John Steinbeck’s Confused Hebrew

In his novel East of Eden, John Steinbeck tells a tale of several generations of an American family, using the stories of Adam and Eve and of Cain and Able as his templates. At a key juncture near the end of the book, two characters debate the meaning of God’s words to Cain after He has rejected his offering, which was read in synagogues last Shabbat: “If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.” One of them, a Chinese immigrant named Lee, then consults with the elders of his own community over the verse’s meaning, and they in turn consult with a group of rabbis. Lee concludes:

The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in “Thou shalt,” meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—“Thou mayest”—that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if “Thou mayest”—it is also true that “Thou mayest not.” Don’t you see?

Although Steinbeck’s grandparents came to the U.S. from Ottoman Palestine, he had to do some consultations of his own to write this passage. Sheila Tuller Keiter tells the story:

Timshel” or “thou mayest” becomes the mantra, the moral core of East of Eden. It is, in fact, the final, redemptive word of the novel. . . . Yet, as others have noticed before me, it makes little sense. The word in the Torah is “timshol,” not “timshel,” and it doesn’t mean simply “thou mayest”; it means something like “thou mayest rule over.” Steinbeck’s translation accounts only for the tav at the beginning of the word, a prefix that indicates you, singular masculine, future tense—you will. The remaining letters of the verb, mem, shin, lamed, form the Hebrew root that means to rule, control, or govern. How did Steinbeck get both the pronunciation and the meaning of the key word in, arguably, his most ambitious novel wrong?

John Steinbeck began almost every working day of 1951 with a letter to his editor at Viking Press, Pascal Covici, before turning to East of Eden. At one point Steinbeck recruited Covici, himself a Romanian Jew (Pascal Avram), to find a rabbinic authority to consult with on the original Hebrew of the key phrase in Genesis 4:7. As the fictional Lee’s Chinese elders turned to the rabbis, Covici turned to Professor Louis Ginzberg of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, one of the preeminent rabbinic scholars of his generation.

Alas, the Steinbeck-Covici letters do not reveal exactly what Ginzberg told Covici and what Covici relayed to Steinbeck in this game of exegetical telephone. However, it seems that great minds did not think alike. For some reason, Steinbeck was not entirely pleased with Ginzberg’s interpretation of the key word.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: Biblical Hebrew, Genesis, Literature

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF