Down with Repetition!
Sometimes the Bible doesn’t seem to like exact repetition. In this week’s reading, for example, the Torah starts by relating Pharaoh’s dream: Seven cows, “well favored in appearance and plump-skinned,” come up from the Nile to graze in the grass. Then come seven more cows, “ugly in appearance and with little fat,” and they swallow up the plump cows. Pharaoh’s second dream is similar: Seven ears of grain, “plump and goodly,” are growing from a single stalk; then seven more ears of grain, “thin and blighted by the east wind,” sprout up after them, and the thin ears swallow up the plump ones.
When Pharaoh tells Joseph of his dreams, we might expect his words to be the same the second time around—or else the Torah could have simply said: “he told his dreams to Joseph,” with going into the same details again. Neither option was taken. Instead, the descriptions change a little. The first seven cows are “plump-skinned and well-favored in appearance” (the same adjectives, but their order is switched). Then come the seven other cows, “poor and very ugly in form, and empty-skinned” (all somewhat different adjectives from those of the earlier description). As for the first ears of grain, this time they are “full and goodly,” while the other ears are “withered, thin, blighted by the east wind.”If this is not enough, when Joseph explains Pharaoh’s dreams to him, he introduces some further variations: the second set of cows are “empty and ill,” while and the second set of ears are “empty and blighted by the east wind.”
Well naturally, you might say—no one would expect ordinary people to repeat a dream description in precisely the same terms. But the Bible presents lots of other non-repetitions even when it is not quoting someone’s speech. Psalm 107, for example, recounts various incidents in Israel’s history, ending each with a refrain: “Then they cried out (vayyitzaku) to the Lord” (verse 6); the same refrain appears in verses 13 and 20, but here a slightly different word is used for “they cried out,” vayyiz‘aku. Then, in verse 28, we go back to vayyitzaku. Innocent variation? But isn’t the whole idea of a refrain that it repeats the same words each time?
Psalm 24 also has a couple of non-repetitions. Verse 7 says, “Lift up your heads, O gates! And be lifted up, O ancient doors, and let the Glorious King come in!” Verse 9 is slightly different: “Lift up your heads, O gates! And lift up, O ancient doors, and let the Glorious King come in!” Those who answer to these calls also differ slightly in the two cases. The first response (verse 8) is “Who is the Glorious King?” The second time, it’s “Who is this Glorious King?”
(Readers: It’s a little late, and these are the ones that came to my mind immediately, but if you have other examples, I will be grateful if you send them in.)
In any event, later sages seem to have gone even farther in their avoiding exact repetition. For example, when Jacob blesses his son Joseph (Gen 49:22) he exclaims, “A fruitful bough [ben porat; alternate translation: “a wild donkey”] is Joseph, a fruitful bough [or: “a wild donkey”] on a spring…” The phrase ben porat is repeated twice. But in his Aramaic targum, Onkelos translates this phrase the first time as “my son who will be great” and the second time as “my son who will be blessed.” The exact same words mean two different things. When Isaiah saw the heavenly throne, the seraphim were calling to each other, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts,” but the Aramaic translation makes it clear that each of these three words have three different meanings: “Holy in the highest heaven, His dwelling place; holy on earth, where He performs great deeds; holy forever and ever.”
Behind such translations stands the conviction that every word of Scripture is sacred and that, as a consequence, even apparent repetition must carry some additional meaning. Indeed, the same conviction seems to be expressed in the (medieval) vowel signs (nekudot) and Masoretic accents (te‘amim) added to the consonantal text. For example, each of those three repetitions of “holy” in Isaiah’s vision is marked with a different Masoretic accent, and when the Israelites twice ask rhetorically “Who is like You” in the Song of the Sea (Exod 15:11), the first time the nekudot have us read mi-khamokha and the second time mi kamokha. Something there is that hates exact repetition.
With one flagrant exception, also in this week’s Torah reading, in the special additional reading for Hanukkah. This reading comes from the section in Numbers chapter 7 relating the sacrifices offered by each of the leaders of Israel’s twelve tribes (sometimes called the “princes” or “chieftains”) at the time of the consecration of the tabernacle. Each of these “princes” is said to have offered “one silver bowl weighing 130 shekels and one silver basin of 70 shekels by the sanctuary weight, both filled with choice flour and oil mixed in, for a meal offering; one golden ladle of 10 shekels, filled with incense; one bull of the herd, one ram, and one lamb in its first year, for a burnt offering; one goat for a sin offering; and for his sacrifice of well-being: two oxen, five rams, five he-goats, and five yearling lambs.”
These words are listed in the Torah no fewer than twelve times, one after the other. Why bother? Certainly the Torah could have said, “Each of the princes gave the following” and then listed the details only once. Given the above-mentioned conviction that each word of the Torah is significant, isn’t the exact repetition of these verses to be considered a flagrant contradiction of that belief?
Different answers to this question have been given, but it seems to me that the most straightforward explanation is that the Torah is seeking to underline an important principle. Israel’s twelve tribes were all different: some were very large and some were quite small in number; as a result, some of the princes no doubt had far greater resources than the others; yet they all offered precisely the same gifts for the tabernacle.
Here, it seems to me, is a laudable ideal for Jewish organizations and their “princes” today.
Shabbat shalom!
