Word of the Day: עקב eikov – “heel”
Verse of the Day:
וַיֹּאמֶר הֲכִי קָרָא שְׁמוֹ יַעֲקֹב וַיַּעְקְבֵנִי זֶה פַעֲמַיִם אֶת־בְּכֹרָתִי לָקָח וְהִנֵּה עַתָּה לָקַח בִּרְכָתִי וַיֹּאמַר הֲלֹא־אָצַלְתָּ לִּי בְּרָכָה׃
Vayomer hachi kara sh’mo Ya’akov vaya’akveini zeh pa’amayim et-b’chorati lakach v’hineh atah lakach birchati vayomer halo-atzalta li b’rachah.
And he [Esau] said, “Is this why he was named Jacob, so he could cheat me twice? First he stole my birthright and then he stole my blessing. Haven’t you reserved a blessing for me?” – Gen 27:36
Question of the Day: Is Esau right? Is Jacob, the patriarch of the Jews, treacherous in his very essence?
Shmooze: Esau’s Clever Pun
Genesis doesn’t have many witticisms.
It has ironic laughter (“What? Am I going to get pregnant at the age of 90?”) and defensive sarcasm (“What? Am I my brother’s babysitter?”) and passive aggression (“What? It’s only 400 shekels between old friends like us”). But witty ripostes are rare.
So it’s surprising that one of the more brooding and muscular characters, Esau the bloody hunter, gives us one of the great instances.
Esau has learned that his twin Jacob has cheated him out of his inheritance. Like a tragic hero in Shakespeare, the bitterness of the injustice inspires Esau to a heartrending plea to Isaac, his father:
So is it because of this he was named Jacob? So he could cheat me twice? First he stole my birthright and then he stole my blessing. Haven’t you reserved a blessing for me?” [Gen 27:36]
His pain and pathos come through. He is weeping bitterly. But Esau’s wit is lost in translation. Hebrew readers can see Esau is also delivering a great pun, playing on the Hebrew of his brother’s name, even in the midst of his misery. Maybe his pain inspires him to plumb the depths of his own spirit, making him what they used to call “grandiloquent.” The pun reveals a deep current: Yaacob comes from the word for “heel.” Yakvani means “he cheated me,” from the root for “treachery.” Is this why you named him Jacob, so he could Jacob (cheat) me twice? Even Isaac seems to indict Jacob when he realizes his mistake: “Your brother came with treachery and took away your blessing,” he tells Esau later.
The War in Words
To understand how clever this pun is, let’s refresh our memories of the story.
The twins are at war. They even fight in Rebecca’s womb. At birth, Esau emerges first, but the second baby grabs him by the heel [ekev – עקב] and tries to draw him back. Jacob’s name commemorates this unusual act. With different vowels we can pronounce the same three Hebrew letters y-k-b yakob, “deceitful.” Yakvani zeh pamaim, Esau protests. “He cheated me twice!” To put it another way, Esau is saying, “He yaakov’ed me!”
On the first level, Esau is appealing to the tradition that names capture some inner essence of a person’s character and destiny. Yitzchok, from the root word for “laugh [tzaw-chak צְחַק]” because both Abraham and then Sarah laugh when God tells them she will get pregnant and bear a son to Abraham. But on closer look, it’s a prophecy. The yud is future tense: Yitzchok means “he will laugh.”
Similarly, “Yaakov” doesn’t mean “[he grabbed Esau’s] heel” or “[he brought him to] heel” or “[he’s a] heel,” but again, future tense: “he will heel.” Esau perhaps rightly says, “Is this why you named him Jacob, because he’s a cheater in his essence?”
Jacob’s maneuver at birth implies a kind of cunning. Grabbing his twin’s heel is the ultimate sneak attack. He comes from behind and grabs Esau by the heel, pulling him back, snatching away Esau’s firstborn right at the last moment. It’s an ambush. Just as Esau is emerging from the birth canal, Jacob snatches his victory away. “Let the devil take the hindmost!” goes the old English expression, something a panicked lieutenant might say to his troops just before he runs away in retreat.
Is Esau and all our other accusers right?
Is Esau right? Is Jacob’s name a prophesy of his character? Jacob is renamed Israel, father of the twelve tribes who go down to Egypt and emerge generations as the nation named after him. So is this also a prophesy of the character of the Jewish nation? After all, the libel was weaponized throughout history to persecute Jews. Esau become Edom, the Roman Empire. We saw what the Romans did to Israel.
Edom then becomes the Holy Roman Empire of the Catholic Church. It led to the expulsion of Jews from England (1290), France (multiple times 1182-1394), and various German states. Spain invoked it as “evidence” during the Inquisition (15th-16th centuries) leading to mass slaughter, forced conversions and ultimately the expulsion of Jews in 1492. Martin Luther’s tract “On the Jews and Their Lies” (1543) cast Christians as “Esau,” ultimately fueling Nazism. The volumes of apologetics of the Sages and commentators rationalizing and explaining it still don’t completely satisfy those who can’t get past the plain sense. Even Isaac seals the indictment against his son: “Your brother came with treachery and took away your blessing.” Is the character of Israel at its core deceptive, sneaky, treacherous? So it’s important not only to defend ourselves but for our own consciences to decide, without resort to apologetics or rationalizing it away, if Esau is right. Is Jacob, the patriarch of the Jews, a cheater in his very essence?
The If at the Fulcrum of History
Our method of laser-focusing on every word, every letter, may hold the answer.
The three Hebrew letters in “Jacob” hide yet another, even deeper and more essential meaning. Add different vowels to y-k-b, change pronunciation of the letter bet from ‘b’ to ‘v’ (they are the same letter) and you get aykev or eikev. The most common translation of the word is “if” or “because.” A weekly reading in Devarim [7:12-8:10] is named for it:
And it will come to pass, eikev – if – you listen to these rules and faithfully obey them, the LORD your God will keep his promise to you and be merciful to you, as he swore to your ancestors. [Deut 7:12]
It implies conditionality or contingency, a quid pro quo, as in a deal or contract to be fulfilled in the future. If you will do this, I will do that. Or Because you do this, I will do that as promised. The “if-ness” is intrinsic in any well-written contract and usually comes out at the tail end, the hindmost sections of rewards and penalties “And in consideration of your performance of these agreements, buyer agrees to pay seller $1000.”
Of course, Moses spells out this negative eikev formula clearly:
Now it shall be if you forget, yes, forget God your Lord and walk after other gods, and serve them and bow down to them, I promise you today that perish, you will perish. [Deut 8:19]
Esau’s pun intends to be a clever indictment of Jacob as cheater. But it also invokes, unwittingly, this deeper secret meaning prophesying the destiny of Israelites. Far from implying a treacherous ambush, the heelness in Jacob’s name points to the ongoing contingency in Israel’s relationship to God:
As long as you keep your end of the bargain — follow the Torah and don’t chase after other gods — I will fulfill Mine and you will thrive. Don’t, and you’ll perish
This covenantal contingency is one of the big, bright threads that stitches the entire story together throughout its five books: God promises Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, then seals his contract, writing it through Moses for all their descendants. God, sometimes directly and sometimes through Moses, re-iterates over and over the terms of the deal. As they wander the desert and then get ready to enter the Promised Land, He proves to them over and over its reality, the intrusion of His Hand into their history. It’s simple, clear, clean. The Torah is many things — epic, national myth, comedy, tragedy, constitution, utopian vision — and a contract, with the quid in the quid pro quo of every contract: If
Indeed, reading the word this way makes sense of the rest of the prophesy in the story of Jacob and Esau that we haven’t discussed yet. Isaac does in fact find a worthy blessing to give Esau. He promises that mighty nations will spring from him but also lays out a mindbending, eons-long vista
Your land will enjoy the fat of the earth and the dew from heaven. You will live by the sword and serve your brother, but when you start getting restless, you will break his yoke from your neck.” [Deut 27:40]
In Jewish tradition, as I mentioned above, Esau becomes Edom. Edom inherits Italy, truly one of the fattest and most sensuously blessed countries on Earth. Italy continues to this day to cultivate beauty, art, great food, and the aesthetic rewards of the world. Edom also becomes the empire that continues to morph through the millennia into different iterations and guises that periodically “throw off the yoke” of Israel and then afflict and subjugate it: first Rome, then Christianity, then Europe.
This is just word play. It’s prophesy that comes true.
Is everything contingent and a miracle?
Every second of every moment in life is a contingency, an “if” at the crossroads of destiny between the reality of what just happened and the infinite possibilities of what might happen next. If we miss the bus, we then miss the job interview, and our life changes radically from what it could have been. If Polonius didn’t hide behind the curtain, “Hamlet” would turn out quite differently. If fog hadn’t rolled in on Aug. 22, 1776, Washington might have lost the Battle of Long Island or even been killed. Americans would still be eating bangers and mash. If fog had rolled in, Hiroshima wouldn’t have been bombed.
Does this mean that the world is just a machine of coincidences and accidents? No. If we understand the world as a well-written narrative rather than a blind sequence of causes and effects, we get at a more profound truth of the nature of the cosmos. Reality and history are “sensitively dependent on initial conditions” — the so-called Butterfly Effect, as the science of chaos dubbed it. Trivial events lead to enormous consequences. In novels, there are no coincidences, just well-plotted incidents woven by the author’s hand to produce dramatic outcomes. The iffyness in Jacob’s name points to this way of framing his story.
Consider the alternatives: How would it have turned out if Jacob had not bought Esau’s birthright? If Isaac had given Esau instead of Jacob his first blessing? If their roles were reversed and Jacob lived under Esau’s yoke in their lifetimes. What would the world look like if the West was ruled by Rome alone without the Jewish worldview in its origin and surviving on its margins? It beggars the imagination.
Modern science after quantum mechanics has a view much closer to not only the literary one, but the Jewish one. Physics has the concept of the Feynman Path Integral.
” It’s more of a philosophy than a rigorous recipe. It suggests that our reality is a sort of blending – a sum – of all imaginable possibilities … It’s how the world really is,” said Renate Loll, a theoretical physicist at Radboud University in the Netherlands.
In other words, it seems science is growing towards an idea of the cosmos that portrays it working exactly as if a God mind is weaving reality for a purposeful destiny.
The name of Jacob evokes not past treachery but the whole future history of his people and the deal they made with the Author weaving their destiny.
