Hi, all. Please pardon me in advance, I am a more or less secular
Jew, not a spiritual person in the sense that most of you
probably mean, yet I enjoy reading the Bible very much. Since my
Hebrew is probably better than most of yours, I'd like to make a
couple of remarks to Katherine Catona's post. Hebrew is a very
old and at times strange language. Every letter has a numerical
value (still in limited use even now in modern Israel), and this
opened the way to study of the Kabbala, which was discussed a
little bit on Lactnet many moons ago. Kabbala can be most
seductive, and many are the stories of promising scholars "losing
their way" in its study. One of the problems with Shaddai is a
special meaning in its numerical value, if I'm not mistaken, so
we may be going astray in looking for some deeper meaning in the
*word* instead of in its *numerical value*. "Shad" (a 2 letter
word in Hebrew, a language with no vowels, sh is 1 letter and d
is the second) does mean breast, but "shed", spelled exactly the
same, means demon or evil spirit. Sigh.
I have another problem with "breasts" in Hebrew. According to the
rules of grammar, anything that comes in pairs is automatically
feminine in gender (oops, forgot to tell you that everything in
Hebrew is either masculine or feminine, there is no "it"). Arms,
eyes, bicycle - all feminine. What is the one "pair" that breaks
the rule? You got it! Breast(s) is/are masculine. Can someone
explain this to me?
I looked up Proverbs 22:6 in Hebrew, and, with all respect, I
have no idea how Kathy's pastor got all that about Hebrew
midwives training a baby to suck. It just isn't there.
On the OTHER hand, when writing about the young Samuel, the
Hebrew word used to describe the boy when he was weaned is a bit
strange: "na'ar" usually means "youth", like we would describe a
teenager. In fact, later on in the same book, Jonathan's armor-
bearer is also called a "na'ar", and I doubt if Prince Jonathan
would have a 6 year old armor-bearer! So how old WAS Samuel when
weaned, anyhow? Now THAT's one for our side!
I LOVE interacting with all of you! Judy Knopf in Beer Sheva,
Israel, whose Hebrew really isn't all that good, but who loves
language, no matter what language it is.