(Deuteronomy 26:1-29:8)

The Seventy Languages

 

In this week’s reading, the Israelites are about to enter the promised land. At this crucial point, they are given an odd instruction: On the very day that you cross the Jordan River, set up some large stones and coat them with plaster, so that you can write on them “all the words of this Torah, ba’er hetev (“very clearly” or “most distinctly”) (Deut 27:8).

What is the point of this last specification? Did it really need to be said? The Talmud (Sota, 36a) only compounds the mystery. Commenting on ba’er hetev, it explains: “in seventy languages.” What did it mean by this?

 

A later practice probably underlies the Talmud’s remark. For centuries when the Torah was read aloud in synagogue, each Hebrew verse was followed by its translation into Aramaic (targum). Certainly many listeners in synagogue knew enough Hebrew to understand the text in the original, but translation nevertheless served as the easiest and most versatile way of explaining the Hebrew text, often slightly transforming the meaning in the process. Indeed, this practice was understood to go back to earlier times. Thus, when Ezra  assembled the Israelites for a public reading of the Torah, he and his helpers “read from the scroll of God’s Torah with interpretation and giving the sense” (Nehemiah 8:8). This last phrase was understood to refer to providing the Aramaic translation of the Torah’s words.

But then why the seventy languages? The Genesis account of the world’s beginnings was understood to reflect the belief that there were exactly seventy nations in the world—and hence, seventy languages. So the Talmud’s remark is really an assertion that, at the moment when the Israelites were entering their own land, they were to take care to make all the Torah’s laws understandable to any non-Israelite who might wish to follow Israel’s God and His laws.

 

In Hellenistic times, Greek writers sometimes accused the Jews of avoiding dealings with non-Jews, even to the point of eliminating all contact whatsoever with foreigners. And, as a matter of fact, the translation of the Torah into Greek was denounced at the time by some Jews who considered it a dangerous act of betrayal: “Don’t make the Torah available to anyone but us!” But at least in regard to this week’s reading, what seems to be a rather universalist note is sounded: Let all the nations of the world learn just what the Torah says, indeed, let them read it in their own languages.

 

Shabbat shalom!