Genesis 29:34 names him as a son of Le'ah and Ya'akov's (Jacob's) third child.
Genesis 34:25 ff identifies him as a pair with his elder brother Shim'on (Simeon); together they revenge Dinah against Shechem, and are cursed by Ya'akov; clearly the curse was later lifted, since he acquired the second most important role in Judaism, the priesthood! Does this pairing infer that they were twins? (Shim'on was the second-born, Levi the third, so it is plausible).
Genesis 46:11 ff names his sons as Gershon, Kehat and Merari.
Genesis 49:5/7 gives Ya'akov's blessing: "Shimon and Levi are brothers; weapons of violence their kinship. Let my soul not come into their council; to their assembly let my glory not be united; for in their anger they slew men, and in their self-will they houghed oxen. Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce, and their wrath, for it was cruel; I will divide them in Ya'akov, and scatter them in Yisra-El."
Once again, the blessings of Ya'akov turn out not to be "blessings" at all – closer to curses in many cases! This is because the Redactor needed to reduce them from their real status as horoscopal oracles. This "blessing" is generally held to reflect the Cherem (or we might say, the "religiously inspired massacre") at Shechem, but in fact the details do not match; there they did not kill one man, but wiped out a whole city; there is nothing in the Shechem story about them "digging down a wall". Then what is it about?
"Instruments of cruelty are in their habitations" - which is how King James renders this - is a crudely unliteral mistranslation of "Kley chamas mechoroteyhem - כלי חמס מכרתיהם." Hertz prefers "weapons of violence are their kinship" which is closer. Both are using the root Machar (מכר) = "acquaintance"; but Mecherah (מכרה) means "a sword", and it is perfectly simple to translate the phrase literally as "Their swords (mechoroteyhem) are weapons (kley) of violence (chamas)", which reflects the Shechem story more closely too. Chamas, meaning "violence", is indeed the name you think you recognise, from a certain Palestinian terrorist organisation.
"Let my soul not come into their secret - בסדם אל-תבש נפשי - unto their assembly let my honour not be united - בקהלם אל-תחד כבדי- for in their anger they slew a man - כי בעפם הרגו איש- and in their self-will they dug down a wall - וברצנם עקרו-שור."
Hertz gives "council" for "secret", "glory" for "honour", and for the last phrase puts "they houghed oxen" in place of "they dug down a wall", which highlights the extent of the difficulty scholars have in making sense of the ancient Yehudit.
Sodam (סדם) is better translated as "council" than "secret", though we should not ignore the fact that the city of Sedom (Sodom - סדם) shares its spelling - though this may be more useful as an aide to understanding what Sedom did that was so wrong.
Kahal (קהל) does indeed mean assembly, though Kehelah (קהלה) was mentioned in Numbers 33:22 as a station in the wilderness, and Kohelet (קהלת) was the name, usually translated as "the preacher", by which King Shelomoh (Solomon) was addressed in the Book of Ecclesiastes.
Ya'akov then is declining either to follow their advice or to listen to their sermons. Why? Because of what the next verse says they did. "For in their anger they slew a man" - which is plain enough. But "Ikru shor" as we have seen is somewhat more ambivalent. "Dug a wall" or "houghed oxen"?
Shur (שור) has many meanings. It is the name of a town that stood almost exactly where Suez stands now. It is used to mean "to go on a journey", "to look around", "to arrange stones in order", even "to lie in wait for an enemy". Then which one here? Its link to Ikru (עקרו) must contain the answer, but Ikru means "to root out" or "pluck up", and is also used for overthrowing cities, cobbling (houghing) no longer useful animals, and even means "to be barren". It is sadly impossible to evince any conclusion out of all this welter of information.
Given that Levi and Shim'on are later regarded as twins in Jewish commentary, it is interesting to note that Aph (אף), which appears in the next verse and is generally translated as "anger", is elsewhere used to mean "two people" or "two faces", as a variation upon Panim (פנים) = "face"; in 1 Samuel 1:5 for example we find "Manah achat apayim (מנה אחת אפים)". Aph is really "the nose", and anose has two sides, two nostrils, which is probably the explanation of this.
Sodam (סדם) is better translated as "council" than "secret", though we should not ignore the fact that the city of Sedom (Sodom - סדם) shares its spelling - though this may be more useful as an aide to understanding what Sedom did that was so wrong.
Kahal (קהל) does indeed mean assembly, though Kehelah (קהלה) was mentioned in Numbers 33:22 as a station in the wilderness, and Kohelet (קהלת) was the name, usually translated as "the preacher", by which King Shelomoh (Solomon) was addressed in the Book of Ecclesiastes.
Ya'akov then is declining either to follow their advice or to listen to their sermons. Why? Because of what the next verse says they did. "For in their anger they slew a man" - which is plain enough. But "Ikru shor" as we have seen is somewhat more ambivalent. "Dug a wall" or "houghed oxen"?
Shur (שור) has many meanings. It is the name of a town that stood almost exactly where Suez stands now. It is used to mean "to go on a journey", "to look around", "to arrange stones in order", even "to lie in wait for an enemy". Then which one here? Its link to Ikru (עקרו) must contain the answer, but Ikru means "to root out" or "pluck up", and is also used for overthrowing cities, cobbling (houghing) no longer useful animals, and even means "to be barren". It is sadly impossible to evince any conclusion out of all this welter of information.
Given that Levi and Shim'on are later regarded as twins in Jewish commentary, it is interesting to note that Aph (אף), which appears in the next verse and is generally translated as "anger", is elsewhere used to mean "two people" or "two faces", as a variation upon Panim (פנים) = "face"; in 1 Samuel 1:5 for example we find "Manah achat apayim (מנה אחת אפים)". Aph is really "the nose", and anose has two sides, two nostrils, which is probably the explanation of this.
A character named Apayim (אפים) appears in 1 Chronicles 2:30, as the son of Nadav, the father of Yishay (ישעי) and the grandfather of Sheshan (ששן). Nadav means "generous"; Yishay is a form of the word that gives the Divine Child, of which Yehoshu'a (Joshua), Yesha-Yahu (Isaiah) and Yeshu (Jesus) are also synonyms. Sheshan comes from Shush (שוש) = "white", from which comes the Persian Susa and the white lily Shoshanna (שושנה) – or more likely the other way around: Yehudit will have taken the words from the Persian. Apayim can thus be taken as a Yisra-Eli equivalent of Janus, the two-headed god, whose progeny here should in fact be father and son and not grandchild and son: the white goddess and divine child concealed yet again. Given what we have already deduced about Levi, this makes Aph in this context a synonym for Levi, and we can translate the verse slightly differently.
But we also have to pick up a second tier of "secret" meaning, hinted at by the fatherhood of "generosity"; because "Apayim" is also one of the Thirteen Attributes of the deity - found in the liturgy in the chanted verse "YHVH, YHVH, El rachum ve chanun, erech, apayim, ve rav chesed ve emet; YHVH, YHVH, merciful and gracious god, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth." (Exodus 34:6)
The Levites had no inheritance when the land of Kena'an (Canaan) was apportioned by Yehoshu'a, though they were given refuge-cities in each tribe. This is probably because they were never actually a tribe at all, not even in the sense that we are re-interpreting the word "tribe" in TheBibleNet. They were simply that group of people consecrated to the priesthood, and though we are told in the Mosaic writings that only the descendants of Aharon could become priests, in fact we know from discrepancies in the Tanach (e.g. 2 Samuel 8:18), that King David's sons served as priests, despite not being Beney Levi: the requirement to be descendants of Mosheh and Aharon probably belongs to the Second Temple period, and it is even likely that the tribe was a reverse anachronism to validate retroactively that new requirement. Aharon was a Beney Levi and established the Kohanic (or Cohenic; from the Sanskrit Khan = "priest-king") dynasty.
Aharon (אהרון) in Arabic is Haroun (Yehudit would write that as הרון), which links to the name Haran (הרן), the youngest brother of Av-Ram and Nachor; and also to Horus, the falcon-headed Egyptian son-god whose shrine at On (Heliopolis) is linked to the Yoseph, Bin-Yamin and Mosheh stories. Yoseph in fact married the daughter of the priest (Kohen) of On, as Mosheh married his Midyanite equivalent, Tsiporah; Mosheh and Aharon were descended from Levi through Gershon.
The root of the name is Lavah (לוה) = "to join closely", "to borrow"; the words for "garland" and "crown" are both Livyah (לויה), which is probably an ellipsis of Lavah (לוה) and Yah (יה); so that the original Yisra-Eli king, who wore the garland as the equivalent of a crown on his head, was in fact a sacred priest-king or Khan of the moon-goddess: i.e there was no distinction between a Kohen and a Levi because the two words meant the same thing in different languages (as Dieu and Gott do in French and German). At some point, but it is not clear when, the two functions in the theocracy came to be separated, with the Kohanim and the Beney Levi taking very different roles. This may well explain how David's sons came to be priests; and if it does, then we can state that the division of roles must have been post-Davidic, and therefore probably post-Solomonic as well.
The name is also connected to Lev-Yatan (Leviathan - לויתן), the Tan ending recalling Nechushtan (נחשתן), Mosheh's banner, and Akalaton (עקלתן) from Akalah (עקלה), meaning "coiled"; both being epithets for the Great Serpent of the moon-goddess (the serpent in Eden is likewise Nachash - נחש. Lev-Yatan in Job is clearly the sea-monster Tahamat, the Tohu and Tehom of Genesis 1:2); though elsewhere it regarded simply as the crocodile. There is clearly an ancient priestly link to the oracular sacred-serpent cult of the fertility goddess for which cf Chavah (Eve) in Eden etc. In that case we can perhaps make the link more clear. Levi, as we have seen in Leviyah and Lev-Yatan, is the priest of the moon-goddess; the Kohen is the priest of the sun-god, her husband.
Astrologically their being twins links them to Gemini, which would place them in April according to the calendar in Ya'akov's time (June today, because the astrological signs move forward a month every two thousand two hundred years).
Copyright © 2019 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press
No comments:
Post a Comment