Transfer (Gen 12:8)
The Story of Abraham Begins
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8 From there he transferred to the mountain east of Bethel and pitched his tent.
וַיַּעְתֵּ֨ק מִשָּׁ֜ם הָהָ֗רָה מִקֶּ֛דֶם לְבֵֽית־אֵ֖ל וַיֵּ֣ט אָהֳלֹ֑ה
The last thing we saw Abram do was that he built an altar. The next thing he does is leave. Here are the two verbs he does in a row:
וַיִּ֤בֶן va-yíven ‘he built’ (v. 7)
וַיַּעְתֵּ֨ק va-ya’teq ‘he transferred’ (v. 8)
Though I’ve gone ahead and translated it, the first verb in our verse is somewhat challenging. However, since Abram does it “from there to the mountain,” it must be a verb of motion. Before we discuss it any further, though, it leaves us with another question: Why did Abram build that altar?
Victor Hamilton, in his comment to v. 7, observes:
Abram the pilgrim becomes Abram the builder. But he is intent on building neither a tower nor a city. His project is an altar. This is an activity in which the patriarchs often engaged (12:8; 13:18; 22:9; 26:25; 33:20; 35:7). We are never told, however, that the patriarchs offered sacrifices on any of them, except for 22:9. In two of these references (12:8; 26:25) building an altar is associated with invoking God’s name.
Writes Nahum Sarna:
It is strange that there is no mention made of a sacrifice being offered.
We said a bit, last time, about Lisbeth Fried’s notion that building an altar marks a text as having a Hellenistic perspective, not the more ancient Near Eastern perspective that the god lives in a temple building. She lists Abram’s altars (there will be another one later in this very verse), introducing them this way:
The J text of Genesis consistently depicts acts of spontaneous offerings.
The remarkable thing about the altar Abram has just built in v. 7 is precisely the opposite. He builds it and immediately leaves, without making an offering! What do you need an altar for if you’re not going to offer anything on top of it?
One possible answer might be that in the “original” J version of this story — scare quotes because we have no idea what earlier material the writer of J knew — Abram did offer a sacrifice. In the Torah version, H (who after all came from a priestly perspective) might have simply omitted this offering, leaving us with Abram’s somewhat abrupt departure. True, Noah built an altar and did make sacrificial offerings. We could imagine that it was okay for him, representing the (future) non-Jews, but not for Abram, representing the (future) Jews.
However, once you begin leaving out inconvenient details, it raises questions when other inconvenient details still remain. I prefer to think that Abram did not build this altar for the purpose of offering sacrifice.
What other reason might lead you to build an altar?, I hear you ask. My guess is this: Abram is marking his territory. He has followed YHWH’s command to “Get going! … to the land that I will show you” (v. 1), and now, at Shechem, is promised that “this land” (v. 7) will belong to his descendants.
It might have seemed to Abram that this declaration fulfilled YHWH’s statement that he would “show” Abram the land he should go to. In any case, he now has a future claim on the land and — I believe — builds an altar not to make an offering, not “in thanks” (as Radak/Kimhi writes) nor “to celebrate” (as Rashi thinks), but to stake his claim. He is, as it were, sticking a flag in the sand.
Then he leaves. Yet what a strange verb he chooses to do it with! The verb occurs 11 times in poetry (all but twice in Psalms and Job) and just three times, including ours, in prose. Isaac, like his father, will “transfer” to another location (in 26:22), and we see the word in a title in the book of Proverbs, given here in the translation of Michael Fox in the Anchor Bible series:
Prov 25:1 These too are proverbs of Solomon,
which the men of Hezekiah king of Judah transcribed [הֶ֝עְתִּ֗יקוּ].
He notes:
heʿtîqû: The root ʿ‑t‑q basically means “move” or “change place.” In the H-stem, its transitive use means “move from one place to another,” “remove” (mountains) (Job 9:5). The intransitive use is similar (Gen 12:8; 26:22).
Rashi (in my Commentators’ Bible translation) corrects the NJPS translation this way:
From there he moved on. Rather, “from there he moved [his tent].”
Ibn Ezra, typically, adds the grammatical details:
The verb is Hiphil and therefore transitive: he “removed” (OJPS) the tent that he will pitch later in the verse.
And why did he “remove” to another location? Here Kimhi explains:
To see more of the land.
That, I think, fits with my own understanding of why Abram built the altar of v. 7 and will build another later in v. 8. I have in my notes an observation from Gary Rendsburg’s book How the Bible is Written that va-ya’teq in our verse “is a proleptic link to ויעקוד of Genesis 22,” which seems unlikely to me. The sounds are vaguely similar — d and t are both dentals, so if you reverse the last two consonants these words more or less switch into one another. If his argument had more to it than this, I did not preserve it.
Since the text will use this same word writing of Isaac a few chapters after he is almost sacrificed, it’s hard to see what using it here would achieve. I prefer to think that this idiom — “transferring” without the direct object that the verb really implies — comes either from (1) a particular stage of the language, or (2) a particular author who told these stories at some earlier stage. We writers all have our idiosyncrasies (presumably long-time readers enjoy, or at least are used to, mine) and it should not surprise us to find them in the Bible as well.
Next time, we’ll be talking about where Abram transfers to — not, as we might imagine, directly to Bethel but instead, to a location somewhere in that vicinity. That’s another biblical puzzler we’ll hope to solve.
