Man & Meat (Gen 6:3)

Adam’s Aftermath

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³ given that they are meat too. בְּשַׁגַּ֖ם ה֣וּא בָשָׂ֑ר

The difficult word in this phrase is בְּשַׁגַּ֖ם b’shaggam. It’s not quite as bad as yadon; BHQ’s textual commentary gives it only 150 words, not 350. Their conclusion: “This is a linguistic problem rather than a textual case,” i.e., “it’s not our problem.” The point of that conclusion is that none of the ancient witnesses to the text of the Bible (the Septuagint, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and so forth) makes us think there is some mistake in our version of the text. This is just an extremely unusual word.

It’s another of those cases, like yadon in the previous post, where we’re pretty sure we know what it means even if we don’t know why. HALOT points to the answer:

בְּשַׁגַּם Gn 6₃: → גַּם.

The word seems to be made up of three parts:

• ב b- ‘in’

• שׁ sha- ‘that’

• גם gam ‘also’

The biggest guessing game here is sha- meaning “that,” but … sha- sounds like sheh- and sheh- means asher, the relative pronoun “that” or “which.” Sheh- is vastly more common in Modern Hebrew than in the Bible, but it does exist; even sha- exists (see Jud 5:7). Plus, we do have the combination ba-asher ‘in that, inasmuch as’ 26 times in the Bible. Since b- and sha-/sheh- must be attached to something and can’t exist independently, b’shaggam “makes sense” in a strange way, even if the combination itself is unique. (The double g is because sha-/sheh- is always followed by doubling of the next letter, indicated in Hebrew by a dagesh, that dot in the ג.)

But what do you mean “also”? That leads us to the last word in this phrase, בָשָׂ֑ר basar ‘meat’.