How?

It is relatively rare that two words in two languages mean exactly the same thing all the time. For example, the equivalent of “house” in English is usually bayit in Hebrew—except when it isn’t. If, on a telephone call, your Israeli interlocutor tells you, “I am in the house,” you may understand what he means, but a real English speaker would have said, “I’m at home.” (To say this in Hebrew, you do indeed say ani ba-bayit, which quite literally is, “I am in the house”).

 

In modern Hebrew, there are basically two words that are both translated as “how” in English—eikh and keitzad. But they have quite different meanings. Consider what Joseph replies to Potiphar’s wife when she shamelessly says to him, “Lie with me!” Joseph responds: “There’s no one in the house[hold staff] more trusted than me, and he [your husband] has not withheld anything from me—except, of course, yourself, insofar as you’re his wife. So how could I do this great evil?” If Joseph said (as he does in the biblical text) eikh, he would indeed be expressing shock and outrage at the very idea. But if he had used the (I admit, post-biblical) word keitzad, it would be more like, “Hmm, let’s see! How can we go about doing this?”

 

The book of Lamentations, which is read on the day following Shabbat, is called Eikhah in Hebrew, a variant form of eikh. This title, as is often the case in the Hebrew Bible, is derived from the first word or words of the first verse of the book, in this instance: “How solitary does the city sit, which once was full of people!” This how makes perfect sense in English, since we often use the same word to introduce an exclamatory sentence: “How great it is to be back in Israel!” But in Hebrew, “How solitary does the city sit…” carries an additional nuance.

 

Eikh or eikhah also has the connotation of “alas!” in English. Thus, when David laments over the death of Saul and Jonathan, he starts off by saying, “Your glory, O Israel, lies slain on your heights. How the mighty have fallen!” (2 Sam 1:19). David really means something closer to, “Alas! These mighty men have fallen.” Similarly, when Koheleth (Ecclesiastes) says, “How can the sage die in the same way as the fool!” he apparently means not just “How” but “Alas! The sage and the fool both die the same.”

 

This week’s Torah reading, from the beginning of the book of Deuteronomy, is always read on the Shabbat preceding the Ninth of Av (Tish‘ah be-Av), a day of mourning that commemorates the destruction of the first and second temples in Jerusalem. The haftarah (reading from the Prophets) accompanying this portion is likewise fixed: it is always the first chapter of the book of Isaiah, verses 1-27. The two readings share one particular word, eikhah (which occurs in Deut 1:12 and Isa 1:21), and thus seem to look forward to the reading of Eikhah (Lamentations) following Shabbat.

 

But the reading from Isaiah was chosen as the haftarah not merely because of this verbal tally. Isaiah describes in some detail the sins of the people—sins that, he says, brought about the conquest of the northern tribes at the hands of the Assyrian army (in 722 BCE) and their subsequent deportation to points unknown in the Assyrian empire.

 

What were they guilty of? Among other things, corruption and injustice: “From head to toe, no one is straight,” Isaiah says. Still worse, the institutions of religion are used by the guilty in a vain attempt to cover their wrongdoing. “What need do I have of all your sacrifices,” God says; “I’ve had enough burnt offerings of rams, suet of fatlings; I don’t want the blood of bulls and lambs and he-goats.” Instead, “Wash and be cleansed, and remove your evil from out of My sight. Stop your wrongdoing and practice doing what’s right.”

 

Such noble words are rarely given a serious audience; this is as true today as it was in Isaiah’s time. But even if catastrophe was not avoided, the words themselves survived. I have always been taken by the subtlety of Isaiah’s initial denunciation of his contemporaries: “An ox knows its owner, and a donkey its master’s trough; Israel does not know, My people has not begun to understand.”

 

It used to be said about such lines that they are a good example of parallelism, said to be the hallmark of biblical poetry: each line divides into two clauses, and the two clauses say “the same idea in different words.” But we now know that this is really not a very good description of how these poetic lines work. Usually, they aren’t saying the same thing exactly.

 

In the case at hand, an ox may not be the noblest of animals, but it is generally obedient; two oxen can be yoked together without protest and jointly plow a farmer’s fields. It is in this sense that oxen know their owners, obediently doing what is demanded. But all a donkey is said to know in this verse is “its master’s trough.” No matter how disobedient he may be, when it comes time to be fed, the donkey will go to his trough to eat the food given by his master. The same cannot be said of Israel, however. In this great, non-parallel descent, Israel comes in third: it does not know what an ox knows, it doesn’t even know what a donkey knows, that it is his master who is feeding him.

 

But this compact pair of lines has a secret addendum: the words “owner” and “master” were two ways of referring to the divine. Thus, the word “owner” (koneh) is sometimes used of God in the sense of “Creator” (Gen 14:19, 14:22; Deut 32:6, Ps 139:13, 78:54; Prov 8:22). As for “master” (ba‘al), this word was also the common name for a major Canaanite deity, Ba‘al/Hadad, but apparently it could sometime also refer to Israel’s God (see Hos 2:16). So what the prophet is saying is that even a dumb beast knows enough to understand that he has a koneh, a Creator, and a ba‘al, a Master.  But Israel seems not even to have grasped this much; in fact, they haven’t even begun to understand.

 

Alas!