Numbers 8:1-12:16

 

The Inverted Nuns

 

This week’s reading includes a minor oddity, one that has puzzled scholars from ancient times to the present. Numbers 10:33-34 reports that when the Israelites left Mount Sinai, they traveled for three days in search of a stopping point, adding, “The Lord’s cloud was above them by day as they traveled from the campsite.” Then comes the following brief passage:

 

When the Ark was traveling, Moses would say: “Rise up, O Lord, so that Your enemies will be scattered and Your adversaries put to flight from before You!” And when it [the Ark] came to rest he would say, “Return, O Lord, [You who are] Israel’s myriads of thousands.” (Num 10:35-36)

 

The minor oddity I mentioned consists of two strange signs, one immediately preceding and the other immediately following the above passage as it is written in Torah scrolls. The strange signs vary slightly from scroll to scroll, but in general they seem to be backward and/or upside-down versions of the letter nun. The question is: what are the inverted nuns intended to tell us?

Rabbinic tradition holds that these nuns were a way of indicating that the passage that they enclose really doesn’t belong there—and this certainly makes sense. The words inside the inverted nuns are talking about Israel’s enemies being scattered—in other words, fleeing the battlefield. But there is no battle going on here, so the nuns were inserted as a way of saying, “This passage belongs to a different context.” But what context is that?

It is well known that in time of war, the Ark of the Covenant was sometimes moved onto the battlefield itself, as a way of embodying God’s very presence in Israel’s midst in time of danger. Apparently, as the Ark was being hoisted and carried onto the battlefield, Moses 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 on the field, the people would cry out… Well, here is where things get a little complicated.

The words that they cry out are usually translated, “Return, O Lord, You who are Israel’s myriads of thousands.” This translation has circulated widely, and it’s why I cited it above, but it sounds utterly tone-deaf to me. First of all, “myriads of thousands” (revevot alfei) is bad biblical math. The word translated as “myriad” (revavah) means, specifically, 10,000. Now, the normal biblical order of complex numbers is to go from lower to higher, so that our text should say alfei revevot, “thousands of ten thousands.” (Thus in Gen 24:60, “O sister, may you grow into thousands of ten thousands,” or Ahasuerus’ empire, which consisted of 127 provinces, literally “seven and twenty and one hundred” provinces.). 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 on the way to the battlefield, the troops would ask God to “rise up and may 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 quoted it above, “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 a particular place. 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: “Return, 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 on the battlefield, 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 with the Ark, 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 troops who cry out, but Moses, and the people are not carrying the Ark into battle, but just looking for a proper place to stop.

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.