June 2017 - 29 August 2022 index-genesis
See also the text.
This set of translation and notes, for Genesis 13, was begun as an experiment. I made up a translation of Genesis 13 by reading the Hebrew text, with the assistance of Gesenius's Lexicon as translated by Tregelles, and a concordance where it seemed helpful. Then I made notes as I went along, illustrating various issues that came up. In making the notes, I made free use of the commentaries of Dillmann, Skinner, and Genesis, adapting and stealing their material at will. I also consulted the King James and the World English Bible (in the public domain) to try and make sure that I did at least as well as the two of them in getting the meaning across. Anything written after 1923 that I used in putting this together I cited specifically. Otherwise, just assume I shamelessly stole everything from all over the place. The whole thing is a very amateur production, but an interesting experiment (at least for me).
and Lot with him. Dillmann sees these words as a redactional addition.
into the Negev. This wording often means “south” in the Hebrew Bible, but literally it means toward the Negev, an arid region south of Canaan. In this case, with Abram in Egypt, travelling Negevward means going north and east. Therefore, the King James rendering “into the south” may be misleading. The World English Bible (WEB) does somewhat better, capitalizing it as a proper noun, “the South,” but even this is not as clear as “the Negev,” which is after all what the Hebrew text says.
2. livestock, silver, and gold. The words are pointed by the Masoretes with the article: ba-miqneh, ba-keseph, uba-zahab. According to Dillmann, this might just be a generic article, thus “livestock, silver, and gold” or it might be interpreted as specifically, “the livestock, the silver, and the gold [that he had acquired in Egypt].”
livestock. The KJV reads “cattle,” which is in keeping with a now-archaic broader use of the term, when it used to include sheep and goats as well as cattle in the modern sense.
3. continued his nomadic journeys: literally, he went according to his stages, the word stages being commonly used for the way nomads travel by repeatedly pulling up stakes, moving a ways, and then setting down camp somewhere else. So, with Skinner, I am reading this simply as recording a nomadic movement up from the Negev to Bethel. However, because literally the phrase is by his stages rather than merely by stages, there is an old tradition (Septuagint, Vulgate, Rashi) of reading the phrase as if it indicates that Abram went north by stopping at all the same places he had stopped at as he went south. Driver reads the word stage (he renders it “journey”) as referring to the distance one would travel in a single day.
his tent. There is a Ketiv-Qere variation as to how the Hebrew word translated “his tent” is to be spelled, though it does not affect the meaning. The Qere has the Hebrew word ending with a waw, while the Ketiv, following a more archaic spelling than is usual in the Bible, ends it with a he. Such an archaic spelling of “his tent” can also be found in Genesis 9:21.
Hai. More commonly known as Ai, a name which means “heap of ruins.”
4. Abram called. According to Dillmann, Abram is perhaps a later interpolation here, and the original text may have read he called, making the second half of verse four part of the sentence that begins at the beginning of verse 3.
called on the name of Yahweh. Some sort of idiom for worship. I’m not sure precisely, exactly what calling on the name of Yahweh meant to the writer here.
5. flocks. The Hebrew word refers to sheep and/or goats. Herds refers to cattle. Tents must imply that Lot had a number of people, slaves and perhaps others, traveling with him. Dillmann sees the words tents as implying both “slaves and household goods.”
6. support them. The Masoretic Text has this as a masculine verb, which is unusual with the word earth. The Samaritan Pentateuch, with Skinner’s approval, has the feminine form of the verb here instead.
7. quarreling. Skinner says, “The situation reflects the relations of tribes rather than of private families.” If I am understanding his implication correctly, Skinner is telling us that the text of this chapter reads a later tribal situation back into the experience of Abram and Lot, creating a scenario which, if taken literally, is not quite realistic.
The mention of Canaanites and Perizzites would imply that this was written at a time when Canaanites and Perizzites were no longer present. Because none of the indigenous peoples were expelled until after the death of Moses, this argues against Mosaic authorship. The term Perizzites is usually found in lists of various pre-Israelites inhabitants of the land of Canaan. However, here and in Genesis 34:30 and Judges 1:4, we find the expression “Canaanites and Perizzites” without a further listing of peoples. Skinner raises the possibility that this speaks not so much as an ethnic division as a division into Canaanites, who dwell in walled cities, and Perizzites, who live in villages in the countryside. Skinner mentions, but rejects, the idea that the Perizzites were supposed to be “remnants of a _pre-_Canaanite population.” Driver says that “the Perizzites were a people of central Palestine; but more is not definitely known about them,” and notes the opinion of some commentators who consider it a term for rural agricultural laborers or peasants.
8. relatives. Literally, brother men. Lot is Abram’s nephew, so I think “relatives” is the gist of what the phrase means. Driver takes the phrase as referring specifically to “near relatives.”
Is not the whole land in front of you? Where the Masoretic Text has a rhetorical question (beginning with ha-lo), the Septuagint and Syriac have a declarative statement, beginning with we-hinneh, “And behold, the whole land is before you.”
10-12. Abram gets Canaan, Lot the Jordan Plain. Abram is the ancestor of the Israelites, while Lot is that of the Moabites and Ammonites, according to Genesis. Thus, as Dillmann sees it, the narrator is making the implication that because Lot, the prototypical Moabite/Ammonite, has voluntary chosen the Jordan Plain and left Abram with the land of Canaan, this is intended to deny any claim Moab or Ammon might have a legitimate claim on the land of Canaan. This fits well with what follows immediately after they separate — Yahweh enters the narrative to confirm that it is to Abram, and his descendants, that Canaan will belong. As is usual for the book of Genesis, later realities are described in terms of a prototypical experience of the ancestors. At the same time, the text vouches for the peaceableness and generosity of Abram, while casting Lot as selfish for picking the best land, a move which will later backfire when Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed.
10. lifted up his eyes and saw. Skinner suggests that the vantage point described here is the Burj Beitin, “from which the Jordan valley and the N end of the Dead Sea are clearly visible.”
Jordan Plain. Hebrew kikkar hay-yarden, which Gesenius says denotes something circular. Other translators include such renderings for kikkar as “valley” (ESV, NASB) and “region” (NET). Skinner and Driver read it as, the Oval of the Jordan. According to Skinner the northern end of the kikkar is uncertain (Driver places the north end 25 miles north of the Dead Sea), while the south end must at the site of Zoar, which is unfortunately unknown. Just what we are to imagine Lot looking at depends on whether or not we think that Genesis imagines a time before the existence of the Dead Sea, in which case the kikkar as seen by lot would include a great deal of land now under water. The kikkar is not as fertile in Driver’s time, but Driver supposes that the writer intends it to have been much more fertile in the days of Abram and Lot, before the catastrophe of Sodom.
that all of it was well-watered. The Lucianic recension of the Septuagint omits “all of it.”
before Yahweh destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. According to Skinner these words “might very well be a gloss.”
like the garden of Yahweh. I’m taking this as a reference to the garden of Eden. I could be wrong, though. After all, events and persons mentioned in Genesis 1-11 (the “Primeval History”) tend not to be mentioned again, perhaps indicating that it is a relatively late addition to the rest of the Hebrew Bible. If this is not a reference to the garden of Eden, then perhaps we should drop the and read the phrase as “like a garden of Yahweh.” Dillmann says that dropping the the and reading “a garden of [Yahweh]” is “linguistically impossible,” but I don’t see why it would be.
like the land of Egypt as you come toward Zoar. I’m not sure what to make of this bit. Zoar is a town near the Dead Sea, (Skinner thinks it was most likely at the south end of the Dead Sea) so what would it mean for something to look “like Egypt as you come toward Zoar”? I think I read a paper on this once, but the details are escaping me. I’m translating this phrase the same way that the NASB does.
On the other hand, a number of other translations see like the land of Egypt and as you go toward Zoar, (or, in the direction of Zoar) as two separate phrases. Lot looks across the Jordan Plain “in the direction of Zoar,” and the Jordan Plain is “like the garden of Yahweh, like the land of Egypt.” Severing the reference to Egypt from the reference to Zoar does away with a geographical difficulty. Because Zoar is a small town near the Dead Sea (mentioned in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah), saying, “like the land of Egypt as you go toward Zoar” seems about as strange as “like the state of Illinois as you go toward New Knoxville, Ohio.” It just doesn’t seem like something anyone would say.
The Peshitta deals with this strangeness by emending Zoar to Zoan (Tanis). Ebers accepted the Peshitta reading as correct. Another interpretation is to take Zoar here not as a reference to the Zoar of the Sodom and Gomorrah destruction episode, but as “the name of of the borderland of the north-east of Egypt,” although I doubt there is any evidence for this. Skinner suggests that “like the land of Egypt” was not present in the original form of the verse, which would also solve the difficulty, although then I would wonder who would add the words in here.
11. eastward: Hebrew miq-qedem, which is min- (usually “from”) plus qedem (“east”). One might think that someone traveling “from east” is moving westward, except that the context demands that Lot be moving eastward (from Bethel to the Jordan Plain). On account of this, Skinner records that H. Gunkel and B. Stade suggest an emendation to qedmah, a more straightforward way of saying toward the east.
from one another. Literally, a man from his brother, but of course the two are not literally brothers, so I thought not to confuse the reader by translating literally.
13. in Yahweh’s view. Literally, “to Yahweh.” Another way to take this (though Dillmann discourages it) would be “against Yahweh.”
14. Lift up your eyes. Abram is at Bethel, and therefore “pretty much in the centre of the country, and at the same high up on the hills. From its heights there appears to have been a wide overlook over the various parts of the country” (Dillmann).
17. to you. The Septuagint reads, to you and to your descendants forever, which C. J. Ball thinks is the original reading (Skinner, Dillmann).
18. took his tent. In Hebrew this is a verb, like a verbal form of the more common noun tent, “Abram tenteth” is how Young’s Literal Translation puts it. Dillmann takes it to describe Abram wandering about in nomadic fashion until he arrived at Hebron.
at Elonei Mamre. That is, the oaks of Mamre, or, the terebinths of Mamre. It seems likely that Elon-_trees had a religious significance, and marked sacred sites. The Septuagint reads a singular, _oak of Mambre (the Syriac also has a singular reading). Possibly as a result of this, the translators of the New King James Version seem to have gotten themselves mixed up, and have a footnote which reads “Hebrew Alon Mamre,” as if the Masoretic Text agreed with the Septuagint here in having a singular reading.
According to Driver, the exact present site of Mamre is not known, though Hebron is a known site, about 19 miles south-southwest of Jerusalem. Instead of terebinths of Mamre, the KJV (incorrectly) reads plain of Mamre.
in Hebron. The mention of Abram building an altar in Hebron provides an etiology for Hebron’s use as a cultic site (Dillmann).
At the end of this verse, the Masoretic Text (Leningrad Codex) has a petuhah paragraph marker.
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