Baruch Attah

     That's what I was writing, in Hebrew letters, on a notebook belonging to a Jewish colleague of mine, while we were waiting for the end of an interminable and unpleasant department meeting.  He's a devout Jew, bemused and gratified by my attempts to learn Hebrew.  But when I got to the word that should follow "Blessed are you," namely, the name of God, written but not pronounced, he whispered to me, "Don't write the name of God, don't write the name of God!"  Unfortunately I couldn't hear him -- one of my other colleagues was talking -- and I wrote it anyway.  "You know what this means," he said.  "I can't throw this piece of paper away.  I have to save it."  Apparently there's a special receptacle, like a treasure chest, for pieces of paper, or cloth, or wood, or stone with the name of God written upon it.  He'll have to take this sheet there.  I told him I was sorry I had caused him the trouble.

     This reverence for the name of God befits the general impression I get from trying to ABC my way through a chapter of the Hebrew bible every night, with the training wheels of English on the side.  That is to say, it seems -- and I don't have much direct experience with the Hebrew to warrant this conclusion, which anybody at all interested might derive from far more reliable sources -- that the Hebrews long before the captivity had had a high and sacral view of their Scriptures, as the Greeks had a high view of Homer, treasuring every word, every phrase.  It is why Genesis, which has some of the narrative structure of folk tale here and there, nevertheless does not read like a folk tale; it reads, in its cunning compression, its terseness and intriguing taciturnity, more like a blessing or a holy decree.  Anybody who reads the Gilgamesh Epic can see at once that we've got the same thing as we have in one of Grimm's Fairy Tales.  "Why have you left Uruk, O Gilgamesh, and why have you clothed yourself in skins?  Why is your face the face of a man who has made a long journey?"  "Why should I not have left Uruk, and why should I not have clothed myself in skins?" says Gilgamesh -- excuse me for spinning the narrative from memory.  "Why should my face not be like the face of a man who has made a long journey?  For Enkidu my friend, Enkidu my little brother, is dead."  "Mirror, mirror, on the wall," says the evil queen, "who is the fairest of them all?"  "You are, O queen," says the mirror -- until Snow White shows up.

     That sort of thing is, for the most part, absent from Genesis.  In other words, I'm struck not by any supposed primitivism -- but by what is, from the first, a deep meditation upon, and revelation of, the relationship of God with man.  If one assumes that the words are just what they ought to be, and in just the right place, one finds gold.  For example, Abraham has just dismissed his son Ishmael and his mother from the camp.  Ishmael is still but a boy; the Hebrew word used for him, consistently, is "na'ar," which the KJV well translates as "lad".  In the very next chapter, though, God calls Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac; and then the word "son" with the attached possessive pronoun strikes like a death knell, again and again.  God makes sure we know how high the stakes are.   "Take your-son," he says, "your-beloved-one," that is, "whom you-love," "Isaac," and then "get thee to the land" -- and at this point we are expecting "that I will show you," repeating the promise made to Abram in the beginning, that caused him to leave Haran and travel those many hundreds of miles to a place he knew not.  But that isn't how the sentence ends.  So Abraham took Isaac his son, and some pack animals, and provisions, and two "ne'areiu," "lads."  The word is repeated soon after, and the point is made with all the deftness of a master poet.  Abraham has just dismissed a lad, Ishmael, and now he takes two lads to accompany him to Moriah, where he will sacrifice his son, and return with fewer lads than when he set out, missing the one lad for whom he would gladly have laid down his life.

     All that is left, in case the scene is not excruciating enough, is for the sacred author to refer to Isaac as a lad.  This he does, twice.  The first time is when Abraham, with terrible nonchalance, says to his ne'areiu, "Stay here, while I and the na'ar we will walk up there, and we will worship-God, and we will return to you."  And with every verb he uses, he alliterates on na'ar, because every verb is in the first person plural, and begins with the ne- prefix.  We, we, we, he says, knowing that "we" will in fact not return, because when "we" worship, it will be at the cost of the lad's life. 

     So Abraham goes up to the mountain, and the words will not let us free; he has to bind Isaac his son, and stretches forth his hand to slay his son.  But then the angel of the Lord cries out, "Abraham, Abraham!"  And the old man replies just as he had done before, "Hinneni," "Behold-me," or "Here I am."  "Lay not your hand," says the angel, "upon hanna'ar," upon the lad -- the boy, the son, the servant; and only at the end of the sentence does he repeat the words of the Lord when he first issued the command, "your-son, your-beloved."

     Now I find all that to be perfect, and implying all manner of things about who is whose son, and who is whose servant; not to mention that the original is at once more tender and more terrible than a translation can be.  LXX does a decent job at preserving the connections, rendering "servant" as pais (as in Latin puer, untranslatable in formal English when it is supposed to mean "servant"; closest to English jocular "lad" or "boy," as in "Let's go for it, boys!"), Ishmael as paidion, "little child" or "little boy," and Isaac as paidarion, "little boy".  English strays farther away. 

     And then there's the New Testament.  When we read that Joseph in a dream was instructed to take the paidion into Egypt, we hear it in English as "young child," and yet I wonder -- I wonder whether the Hebrew that the apostle had in mind was not the word for infant, yeledh, as of Moses in the wicker basket, but that same na'ar.  Either one would work, of course.