Genesis 2:12-13
יב וּזֲהַב הָאָרֶץ הַהִוא טוֹב שָׁם הַבְּדֹלַח וְאֶבֶן הַשֹּׁהַם:
יג וְשֵׁם־הַנָּהָר הַשֵּׁנִי גִּיחוֹן הוּא הַסּוֹבֵב אֵת כָּל־אֶרֶץ כּוּשׁ:
Transliteration: v’-zahav ha-arets ha-hi tov sham ha-b’dolach v’-even ha-shoham.
V’-shem ha-nahar ha-sheni gichon hu ha-sovev et kal-erets kush.
Translation: The gold of that land is good, there is the b’dolach and the shoham stone.
The name of the second river is Gichon, it is the one that surrounds all the land of Kush.
Vocabulary in this lesson:
The reason I didn’t give meanings for the two stones is that there’s no agreement on what they are. There are traditional translations, true. Online dictionaries of the languages of the area, Sumerian and Akkadian, don’t have cognates.
I also didn’t translate Kush but apparently it is the ancestral land of the Kossaeans. The Kossaeans seem to have called themselves galzu which came into Akkadian as kasdu and then turned into Chaldaean.
Kush also refers to Moshe’s wife Tsiporah if the Midianites are considered to be somewhat related to the Kasdu, but that’s not what Torah says; it claims they are descended from Avraham.
What Tsiporah was not, was Ethiopian. The Egyptian name for Ethiopia was Kash, related to its name for itself, Kush, which appears in Jeremiah 13:23, “shall an Ethiopian change his skin?” There is a northern Kush, which is Mesopotamian, and a southern one, which is African.
I’m going to catch up on some pronoun declensions I should have done long ago. Here’s “ablative,” “from me”. This can be used both for “he went away from me” and “what do you want from me.”
Singular
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Plural
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Person/gender
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מִמֶּנִּי
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מִמֶּנּוּ
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First
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מִמְּךָ
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מִכֶּם
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Second/masculine
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מִמֵּךְ
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מִכֶּן
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Second/feminine
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מִמֶּנּוּ
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מֵהֶם
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Third/masculine
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מִמֶּנָּהּ
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מֵהֶן
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Third/feminine
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Notice the dagesh in the middle mem of of the forms that have two. Look back at the dagesh rules if you don’t understand why it’s there.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
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