This week is parshah Bechukotai, the end of Leviticus. The Haftorah is Jeremiah 16:19 - 17:14; I won’t paste the whole thing in, if that’s all right with you. I’ll just put in 17:7-17:10 for a taste:
Blessed [is] the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the LORD is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and [that] spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.
The heart [is] deceitful above all [things], and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the LORD search the heart, [I] try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, [and] according to the fruit of his doings.
Mostly, I read this and I wish I understood this old Hebrew well enough to pick up connotations and puns. Frankly, I wish this old Hebrew were in decent shape; in William L. Holliday’s Commentary, he writes about 17:1-4, “Exegesis must be based on a convincing text, and there is no way to be sure of the text of at least some of this passage; the interpretation must therefore be tentative.” These verses are a little better, but still pretty obscure. In v. 7, the KJV has trust and hope, but the word is the same root, batakh, although in a different form. Lots of translations keep trust in both places: Mr. Holliday has Blessed is the man who trusts in Yahweh, so that Yahweh becomes his trust. That’s awkward too, though, as in English trust as a noun has very different connotations than the verb.
In 17:9, Mr. Holliday has The mind is devious above all else, perverse it is/who can understand it? It’s a hard sentence. Seven words. The word leyv is definitely heart, but then the idea of the heart as the seat of love or emotion was not one Jeremiah would have had. That was the kidneys, the kilyot from v. 10 that Mr. Holliday translates as heart, and that the KJV calls the reins (I assume based on the Vulgate, who knows what they were up to). So what is it that is deceitful above all things? The heart? The mind? The self? Whatever it is, it’s deceitful, or devious, and perverse, or perhaps corrupt, or sick, or wicked, or incurable. Akov ha-leyv micol, v’anush hu. Mi yayda’ehnu?
That last bit is reminiscent of a song we sing at the Seder: echod mi yoday’ah? Who knows one? One is the Lord, of course, and then who knows two? and three? And four? My Perfect Non-Reader knows all the way up to thirteen, or did on the First Night, and I can usually remember most of them. echod mi yoday’ah? Echod ani yoday’ah I know one. mi yayda’ehnu? Who knows us? ani YHVH khokair leyv, bokhain k’lyot. I, the Lord, search out the heart and prove the soul.
Oh, and verse ten is one of those verses that has words that I know from services and brachas, but that I don’t recognize here in these forms and context. v’latain, from natan, a gift, which becomes the name Nathan. l’ish for a man. Kidrachav, from derech, a path, which I know from the aitz hayim, in which the paths of the Divine are paths of pleasantness. kipri, from p’ri, fruit, which I know from the blessings over the fruits of the vine and the tree and the earth.
It’s those kinds of verses that make me think I really should be able to read Biblical Hebrew, if I just set myself down to do it properly. Sadly, this is utterly false.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.