The other day, I started a brief series on Genesis 21:9, arguing against a line of interpretation that accuses Abraham’s older son Ishmael of sexually abusing his younger brother, Isaac. Part 1 simply announced the series, explaining why I decided to address this issue and how I would proceed. In this installment, I’ll focus on the Hebrew word צחק (tsachaq) and the nature of euphemism.

First, I should probably quasi-apologize to Joel Watts. He got me onto this topic by repeating something he’d read elsewhere. The first paragraph of my previous post may have unfairly cast Joel as the quintessential devil in these matters (+10 to your pop culture knowledge quotient if you can identify the quotation from memory). Actually, Joel’s simply triggered an old pet peeve. I wrote about this topic in Dynamics of Diselection a decade ago:

[A reading that implies some sort of abusive or slanderous behavior of Ishmael toward Isaac] is already evident in Gal 4:29 and in early midrash (as in Bereshith Rabbah), which portrays Ishmael as variously committing idolatry, sexual immorality, or murder. Among more recent commentators, Hamilton is “inclined to believe” that the narrator depicts Ishmael as abusing Isaac sexually (1994:78; cf. Rulon-Miller:81) or masturbating (1994:79; cf. Rulon-Miller:81; Steinberg:67 n. 69), while Wenham, although dismissing the midrashic speculations, suggests that “Ishmael was making fun of Isaac’s status or the circumstances of his birth” (1994:82). (Dynamics of Diselection, 2001, p. 84, note 16)

I’ve been thinking about this issue for a long time. Joel’s post just brought it back to the forefront of my attention.

Intimations that Ishmael molested Isaac depend entirely on taking a single word in Genesis 21:9—the aforementioned צחק—as a euphemism for sexual activity. I beg the indulgence of the Hebraists in my audience while I share the following basics with my non-Hebraist readers:

• Hebrew verb conjugations involve some of the same transformations as English verb conjugations, such as grammatical number. However, Hebrew verbs feature other conjugational dimensions as well. One of those dimensions, called the binyan, has significant effects on a verb’s meaning. Casting a Hebrew verb in a different binyan can have roughly the same range of effects as changing the voice of an English verb or adding helping verbs to an English verb.
• In the qal (“simple”) binyan, also called the G (from German Grund, “base”) stem, צחק normally means “to laugh.”
• In the pi‘el binyan, also called the D (think “double”) stem, צחק normally means something like “to amuse, to evoke laughter.”

The narrator of Genesis 21:9 uses the verb צחק, in its pi‘el participle form מצחק (i.e., צחק-ing), to describe what Sarah saw Ishmael doing. The narrator implies that witnessing this action or set of actions triggered Sarah’s insistence that Abraham dismiss Hagar and Ishmael from his household. Interpreters who consider the piel of צחק a euphemism for sexual activity here do so on the analogy of two other passages, both also in Genesis.

• In Genesis 26:8, King Abimelech of Gerar looks out his window to see Isaac and Rebekah מצחק. Isaac’s and Rebekah’s actions somehow reveal to Abimelech that this couple had lied to him by introducing themselves as brother and sister, hiding the crucial fact of their marriage to one another. Most modern English committee translations end up representing מצחק with something like “caressing” or “fondling” here.
• In Genesis 39:14, 17, Potiphar’s wife accuses Joseph of an action that she describes by the pi‘el infinitive of צחק. Since her speech already stacks euphemism upon euphemism—“he came to me to lie with me,” בא אלי לשכב עמי—interpreters slide with little difficulty into considering צחק a sexual euphemism as well.

One can, however, easily justify a reading of each passage that imputes no sexual connotation at all to צחק. In the case of Genesis 26:8, I’ll bet you can think of a number non-sexual activities in which a married couple might engage with visible amusement or laughter as a result. Compare the English phrase “have fun.” I can certainly imagine many ways to “have fun” with my wife that involve social, but not sexual, intercourse. Perhaps the narrator imagines Isaac and Rebekah engaging in foreplay with a direct line of sight to Abimelech’s (second-story?) window, but perhaps the narrator simply thinks of them sharing an “inside joke” or something of that nature. In this passage, a reader can swing both ways.

Most readers may find it stretching a point to argue for an innuendo-free interpretation of צחק in Genesis 39. I myself don’t regard this argument as compelling, but I do regard it as plausible; conversely, one may plausibly impute sexual connotations to צחק in Genesis 39:14, 17, but the language doesn’t compel that reading, either. In my mind, one has a harder time resisting a sexual connotation for צחק in verse 17: “The Hebrew servant that you brought to us came to me to צחק me.” Since “come to” (בוא אל) is frequently used in biblical Hebrew to mean “have sex with,” one easily imagines that צחק בי is another roundabout way of saying the same thing. However, this sense gets harder to maintain once one takes verse 14 into account. In that earlier verse, Potiphar’s wife tells her husband’s household, “Look, [my husband] brought a Hebrew man to צחק us!” Here, a sexual euphemism actually seems most unlikely, if only because of the plural object, “us.” Whatever Potiphar’s wife specifically means by צחק, it must be applicable to the entire household.

Curiously, modern English translations actually show less preference for sexual innuendo in Genesis 39 than in Genesis 26!

Thus, the case for believing that Biblical Hebrew knew a well-established euphemistic usage of צחק for sexual activity seems quite flaccid. The well-established uses of “come” (בוא), “know” (ידע), and “sleep with” (שׁכב) as euphemisms for “to have sex,” and of “feet” (רגלים) for genitals, stand in an entirely different category. One simply cannot lay bare compelling evidence for thinking that speakers of biblical Hebrew would commonly think of צחק as a euphemism for sexual activity.

I’ll bring this post to a climax with one concluding thought about the nature of euphemism. Like beauty, innuendo is in the eye of the beholder. It’s also heavily dependent on context. Readers might find justification for imputing sexual overtones to צחק in Genesis 26:8 because the action described by צחק indicates to Abimelech that Isaac and Sarah Rebekah are married. Readers might find justification for imputing sexual overtones to צחק in Genesis 39:14, 17 because of the overt sexuality of the rest of the scene. However, these justifications operate on a very small scale. They do not give readers license to perceive sexual innuendo in any and every use of צחק, irrespective of context.

Sometimes fooling around (מצחק) might have a sexual component, and sometimes it’s just goofing off. The piel of צחק appears only seven times in the entire Tanakh. This series focuses, of course, on Genesis 21:9; this post has already discussed Genesis 26:8 and Genesis 37:14, 17. Nobody, as far as I know, proposes to read צחק as a sexual euphemism in Genesis 19:14 or Judges 16:25 (both quoted below from the NRSV):

So Lot went out and said to his sons-in-law, who were to marry his daughters, “Up, get out of this place; for the Lord is about to destroy the city.” But he seemed to his sons-in-law to be jesting [צחק]. (Genesis 19:14)

And when their hearts were merry, they said, “Call Samson, and let him entertain [צחק] us.” (Judges 16:25a)

Some interpreters do impute sexual connotations to צחק in Exodus 32:6:

They rose early the next day, and offered burnt offerings and brought sacrifices of well-being; and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to revel [צחק]. (Exodus 32:6)

Few readers can find any reason to hear a sexual צחק in the scenes with Lot and Samson. Neither “Lot’s sons-in-law thought he was sexually molesting them” nor “Call Samson, and let him sexually molest us” makes any sense. As for Exodus 32:6, the imputation of sexual immorality into the golden calf incident can be detected as early as Paul (1 Corinthians 10:6–8), although I can see no justification for this in the Hebrew text of Exodus 32. Again, however, even if such a reading of Exodus 32:6 rests on something demonstrable in the text, that doesn’t justify “transferring” the sexual connotation of the context onto צחק itself and then importing that connotation into a context—Genesis 21—where there’s no other hint of sexual activity.

In sum, the biblical evidence simply doesn’t support the claim that צחק “is” a sexual euphemism in Biblical Hebrew on the same order as בוא (“come”), ידע (“know”), and שׁכב (“lie/sleep with”). Even if such evidence could be adduced—or if you ramify the slim evidence differently than I do—one must judge the possibility of euphemism on a case-by-case basis. Frankly, if you perceive sexual connotations in צחק in Genesis 21:9, I think you’re handling both the verb צחק and the idea of euphemism carelessly—or you’ve been watching too much Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. That show will mess you up.

Robert Holmstedt and John Cook report that they have finished a draft of their forthcoming biblical Hebrew textbook, Biblical Hebrew: An Illustrated Introduction. I’ve had a chance to look at an earlier draft, and my first impressions were almost entirely positive. BHII, as Robert and John like to abbreviate it, isn’t just “yet another Hebrew grammar.” As Robert puts it,

this textbook bridges two (if not more) models of language learning in our quest to take advantage of the various results of applied Second Language Acquisition research while maintaining what we call a philological realism—no-longer-spoken languages simply cannot be learned in the same ways that spoken languages can.

Based on the earlier draft I reviewed, I think that John and Robert carry this out pretty well. I’m eager to see the finished version and to compare it to the Cohelet materials that I used last year. I expect to teach Hebrew again in 2011-2012, and I consider BHII a strong contender in the textbook race.

The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols claims that the word abracadabra “derives from the Hebrew abreg ad hābra meaning ‘strike dead with thy lightning.’” I cannot make sense of this statement, and I cannot perceive “strike dead with thy lightning” in abreg ad hābra.

Various Internet sources claim that the word abracadabra derives from a Gnostic term, Abrasax or Abraxas, or from a combination of ab, ben, and ruaḥ haqodesh.

When I hear abracadabra as a magical word, I hear Aramaic אברא כדברה, “I create according to speech,” or אברא כדברא, “I create according to the word.” I have no evidence for this phrase as the origin of abracadabra, but it makes much more sense to me than the other explanations.

The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures has recently published an article by Bob Becking and Marjo Korpel entitled “To Create, to Separate, or to Construct: An Alternative for a Recent Proposal as to the Interpretation of ברא in Gen 1:1–2:4a.” In this article, Becking and Korpel analyze and criticize Ellen van Wolde’s proposal that ברא properly means “to separate” or “to differentiate,” not “to create.” In my judgment, Becking and Korpel show the unlikelihood of van Wolde’s suggestion from a lexicographical point of view, and they also provide a coherent lexical and theological account of the “neologism” ברא. If you’re interested in this particular subject, you should definitely put this article on your reading list.

For some time, I’ve contented myself largely with consonantal Hebrew only here on Higgaion. I kept seeing goofy spacing when I would try to use nikud; the vowel points would show up between the letters instead of beneath, above, or within the letters as appropriate. However, I think I just may have learned a solution. Unfortunately, I cannot remember were I read this or from whom I learned it, though it wasn’t that long ago. I think it was on some discussion board or other. If you’re viewing Higgaion using a Macintosh, do you see the following text in appropriately-pointed עִבְרִית?

בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃

It’s all done with the magic of style sheets, and the solution assumes that you have access thereto. If you’re hosting a WordPress blog on your own server, the style sheet is probably in the folder with your theme, and is probably named style.css or styles.css. Specific locations and names can vary. The solution remains the same. Once you have found your style sheet and opened it in an appropriate editor (use whatever editor you would use to edit raw HTML), add something like this to your style sheet:

.hebrew {
     font-family:"New Peninim MT",serif;
     font-size:1.5em;
     text-align:right;
}

You will probably want to fiddle around with the font-size. If your Hebrew looks too small compared to your English, try making the Hebrew font size about 150–175% of your English font size. For reference, I have my English font size set to .85em.

Now you can style any HTML object to display Hebrew more nicely. My quotation from Genesis 1:1 above just applies the “hebrew” style to a blockquote object, as follows:

<blockquote class="hebrew">בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃</blockquote>

You can apply the class to almost any HTML container: p, blockquote, td, and so forth. For inline Hebrew, apply the class to a span, as in the following example:

… do you see the following text in appropriately-pointed <span class="hebrew">עִבְרִית</span>?

If you don’t want to manipulate the size of your Hebrew text relative to the size of your English (or German, or French, or whatever else your main text is), you can simply add “New Peninim MT” and/or “Lucida Grande” to the font-family attribute of your body class. However, if you do this, ensure that something else sits in the first position. In my case, that would be Charis SIL (although I just looked at the site in Windows XP—something I never do—and Charis SIL seems ugly in Firefox for WinXP):

body {
     put your other body stuff here, plus …
     font-family: "Charis SIL","Georgia","New Peninim MT",serif;
}

My font definitions follow my own preference for a serif-style Hebrew font, using a specific font name for the Mac side and relying on browser interpretation on the Windows side. If you prefer a sans-serif font, just replace “New Peninim MT” with “Lucida Sans Unicode” (preserve the quotation marks) and add “sans-” (no quotation marks) in front of “serif” in the definition of the .hebrew class.

If Hebrew is working fine for you as it is, never mind! But these tweaks seem to display Hebrew well in Higgaion both on Mac (which I really care about) and Windows (whose users I don’t wish to alienate). Perhaps you’ll get some mileage from these style definitions as well.

Final examination fever will hit Pepperdine in about two weeks. In my Hebrew 330 class, I will examine and assess students on their ability to perform the following communicative tasks in oral and written Biblical Hebrew, using the vocabulary introduced to them this semester (related grammatical concepts appear in square brackets).

• Recognize, form, name, and pronounce the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, using both block and cursive letter forms [orthography]
• Exchange greetings and introduce yourself by name
• Indicate whether you have (or do not have) something, and ask whether someone else has something [יש ל and אין ל to show possession; interrogative particle ה]
• Ask about an object’s name and function [using the question words מה and למה], and answer such questions [using infinitives]
• Distinguish between similar objects by describing their appearances [using adjectives] and positions [using prepositions]
• Explain what belongs to whom [using ל with nouns]
• Distinguish whether you or someone else is talking about something general ("a ship") or specific ("the ship") [using definite articles]
• Describe what you, your group, someone else, or someone else’s group is doing at the moment [using participles]
• Describe what you, your group, someone else, or someone else’s group needs or wants to do [using appropriate forms of על and חפץ]
• Describe what you, your group, someone else, or someone else’s group will do (or will finish doing) in the future [using prefix/יקטל forms]
• Describe your plans for the future [using prefix/יקטל forms and infinitives]
• Give and follow instructions [using imperatives]

Some of you may wonder about the בנינים. Thus far, students have mainly learned G or קל verbs, though they have also picked up the masculine singular participial forms of a D verb or two (דבר, בקש) and at least one H verb (השליך). Please don’t confuse my students with this information just yet. They know that different בנינים exist, but I haven’t introduced the names thereof just yet.

Some time ago, I shared with you a slide that I used in my Hebrew 330 class to visually show students the usage of various Biblical Hebrew prepositions.

Subsequent to correspondence with Karyn Traphagen, I had intended to make the slide available in various formats, but then I dropped the ball … until now. (Be sure to read those last two words in your best Simcha Jacobovici voice.) For your convenience, should you find the slide helpful, you may download it in any of several formats:

• JPEG
• PNG
• PDF
• Keynote (zipped)

Since returning from the 2009 Society of Biblical Literature meeting, I’ve uploaded three new YouTube videos. One relates to my Religion 101 class:

• Parallelism in Biblical Hebrew Poetry

I will soon (today, if all goes well) supplement that one with additional videos on poetic structures in the psalms and form criticism of the Psalter. Two other videos, which I created in response to an e-mail from another teacher of Biblical Hebrew (whom I met through the Cohelet project), introduce students to typing in Hebrew on a Macintosh:

• Typing Hebrew on Mac OS X, Part 1 — This video shows viewers how to activate and access Hebrew keyboards on the Mac, and how to use the Keyboard Viewer and Character Viewer.
• Typing Hebrew on Mac OS X, Part 2 — This video discusses font selections as well as some of the challenges with selecting and editing right-to-left text on the Mac.

I’ve also expanded the Cohelet and Semantic Biblical Hebrew offerings on iFlipr:

• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5.1
• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5.2
• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5.3
• Cohelet Biblical Hebrew, Unit 5 (Cumulative)
• Semantic Biblical Hebrew: Movement
• Semantic Biblical Hebrew: Prepositions
• Semantic Biblical Hebrew: Senses

Please let me know of any typos you find in the decks, and please send suggestions for additions (especially ways to expand the movement and senses decks without getting into obscure or difficult-to-illustrate terms).

This post could also be called “hanging myself out to dry,” I suppose, since I am very much a n00b at using communicative pedagogy to teach Biblical Hebrew. Nonetheless, in the interests of advancing the conversation about the use of those methods, I have posted two videos from my Elementary Biblical Hebrew class on November 13, 2009:

• Giving a Quiz. In this video, you’ll see me greeting my class and handing out a quiz on body parts. (For those of you who speak Modern Hebrew, what word would you use for a “box” on a form?)
• What’s This For? In this video, you’ll see me teaching my class how to use למה־זה to ask “What’s this for?” and how to answer using appropriate infinitive constructs.

To save you the trouble of pointing out all my mistakes, I’ve already included annotations to call them out. Most of them relate to gender agreement. Constructive criticism is always helpful, but be kind; many of you could probably teach this way better than I can right now, but I’m committed to seeing it through for at least this academic year and I’m sure I’ll be much more comfortable with it by the end of spring.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve made a few updates to the Semantic Biblical Hebrew flash cards:

• In the Faces and Body Parts decks, the question asked now matches the body part name in gender, instead of the question always being a generic מה־זה.
• I added five cards to the Body Parts deck:
• כף
• אצבע
• אצבעות
• בהן יד
• בטן
• I fixed a problem in which the Hebrew entries sometimes included square boxes on Windows systems.

I think these changes make the decks more useful, and I hope you agree!