Abnormal Interests

I start with a reminder of the canonical text of Numbers 6:22-26.

And YHWH spoke to Moses saying,
     Speak to Aaron and his sons saying,
          In this way you shall bless the sons of Israel: You shall say to them,
               YHWH bless you and keep you;
               YHWH make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
               YHWH lift up his face upon you and give you peace.

My thesis is that, with relatively little massaging, these verses reflect the formal opening of a letter addressed to Aaron, or maybe Moses or perhaps, in origin, someone else. There is a significant literature on the form of letters from the ancient Near East. In fact, depending on time, language, location and the relationship between the parties involved there are several formal structures. And within each of those structures, there is room for flexibility. Lindenberger, 7, outlines the structure of Aramaic and Hebrew letters as follows:

Opening
     Initial Address
     Initial Greeting
Body
Closing
     Concluding Formulas
     Mention of Scribe
     Date
Outside Address

Most Hebrew and Aramaic letters have אל, "to," plus a personal name as their Initial Address. Some indicate the relationship between the parties: brother, sister, father, servant, etc. Many of these "relationships" are matters of courtesy and protocol rather than biology or condition of servitude. Some Hebrew and Aramaic Initial Addresses identify the sender. I'll look at a couple of these later. Of course, not every letter has every element; the formal closing and/or outside address are very often missing. The opening may be rather expansive or severely truncated. Some letters totally lack a greeting or simply say, "Greeting," שלם. Others like, Arad 18, have a blessing in the Initial Greeting. Arad 18:2-3a, a Hebrew letter reads, "May YHWH ask of (look after) your will being," יהוה ישאל לשלמך. And Arad 16:2b-3a reads, "I bless you to YHWH," ברכתך ליהוה. An Aramaic letter from Yedanyah of Elephantine to Bagavahya has a very elaborate blessing in its Initial Greeting, I follow Lindenberg's, 75, translation, "May the God of heaven richly bless our lord always, and may he put you in the good graces of King Darius and his household a thousand times more than now. May he grant you a long life, and may you always be happy and strong." Please remember "strong," שריר, for a while.

Now, for heuristic reasons, let me take a little liberty with the text of Numbers 6:22-26 and remove a few words and slightly rewrite a few others in verses 22 and 23. I will not add anything but I will need to re-vocalize two words. I'm not claiming that this exact text ever existed but I do think something like it may have. There are several ways the first line of my rewrite can be abstracted from Numbers 6:22-23. I'll give more details below.

A message of Moses, say to Aaron (and his sons),
     YHWH bless you and keep you;
     YHWH make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
     YHWH lift up his face upon you and give you peace.

Voilá! Now that looks like a letter opening to me. Sure, I have used the well-known method of "pound to fit and paint to match" on Numbers 6:22-23. I'll show you how I did this trick later in the post. But before you become overly critical allow me to discuss each line, starting with the first blessing and ending with my reconstruction of the opening, in the context extra biblical letters from the Levant.

Blessing and Greeting

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A) Numbers 6:24, יְבָרֶכְךָ יְהוָה וְיִשְׁמְרֶךָ, "YHWH bless you and keep you."

Aphek 7 is an Akkadian letter from the governor (šakinu) of Ugarit to the governor of Aphek. Below are lines 8-12, part of the opening of the letter, first as written, then more or less as it was pronounce, and finally in my translation.

a-na˥ muḫ-ḫi a-bi-ia˥ EN-ia
lu-ú šul-ma DINGER.MEŠ ša LUGAL GAL˥ EN-ka
DINGER.MEŠ ša KUR URU Ú-ga-ri-it
lu-uk-ru-bu-ka
li-iṣ-ṣu-ru-ka

ana muḫḫi abiya bēlīya
lû šulma ilū ša milki rabî bēlīka
ilū ša Ugarit
lūkrubuka
lîṣṣuruka

To my father, my lord
Greetings (lit. Peace or Health). May the gods of the Great King, your lord,
(and) the gods of Ugarit
bless you
(and) keep you.

The great king here is likely the pharaoh of Egypt. Note the words lūkrubuka lîṣṣuruka, precatives on karābu ("pray", "bless") and naṣāru (guard/protect) respectively. While not exactly identical with Hebrew יְבָרֶכְךָ וְיִשְׁמְרֶךָ, they are certainly well within the same semantic range. Note also that both have the same two fold structure with only the subject defined explicitly in the first part.

Turning to Hebrew material: Of the writing on pithio from Kuntillet 'Ajrud Lindenberger, 134, says the following,

Only recently have scholars recognized that two of the inscriptions containing the phrase in question [YHWH and his asherah -des] are epistolary greetings formulas . . . apparently written as practice exercises, which explains their inclusion here. [emphasis added, references omitted]

So what do these epistolary greetings formulas say? Well an inscription on pithos B reads, "Amaryaw [says], say to my lord, "Are you well? I bless you by YHWH of [Teman] and his asherah. May he bless (you) and keep you (יברך וישרך)." Sound familiar? This text is generally dated to late ninth-early eighth century BCE.

B) Numbers 6:25, יָאֵר יְהוָה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ וִיחֻנֶּךּ, "YHWH make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you"

I have not been able to find supporting evidence for the first part of this two fold blessing in greeting formulas from external sources. But KTU 2:13:17b-18, a letter to the queen (mother) from the king of Ugarit, contains very similar language to the first part of this our second blessing.

w . pn / mlk . nr . bn
wa panū malki nārū binū
"And may the face of the king shine on (all of) us."

I also see some commonality with the second half of the Biblical blessing in a blessing formula found in several Amarna letters from Byblos. EA 75 will service as an example,

DINGER. NIN ša UR[U.gub-la] ti-din KAL.GA a[-na EN-ia] (the restoration is assured from other texts)
bêlit ša gubla tidin dunna ana bēlīya
"May the lady of Gubla (Byblos) grant power to my lord."

In Psalm 6:2, for example, the petitioner asks YHWH to be "gracious" "for I am languishing. (כִּ֤י אֻמְלַ֫ל)" In the Amarna letter, power is requested; in Psalm 6, the petitioner seeks grace, favor, in the face of powerlessness. Okay, so it's not that close but it is the best I could find. But do remember "May you always be . . . strong," שריר, in the extended blessing in the greeting of the letter from Elephantine that I cited at the beginning of this post.

C) Numbers 6:26, יִשָּׂא יְהוָה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ וְיָשֵׂם לְךָ שָׁלוֹם, "YHWH lift up his face upon you and give you peace."

KTU 2.38:4b-5, part of the greeting in a letter from the King of Tyre to king of Ugarit, reads,

ilm tģrk tšlmk
ilūma taģģurūka tašallimūka
"May the gods protect you (and) give you peace/health."

Compare this with the fairly common greeting blessing formula in several Akkadian letters from Ugarit. RS17.78:5 will serve as an example.

DINGER.MEŠ a-na šul-ma-ni PAP^ru-ka
ilū ana šulmani lîṣṣuruka
"May the gods keep you healthy."

Again, these examples do not exactly match the two-fold blessing in Numbers 6:26 but they seem to me to reflect sentiment of the second half of that blessing.

The extra biblical blessing examples presented above all come from letters and with one exception all come from the greetings in letters. To be sure, blessings like these are found in other literary genres but, even so, they are part of the repertory of blessings used in letters. The parallel between Numbers 6:24 and Aphek 7:8-12 and the blessing on 'Ajrud pithos B is striking. The other parallels are more suggestive than direct but do indicate a use of language that is very similar to that found in Numbers 6:25-26. I would also note that the two fold blessing, the principle substructure of the blessings in Numbers 6:24-26 also occurs in several of the extra biblical blessings; KTU 2.38:4b-5, "May the gods protect you (and) give you peace," for example.

Addresses

Now I want to turn to letter Initial Addresses. As I said at the beginning, they can have a fairly wide variety of forms from the very simple to the fairly complex. Let's look at a couple of extra biblical letter addresses in languages with close affinities to Hebrew and a couple of addresses that are in Hebrew. These examples can be found in Lindenberg, 136-138 but the translations are mine.

The first letter address I want to consider comes from a late seventh-early sixth century letter in Edomite from Horvat 'Uza in the eastern Negev:

אמר למלך אמר לבלבל
"A message of Lumalak, say to Bulbul,"

On sees this same structure in the Ammonite letter from Tell el-Mazār (early sixth century BCE):

[אמר פלט אמר לאחה לעבדא[ל
A message of Pelet, say to his brother, to Ebed-El,"

Again, the same structure in the late sixth century BCE Saqqara Phoenician Papyrus. This time with the recipient's name is first:

אמר לאחתי ארשת אמר אחתך בשא
"Say to my sister, Arishut, a message of your sister, Basu"

All this gives me confidence that one Hebrew form of the address occurs in the reconstructed "practice" address on the Kuntillet 'Ajrud pithos 2:

אמר] אמריו אמר ל אדני]
"Message of Amaryaw, say to my lord,"

The traces from Kuntillet 'Ajrud pithos 1 and the late eight-early seventh century BCE papyrus letter fragment from Wadi Muraba'at, south of Qumran, appear to reflect the same structure. The papyrus letter fragment from Wadi Muraba'at is the earliest known letter (fragment) in Hebrew to have survived. Interestingly, it is itself a palimpsest. Over the erased letter is a list of names was written. Papyrus was dear and a reusable resource.

Lindenberg, 8, calls this address structure the "double saying formula." The origin of this "double saying formula" is not clear. It is somewhat reminiscent of the address structure of letters in Ugartic but it may have Akkadian origins or even be indigenous to the southern Levant. The structure is simple even if the details of the grammar are not: אמר (likely read as a noun) + SENDER's name and/or title + אמר (likely read as an imperative here) + the preposition ל + the RECIPIENT's name and/or title. Some letters have the order of sender and recipient reversed.

That said, let's look at the variant of this structure as seen at Ugarit in the Ugaritic language. KTU 2.10:1-3 will service as a model.

tḥm . iwrḏr / l . plsy / rgm
taḥmu ʼiwriḏarri lê pilsiya rugum
"Message of Iwridharri to Pilsiya say,"

The word I translate "message (taḥmu)" is based on a different root than the word I translate "say (rugum)." I point this out because of a little slight of hand I will be performing below.

Reconstructing an address formula from Numbers 6:22-23

Remembering that some Hebrew letters use אל instead of the preposition ל to designate the recipient, let's look again at Numbers 6:22-23:

"And YHWH spoke to Moses saying,
     Speak to Aaron and his sons saying,
          In this way you shall bless the sons of Israel: You shall say to them,"

First, I suggest that we remove כֹּה תְבָרְכוּ אֶת-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, "In this way you shall bless the sons of Israel," as secondary. This leaves us with,

"And YHWH spoke to Moses saying,
     Speak to Aaron and his sons saying,
          You shall say to them,"

Now we need to make a decision. If this comes from a letter address form, was the "original" letter from YHWH or from Moses? For completely arbitrary reasons I choose Moses and rewrite the possible address with only a few more deletions and a small re-vocalization,

"A message of Moses, say to Aaron and his sons,"

Looking good! Yes, I did notice that my reconstruction has דָּבָר while the Hebrew, Edomite, Ammonite, and Phoenician examples I gave all have אמר. If this bothers you a lot, check out, for example, Proverbs 4:20. How sure am I of all this? Not very sure. Unfortunately, there are too many near misses, which deserve a lot more discussion, for my taste. On the other hand, I find the potential parallel use of blessings, and these specific blessings, in letters more convincing. Do I really think that there was once a letter from Moses to Aaron? No. Was there a literary device that used a letter structure? Maybe.

I do think it possible that the vorlage of the Priestly Benediction was a letter or at least the opening of a letter. How probable is still an open question. I need to do much more work before I can really support or reject my thesis. If it turns out that I am correct, it is interesting that the account in Numbers seems to preserve a memory of the letter genre vorlage while the Ketef Hinnom Amulets do not. But that is for some other post. So are any questions about how this might inform our understanding of the role of scribes in the (early?) development of the Hebrew Bible

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