A fruitful son. The
morphology of the reiterated noun in this line is to peculiar that some
scholars have imagined a reference to branches, others to a wild ass. There is
little philological warrant for the former, and the connection between the term
used here, porat and pere’, “wild ass,” seems strainted. (The
main argument for the wild ass is that it preserves the animal imagery, but
there are several other tribes in the poems that have no animal icons.) A link
between porat and the root p-r-h, “to be fruitful,” is less of a
grammatical stretch, and is encouraged by Joseph’s play on that same root in
naming his soon Ephraim. Joseph and Judah, as the dominant tribes of the north
and the south respectively, get far more elaborate attention in the poem that
do any of their brothers. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3
vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 1:196)
