see also BEN-ONI
Genesis 35:18 has him born on the road to Ephrat, which later came to be within the tribal area of Bin-Yamin, so perhaps it was retrospective. His mother Rachel died on the road, while giving birth, and was buried in Beit Lechem Ephratah, which is to say that the ewe-goddess Rachel, priestess of the moon-cult, had her shrine at Beit Lechem Ephratah, the House of the Corn-God of the Euphrates, Tammuz; the exact Babylonian equivalent of Bin-Yamin's "brother" Yoseph, whose stories clearly identify him with the Egyptian vegetation god of the Nile, Osher (Osiris); as those of Mosheh identify him with Osher too.
Rachel called her son Ben Oni (בן אוני), which the Tanach renders (Genesis 35:18) as "child of my affliction" in one of its familiar false aetiologies: Ben Oni in that meaning is not a name but an epithet. What becomes apparent in the Egyptian stories, especially his role as cup-bearer to Yoseph (Genesis 44), and his status as youngest son in a family for whom ultimogeniture was the norm, is that Ben Oni really means "inhabitant of the city of On" (און). On was the Egyptian name for Heliopolis, the city of the sun-god and the capital before the Hyksos conquest moved the capital to Avaris, in Goshen, where Ya'akov settled.
Yoseph's wife Asnat (אסנת) was a daughter of the high priest of On, and Yoseph as Pharaoh's Vizier or "right-hand-man" (which is the meaning of Bin-Yamin) makes On his own city. There is even a case to be made that Bin-Yamin and Yoseph were the same person, confused by separating them in the later Yisra-Eli legends: one pillar for this theory is the parallel in ancient Ireland, where the Ollave or Ollamh, the Master-Poet, the equivalent of the Prophet Shemu-El's (Samuel's) relationship to King Sha'ul, or the Archbishop of Canterbury's to the monarch of England, sat at the king's right hand, brought him the silver goblet, and shared with the king the privilege of wearing six colours in his clothing (indeed, so similar are the roles, I can't help wondering if Ollave isn't a dialect variation of Levi).
In the original Egyptian version of this myth (see for example "The Tale of the Two Brothers"), Yoseph and Bin-Yamin almost certainly were the same person, and even more probably neither of them ever set foot in Kena'an in their lives, any more than Rachel did until the Redactor found it convenient to bring her there for death and burial; and that an Egyptian myth has been married to an almost identical Babylonian myth at some later point in Yisra-Eli history.
Genesis 42:4, and 43:15 ff make him the key second figure in the Yoseph story in Mitsrayim. It is he who carries away the silver cup, the Grail Cup from which the wizard Yoseph in his capacity as High Priest of On made his divinations; a version of what would become the kiddush becher in the later Jewish tradition. The role of cup-bearer to Yoseph echoes that of the cup-bearer to Pharaoh whose dream Yoseph interprets (Genesis 40). If Bin-Yamin and Yoseph were separate people, then they stood in relation to each other in their royal offices, exactly as the bread stands to the wine in communion or kiddush services, with Yoseph in charge of the bread (the corn) and Bin-Yamin the wine - a repetition of the butler and baker in the first part of the tale. However the bread is not in fact bread, nor the wine wine, as we shall see shortly.
Ya'akov on the other hand names him Bin-Yamin (בנימין - the secund yud/י is important in giving the meaning), not Ben Oni. It is most odd that each parent should give their son a different name. He is clearly Ya'akov's favourite - a fact we can attribute to ultimogeniture. Ya'akov was an Aramaean from mid-Syria, and we know of the existence of a tribe of Middle Syria called the Bene Jamun; most likely the original Bin-Yamin did not have that secund Yud/י. Were they the original Aramaeans who came down into Kena'an and established a tribal area to the south of Yehudah? Bene Jamun echoes Bin-Yamin just closely enough. And as a Ba'alite tribe, they would have had their own Ba'al-Anat-Tammuz version of the same legend into which the Egyptian version could easily merge. Beit Anatot (בית אנתות- Bethany) where Anat had her Temple was also in the tribal area of Bin-Yamin.
Having him born in his own tribal area was obviously essential in order to justify the tribal area. Remember that Bin-Yamin was the only other tribe to survive, incorporated within Yehudah, after the various destructions and exiles; and Yeru-Shala'im, the nation's capital, was in Bin-Yamin's tribal territory, not Yehudah's. It is not insignificant, if Bin-Yamin and Yoseph are indeed the same person in the original Egyptian myth, that Yoseph had no tribal area, but instead his two "sons", Ephrayim and Menasheh, had one each; and of course their tribal areas bordered Bin-Yamin to his north. If the ancient Beney Yisra-El had known that Yoseph was an Egyptian and not a Yisra-Eli, they would not have expected his "successors" to gain a tribal territory.
Genesis 46:19 gives his family list, naming his sons as Bela (בלע), Becher (בכר), Ashbel (אשבל), Gera (גרא), Na'aman (נעמן), Echi (אחי), Rosh (ראש), Mupim (מפים), Chupim (חפים) and Ard (ארד), which is two sons and one daughter fewer than we would expect from a true Yisra-Eli patriarch, but also (but see later on in this essay) one too many for an Egyptian.
Can we learn anything about the father from the names of the sons? (Each of them has his own fuller page on TheBibleNet, as per the hyperlink under his name)
Bela (בלע): means "destruction" or "ruins", and is the alternate name for Tso'ar (צוער), one of the five cities of the plain. Lot fled to Tso'ar after the destruction of Sedom (Genesis 19). An Edomite king from Dinhava bore the name (Genesis 36:32), and another Bela is mentioned in the tribe of Re'u-Ven, though that may well be a dialect variation, or even a mis-spelling, of the name Ba'al. No help here then, except geographically. Re'u-Ven lay to the east of the Dead Sea, Tso'ar on its north-west coast; both close enough to the borders of Bin-Yamin that a tribal link can easily be imagined. The Re'u-Venite area later became part of Mo-Av, and of course King David's legendary great-grandmother Na'ami (נעמי) came from Mo-Av. Many of the genealogical tables turn out to be an ancient way of drawing maps, so we should keep the town-name in mind as we continue.
Becher (בכר): means "first-born". Numbers 26:35 says he was an Ephrayimite, but then Ephrayim was a "son" of Yoseph, so this is not such a problem. It is nonetheless an odd coincidence that the second meaning of Becher is "a wine-cup" and, although the word used in the Yehudit text (Genesis 44:2) is not Becher but Geviyah (גְּבִיעַ), this in fact reinforces rather than undermining the supposition. A Geviyah is specifically a kylyx (whence the Latin word calix, from which the English word "chalice" is taken), and was used as a drinking vessel; where Becher would be a goblet (see the link to "kiddush becher", above), a mug-shaped drinking vessel, the kylyx was closer to a flat cereal bowl, though its two handles enabled a person to pour the drink into their mouth, or to use it for libations.
Ashbel (אשבל): the spelling is erroneous and should be Ish-Ba'al (איש בעל). If the Bene Jamun supposition is correct as the tribal root, this makes for a validatory piece of additional evidence, and may also resolve the number-of-sons issue, because the Great Ennead of On was comprised of nine deities, and Ashbelas Ish-Ba'al turns out to be the same name as Bela as Ba'al, reducing the apparent ten to an actual nine.Gera (גרא): the name means "a grain", which might not be a bad choice for the offspring of the corn-god; the same root gives "agorot", the pennies of the Yisra-Eli coinage.Na'aman (נעמן): the root word Na'am (נעם) means "pleasant", and several names stem from it. Na'amah (נעמה) was a daughter of Lamech (Genesis 4:22), and the mother of Rechav-Am (Rehoboam) in 1 Kings 14:21; Na'aman (נעמן) was a Syrian general whom Elisha cured of leprosy (2 Kings 5:1). But most relevant is Na'ami (נעמי), King David's maternal ancestor from Mo-Av, the mother-in-law and later adoptive mother of Rut (Ruth) - and you thought it was odd, strange and irrelevant that I mentioned her earlier, and even included the Yehudit spelling! A tale of corn-gods, set in the shrine of the corn-god, at Beit-Lechem Ephratah, with her husband Bo'az one of the two pillars at the entrance to the Solomonic Temple... the entire Christian myth resides here, let alone the Davidic Jewish one...
Echi (אחי): Gesenius states that it is almost certainly an abbreviated form of Echud (אחוד), which is the name he is given in 1 Chronicles 8:6 (the pattern is commonplace in Yehudit, to this day, with Av-Raham reduced to Avi, David to Dodi, Bin-Yamin to Benny etc). It means "joining together", and gives the number "one" - Echad (אחד). However, Chronicles is usually the faulty text (it was written several hundred years after the Genesis texts were first set down, and like the folio and quarto Shakespeares was assembled from memories rather than based on documents; it was also specifically an Ephrayimite view of history, where the first nine books – Genesis to Kings – are Yehudan); it makes more sense to treat Echi as correct and Echud as erroneous, provided of course that Echi means anything. It does. It stems from Achu (אחו), an Egyptian word meaning "marsh grass", "reeds" or "bulrushes" and appears in Genesis 41:2 and 41:18, as well as in Job 8:11 and Isaiah 19:7. Osher (Osiris), the Egyptian god of vegetation, like his Yisra-Eli counterpart Mosheh, was found in a basket made of Achu, floating among the Achu on the Nile; Tammuz likewise in Babylon. For Ben Oni to give his children Mitsri (Egyptian) rather than Kena'ani names should not be surprsing.
Ya'akov on the other hand names him Bin-Yamin (בנימין - the secund yud/י is important in giving the meaning), not Ben Oni. It is most odd that each parent should give their son a different name. He is clearly Ya'akov's favourite - a fact we can attribute to ultimogeniture. Ya'akov was an Aramaean from mid-Syria, and we know of the existence of a tribe of Middle Syria called the Bene Jamun; most likely the original Bin-Yamin did not have that secund Yud/י. Were they the original Aramaeans who came down into Kena'an and established a tribal area to the south of Yehudah? Bene Jamun echoes Bin-Yamin just closely enough. And as a Ba'alite tribe, they would have had their own Ba'al-Anat-Tammuz version of the same legend into which the Egyptian version could easily merge. Beit Anatot (בית אנתות- Bethany) where Anat had her Temple was also in the tribal area of Bin-Yamin.
Having him born in his own tribal area was obviously essential in order to justify the tribal area. Remember that Bin-Yamin was the only other tribe to survive, incorporated within Yehudah, after the various destructions and exiles; and Yeru-Shala'im, the nation's capital, was in Bin-Yamin's tribal territory, not Yehudah's. It is not insignificant, if Bin-Yamin and Yoseph are indeed the same person in the original Egyptian myth, that Yoseph had no tribal area, but instead his two "sons", Ephrayim and Menasheh, had one each; and of course their tribal areas bordered Bin-Yamin to his north. If the ancient Beney Yisra-El had known that Yoseph was an Egyptian and not a Yisra-Eli, they would not have expected his "successors" to gain a tribal territory.
Genesis 46:19 gives his family list, naming his sons as Bela (בלע), Becher (בכר), Ashbel (אשבל), Gera (גרא), Na'aman (נעמן), Echi (אחי), Rosh (ראש), Mupim (מפים), Chupim (חפים) and Ard (ארד), which is two sons and one daughter fewer than we would expect from a true Yisra-Eli patriarch, but also (but see later on in this essay) one too many for an Egyptian.
Can we learn anything about the father from the names of the sons? (Each of them has his own fuller page on TheBibleNet, as per the hyperlink under his name)
Bela (בלע): means "destruction" or "ruins", and is the alternate name for Tso'ar (צוער), one of the five cities of the plain. Lot fled to Tso'ar after the destruction of Sedom (Genesis 19). An Edomite king from Dinhava bore the name (Genesis 36:32), and another Bela is mentioned in the tribe of Re'u-Ven, though that may well be a dialect variation, or even a mis-spelling, of the name Ba'al. No help here then, except geographically. Re'u-Ven lay to the east of the Dead Sea, Tso'ar on its north-west coast; both close enough to the borders of Bin-Yamin that a tribal link can easily be imagined. The Re'u-Venite area later became part of Mo-Av, and of course King David's legendary great-grandmother Na'ami (נעמי) came from Mo-Av. Many of the genealogical tables turn out to be an ancient way of drawing maps, so we should keep the town-name in mind as we continue.
Becher (בכר): means "first-born". Numbers 26:35 says he was an Ephrayimite, but then Ephrayim was a "son" of Yoseph, so this is not such a problem. It is nonetheless an odd coincidence that the second meaning of Becher is "a wine-cup" and, although the word used in the Yehudit text (Genesis 44:2) is not Becher but Geviyah (גְּבִיעַ), this in fact reinforces rather than undermining the supposition. A Geviyah is specifically a kylyx (whence the Latin word calix, from which the English word "chalice" is taken), and was used as a drinking vessel; where Becher would be a goblet (see the link to "kiddush becher", above), a mug-shaped drinking vessel, the kylyx was closer to a flat cereal bowl, though its two handles enabled a person to pour the drink into their mouth, or to use it for libations.
Ashbel (אשבל): the spelling is erroneous and should be Ish-Ba'al (איש בעל). If the Bene Jamun supposition is correct as the tribal root, this makes for a validatory piece of additional evidence, and may also resolve the number-of-sons issue, because the Great Ennead of On was comprised of nine deities, and Ashbelas Ish-Ba'al turns out to be the same name as Bela as Ba'al, reducing the apparent ten to an actual nine.Gera (גרא): the name means "a grain", which might not be a bad choice for the offspring of the corn-god; the same root gives "agorot", the pennies of the Yisra-Eli coinage.Na'aman (נעמן): the root word Na'am (נעם) means "pleasant", and several names stem from it. Na'amah (נעמה) was a daughter of Lamech (Genesis 4:22), and the mother of Rechav-Am (Rehoboam) in 1 Kings 14:21; Na'aman (נעמן) was a Syrian general whom Elisha cured of leprosy (2 Kings 5:1). But most relevant is Na'ami (נעמי), King David's maternal ancestor from Mo-Av, the mother-in-law and later adoptive mother of Rut (Ruth) - and you thought it was odd, strange and irrelevant that I mentioned her earlier, and even included the Yehudit spelling! A tale of corn-gods, set in the shrine of the corn-god, at Beit-Lechem Ephratah, with her husband Bo'az one of the two pillars at the entrance to the Solomonic Temple... the entire Christian myth resides here, let alone the Davidic Jewish one...
Echi (אחי): Gesenius states that it is almost certainly an abbreviated form of Echud (אחוד), which is the name he is given in 1 Chronicles 8:6 (the pattern is commonplace in Yehudit, to this day, with Av-Raham reduced to Avi, David to Dodi, Bin-Yamin to Benny etc). It means "joining together", and gives the number "one" - Echad (אחד). However, Chronicles is usually the faulty text (it was written several hundred years after the Genesis texts were first set down, and like the folio and quarto Shakespeares was assembled from memories rather than based on documents; it was also specifically an Ephrayimite view of history, where the first nine books – Genesis to Kings – are Yehudan); it makes more sense to treat Echi as correct and Echud as erroneous, provided of course that Echi means anything. It does. It stems from Achu (אחו), an Egyptian word meaning "marsh grass", "reeds" or "bulrushes" and appears in Genesis 41:2 and 41:18, as well as in Job 8:11 and Isaiah 19:7. Osher (Osiris), the Egyptian god of vegetation, like his Yisra-Eli counterpart Mosheh, was found in a basket made of Achu, floating among the Achu on the Nile; Tammuz likewise in Babylon. For Ben Oni to give his children Mitsri (Egyptian) rather than Kena'ani names should not be surprsing.
Rosh (ראש): Ezekiel 38:2 and 39:1 mention a northern people of this name, and link it with two other tribes, Tuval (תֻבָל) and Meshech (מֶשֶׁךְ). Meshech is located in what is now called Armenia, and Tuval's southern border is the northern border of what was then called Aram - in other words, Rosh lived in precisely the same region as the original Bene Jamun.
Does that provide an alternate explanation for the nine being ten? Leave Bela and Ashbel as separate, but take out the non-Egyptian Rosh? Possibly.Mupim (מפים): This has presented many problems to lexicographers, who invariably end by assuming it is an error for some other tribe - Gesenius, the best of them, lands on Shephupham (שפופם), the gods help us! But the Egyptian word for Memphis, the capital city where the Pharaoh lived, is Moph (מף), and residents of Memphis would have been precisely Mupim (מפים). Yet again, an Egyptian name for Ben Oni's children, and Middle Syrian names for Bin-Yamin's.Chupim (חפים): On this one TheBibleNet confesses to being bamboozled. See my link, though there is very little there. One possible root is Chof, meaning "the sea-coast"; if the interpretation of Mupim is correct, then Chupim from Chof would be logical, and would be a nicely poetic way of distinguishing the inhabitants of Upper Egypt, where Memphis was the capital, from Lower Egypt, the coastal land of Goshen where Ya'akov's people settled. With one qualification: Memphis was the Upper capital under the Pharaohs, but not under the Hyksos, who moved it to Avaris, in Goshen.
Ard (ארד): Genesis 46:21 prefers to see him as a grandson of Bin-Yamin, out of Bela, as does Numbers 26:40 - which provides a third route to reduce our list to nine 1 Chronicles 2:18 has an Ardon (ארדון) meaning "fugitive", which of course all the twelve tribes would have been perceived as being by the Egyptians, after Mosheh took them across the "Red Sea" (or were they perhaps a class rather than a tribe, from their time inside Pharaonic Egypt?)
1 Chronicles 7:6 ff gives Bin-Yamin's tribal list rather differently, naming his sons as: Bela, Becher and Yedi'a-El (ידיעאל) and excluding all the others. Yedi'a-El has to be either wrong, or an attempt to associate him with El-worship at the time of writing the history, for there are no El connections anywhere in the Benjamite tales.
Genesis 49:27 gives Ya'akov's blessing:
BIN-YAMIN ZE'EV YITRAPH BA BOKER YOCHAL AD VE LA EREV YECHALEK SHALAL
ZE'EV (זאב) means "a wolf"; the only other use of the word as a name is for a Midyanite prince in Judges 7:25 and 8:3, and also in Psalm 83:12. The only connection, and it is vague, is that Yoseph was trafficked to Mitsrayim by Midyanites, and Mosheh escaped from Mitsrayim to Midyan, where he married Tsiporah (צפרה), the daughter of the High Priest Yitro, as Yoseph had married Asnat, the daughter of the high priest of On. (Is the repetition of a legend being reflected in that parallel?) This takes us nowhere in solving the riddle, but as a side note, Tsiporah comes from the root Tsaphar (צפר) which means "to wound with claws", whence Tsipur (צפר) = "a bird", and Tsaphir (צפיר) = "a billy-goat".
YITRAPH (יטרף) comes from the root Taraph (טרף) which is used to mean "an animal torn in pieces" (as in "wounded with claws", just the same as Tsiporah) or "a newly plucked leaf". Yoseph was described as being Taroph Toreph (טרף טורף) - eaten by a wild beast - when his brothers brought his bloody coat back to Ya'akov (Genesis 37:33). Osher (Osiris) is likewise Taroph, torn indeed into so many pieces that Eshet (Isis) has to scour most of Egypt and the coast of Kena'an to find all his pieces and put him back together again. And the modern Yiddish word for non-kosher meat, from the same root, is Treyf, or Treif...
However...the Yehudit here is Yitraph (יטרף), which is the Niphal or passive form, and not Yitroph (יטרוף) which would be the Po'al or active; though every translation you can find translates it as though it were active. This is important. It actually says that Benjamin "will be" torn in pieces, rather than doing the tearing; and then Yechalek (יחלק) - divided, which again should be passive, though the absence of pointing would allow active in the Pi'el form. Thus Bin-Yamin incurs the fate of Yoseph - as though they were the same person; the fate, indeed, of Osher.
BA BOKER YOCHAL (בבקר יאכל): "in the morning" is the usual rendition, and it is etymologically valid. But again Yochal (יאכל) is passive, not active, and Boker is simply a mis-reading. Instead of Ba boker yochal, Ba Bakar Ye'achal is also etymologically valid; it would mean "eaten by cattle". Given the context, not to mention the grazing herds in the fields alongside the Nile and Euphrates...
AD VE LA EREV (עד ולערב): the Yisra-Eli love of puns is found throughout the Tanach, and puns are the nub of riddles. Ad ve la erev is grammatically awkward, and not an idiom that has ever been known to be used, though it allows the pun to be made on Erev (ערב) = "evening" and Orev (ערב), the crow which just happens to accompany the Ze'ev in all of the links I have noted above (see below).
An Orev is "a raven" (English translators who say "ravin as a wolf" in the first part of the line have unintentionally captured the punning-game themselves). And a raven is a predatory bird that feeds on slaughtered creatures ("wounded by claws"). It is also the sacred bird of the goddess of the Underworld - Eshet in the time of her searching for Osher, himself the god of the underworld; Inanna in the Babylonian equivalent).
Orev (ערב) is also "a weeping willow", and as we know from Devorah's burial at Alon Bachot - the weeping oak in her case - this is the same goddess' sacred tree. And just to make it even more interesting, there is a character named Orev (ערב) who appears in Psalm 83:12 and Isaiah 10:26, but more significantly in Judges 7:25 and 8:3, always as a pairing of Orev with Ze'ev, and in the latter with Midyan as well.
The text of Judges 7:25, which Isaiah 10:26 then alludes to, reads: "and they took two princes of the Midyanites, Orev and Ze'ev, and they slew Orev upon the rock Orev, and Ze'ev they slew at the winepress of Ze'ev, and pursued Midyan, and brought the heads of Orev and Ze'ev to Gid'on (Gideon) on the other side of the Yarden (Jordan)". Orev and Ze'ev, both named in the Bin-Yamin blessing. Something ritualistic is clearly going on here: a deliberate act of sacrifice, a Toreph in fact, a tearing apart of the bodies, a wounding with claws.
And as to the rocks and wine-presses. Rocks, as we know from the Akeda (the non-sacrifice of Yitschak in Genesis 21), are places of sacrifice, and wine-presses require cup-bearers. The equivalents of Orev and Ze'ev in the Yoseph story are the two men whose dreams he interprets in the dungeon, one of them the cup-bearer (butler, as he is usually called) to Pharaoh, the other his Sar Ha Tabach (סר הטבח). Now Sar ha-Tabach is usually translated as "baker", which connects the communion wine with the eucharistic bread, but is also something else even more significant. Tabach (טבח) means "a sacrifice", whether animal or human, and Sar ha-Tabach was the name for the official executioner. In the Yoseph story too we hear about the fate of their heads: the one lifted up, the other lifted off, and then, guess what, "picked clean by ravens" (ערבים) - Genesis 40:19 if you want to check. In Judges their heads are brought to Gideon. Gideon in Hebrew is Gid'on (גדעון), from the root Gad'a (גדע), which means "to cut down", a verb generally used for the pruning of vines. Rather appropriate, wouldn't you say? The tribe of Gad was located on Bin-Yamin's east, on the opposite side of the river Yarden. Tso'ar was one of its major cities.
YECHALEK (יחלק) I have already observed that this should be treated as passive, YUCHLAK; again we have the idea of things cut up or divided.
SHALAL (שלל): is treated as meaning "spoil", the newly deciphered context seems to infer the hyena-parts, the last meat picked from the bones of the sacrificial first-born Midyanite prince, conquered by the Gadites (and Gad - גד - just happens to mean "a he-goat").
All that remains then is to re-translate the riddle using our decipherment of the original intention, hidden by the redactors when they sought to impose YHVH on an Egyptian sacred text…
And while you are undertaking that task (much better if you do it, than me doing it for you!)...
Nehemiah 3:23 names a Bin-Yamin who effected some repairs on the walls of Yeru-Shala'im.
1 Samuel 9:1 and many others refer to the "district" of Bin-Yamin, which presumably means the origin of his tribal domain.
Ard (ארד): Genesis 46:21 prefers to see him as a grandson of Bin-Yamin, out of Bela, as does Numbers 26:40 - which provides a third route to reduce our list to nine 1 Chronicles 2:18 has an Ardon (ארדון) meaning "fugitive", which of course all the twelve tribes would have been perceived as being by the Egyptians, after Mosheh took them across the "Red Sea" (or were they perhaps a class rather than a tribe, from their time inside Pharaonic Egypt?)
1 Chronicles 7:6 ff gives Bin-Yamin's tribal list rather differently, naming his sons as: Bela, Becher and Yedi'a-El (ידיעאל) and excluding all the others. Yedi'a-El has to be either wrong, or an attempt to associate him with El-worship at the time of writing the history, for there are no El connections anywhere in the Benjamite tales.
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| "Joseph's Cup Found in Benjamin's Sack", Giovanni da Brescia c 1520 |
Genesis 49:27 gives Ya'akov's blessing:
"Bin-Yamin shall be ravenous like a wolf; in the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil."Which sounds more like a riddle or an oracle than a blessing, as indeed all the blessings were originally not blessings at all but oracular statements relating to the tribes, and even more to the constellations which the tribes were supposed to mirror; and therefore effectively riddles. Pascal once wrote that "the Old Testament is a cipher". Can we, then, decipher it?
בִּנְיָמִין זְאֵב יִטְרָף בַּבֹּקֶר יֹאכַל עַד וְלָעֶרֶב יְחַלֵּק שָׁלָל
BIN-YAMIN ZE'EV YITRAPH BA BOKER YOCHAL AD VE LA EREV YECHALEK SHALAL
ZE'EV (זאב) means "a wolf"; the only other use of the word as a name is for a Midyanite prince in Judges 7:25 and 8:3, and also in Psalm 83:12. The only connection, and it is vague, is that Yoseph was trafficked to Mitsrayim by Midyanites, and Mosheh escaped from Mitsrayim to Midyan, where he married Tsiporah (צפרה), the daughter of the High Priest Yitro, as Yoseph had married Asnat, the daughter of the high priest of On. (Is the repetition of a legend being reflected in that parallel?) This takes us nowhere in solving the riddle, but as a side note, Tsiporah comes from the root Tsaphar (צפר) which means "to wound with claws", whence Tsipur (צפר) = "a bird", and Tsaphir (צפיר) = "a billy-goat".
YITRAPH (יטרף) comes from the root Taraph (טרף) which is used to mean "an animal torn in pieces" (as in "wounded with claws", just the same as Tsiporah) or "a newly plucked leaf". Yoseph was described as being Taroph Toreph (טרף טורף) - eaten by a wild beast - when his brothers brought his bloody coat back to Ya'akov (Genesis 37:33). Osher (Osiris) is likewise Taroph, torn indeed into so many pieces that Eshet (Isis) has to scour most of Egypt and the coast of Kena'an to find all his pieces and put him back together again. And the modern Yiddish word for non-kosher meat, from the same root, is Treyf, or Treif...
However...the Yehudit here is Yitraph (יטרף), which is the Niphal or passive form, and not Yitroph (יטרוף) which would be the Po'al or active; though every translation you can find translates it as though it were active. This is important. It actually says that Benjamin "will be" torn in pieces, rather than doing the tearing; and then Yechalek (יחלק) - divided, which again should be passive, though the absence of pointing would allow active in the Pi'el form. Thus Bin-Yamin incurs the fate of Yoseph - as though they were the same person; the fate, indeed, of Osher.
BA BOKER YOCHAL (בבקר יאכל): "in the morning" is the usual rendition, and it is etymologically valid. But again Yochal (יאכל) is passive, not active, and Boker is simply a mis-reading. Instead of Ba boker yochal, Ba Bakar Ye'achal is also etymologically valid; it would mean "eaten by cattle". Given the context, not to mention the grazing herds in the fields alongside the Nile and Euphrates...
AD VE LA EREV (עד ולערב): the Yisra-Eli love of puns is found throughout the Tanach, and puns are the nub of riddles. Ad ve la erev is grammatically awkward, and not an idiom that has ever been known to be used, though it allows the pun to be made on Erev (ערב) = "evening" and Orev (ערב), the crow which just happens to accompany the Ze'ev in all of the links I have noted above (see below).
An Orev is "a raven" (English translators who say "ravin as a wolf" in the first part of the line have unintentionally captured the punning-game themselves). And a raven is a predatory bird that feeds on slaughtered creatures ("wounded by claws"). It is also the sacred bird of the goddess of the Underworld - Eshet in the time of her searching for Osher, himself the god of the underworld; Inanna in the Babylonian equivalent).
Orev (ערב) is also "a weeping willow", and as we know from Devorah's burial at Alon Bachot - the weeping oak in her case - this is the same goddess' sacred tree. And just to make it even more interesting, there is a character named Orev (ערב) who appears in Psalm 83:12 and Isaiah 10:26, but more significantly in Judges 7:25 and 8:3, always as a pairing of Orev with Ze'ev, and in the latter with Midyan as well.
The text of Judges 7:25, which Isaiah 10:26 then alludes to, reads: "and they took two princes of the Midyanites, Orev and Ze'ev, and they slew Orev upon the rock Orev, and Ze'ev they slew at the winepress of Ze'ev, and pursued Midyan, and brought the heads of Orev and Ze'ev to Gid'on (Gideon) on the other side of the Yarden (Jordan)". Orev and Ze'ev, both named in the Bin-Yamin blessing. Something ritualistic is clearly going on here: a deliberate act of sacrifice, a Toreph in fact, a tearing apart of the bodies, a wounding with claws.
And as to the rocks and wine-presses. Rocks, as we know from the Akeda (the non-sacrifice of Yitschak in Genesis 21), are places of sacrifice, and wine-presses require cup-bearers. The equivalents of Orev and Ze'ev in the Yoseph story are the two men whose dreams he interprets in the dungeon, one of them the cup-bearer (butler, as he is usually called) to Pharaoh, the other his Sar Ha Tabach (סר הטבח). Now Sar ha-Tabach is usually translated as "baker", which connects the communion wine with the eucharistic bread, but is also something else even more significant. Tabach (טבח) means "a sacrifice", whether animal or human, and Sar ha-Tabach was the name for the official executioner. In the Yoseph story too we hear about the fate of their heads: the one lifted up, the other lifted off, and then, guess what, "picked clean by ravens" (ערבים) - Genesis 40:19 if you want to check. In Judges their heads are brought to Gideon. Gideon in Hebrew is Gid'on (גדעון), from the root Gad'a (גדע), which means "to cut down", a verb generally used for the pruning of vines. Rather appropriate, wouldn't you say? The tribe of Gad was located on Bin-Yamin's east, on the opposite side of the river Yarden. Tso'ar was one of its major cities.
YECHALEK (יחלק) I have already observed that this should be treated as passive, YUCHLAK; again we have the idea of things cut up or divided.
SHALAL (שלל): is treated as meaning "spoil", the newly deciphered context seems to infer the hyena-parts, the last meat picked from the bones of the sacrificial first-born Midyanite prince, conquered by the Gadites (and Gad - גד - just happens to mean "a he-goat").
All that remains then is to re-translate the riddle using our decipherment of the original intention, hidden by the redactors when they sought to impose YHVH on an Egyptian sacred text…
And while you are undertaking that task (much better if you do it, than me doing it for you!)...
Nehemiah 3:23 names a Bin-Yamin who effected some repairs on the walls of Yeru-Shala'im.
1 Samuel 9:1 and many others refer to the "district" of Bin-Yamin, which presumably means the origin of his tribal domain.
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