Nehar Deah

Mishpatim

On the Blessing and on the Curse

The topics dealt with in parashat Mishpatim are many and varied. Among the many, we have chosen to deal with one: “You shall not revile God, nor curse a prince of thy people” (Shemot 22:27). The two hemistiches of the written verse, constructed in the poetic format of correspondence, parallel “God” with “prince” and “[do] not revile” with “nor curse”. The two Hebrew roots of the verbs “revile” and “curse” are opposites of the verb “bless”, as can bee seen, for example, in: “… and I shall bring a curse upon me, and not a blessing” (Bereishit 27:12); “And I will bless them that bless you, and those that curse you will I revile” (ibid 12:3).

The Bible reflects man’s faith in the power of blessings and curses, as if the words which come from a person’s mouth, especially the more exalted members of the nation, the elders and prophets, have the power to alter the flow of events in favor of the blessed and to the detriment of the cursed. This faith in blessings and curses has many faces, various types of amulets or bowls with words of protections and aid carved on them, ceremonies to invoke curses and taking of vows and suchlike. This faith also has a morally problematic aspect: man is likely to misuse blessings and curses to bring good to evildoers or evil to those who do good. It seems that this is the reason that our morally exacting religion wishes to uproot this faith and teach us that only God, the highest judge, who judges his world with complete righteousness, is able and permitted to bless and curse, to bring good and evil. This is seen clearly in two stories from the Torah.

When Rebecca wishes to transfer to Jacob the blessing her elderly husband, Isaac, has earmarked for his firstborn, Esau, her plot apparently succeeds (Bereishit 27), but the reader realizes that it is not on the strength of the stratagem or the deception that Jacob is blessed, but rather due to the fact that God intended him for greatness, as he foretold to Rebecca even before her two sons were born: “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples shall be separated from your bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger.” (Bereishit 25:23). The blessing which Jacob gained by deception therefore did not change the preordained course of events.

From the story of Balaam we find evidence, similar to the preceding, as to the strength of the opposition to the popular view and to the power of man to curse. When Balak wishes to curse Israel he turns to Balaam with a request: “Go now therefore, please, curse for me this people; … for I know that he that you bless is blessed, and which you curse is cursed” (Bamidbar 22:6), but Balaam answers him saying, “If Balak would give me his house full of silver and gold, I could not transgress the word of the Hashem my God, to do any thing, small or great” (ibid, verse 18), and he continues: “And now, have I now any power at all to say any thing, the word that God puts in my mouth, that shall I say” (verse 38, see also Devarim 23:6 and Yehoshua 24:9-10). Blessings and curses are for God alone.

Therefore, the prohibition against cursing God and princes does not express a fear of harm that the curser may bring upon the cursed, but rather an important principle, that it is incumbent upon a person to honor those who are higher in status than they are – God, who rules over the earth and all it contains, and the prince, a human ruler. Therefore, “to curse/revile” is also the opposite of “to honor”, for example: “And I will be yet cursed than thus … and with the handmaids whom thou hast spoken of, with them will I be honored” (Shmuel II 6:22).

As well as the verses we are dealing with, cursing God is also mentioned in the Book of Iyov (Job). Iyov is worried that his sons might have sinned in the drinking of wine, “and they ‘blessed’ God in their hearts” (Iyov 1:5), and therefore he brings a burnt offerings as atonement. As disasters pile up upon Iyov, his wife pleads with him: “’bless’ God and die” (2:9), and it is clear that the use of the term “bless” here is “sagi nahor” (euphemism. literally “great light”), a result of the desire to avoid using the harsh expression, cursing God.

In the story of the vineyard of Naboth (Kings I 21), the unscrupulous Queen Jezebel stages a trial, with a resulting death penalty, against Naboth and witnesses testify against him claiming that “Naboth ‘blessed’ God and King” (verse 14; see also verse 10). Naboth’s refusal to sell his vineyard to the king is interpreted by the Queen as cursing the King. Naboth reason for refusing, “Hashem forbade me that I should give the inheritance of my fathers to you” – the use he makes of the name of God – is used by the Queen as a pretext for accusing him of cursing God.

Another explanation which distances us from the concept of cursing God – other than “sagi nahor” – is the interpretation of the word “Elohim” in the verse not as referring to God, but rather to flesh and blood, a reference to judges. This is a widespread tradition in biblical commentaries, literature of chazal (literally, “our sages of blessed memory”) and translations, although it is not the simple interpretation of the text. It seems that this interpretation finds support in our verse, since the second hemistich of the verse speaks of flesh and blood, the prince, but in reality the intention of this precept is: it is not only God that we are forbidden to curse, but also any human ruler.

Additionally, on the issue of the identity of those we are forbidden to curse: it seems that in the story of Naboth, mentioned above, Jezebel quotes-hints at the aforementioned precept, but substitutes “king” for “prince”. This precept is also hinted at in Yesha’ayah (Isaiah) 8:21: “and curse by their king and by their God”. It may be that in the manner in which this precept echoes through the story of Naboth and the words of Yesha’ayah, we can find reference to an earlier wording: “You shall not revile God, nor curse a king of thy people”, and it seems that at some stage the word “king” was substituted with “prince”, which was common form of rulership in ancient tribes (see Bereishit 23:6; Shemot 34:31). This substitution probably results from the Bible’s ambivalent attitude to the institution of monarchy. It is not coincidental that the Torah only has one law which deals with the monarchy (Devarim 17:14-20), a law which assumes that a monarchy in Israel will not come about due to God’s will but rather in answer to the children of Israel’s desire to emulate the rulership of the nations. The law of the monarchy in the Book of Devarim even clarifies that the king is subject to the laws of the Torah, in the same manner as any other Jew, and he does not have even the slightest preference over his fellows. From this same trend of avoidance of the concept of monarchy, the prophet Ezekiel prefers to refer to the king as “prince (for example 12:10; 19:1; 21:17), and the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible, translates the term “king” in Devarim 17, as “prince”. In the scroll of the “Damascus Covenant”, the author refers to the law of the king in the Book of Devarim, and paraphrases in the same style: “and about the prince it is written, he should not increase his wives” (5:1-2). From all this we learn that it is possible that the law in Shemot which we have before us today has already been changes from it’s original form based on ideological reasons.

Professor Yair Zackovitz
Department of Bible Studies

Folklore – Amulets

Various objects – from nature (such as an animals tooth, a head of garlic) or man made objects worn around the neck, carried on ones body or kept close to a person out of the belief that they have the power to bring them good luck, success, good health, or to save them from curses, the evil eye, demons and evil creatures. The use of amulets has been widespread since the dawn of history and in every nation and religion, and attitudes towards them vary from appreciation and even veneration to contempt and outright rejection as pure superstition. The term “kami’ah” (amulet, in Hebrew) is known only from the literature of chazal onwards, taken probably from a Hebrew root word meaning to bind or connect (for example: “bind on your hand tefillin” [Tosephta D’mai 2:17]), and it seems that a kami’ah was originally something bound to the body.

Among the Jewish amulets written in Hebrew, there is a special place for those mentioning the various names of God (e.g. Shaddai, Tzeva’ot), names of angels (the better known are: Raphael, Uriel, and Gabriel, and the lesser known Smnglof and Yachbiel), and Bible verses, in full and abbreviated. We find various amulets, Oriental and Occidental, contain combinations of letters not immediately recognizable as words in any languages. It seems that these words are made up of the first letter of each word of specific biblical verses: “The secret things belong to Hashem our God; but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children for ever” (Devarim 29:28) – on an amulet which gives the ability to interpret dreams; “But against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog whet his tongue” (Shemot 11:7) – for protection against evil dogs; “And in the greatness of Your excellence You overthrow those who rise up against You; You send forth Your wrath, it consumes them as stubble” (Shemot 15:7) – against slander. Specific biblical verses are repeatedly found in this context on amulets, especially those that promise some form of heavenly protection.

Language – “Sagi Nahor” (“Great Light”)

“Sagi nahor”, an expression in Aramaic meaning “great light”, is surprisingly actually an expression for one who cannot see, a blind person (for example: “Rav Sheshet was a sagi nahor” [Babylonian Talmud Berachot 58a]). According to a proverb from another source (Midrash Bereishit Rabbah 35:9), those who are blind in both eyes, refer to one who is blind in only one eye as “sagi nahor”. According to this, “sagi nahor” has two different meanings in the literature of chazal: a person who is completely blind or someone who is blind in one eye. Presenting a blind person as a “great light” comes to avoid harsh and hurtful references to his disability.

The tendency to refer to things which have an aspect of disgrace, insult, harmfulness, a risk of attracting Satan’s attention and other suchlike wording, by saying their exact opposite, is known already from the Bible (“to bless” meaning in fact “to curse”) and other ancient sources, such as the name of a work compiled in the sixth or seventh century, devoted entirely to the issues of death and mourning. This work lists laws and various topics from dying to burial and graves, but the name of the work is “Tractate of Happiness”, in contrast to the topic dealt with. Similarly, a cemetery, the resting place of the dead, is referred to as “the house of the living” (an expression found already in the fourteenth century), and this is also the case with the custom of chazal to refer to “the haters of Israel” instead of “the nation of Israel” in a negative context (for example: “At the time of a solar eclipse – an inauspicious sign for the nations of the world, lunar eclipse – a inauspicious time for the haters of Israel [= meaning the nation of Israel!], because the nations count [the months] by the sun and Israel counts by the moon” [Tosefta Succah 2:6]). In all the above cases, concern about mentioning something negative leads to it being expressed as its opposite.

Despite this, the expression “sagi nahor” was only coined in the nineteenth century to describe this style of language. We find it in the writings of Mendele the Bookseller (“And each one calls to his friend, in the style of sagi nahor, a great intellect, meaning a world class idiot”), or in a responsa by Rabbi David Tzvi Hoffman (1843-1921), who writes: “we find a number of cases in which chazal twist their language in order not to bring forth words of revilement or badness from their mouths, and this language is called the language of sagi nahor”, and since then this expression has become part of our language with the poet Avraham Shlonsky even creating the title: “descriptions of modesty sagi nahorayim”.

History – The Damascus Covenant Scroll

Approximately one hundred years ago, while living in England, the researcher Shneur-Zalman Schechter discovered, among part of the Cairo Geniza, 18 worn pages, written in Hebrew, which had been copied between the 10th and 14th centuries, and which he described as the “most important find” from the Geniza. He published these pages, together with an introduction, in 1910 under the title “Fragments of a Zadokite Work”. Schechter surmised that this was a work which reflected the religious laws of one of the cults from the Second Temple period and anti-cult polemics found in the literature of chazal, can then be understood as being in response to issues dealt with in it. The publication of Schechter’s work lead to a wave of research, some of which doubted the origins of the text or its cultic origins, but due to the First World War and Schechter’s death the interest in it waned. Before his death, Schechter expressed the hope that additional pages of the work would be discovered which would “reveal the complete truth”. He hoped but could not know that within a few decades his hope would be realized.

With the discovery of the Judean Desert Scrolls in the 1940’s and 1950’s, this work garnered renewed and intensive attention. Among the scrolls were found additional copies of this work, mostly incomplete, some of which paralleled those that Schechter publicized and some of which added to them. In this way the overall structure of the work was revealed – it opens with a description of the history of the sect and continues with its extremely stringent religious laws and its decrees – and this allowed its language and characteristics to be reconstructed with greater clarity.

As far as we know today, this work comes from the world of the Judean Desert sect and was compiled by a part of the sect, that at some stage left the land of Israel and moved to the near Damascus or alternatively moved to an area of the Judean Desert they referred to as “Damascus” (and from this we have the name of the work: the Damascus Covenant Scroll). Research into the history of religious law in the nation of Israel has been enriched by the discovery of the full version of the “Damascus Covenant Scroll”, and many areas in ritual law – for example laws of the Sabbath, marriage, court system, forbidden foods, leprosy, vows – gained important clarification, as this scroll aids in filling the time gap between the commandments and laws of the Torah and the religious-law literature of chazal, which begins with the Mishna, which was compiled at the beginning of the third century of the common era.