3 At the end of a year … וַֽיְהִ֖י מִקֵּ֣ץ יָמִ֑ים
Our two heroes are going to present offerings to God. The question is, When? My answer, which (as always) will take a bit of explaining: At the end of a year.
The Hebrew phrase is מקץ ימים mi-qetz yamim ‘from an end of days’. This is not the End of Days with capital letters; that is אחרית הימים aḥrit ha-yamim, as in Gen 49:1 and elsewhere. (There too it is not really the apocalyptic End of Days, but that is the source of the expression.)
It’s true that הקץ ha-qetz “the End” is sometimes used in later Hebrew to refer to “the end of history,” which in a Jewish sense means the coming of the Messiah, building of the Third Temple, ingathering of the exiles, or whatever other happy ending matches your political and religious position. But in the Bible קץ and its twin קצה qatzeh just refer to the “end” of anything — a period of time, the far end of some territory, or even the ends of a box like the Ark of the Covenant.
The general English translation of our phrase mi-qetz yamim seems to be something like “in the course of time.” Richard Elliott Friedman makes it “at the end of some days” in order to be somewhat more literal. The giveaway, though, is an idiosyncracy of the Hebrew language. English almost always uses a plural noun when counting more than one; Biblical Hebrew is much likelier to use the singular.
In English, you can talk about “500 head of cattle,” but in almost every other case you’ve got to say “500 men” (not “man”), “500 trees” (not “tree”), “A Hundred Days” (not “A Hundred Day”). Yet all the way through Genesis 1 we read about God creating “a bird,” “a fish,” “a tree,” “a beast,” and so forth — because the Hebrew idiom is to use the singular form of the noun as a collective, and especially when you’re counting. Here’s an example with יום ‘day’:
Gen 8:6 At the end of forty days [מִקֵּ֖ץ אַרְבָּעִ֣ים י֑וֹם mi-qetz arba’im yom], Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made.
The English has to say plural days, but the Hebrew is singular yom. Abraham ibn Ezra does not make that argument explicitly, but here’s how he explains our phrase, quoting and then correcting NJPS:
In the course of time. But “time” here is literally “days,” which in my opinion is idiomatic for a full (solar) year, the length of time after which the days return to precisely the same length they originally had (whether short or long). Compare “from year to year [מִיָּמִ֖ים יָמִֽימָה]” (Exod 13:10); and “after two years’ time [מִקֵּ֖ץ שְׁנָתַ֣יִם יָמִ֑ים]” (Gen 41:1), literally “two years of days.” The point of the idiom in an expression like this is to preclude the meaning “two calendar years,” which might not be full years.
Ibn Ezra’s opinion (quoted here in my Commentators’ Bible translation) is accepted by the standard dictionaries nowadays: ימים yamim is one way to say “a year” in Biblical Hebrew. A couple of examples from the book of Samuel will demonstrate:
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