it is to Tso'ar that Lot will flee with his daughters after the destruction of the Cities of the Plain (Genesis 19), and there that his daughters will get him drunk (echoing No'ach's drunkenness immediately after the Flood), and then "lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father" (Genesis 19:32), which does not quite echo the latter part of No'ach's story but does provide a sort of mythological parallel; indeed, it makes rather more sense than the male No'ach version.In fact, Lot as al-Lat makes the third of the trinity of "Graces", with al-Lah providing the father-deity; this is the Beney Yisra-Eil bowdlerisation, and if you want to follow through the originals, you will need to look in the pre-Islamic sources, because the three daughters were expunged by Muhammad from Islam as much as they were from the cult of the Beney Yisra-El by Ezra, and by Christianity reduced to such tales as Cinderella and her two step-sisters (British mythology before Shakespeare had already renamed them as Goneril, Regan and Cordelia), or remodelled in the style of Canova as "The Three Graces" (see photo, above left).
At least one scholar claims that the mentioning of Tso'ar is a Mosaic touch, that Tso'ar is not the town near Sedom at all, but that of an ancient Egyptian frontier fortress. He argues that the wording of "bo'achah Tso'ar" (באכה צער) is the give-away; who is being addressed and from which direction would they be coming? "Like the land of Egypt" implies knowledge of that land, so the addressee must be coming up from Egypt. (One cannot help but admire the contortions of logic that some scholars will go through to prove what is so desperately unimportant! And then to fail to prove it! Me too, I know. Me too.)
SEDOM AND AMORAH: Better known as Sodom and Gomorrah, but we need to accustom ourselves to using correct names based on correct pronunciation in order to evince full meaning. Many Yehudit words beginning with Ayin (ע) end up in English with a G; possibly because the very back-of-the-throat sound which an Ayin makes, almost a cluck, but aspirate, is very close to a G in English, and even more so in its Arabic equivalent. But a Yehudit G is Gimmel (ג) not Ayin (ע). And no, the town of Amorah and the people called the Emorites (incorrectly rendered as Amorites in English) are not connected; the former has an Ayin (עֲמֹרָה), the latter an Aleph (אמורי)
13:11 VA YIVCHAR LO LOT ET KOL KIKAR HA YARDEN VA YISA LOT MI KEDEM VA YIPARDU ISH ME AL ACHIV
וַיִּבְחַר לוֹ לוֹט אֵת כָּל־כִּכַּר הַיַּרְדֵּן וַיִּסַּע לוֹט מִקֶּדֶם וַיִּפָּרְדוּ אִישׁ מֵעַל אָחִיו
KJ: Then Lot chose him all the plain of Jordan; and Lot journeyed east: and they separated themselves the one from the other.
BN: So Lot chose for himself all of the Yarden valley; and Lot set off eastward; and they separated themselves, each man from his brother.
VA YISA LOT MI KEDEM: Translated as "Lot journeyed east", but due east from Beit-El takes you to Yericho (Jericho), not Sedom; in fact you have to go virtually due south to get to Sedom, with a touch of east, but not more than a few degrees. This makes even more nonsense of Neville's scholarship in verse 10.
But it also says MI KEDEM, which surely means "from the east" and not "to the east", which is generally KEDMAH or EL KEDEM? From the east would bring him out of the Hejaz, out of what is now Saudi Arabia, out of the land of the three daughters of al-Lah!
KIKAR HA YARDEN: The notes here are really the wrong way round, but you need the previous one first in order to appreciate this one fully. If Lot's tribe took KIKAR HA YARDEN, which is essentially the land of Edom, then this becomes historically interesting, both because that adds Lot to the list of Kayin, Esav and Yishma-El who allegedly founded Edom – and because all are outcast, supplanted, rejected kinsmen.
13:12 AV-RAM YASHAV BE ERETS KENA'AN VE LOT YASHAV BE AREY HA KIKAR VA YE'EHAL AD SEDOM
אַבְרָם יָשַׁב בְּאֶרֶץ כְּנָעַן וְלוֹט יָשַׁב בְּעָרֵי הַכִּכָּר וַיֶּאֱהַל עַד סְדֹם
KJ: Abram dwelled in the land of Canaan, and Lot dwelled in the cities of the plain, and pitched his tent toward Sodom.
BN: Av-ram dwelt in the land of Kena'an, and Lot dwelt in the cities of the plain, and moved his tent as far as Sedom.
Lot cannot personally have dwelt in all the Cities of the Plain, and even more so if he is living in a tent, which means still nomadic; so either he moved a good deal, or Lot implies a tribe, or even the spread of the worship of a deity to those cities, while the deity of Av-Ram was spreading to the more westerly cities of Kena'an. If Lot is a tribe, so must Av-Ram be. Again an attempt to show that Av-Ram = Ivrim, and he the eponymous ancestor. And if Lot's tribe did move in to the Cities of the Plain, then we are witnessing a historic moment: the return of Av-Ram's people to city-dwelling (yes, return - if he did indeed grow up in Ur and then Charan, both major cities). But this statement also raises a complex question. It is very unusual for sedentary people to become nomads; so is it possible that Av-Ram travelled nomadically, but was not actually nomadic in the strict sense; merely a refugee who had to earn a living, or a travelling merchant, and did so nomadically only until he found a permanent home?
Nor did Av-Ram dwell in the land of Kena'an. Look at a map and see where he wandered – Beit-El, Be'er-Sheva, Chevron, down to the Cities of the Plain – and he never really gets out of the Negev desert except on that one brief excursion to what was not yet Yeru-Shala'im, and the wars he supposedly fought all over the Middle East.
In fact, the probability is that neither Lot nor Av-Ram were ever much in the vicinity of the Five Cities, but the Redactor needed to incorporate various myths, and this is where he chose to fit them into the artificial historical narrative. Rather cleverly in fact, disposing of the hugely important triple goddess by masculinising her into Lot and his two daughters, and then assimilating Lot as Av-Ram's nephew.
13:13 VE ANSHEY SEDOM RA'IM VE CHATA'IM LA YHVH ME'OD
וְאַנְשֵׁי סְדֹם רָעִים וְחַטָּאִים לַיהוָה מְאֹד
KJ: But the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the LORD exceedingly.
BN: Now the men of Sedom were grievous and wicked sinners against YHVH.
Yes, sinners and wicked men they may well have been, except that they were unlikely to have been worshippers of YHVH, and therefore his view of their moral standards was of no relevance... and don't forget your rainbow, YHVH, don't forget that you made a promise... a covenant, noch... never again to destroy Humankind...
Ezekiel 16:49 tells us that their sin was "pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness in her and in her daughters; yet she did not strengthen the hand of the poor and the needy", which reads like the most straightforward pre-Marxian indictment of Capitalism yet encountered, and a suggestion that an American cannot be both a Christian and a Republican, or indeed a Jew and a Republican; and the same applies by equivalence to most of western Europe, including the UK (cf Matthew 21:12, John 2:15). In the verses preceding this, Yechezke-El (Ezekiel) speaks of Yisra-El as having a Beney Chet (Hittite) mother and an Emorite father (v45), with Shomron (שֹֽׁמְרוֹן֙ - Samaria) for an elder sister, and Sedom for a younger (v46). This is worth some thinking about in the light of Sarah and Av-Raham.
RA'IM VE CHATA'IM LA YHVH: Meaning what exactly? What we can say for certain is: the long-held assumption that the inhabitants of Sedom practiced sodomy, and the inhabitants of Amorah something equally bestial, is simply invention. There is in fact no statement anywhere of what the sin was, except in this verse, and the Yechezke-El quoted above. So let me ask, again: meaning what exactly? It wasn't YHVH of course, which complicates matters. And all natural disasters, until the 20th century CE, have always been regarded as the consequence of sin; as "acts of god" indeed, in the parlance of the insurance companies. The language once again repeats that of No'ach and the Flood, so that we are yet again in Creation and Re-Creation territory. Can we safely assume that the inhabitants of Sedom and Amorah were no different from anyone else in terms of their goodness and badness, and that what happened there was simply a natural disaster, probably volcanic, possibly techtonic? The only other reasonable conjecture is that this is a way of saying that they worshipped other gods; which of course they did.
13:14 VE YHVH AMAR EL AV-RAM ACHAREY HIPARED LOT ME IMO SA NA EYNEYCHA U RE'EH MIN HA MAKOM ASHER ATAH SHAM TSAPHONAH VA NEGBAH VA KEDMAH VA YAMAH
וַיהוָה אָמַר אֶל אַבְרָם אַחֲרֵי הִפָּרֶד לוֹט מֵעִמּוֹ שָׂא נָא עֵינֶיךָ וּרְאֵה מִן הַמָּקוֹם אֲשֶׁר אַתָּה שָׁם צָפֹנָה וָנֶגְבָּה וָקֵדְמָה וָיָמָּה
BN: And YHVH said to Av-Ram, after Lot had separated from him, "Lift up your eyes now, and look out from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward.
There is no logical link from the last verse to this one, except for the need to bring the devastation of the cities into Av-Ram's story; and to establish an apparently logical link to the next verse – but see the note there.
13:15 KI ET KOL HA ARETS ASHER ATAH RO'EH LECHA ETNENAH U LE ZAR'ACHA AD OLAM
כִּי אֶת כָּל הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַתָּה רֹאֶה לְךָ אֶתְּנֶנָּה וּלְזַרְעֲךָ עַד עוֹלָם
KJ: For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever.
BN: "For all the land which you see, to you will I give it, and to your seed for ever.
The second covenant with Av-Ram. Thinking back to the notes to verse 10, is the previous covenant annulled or supplanted by this one, like the codicil to a will? He actually gets a good deal less than No'ach got.
These lines are being written on the day after Yitschak Rabin was assassinated, so it is extremely relevant to wonder out loud, precisely which of the Biblical covenants granting the land do Jews mean when they talk about Biblical Yisra-El and Biblical justifications etc etc. The first covenant with Av-Ram made a general remark about "land which I will show you" (as he is doing now) but never specifying what land until now; we are left to presume the whole of Kena'an, but really that is our modern sense of nationalism, with geographical borders being imposed on a world in which nations were mostly tribes, and boundary markers were mostly stones and streams, or garrisons.
What we can say is that Av-Ram and Lot have separated, and Av-Ram is on a mountain between Beit-El and Ai, which is to say, on the same line of latitude as modern Yafo (Jaffa - Joppa). Whatever he can see is his. What could he see? From there, on a clear day and with fantastic eyesight, maybe fifty miles in each direction: easily as far north as Shechem; perhaps as far south as Chevron (the hills of what is not yet Yeru-Shala'im will block the view, and Beit-Lechem will be too low in the valley beneath it to be visible); west towards the coast around what is today Rechovot, where Yitschak will one day get into precisely the sort of squabble over a well that the separation of Av-Ram and Lot was designed to avoid - Genesis 26:22); east over the Yarden into the desert; essentially the kingdom of Yehudah and not much more, though it would have included virtually all the West Bank if that had not just been given to Lot - and it would exclude the whole of Galilee, east and especially west. Ironic! Not really. The entire Tanach, with very few exceptions, is set in the tiny geographical area that I have just outlined, Yehudah and Bin-Yamin and not much more, and the Pelishtim occupied a good part of its western side.
13:16 VE SAMTI ET ZAR'ACHA KA APHAR HA ARETS ASHER IM YUCHAL ISH LIMNOT ET APHAR HA ARETS GAM ZAR'ACHA YIMANEH
וְשַׂמְתִּי אֶת זַרְעֲךָ כַּעֲפַר הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אִם יוּכַל אִישׁ לִמְנוֹת אֶת עֲפַר הָאָרֶץ גַּם זַרְעֲךָ יִמָּנֶה
KJ: And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth: so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered.
BN: "And I will make your seed like the dust of the earth; so that if a man could count the dust of the earth, so would your seed too be counted.”
A grandiose claim. Today, there are 13 million Jews, maybe 20 million if you include all the Diasporal Jews who have not joined a synagogue or bought a grave plot in a Jewish cemetery or signed up with their Jewish community school or federation - and you can count more grains of sand than that in a bag of rough from Home Depot bought for mortaring your patio, let alone the contents of Netanya Beach. And as to "make your seed as the dust of the earth" - oh many times, many many times have we seen that seed reduced to dust.
The inference of course is less about the land than about the success of a fertility cult; and that is highly ironic, and highly significant, in light of the story about to be told of Sarai's "barrenness", and the births of Yitschak (Isaac) and Yishma-El.
13:17 KUM HIT'HALECH BA ARETS LE ARKAH U LE RACHBAH KI LECHA ETNENAH
קוּם הִתְהַלֵּךְ בָּאָרֶץ לְאָרְכָּהּ וּלְרָחְבָּהּ כִּי לְךָ אֶתְּנֶנָּה
KJ: Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee.
BN: "Get up, walk through the land, the length of it and the breadth of it; for to you will I give it."
But stay away from the cities; stay carefully in the countryside; because the Beney Kena'an and other city-peoples have not heard about our covenant yet, and they may not be so keen as you are to fulfill it!
Does the covenant signify his dream of conquest/occupation, or mark its achievement?
13:18 VA YE'EHAL AV-RAM VA YAV'O VA YESHEV BE ELONEY MAMRE ASHER BE CHEVRON VA YIVEN SHAM MIZBE'ACH LA YHVH
וַיֶּאֱהַל אַבְרָם וַיָּבֹא וַיֵּשֶׁב בְּאֵלֹנֵי מַמְרֵא אֲשֶׁר בְּחֶבְרוֹן וַיִּבֶן־שָׁם מִזְבֵּחַ לַיהוָה
KJ: Then Abram removed his tent, and came and dwelt in the plain of Mamre, which is in Hebron, and built there an altar unto the LORD.
BN: So Av-Ram moved his tent, and came and lived by the terebinth oaks of Mamre, which are in Chevron, and built an altar to YHVH there.
Why the plains of Mamre, and why Chevron? Wasn't it previously Moreh, not Mamre? Nonetheless this is the start of the history of the Beney Yisra-El as a tribe of Kena'an proper. The terebinths again inform us that the area was a grove sacred to the polytheistic fertility cult. Why leave the Beit-El shrine for this one? (To which the answer is the one I gave to verse 15 - the "whole land" appears to have been a tiny corner of Kena'an - so tiny that a switch from the north to the south would indeed take him to Chevron - Beit-El was about 15 miles north of Beit Lechem, Chevron about 30 miles south).
MAMRE: see Genesis 14:13, which will tell us that "there came one that had escaped, and told Av-Ram the Ivri (הָעִבְרִי); now he dwelt by the terebinths of Mamre the Emori, the brother of Eshkol, and the brother of Aner; and these were confederate with Av-Ram"; this indicates that Mamre was the name of a man, or a deity, and only secondarily the name of the place. The name is given as Emorite, so there is no point looking for a Yehudit root to explain the meaning of the name; except that Av-Ram is also given as an Emorite, so perhaps Yehudit started as an Emoritic language and... the root is in fact MEMER (ממר), which means "sadness", and is itself derived as a Pi'el (intensive) form of the base-root MAR, which means "bitter", which we have already seen as the root of both Mir-Yam (Miriam) and Mor-Yah, the latter being Mount Moriah in Yeru-Shala'im, and the source of the name Maria or Mary in the Christian myth. Do I need to go through the full explanation yet again... sun-god, moon-goddess, ever-dying ever-reborn son, and the bitter waters that are at once purgation and the journey into She'ol... but it is worth pointing out that the separation of Av-Ram and Lot has one going to the "bitter waters" of Mamre, while the other goes to the bitumen and asphalt of the Dead Sea.
CHEVRON: Hebron, in most English renditions. Surely Chevron already existed as a shrine, and didn't need an altar? (And again, it wasn't to YHVH, because Av-Ram never worshipped YHVH until the Redactor changed the text; he worshipped El-Shadai.) Indeed Josephus says that Chevron was "as old as Memphis in Egypt", and suggests of the oak-tree there that "report goes that this tree has continued since the creation of the world". Which probably indicates a symbolic world-tree rather than an actual tree (see notes to Asherah), because oaks live a long time, but not long enough for Josephus to have seen this one himself.
Once again, note that all this story is Yahwistic, not Elohimnik; can we state that Av-Ram is YHVH and Av-Racham Elohim, thus making them two amalgamated versions of the same story/character, or even the amalgamated versions of two different stories/characters? Probably not, but it may well be on the right track. Which is to say, like Beit-El, like al-Lat, like the real story of Chevron which comes later, it is en route to the absorption of all non-Yahwistic cults into the Yahwistic, around the time of Ezra.
VA YAV'O: One last thought. The text says YAV'O = "came", rather than "HALACH" or "NASA", either of which would have served for "went". The difference indicates the location of the narrator, not the protagonist. At what point of history might the narrator have been located in Chevron, and recounting the tale there? The Davidic seems logical.
End of fragment three; end of Chapter 13.
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Genesis: 1a 1b 1c 1d 2a 2b 2c 2d 3 4a 4b 4c/5 6a 6b 7 8 9 10 11a 11b 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25a 25b 26a 26b 27 28a 28b 29 30a 30b 31a 31b/32a 32b 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44a 44b 45 46 47a 47b 48 49 50
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