Is The Translation Right?
And the LORD said to her: “Two nations are in your womb, Two peoples shall be separated from your body; One people shall be stronger than the other, And the older shall serve the younger.”
Readers immediately understand that this is a prophecy about Jacob and his brother Esau, that Esau is meant to serve Jacob. It may well be that Rivka herself understood it this way. But this is not what the words actually say!
What are those words?
Amatz
One key word, amatz, is translated in the above as “stronger,” – but that is now how the word is used elsewhere in the text.
Amatz is used in the blessings for Joshua, that he should be courageous – certainly not mighty. Courage is about state of mind, not physical prowess or strength. Indeed, the word is used other places to refer to persistence, or stubbornness; what might today be called “grit.”
The text seems to be saying that one of these two nations will be more persistent and resolute, possessing more staying power, than the other. And thus you have a prediction about the entire history of the Jewish people, determined and stubborn from Jacob until the present day.
From: One people will be stronger than the other
To: One people will be more resolute than the other.
Could it be that the prophecy for Rivkah is not about Jacob and Esau, but is instead really about the long-term future, for the descendants of both?
Rav
From: And the older shall serve the younger.
The word used universally in the Torah for older is bachur. Bachur is used to compare the daughters of lot, the birth order of the sons of Jacob. The word is paired with the word for “younger” in every single example in the Torah – except this one! Instead of bachur, the word used in this verse is rav, which means a multitude, a large quantity – and does not mean “the older” anywhere in the Torah! Rav is not used to describe a multitude of Jews – it always means a great quantity or great power of other peoples, such as Hagar’s descendants, or the “mixed multitude” of Egyptians who left Egypt with the Jews in the Exodus.
Which seemingly gives us a mystery, right? When we look at the last mis-translation, it becomes clear:
Eved
Usually translated as “serve” (whether as a servant or a slave), there is a more basic meaning in the Torah, referring to causing things to grow.
This is because the word eved in the Torah is first used to discuss agriculture!
When no shrub of the field was yet on earth and no grasses of the field had yet sprouted, because the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth and there was no man to eved the soil,
Consider this! Man’s job is to till the soil, to cultivate and tend it, to invest his energy into the ground to produce useful and good produce. And in so doing, man is a partner with G-d – G-d brings rain, and man brings the elbow grease. Together we take raw and naked nature and turn it into something useful and productive.
What if that is what the Jewish people are supposed to do to or for the world?!
And so, using the way the language is presented in the Torah, the change is:
From: And the older shall serve the younger.
To: And the multitude will be dependent on (cultivated by) the younger
Bringing them together, using the words themselves:
Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples will issue and branch out from you. One people will be more resolute than the other. And the multitude will be dependent on (cultivated by) the younger.
Certainly not as pithy as the normal translation. But there is treasure here, a prophecy that explains the Jewish people throughout history.
After all, are we not the most stubborn (resolute/amatz) people in the history of the world?
And are we not responsible for cultivating and encouraging upward growth for all of the rest of the world? The multitude of the peoples in the world are to receive our investment, just as the earth responds to mankind’s efforts to cultivate plants.
This is the word used in our verse: the younger nation (Jews) will cultivate, invest in, and produce goods from the multitude of humanity.
Is this not what happens? Just not with Jacob and Esau directly. Instead, it happens to Jacob writ large: the Jewish peoples’ impact on the world is likened to that first farmer: we take the world in a state of nature and invest in it. Judaism combats paganism and nature-oriented views of mankind’s place, and replaces it instead with a vision that promotes the value of each soul, the value of love and relationships. It is Jacob’s descendants, as Hitler grasped so well in Mein Kampf, who reject the idea that Might Makes Right, that the powerful should rule the weak. Where Jews invest, the world grows upward, both materially and spiritually. From Judaism came Christianity and Islam, the idea of monotheism and the concept of a golden age that lies in the future and not the past.
Seen in this light, the prophecy Rebecca receives is not a lesson about the inexorability of fate, but is instead a blessing that while her children will form different peoples, one of them will lead by dint of a stubborn refusal to abandon hope, and have the same spiritual impact on the peoples of the world that mankind had in an agricultural sense when we learned to cultivate crops.