Parashah of the week: Chayei Sarah

Biblical Hebrew is compact in that just one Hebrew word might need a few to convey the meaning in English. It is also remarkably word-efficient in that there just aren’t so many words to choose from, perhaps just a couple of thousand roots for the entire biblical vocabulary.

If it’s pointed Hebrew (with the dots and vowels) it can help, but in any case you’d think that working out which three letters are at the root of a particular word wouldn’t be too difficult, once you’ve pruned back all the prefixes, infixes, suffixes and other distractions. But occasionally one of the three root letters drops out of the final form and makes identifying the full root (and thereby locating it in a dictionary) a little harder.

Rebecca demonstrates this grammatical trick for us. On approaching Isaac (on a camel) for the first time… va-tissa. The root is nun-sin-aleph, with a little dot in the letter sin as the remaining clue to the missing nun. Va-tissa, she lifted (her eyes) and then va-teire, “she saw”, although this time the root letter you can’t see is the third letter, a heh.

So Rebecca looked up and saw Isaac. And then? Va-tippol. It’s the same process. Take off the vav-tav prefix to leave the peh and lammed, perhaps noticing the dot in the peh indicating the nun that has fallen out.

Hebrew is terse, compact, concise; but a little attention, even to a tiny dot in a letter, allows a deeper range of meaning to fall out. According to King James, Rebecca “lighted off the camel”, though in the Hertz Chumash, she “alighted” it. In the English Standard Version she “dismounted”, though in the New International Version she “got down” from it.

In the International Standard Version she “quickly dismounted” whereas according to the Darby Bible Translation she “sprang off the camel”. We might hope to stick closer to the literal meaning with Young’s Literal Translation, but here she “lifteth up her eyes, and seeth Isaac, and alighteth from off the camel”.

Va-tippol. Is the verb not grand or dignified enough for the Bible?

Check the dictionary. Riding her camel, Rebecca looked up, saw Isaac (love at first sight?) and she fell off! Ordinary, even comical, moments can be the most special, the most holy. They just don’t automatically stand out. You may have to look closely for clues. Perhaps that’s the point.