17 August 2022 draft-bible
1. he heard. So reads the Hebrew. WEB supplies “Jacob”.
1. wealth. Hebrew kabod. In some cases, kabod is ‘glory’, but ‘wealth’ is also a meaning of the term, and seems more appropriate in this context.
6. strength. Hebrew koaḥ. Both ‘strength’ and ‘power’ would probably work just fine here.
10. the flock’s breeding season. Hebrew bᵉʿet yaḥem ha-ṣon.
11, 12. the he-goats mating with the flock. Literally, the he-goats going up upon the flock.
11. An angel of God. Hebrew malʾak ha-ʾelohim. For the reason to read ‘an angel’ here instead of ‘the angel’, see S. A. Meier, “Angel of Yahweh”, in DDD2.
12. and see. It is normal for WEB to read ‘see’ where the ASV reads ‘behold’, but the reverse is unusual. Making it stranger, the Hebrew here is the verb RʾH, which is usually translated ‘see’ even in archaic translations.
13. I am the god of Bethel. Why does an angel claim to be God? According to S. A. Meier, “Angel of Yahweh”, in DDD2, many passages in which God appears or speaks seemed to some later readers to be inappropriately anthropomorphic, and by the addition of the Hebrew malʾak (‘angel’) in front of the word ‘God’ or ‘Yahweh’, the actor in the passage became an ‘angel of God’ or ‘angel of Yahweh’ rather than the deity himself. This procedure has left traces behind in passages where the now ‘angel’ speaks in ways indicating that he is God himself.
15. also quite devoured. Hebrew wayyokal gam-ʾakol. The ASV preserves the eating metaphor which WEB obscures.
15. our money. Hebrew kaspenu. This can also be interpreted as “the price paid for us” (RV margin) meaning the fruits of Jacob’s fourteen years of labor (Driver, Genesis, 10th ed., 1916 [1904]).
18. This verse seems needlessly repetitive in the Hebrew, and several translations attempt to shorten the verse in various ways. According to Speiser, the portion of verse 18 which begins with “and all…” is a “transparent insert from P” (Genesis, 1964, ad loc.). It is by no means only Speiser who sees a redactional seam here: the exact same division of the verse can also be found in Driver (Genesis, 10th ed.,1916 [1904]), Dillmann (Genesis, Vol II., trans. Stevenson, 1897), and Skinner (Genesis, ICC, 1910).
WEB attempts to handle the redundancy by adding the word ‘including’ where no Hebrew equivalent for it exists. I don’t think this move eliminates the problem which it attempts to solve – there is still unexplained redundancy in the verse even if we grant WEB the addition of ‘including’.
18. livestock. Hebrew miqneh, a word broader in meaning than ‘cattle’, if by ‘cattle’ one means bovines. I have translated both instances of the word in this verse as “livestock”, while Speiser reads the first as ‘livestock’ and the second as ‘property’.
19. stole. Speiser reads ‘appropriated’, and argues that the semantic range of the Hebrew g-n-b is broad enough to include the taking of an object without necessarily implying that the taking was wrong – and Speiser goes on to argue that legal parallels from Nuzi documents indicate that Rachel’s taking of the household gods functioned as a sort of claim to certain property rights. See the comments on this passage in Speiser’s Genesis for details.
19. teraphim. According to the WEB note, echoing the same sort of idea found in Speiser, “terephim were household idols that may have been associated with inheritance rights to the household property.”
20. And Jacob deceived Laban. Literally, ‘And Jacob stole the heart of Laban’. In English, the phrase ‘to steal one’s heart’ means ‘to endear oneself to’, but this is clearly not the meaning in this context. The ASV preserves perhaps part of the figurative phrase by reading ‘stole away unawares’.
20. Aramean. Hebrew ʾarammi.
21. River. Hebrew ha-nahar, capitalized here because this particular word tends to refer specifically to the Euphrates, as it seems to here.
21, 23, 25. hill country of Gilead. The Hebrew har can refer either to a particular mountain or more generally to elevated land. In this case, the whole region of Gilead is hilly. If the phrase har ha-gilᵉʿad refers to a specific peak, just which peak is unknown. NHEB reads ‘hill country’ (nheb.net, 2022-7).
23. he overtook him. So reads the Hebrew. But the KJV, for what reason I am not sure, reads “they overtook him”.
24. Aramean. As in 20.
25. mountain … hill country. The wording of this particular verse is challenging from the standpoint of translation. “Now Jacob had pitched his tent in the har, and Laban with his brethren encamped in the har ha-gilᵉʿad.” If the text intended to say that both Jacob and Laban were simply encamping in the har ha-gilᵉʿad (‘the hill-country of Gilead’) then this is certainly an awkward way to say it – it certainly looks as if there isan attempt to distinguish the har where Jacob is staying from the har ha-gilᵉʿad. Driver suggests that the name of the mountain where Jacob was staying has dropped out of the text. It is unfortunate to translate the word har here by two different terms in a single verse – and it may be a mistake to do so – but I am doing it under the impression that Jacob is being described as being on some specific hill or mountain, while Laban’s people are being described as more generally in the mountainous region of Gilead.
26, 27. deceived. As in 20.
26. carried away. Hebrew g-n-b, the verb translated ‘stolen’ in verse 19, and (with the object ‘heart’) ‘deceived’ in 20, 26, and 27. The repetition of the verb is very noticeable in the Hebrew, and it is unfortunate that the effect is not here reproduced in the English.
30. my gods. Hebrew ʾelohay. Laban describes the stolen objects as ‘gods’, while in verse 19 the narrator uses the word tᵉrafim. Speiser suggests that this is due to the author’s disdain for them, and that tᵉrafim is a “secular, and sometimes irreverent, term … perhaps [meaning] ‘inert things’” (Genesis, 1964, p. 250).
32. will not live. The ASV reads ‘he shall not live’, but the Hebrew wording is non-specific enough that a person of undetermined gender could be in mind.
33. tents of the two slave women. Literally, ‘tent’, but I do not think the Hebrew expression suggests that the two slave women sleep in a single tent. The singular ‘tent’ is found in the NRSV, NIV, ESV, NASB, ASV, WEB, NET, JPS (1917), and Robert Alter’s translation. The plural ‘tents’ is in NLT, KJV, NKJV, CSB, and Speiser (Genesis, 1964). My inclination to follow the majority is in this case tempered by a suspicion that some or all of those who read ‘tent’ in the singular are not intending the reader to actually imagine the two slaves in one tent.
34. saddlebag. Hebrew kar. According to HALOT, this is a saddlebag, while DCH reads “saddle-basket”. BDB and Gesenius describe something more like a camel palanquin or covered litter. In any case, I am not sure how sure one can be about the definition, given that the term appears only once in classical Hebrew (see DCH).
35. it is my time of the month. Literally, ‘I have the way of women.’ The idea here is to translate a Hebrew euphemism with an English euphemism.
47. Jegar Sahadutha is Aramaic for “heap of witness”. Galeed is Hebrew for “heap of witness”.
55 (32:1). The verse counted as 31:55 in the ASV and WEB is counted as 32:1 in BHS, which will in turn introduce a discrepancy of one in the rest of the verses of chapter 32.
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