Mystical Explanations
You will bring them and plant them in the mountain of Your inheritance, Exodus 15:17a NASB
You will bring them – What do you do with a text that has grammatical oddities? Well, you could chalk it up to transmission error. Copyists make mistakes and mistakes are handed on as if they were part of the original. There are some very famous examples of this kind of textual error like adding the scribe’s marginal note “these three are one” in 1 John 5:7 as if it were what John actually wrote. But let’s suppose that you have a rather uncontroversial verse, like this one, and you notice that there’s something odd with the grammar. In this case, the word תְּבִאֵמוֹ has one superfluous vav. It’s as if the scribe added an extra letter to a word that already made perfect sense without the addition. Here’s the opening phrase in Hebrew:
תְּבִאֵמוֹ וְתִטָּעֵמוֹ בְּהַר נַחֲלָתְךָ
“You will bring them” (the first word) should be te’eimo. The extra vav isn’t a copyist error at the end of the word. Instead, it looks like an addition. So, there are two questions: 1) why is it there? and 2) what should be done about it?
By this time you’re probably asking yourself, 3) “Why does it matter?” The meaning of the sentence doesn’t change. The translation is pretty clear. But this isn’t a matter of meaning (at least it doesn’t begin that way). It’s a matter of accuracy. For those who ascribe to the belief that this text is the sacred word of God to men, grammatical oddities are burrs under the saddle. They annoy us. We want explanations, or at least admissions that there’s a mistake. And if we aren’t willing to entertain the possibility of a mistake, then we’ll have to find another reason for this oddity. Low and behold, kabbalists found a way to maintain that this is intentional for mystical reasons.
Rabbi Moses Cordovero, the noted kabbalist of Safed, in writing in praise of Kabbalah, denigrated the importance of grammar and linguistics for the understanding of Scripture. Like other kabbalists before him, he pointed out that the words peshat (‘plain sense’) and tippesh (‘fool’) are spelled with the same letters. While the grammarians have difficulty explaining words with superfluous letters or the differences between keri and ketiv (where a word is read one way and written another), the student of Kabbalah has no problem clarifying these passages. For example, the verse reads, tevi’eimo vetita’eimo (‘You will bring them and you will plant them’) [Exodus 15:17]. What do we learn from the extra vav in tevi’eimo? The Holy Spirit spoke here of the subsequent generation, which Joshua had circumcised and to whom was revealed the sacred Name of God, and that the unity of God is expressed with a vav. They merited inheriting the land, as it is written, ‘And your people [ve’amekh] are all righteous, they will inherit the land forever’ (Isaiah 60:21). This means that to whomever the secret letters of God’s name are revealed and he keeps them secret, such a person is called a ‘righteous person’ (a tzaddik), and he merits ‘to inherit the land forever.’ Thus we see that there is no word or letter in the Torah that does not have a transcendental meaning.[1]
With this explanation, the kabbalists claimed that the superfluous vav was a secret way of saying that Joshua circumcised the generation entering the Land so that they would be righteous.
Are you getting it? The paradigm, that Scripture is without error, governs the explanation. Since there can’t be mistakes, it’s up to us to find a reason why this apparent extra vav is really what God wanted. You might think, “Well, you know those kabbalists. They’ll say anything to promote their beliefs,” but when you deride them for mystical explanations, are you looking in the mirror at the same time? How many anomalies do we explain away with our theological jargon? How much does our paradigm of inerrancy govern the grammar? How many excuses will it take before we realize we’ve pushed the envelope too far? Or perhaps better yet, how much do we have to ignore in order to maintain our “faith”?
Every instance of qere ketiv in the Tanakh challenges our belief in the inerrant text. Did you think the apostolic writers were guaranteed immunity from such human behavior? Pick up any version of the Greek New Testament and notice how many textual differences there are on every page (read the footnotes). Hundreds. Oh, they might not make any difference to the overall meaning, and we are constantly assured that they do not make any difference to the salvation message, but they’re there—everywhere. What do you do about them? Become a New Testament kabbalist?
Topical Index: qere ketiv, tevi’eimo, you will bring, extra vav, Kabbalah, Exodus 15:17
[1] Abraham Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations, pp. 257-258.
