Genesis 25:19-28:9
What a Difference an Aleph Makes!
In this week’s Torah reading, Isaac is now dwelling in Beer Sheba, and the Philistine king, Abimelech, comes with his aides to meet him. Isaac and Abimelech have had rather frosty relations, so as soon as he sees them, Isaac calls out to the king and his courtiers: “What are you coming to see me for? You’re my enemies, you drove me away from you!” But the Philistines have come to reassure Isaac; they suggest making a sworn peace treaty with him to smooth things over. Isaac agrees, and they conclude this agreement with a feast; the next day the Philistines peacefully depart. “That same day, Isaac’s servants came to him and reported about a well that they had dug; they said to him, ‘We found water!’” (Gen 26:32).
That’s what our text says. But there was apparently another version of this text—the one underlying the Septuagint (Old Greek) translation—that differed from our text here in only one letter. While our text reads “they said to him [the Hebrew reads lo, spelled with the letters lamed and vav], ‘We found water!’” the Septuagint’s underlying text wrote lo with the letters lamed alef—a one-letter difference. The resultant text sounds exactly the same, lo, but the Septuagint’s means just the opposite: “They said [without the “to him”] we didn’t find water.”
Which was the intended meaning? Sometimes the broader context will make the meaning clear, but here it’s hard to tell. The verse just before the lines mentioned above says that the Isaac’s servants had dug a well in Beer Sheba (Gen 26:25), but it doesn’t spell out whether the result of their digging was positive or negative. Perhaps now, with Isaac having sworn this peace treaty with the Philistines, his servants told him some more good news, “We found water!”
But another ancient source, one that did not make it into our Bible, is the book of Jubilees (ca. 200 BCE); it put a quite different spin on the whole incident. In general, Jubilees is extraordinarily xenophobic—dealings with non-Jews, it says, were to be avoided at all costs. Now, it’s not clear if Jubilees’ author consciously chose to use the version of the Torah that read “we didn’t find water”; it’s possible that this was the only version of the text that he knew. In any case, the “we didn’t find water” reading fit his own ideology perfectly: Of course Isaac’s servants didn’t find water, he said. That’s what happens when you swear an oath of friendship with non-Jews.
In fact, Jubilees goes on to say that Isaac then cursed the Philistines, in effect undoing the peace treaty he had just sworn. What is more, according to Jubilees, Isaac called the place the Well of the Oath (Hebrew “Beer Sheba”) not in honor of the peace treaty he had just sworn, but as a reminder never to make such an oath of friendship again!
In the light of all this, one can appreciate how important a single letter of the Torah can be. In this case, it made all the difference between a mean-spirited, xenophobic message and one that celebrated quite the opposite. And sometimes a peace treaty is just what you need.