Monthly Archives: January 2013

עזר

Leave a reply

It is my contention that the root עזר in Biblical Hebrew often has a sense of more than just “helping”, but specifically means to help or save in battle, and is in fact synonymous with ישע.  The best example for this is from a Rabbinic – not Biblical – phrase that many Jews repeat three times daily: מלך עוזר ומושיע ומגן.  If עוזר means just to help, it doesn’t really belong with מושיע and מגן.

What exactly עוזר ומושיע ומגן have to do with the rest of the ברכה of אבות is a discussion for another time.

Three examples from the beginning of יהושע will make the point for now:

יהושע י:ד          עלו אלי ועזרני ונכה את גבעון

יהושע י: ו          עלה אלינו מהרה והושיעה לנו ועזרנו

יהושע י:לג          אז עלה הרם מלך גזר לעזר את לכיש

The root עזר occurs 294 times in תנ”ך and a full study of all of them is required in order to fully understand the exact sense of the word.

(72 of these are the name אלעזר and another 14 are the name אליעזר)

Another good example is in I Samuel 7:13 where Samuel takes a stone and makes it a monument at אבן העזר where he says עד הנה עזרנו יי.

עכן

Leave a reply

Following the conquest of Jericho, in Joshua 6:26 – 7:26 we have the story of עכן who steals from the plunder of the city which הקב”ה had claimed for himself.

In this story we have the verb עכר several times.  This verb appears infrequently in תנ”ך.

בראשית לד:ל, we have Jacob scolding Shimon and Levi with עכרתם אתי.

It appears 6 times in our story.

שופטים יא:לה where יפתח uses the word when his daughter is the first to greet him when he returns from battle: וַיְהִי כִרְאוֹתוֹ אוֹתָהּ וַיִקְרַע אֶת בְּגָדָיו וַיֹּאמֶר אֲהָהּ בִּתִּי הַכְרֵעַ הִכְרַעְתִּנִי וְאַתְּ  הָיִיתְ  בְּעֹכְרָי  וְאָנֹכִי פָּצִיתִי פִי אֶל יְדֹוָד וְלֹא אוּכַל לָשׁוּב

Then Jonathan uses it in a very similar context in I Samuel 14:29, where his father, Saul, makes a vow which results in his having to kill his son – although Jonathan is saved by the people in this case. וַיֹּאמֶר יוֹנָתָן  עָכַר  אָבִי אֶת הָאָרֶץ רְאוּ נָא כִּי אֹרוּ עֵינַי כִּי טָעַמְתִּי מְעַט דְּבַשׁ  הַזֶּה

אחאב and אליהו use the phrase call each other עוכר ישראל when they meet in I Kings 18:17-18.

It appears 7 times in the name פגעיאל בן עכרן and then in דברי הימים א ב:ז where it refers to the Jericho story.  And where interestingly, עכן is called עכר.

The root then appears a handful of times in משלי and תהלים.

תהלים פרק לט פסוק ג

נֶאֱלַמְתִּי דוּמִיָּה הֶחֱשֵׁיתִי מִטּוֹב וּכְאֵבִי נֶעְכָּר :

משלי פרק יא פסוק יז

גֹּמֵל נַפְשׁוֹ אִישׁ חָסֶד וְעֹכֵר שְׁאֵרוֹ אַכְזָרִי:

משלי פרק יא פסוק כט

עוֹכֵר בֵּיתוֹ יִנְחַל רוּחַ וְעֶבֶד אֱוִיל לַחֲכַם לֵב:

משלי פרק טו פסוק ו

בֵּית צַדִּיק חֹסֶן רָב וּבִתְבוּאַת רָשָׁע נֶעְכָּרֶת :

משלי פרק טו פסוק כז

עֹכֵר בֵּיתוֹ בּוֹצֵעַ בָּצַע וְשׂוֹנֵא מַתָּנֹת יִחְיֶה:

At some point it will be worthwhile to post about the root עכר in the Mishnah.

The story is alluded to in דברי הימים א ב:ז, where in the geneology of the family of Yehudah we are told: ובני כרמי עוכר ישראל אשר מעל בחרם.  However, we are not told who כרמי is.  In Joshua 7:18 the ancestry of עכן is given as: עכן בן כרמי בן זבדי בן זרח למשפחת יהודה.

For more on עכן and עכר see this post.

Joshua and the ‘שר צבא ה (Joshua 5 13-15)

Leave a reply

Here is another story in תנ”ך where an unnamed איש appears to a man or woman, and turns out to be an angel or messenger of הקב”ה.

I prefer “messenger” to “angel”.  Although the Greek Ἄγγελος (Angelos) is a literal translation of מלאך and means “messenger”, I think that to the modern American mind “angel” conjures images of winged creatures, for which we have other evidence in תנ”ך, but which do not fit with an unnamed איש who is (mistaken for) a man.

Incidentally, the Yiddish name אנטשל is derived from the Latin “angel”, and is unusual in its being one of the relatively few Yiddish words that derive from Latin rather than German.  (I thought I had read this in Uriel Weinreich “Sabesdiker Losn in Yiddish: A Problem of Linguistic Affinity” Word 8, 360-377 (1952) – but I cannot find it right now in that article, so perhaps I came across it somewhere else.  At any rate, this article is well worth reading.

The איש has חרבו שלופה בידו.  The other characters in תנ”ך with a חרב שלופה are the מלאך who appears to the donkey of בלעם and the messenger of destruction whom הקב”ה sends to punish David for counting the people in I Chronicles 21:16.

The איש says to Joshua “כי אני שר צבא ה’ עתה באתי”.  The implication is that this is a messenger of הקב”ה for whom Joshua and the Israelites have been waiting, and it brings to mind Exodus 33:2 where הקב”ה tells Moses after the sin of the Golden Calf that His messenger will lead the Israelites into the Land of Israel, but He will not lead them Himself.

Dates in תנ”ך

1 Reply

I’m not referring to social dates or the dates that grow on trees.  I mean calendar dates.

It has been my intention while going through תנ”ך to collect all the calendar dates mentioned in the תנ”ך.  I’ll start here with נ”ך, and then hopefully add חומש as I get the chance.  I will update this post each time I come across a date in נ”ך.  And by the end of year it will hopefully be complete.

יהושע ד:יט ניסן 10 בעשור לחדש הראשון The Israelites cross the Jordan into the Land of Israel
יהושע ה:י ניסן 14 בארעבעה עשר יום לחדש בערב The Israelites celebrate פסח in the Land of Israel. The following day the מן stops falling, and they eat from the produce of the land

What is nakh.blogyomi.com?

1 Reply

At the end of 2008 I read Karl Rove’s column about his yearly reading contests with President George W. Bush (Bush Is a Book Lover, WSJ 2008-12-26). Towards the end of that column Mr. Rove notes that in addition to all the other books President Bush had read in 2008, “Each year, the president also read the Bible from cover to cover, along with a daily devotional.”

Having only recently finished reading through the entire תנ”ך for my first time, I took this as a challenge: If President Bush can get through the Bible every year from cover to cover, so can I. And since 2009, I have been reading the Bible every year, from יהושע to דברי הימים. I rely on קריאת התורה on שבת for חומש.

This year I will be posting some of my ideas on נ”ך in this blog.

For anyone who is interested in joining the legions of people who read the Bible every year, this is how I do it. Many people use the chapter divisions. I find this highly inefficient, because chapters can vary widely in length (at some point I might post on the standard deviation of chapter lengths in the Bible). I took my תנ”ך (the one I use is Aharon Dotan’s Biblia Hebraica Leningradensia which follows the spelling and punctuation of the Leningrad Codex, but any תנ”ך in Hebrew or English or any other language will do. I highly recommend Hebrew if you think you can manage it). Figure out how many pages you must get through in a year, and divide by 365.

Now all you have to do is read that many pages per day, and by January 1st 2014, you will have completed all of תנ”ך! In my case, it works out to 2.49 pages per day. Since I actually read 3 pages per day, and since it’s hard to have a chance to do na”kh yomi every day, this allows me about 62 “vacation” days. I will post my own schedule, which works with my תנ”ך, but there is nothing special about my schedule. I think that in most editions of the תנ”ך, if you are covering יהושע through the end of na”kh, three pages per day will work.

Best of luck and I hope you enjoy my comments.