Monday, September 30, 2024

Ronald Hendel on Genesis 11:3

  

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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