Moshe recounts some of the miraculous events which accompanied Israel’s forty-year sojourn in the desert, amongst them: ואשר עשה לדתן ולאבירם בני אליאב בן ראובן אשר פצתה הארץ את פי' ותבלעם ואת בתיהם ואת אהליהם ואת כל היקום אשר ברגליהם בקרב כל ישראל (“And what [G-d] did to Dathan and Aviram, sons of Eli’av son of Re’uven, when the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them, and their households, and their tents, and all the substance which was at their feet amidst all Israel;” XI, 6). The reference, of course, is to the decisive end which G-d put to their part in Qorach’s revolt (cf. Numbers XVI, 28-35).
Rashi comments on the above: כל מקום שהי' אחד מהם בורח הארץ נבקעת מתחתיו ובולעתו, אלו דברי רבי יהודה. א"ל רבי נחמי' והלא כבר נאמר "ותפצח הארץ את פי'" ולא "פיותי'". א"ל ומה אני מקיים "בקרב כל ישראל"? א"ל שנעשית הארץ מדרון כמשפך וכל מקום שהי' אחד מהם, הי' מגלגל ובא עד מקום הבקיעה (“Every place that one of them would flee, the earth would split beneath him and swallow him; these are Rabbi Yehuda’s words. Rabbi Nechemya told him, And does it not already say, ‘And the earth opened its mouth’ [Numbers XVI, 32], and not ‘its mouths?’ [Rabbi Yehuda] told him, And what am I to do with ‘Amidst all Israel?’ [Rabbi Nechemya] told him that the earth was made to slope like a funnel, and every place one of them was, he would roll to the site of the rupture [in the earth]”).
Rashi does not reveal his source for the above exchange (and I have been unable to find it in the Talmud or any of the standard collections of midrashim), but the issue underlying the dispute seems clear enough: Rabbi Yehuda appears willing to accept that piha ("its mouth") can be used in a generic, collective sense to refer to “mouths” in general, and therefore imply more than one, whilst Rabbi Nechemya wishes to read the verse literally, as referring only to one, specific mouth; had the Torah meant more than one mouth, the verse would have read piyotheha (“its mouths”).
B.
Fair enough, but if we look in the midrash, we encounter Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Nechemya again. The occasion is Ya‘aqov’s instructions to his emissaries, to tell his brother ‘Esav: ויהי לי שור וחמור צאן ועבד ושפחה וגו' (“And I have had ox and donkey, ovicaprid and manservant and maidservant...’ Genesis XXXII, 6).ר"י אומר משור אחד יצאו שוורים הרבה ומחמור אחד יצאו חמורים הרבה. ר"נ אמר לשנהון דברייתא היא, חמורתא, גמלתא (“Rabbi Yehuda says, 'From one ox came forth many oxen; and from one donkey came forth many donkeys.' Rabbi Nechemya says, 'It is the [common] usage of people [to say] donkey, camel'”).
Rashi appears to agree with Rabbi Nechemya in his comment on this verse: דרך ארץ לומר על שוורים הרבה שור. אדם אומר לחבירו, בלילה קרא התרנגול ואינו אומר קראו התרנגולות (“[It is] the way of the world to say about many oxen, ox. A person says to his comrade, 'the cock crows at night,' and does not say, 'the cocks crow'”; ע"ע אבן עזרא ובעל הטורים שם בבראשית ).
A little consideration reveals that the positions of Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Nechemya in our midrash appear diametrically opposed to those cited by Rashi on our verse supra: There, it is Rabbi Yehuda who wishes to understand the singular noun piha in a generic or collective sense, and Rabbi Nechemya who is the literalist, insisting that a singular noun be singular in meaning; here, Rabbi Yehuda wishes to understand shor as referring to a specific, singular ox, and Rabbi Nechemya recognises the generic or collective use of the singular.
Can their positions be reconciled so that Rabbi Yehuda becomes consistent with Rabbi Yehuda, and Rabbi Nechemya with Rabbi Nechemya?
C.
Rabbi David Pardo, in his supercommentary on Rashi, Maskil l’David, takes note of the fact that Rashi has appended his comment to the final clause of our verse above. In the Hebrew language, the accusative case is indicated by placing the preposition eth (את) before the direct object of a transitive verb. In our verse, this preposition occurs four times, the last one at the head of the last clause, where it is pointed slightly differently than the rest, and hence read éth. Vowelled in this way, it can also be understood to mean “with.” It is a principle of Torah exegesis that such forms may be interpreted l’rabboth, i.e., in an expansive or inclusive manner.
This is how Rabbi Pardo believes that Rabbi Yehuda reads it in our verse: v’éth kol ha-yequm, together with the phrase b’qerev kol Yisra’él, suggests to him that wherever Dathan or Aviram attempted to flee within the camp of Israel, subsidiary “mouths” would open to receive them. ור"נ אולי לא דריש אתין לרבות; Rabbi Nechemya, he suggests, did not apply this principle, and so saw no reason to interpret the term “mouth” as meaning anything other than the singular.
This seems reasonable, but it does not take into account the example of our midrash, for the fact is that the word eth is totally lacking from the verse in Genesis, and yet Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Nechemya still differ concerning the collective usage, or not, of the nouns in the verse.
So, our questions remains.
It seems to me that the key to understanding the stances of Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Nechemya concerning this point of usage lies elsewhere. In our midrash, Rabbi Nechemya refers to the use of the singular in a collective sense as לשנהון דברייתא, i.e. a colloquial expression, a references echoed in Rashi’s use of the phrase דרך ארץ, “the way of the world.” But note that the text under consideration is a literal quotation of Ya‘aqov’s words to his messengers, whereas in our parasha (as, indeed, throughout the book of Deuteronomy), Moshe is speaking in prophetic mode, delivering himself of the “burden” (massa’) of prophecy. as numerous prophets refer to it (cf., e.g., Nachum I, 1; Habakkuk I, 1; Zechariah IX, 1 and XII, 1; Mal’achi I, 1). He was, that is, not using his own words, not speaking as one human being to another, but rather acting as the conduit for G-d’s words.
This suggests that the real grammatical rule is as Rabbi Nechemya suggests in Rashi’s passage, that as a rule the singular is singular in meaning and the plural, plural when G-d speaks; it is only when people are speaking, lishn’hon di-vriyatha, as Rabbi Nechemya says, that the sort of imprecision implicit in Ya‘aqov’s instructions to his messengers can be accepted or countenanced. Hence, in our passage, the term piha must be understood as a singular; in the passage from Genesis, shor va-chamor, etc., can be understood collectively. That Rabbi Nechemya’s opinion is decisive, at least concerning the pshat, is suggested by his being the second tanna quoted concerning the pshat, both by Rashi and in our midrash.
D.
We see in this another indication of the great precision and accuracy of the Torah’s massora, that we can safely recognise that when the Torah quotes a Biblical figure. it is not “putting words in his mouth,” but quoting his words precisely, in all their grammatical imprecision, as he or she spoke them.
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