11:3. Each one
said to his neighbor, “Come, let us mold bricks and bake them in fire”—for
bricks served as stone for them, and pitch served as mortar for them. . . .
The narrator’s explanatory aside—“for bricks served as stone for them, and
pitch served as mortar for them”—introduces the issue of translation; that is,
it annotates the speech for the comprehension of its audience. The details
concern the materials used for architecture in Mesopotamia versus Israel.
Bricks baked in fire (i.e., kiln-fired mudbricks) were the durable building
material used in southern Mesopotamia, since stone deposits were rare and
forests nonexistent (Moorey 1994: 302-32). In Israel, stone was plentiful and
was the preferred building material; so the narrator translators the
Mesopotamian custom into Israelite terms—they use baked bricks joined
together with pitch, whereas we use stone joined together with
clay-based mortar.
With this explanatory
aside, the story adds authentic detail to the Mesopotamian setting, and at the
same time it foregrounds the linguistic dimension. The words in the speech
correspond to their culture, which must be translated to be
comprehensible in our culture. The difference of cultures and lexicons
is intimated in this aside, bringing our attention momentarily to the
differentiated world that is the outcome of the story. (Ronald Hendel, Genesis
1-11: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary [AYB 1A; New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2024], 392, 393)
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