The Inverted Nuns
An added observation about this week’s reading—one that just occurred to me driving home last night. This may be a little too technical for most readers, so I thought I would send it separately as a kind of appendix for any Hebraists interested in this rather obscure question. (And I apologize in advance for having missed anyone/anything obvious—as I said, it just struck me last night.)
The question concerns Numbers 10:35-36, a brief passage about the Ark of the Covenant and its procession ahead of the people. In the Torah scroll, these lines are set off before and after by what look like two upside-down versions of the letter nun, almost like a pair of parentheses. The question is, what are the inverted nuns intended to tell us?
Rabbinic tradition holds that they are something like a parenthesis, a way of indicating that the words they enclose had been taken from somewhere else. And this certainly makes sense. The words inside the inverted nuns talk about Israel’s enemies being scattered—in other words, fleeing the battlefield. But there is no battle going on here, so the nuns are a way of saying, “This is a quote from elsewhere.” But from where?
It is well known that in time of war, the Ark of the Covenant was sometimes moved onto the battlefield itself, a way of embodying God’s very presence in Israel’s midst in time of danger. Apparently, as the Ark was being lifted and carried onto the field, the people would cry out: “Rise up, O Lord, and may Your enemies be scattered and Your foes made to flee!” Then, once the Ark had been set down in its place, the people would cry out… Well, here is where things get a little complicated.
The words they cry out are usually translated, “Return, O Lord, You who are Israel’s myriads of thousands.” This translation has circulated widely, but it sounds utterly tone-deaf to me. First of all, “myriads of thousands” is bad biblical math. The word translated as “myriad” (revavah) means, specifically, 10,000. Now, the normal biblical order of numbers is to go from lower to higher, so that our text should say alfei revavah, “thousands of ten thousand” (as in Gen 24:60; cf. 1 Sam 18:7, “Saul has killed his thousands and David his ten thousands”). Here, the order is reversed, resulting in the clunker: “ten thousand of the thousands of Israel.”
But the word alef (or elef) can also means “tribe,” and that seems to be what is called for here. Taking the Ark up to the battlefield, the troops would ask that God to “rise up and let Your enemies be scattered and Your foes flee.” Then, when they Ark had been set down in its place, the troops would say something else, namely, the next verse, in which alfei Yisrael means “the tribes of Israel.” But then, what does the verse mean as a whole?
Most commentators and translators understand it as saying, “Return, O Lord, You who are Israel’s myriads of thousands.” Unfortunately, there is no “You who are” in the Hebrew: this is just an attempt to paper over the perceived awkwardness of the text.
Surprisingly, the thing that most commentators,[1] old and new, seem to have missed is the fact that “return” (shuv) is sometimes a transitive verb, that is to say, it can refer to returning somebody or some thing to somewhere. This seems counterintuitive: to cause someone or something to return in Hebrew is usually expressed by the hiphil form, heshiv. But not always! Sometimes, the usually intransitive shuv can take a direct object. One well known example is in Psalm 126, which begins, “When the Lord restores (shuv) the fortunes (shivat)[2] of Zion, we will be like people in a dream.” The same psalm goes on to pray, “Restore (shuvah) our fortunes (shevitenu), O Lord…” Other examples of this transitive sense of shuv are Isa 52:8 (“When the Lord restores Zion”) Psalm 85:2 (“May You restore the fortunes of Jacob”) Nahum 2:3 (“For the Lord has restored the pride of Jacob”)—and our verse as well. What it really says is: “Restore, O Lord, the myriads of Israel’s tribes!”
Read in its larger context, what these verses are saying is that, once the Ark was set down in its place, the people would cry out, “Return, O Lord, the myriads of Israel’s tribes!”—in other words, “Let our troops come home safely.” Understood in this way, it is obvious that those inverted nuns are meant to indicate that the words they bracket were originally taken from a battlefield cry: clearly, there was no battle going on in their present context.
Then why mention this battle cry at all? Its insertion here was prompted by the words just preceding the inverted nuns, which say that the Ark had marched (n-s-‘) in front of the Israelites during their wilderness travels (Num 10:33-34). Having mentioned that act of marching, the text then went on to connect it to the Ark’s famous act of marching, its march onto the battlefield, starting with the words “And when the Ark marched forward…” The only difference is that, in the present context, it is not the people or the troops who cry out, but Moses. (Once again, apologies if this has already been pointed out elsewhere.)
Shabbat shalom!
[1] But almost stated by A. ibn Ezra, ad loc.; BDB, p. 998.
[2] Actually, shivah here is what scholars call a cognate accusative, that is, a noun apparently connected with a verb from the same root—“to pray a prayer,” to “dream a dream,” and so forth. But “restore a restoration” or “return a return” is quite awkward in English, so translators have long opted for “restore the fortunes” in this case.