A Sharp Operator (Gen 4:22)

You Can’t Go Home Again

We began last time discussing the difficulty of the very strange phrase לֹטֵ֕שׁ כָּל־חֹרֵ֥שׁ. I translated it literally, for the sake of comparison with the other brothers, but carefully avoided the effort of giving it any sensible meaning. This time, instead of posting my translation at the top of the page, as I usually do, I’m working through it to let you follow my chain of thought. By the end of the column, I hope to have a better idea of what this phrase means — or was meant to mean.

These Hebrew words, describing just what it is Tuval Cain does or who he was, are quite difficult, as BHQ explains:

לֹטֵ֕שׁ כָּל־חֹרֵ֥שׁ M is syntactically very difficult. ‏לטש and ‏חרש‎ are both qal participles, which might have served as appositional attributes of Tubal Cain, “forger,” “smith,” were it not for כל, which subordinates the latter to the former. The versions as well as the Targumim tried, each in its own way, to put some order in their translation.

Ron Hendel’s critical edition of Genesis (which never made it past chapters 1–11) solves the problem this way:

<אבי כל> ] om M S G; parablepsis, cf Tg^O (הוא הוה רבהון דכל) and Tg^J (רב לכל)

All right, you caught me. I just like the opportunity to say parablepsis. If I were a standup comedian, I would figure out a way to use it multiple times in my act. In any case, here’s what Hendel is saying in plain English. In this kind of work, the bottom line comes first.

• <אבי כל>

  Insert the words אבי כל avi kol ‘father of all’.

Then he explains what happened.

• om M S G; parablepsis

  They were omitted from the Masoretic Text (the Hebrew that lies behind our Bibles today), the Samaritan version of the Torah (still used by this unusual group), and the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation) because the scribe of an earlier copy of the Hebrew text skipped it by accident.

The evidence (other than common sense) that confirms his explanation:

• cf Tg^O (הוא הוה רבהון דכל) and Tg^J (רב לכל)

  Both Targum Onkelos and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan have the phrase אבי כל in Aramaic translation.

Not arguing. But BHQ does argue with this idea:

T^O and T^J substituted the first adjective with the noun רב, in harmony with vv. 20, 21.

From my perspective all this either goes too far or not far enough. Two “adjectives” (the participles that are describing those who carried on the boys’ innovations) makes one too many. As I translated it last time just to show you what was going on:

לֹטֵ֕שׁ כָּל־חֹרֵ֥שׁ lotesh kol-ḥoresh ‘sharpener of every plower’

So let’s take a look at those two words to see whether we can figure out what our author was trying to say.

The second of these words is the easier one, though that is not saying much: חרשׁ ḥ-r-sh is the verb that means “to plow.” (The homonym חרשׁ meaning “deaf” originally had the Proto-Semitic ḫ, not ḥ.) Plowing, however, though it’s the commonest meaning of this root in the Bible, seems to be a specialized usage of a broader semantic range. You can חרשׁ a furrow into hard ground because ḥ-r-sh means to make a permanent mark in something that is not easy to cut:

^{Jer. 17:1} The guilt of Judah is inscribed [k’tuva ‘written’]

         With a stylus of iron,

         Engraved [חֲרוּשָׁה֙ ḥarusha] with an adamant point

         On the tablet of their hearts [NJPS]

It’s clear from the copper and iron that follow in our verse that we are talking about a metalworker, so it seems we’ve gotten somewhere with ḥoresh. Yet — an engraver? That’s a fairly small step forward. Engraving metal doesn’t sound as if it could be culture-transforming.

Fun fact: There was a Proto-Semitic letter whose sound -th- fell somewhere between ת and שׁ. It’s usually spelled with שׁ in Hebrew and with ת in Aramaic; hence Hebrew שלוש for “three” matches Aramaic תלת. (There’s also that little matter of “the Canaanite shift,” which perhaps we can schmooze about one day.) I’m bringing it up because that must be the letter in חרשׁ, since once in the Bible it’s spelled instead with a ת: