Bemidbar - Numbers 1:1-4:20

Hey!

There is this continuing argument within the Talmud between Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael. Rabbi Akiva, a zealot, saw that not only was the Torah the Word of God, but that that since God is perfect, then His Torah is perfect, and so there is no such thing as a superfluous or missing letter. All such things must be secret messages from God.

Rabbi Ishmael culminates this argument in Sanhedrin 51b, when he takes Rabbi Akiva to task, interpreting a capital punishment because of a single extra letter: "Shall we condemn this woman to fire because of the way you interpret this superfluous vav?" Rabbi Ishmael's view is that the text is written in a way that people read an write. Would a God use letters that could be reinterpreted to mean different things to different people?

Depending upon your predisposition, especially if you are a religious zealot, the answer might be a resounding "Yes!".

I have sat through more sermons than I can count where the speaker is addressing something as insignificant as a superfluous object-identifier in Biblical Hebrew, as though it had some secret meaning, while ignoring that it was simply not a concern at the time when the men wrote it down.

This brings me to the letter hey, the 5th letter of the Hebrew alphabet (or aleph-bet).

In the beginning

The letter hey, when used as a prefix typically is translated to the article "the". In Hebrew, you append prefixes and suffixes to create phrases. And sometimes the act of doing so creates an uncomfortable pronunciation.  And so, rather than pronounce the name of this book ("Numbers") as "Beh-Ha-Midbar", the "Ha" would dropped, and the "ah" sound would be applied to the "Beh", changing it to "Bah", and a vowel indicator would be placed beneath that first letter to indicate that this shortening of the spelling has taken place (a technique known as smichut), and the result would be "Bah-Midbar", or "In the wilderness/desert".

And that is how almost everyone pronounces this book: "BAH-midbar".

The problem is, there is no such indicator in the name, and there is also no hey (or "the"). And so, the name of this book should really be pronounced as "Bemidbar", even though most Jews that I know, and most English commentators on the text, spell and pronounce it incorrectly, as "Bamidbar".

One might say that this takes place because "Bemidbar" in the context of the sentence makes no sense ("In a wilderness"). But then, what about the very first word in the book of Genesis?

Almost nobody pronounces or spells the first word in Genesis 1:1 as "Bareshit" (Bah-ray-shyt), which does look odd. It too is missing the inferred hey, yet most translations use "In the beginning...".

If you pay attention, you will see that the insertion of "the" or "ה" occurs quite a lot.

It's about style in any language

The thing is, every author from every age has had his own writing style and were rarely concerned with such things as spelling and grammar, as we are today. For some, it was about cadence or sound, and for others, it was a matter of style.

In the Aramaic Targum, for example, it adds "the" to more than 800 different words in the Book of Numbers. In Aramaic, this is done by appending a word with the letter aleph (א), which is akin to prefixing a word with the letter hey (ה) in Hebrew. It does this for consistency of grammar, and was written during a time when such things began to become important.

And so, the Targum changes במדבר to במדברא, which would have become בהמדבר in Hebrew, before it would become "Bamidbar" (but with the missing vowel indicator as previously noted).

Other hey inconsistencies

The letter hey may often be used at the end of a noun to make it feminine. There are exceptions to this, of course. But let's take the noun, na'ar, for example ("young or prepubescent male"). When speaking of a girl, the letter heh would, in modern Hebrew, consistently append the word, making it na'arah.

However...

In Biblical Hebrew, this letter is often not be appended to the end of a word, such a na'ar, and would only be inferred, based on the context of the sentence. In Deuteronomy 22:16, we read of a prepubescent girl who was not found to be a virgin on  her wedding night. It is spelled without the final hey, but the traditional way to read it is to pronounce it as though the hey was there, as na'arah. However, in 22:19, na'arah is spelled fully, and the religious zealots, taking a cue from Rabbi Akiva, will create a sermon about the significance of this change in spelling when it was simply a stylistic rendering.

It's Greek to me

There is no "H" in ancient Greek, so the LXX interpretation of the Masoretic text would often just drop the hey when it was part of a name. And so, Yehudah becomes Judah, and Yehonaton becomes Jonathan and so forth.

And the authors of the LXX, like the Targumist, also "corrected" the missing hey in the words, making the grammar consistent with how people normally spoke.

"THE Angels" vs "Angels"

A friend of mine argued that the two angels (Genesis 19:1) were the same as the three men who visited Abraham (Genesis 18:2), missing one, of course, because the word for "angels" was prefixed with a "ה", meaning THE angels, and because of "the", it must mean that they were known before, and since no angels were mentioned up until this point, then the angels must be from the three men who visited Abraham.

I argued that a prefix doesn't mean that they were mentioned before anymore than saying HaElohim means "the God" who was mentioned before. If you want to argue that HaElohim means the "unique" Elohim (God), then I'm OK with that, and we can say that the two angels were also unique, but in reality, the "ה" being added or removed in either instance doesn't do anything for the verse.

It's an unsatisfactory apologetic to try to resolve the problem with the angels showing up.

Finally, does it matter?

You might think, "So what's the big deal if a letter is missing or superfluous?"

For some, it is not a big deal and they don't see any real significance to the insertion or the removal of a "ה". It is akin to spelling "David" as דוד or דויד in that there is no significant attached to it. Although, there are some who will make up a sermon based on the insertion of elimination of a letter.

If you believe that there is nothing missing or superfluous in the Torah and every letter has a special significance, then you will start seeing things in the text that aren't there or, more likely, parrot others who claim to have seen such things in the text. And some of these interpretation are wonderful, and some aren't inspiring at all.

So, if Bemidbar means "in a wilderness", is that what the person who wrote it intended?

Given that there are more than 800 instances where the missing hey prefix is being treated as though it actually existed, it is most likely just a style of the writing of the time, and something we might consider sloppy by today's standards was quite acceptable back then.

Perhaps I should start pronouncing Bemidbar exactly as it is written.After all, doing so has the potential to cause people who don't think about such things to, perhaps, think a bit more about them.

It's worth thinking about.