Key Words and Repetition

In 1925 two German Jewish thinkers, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, began a new translation of the Hebrew Bible into German. Rosenzweig died in 1929; Buber finished the work alone in 1961. Their aim was to make German readers hear the Hebrew: its rhythm, its breath units, and above all its repetitions. In a 1927 essay on what he called Leitwortstil, the style of the leading word, in the narratives of the Pentateuch, Buber described a technique he believed ran through the whole of Hebrew storytelling. A Leitwort, a leading word, is a word or a root that recurs within a text, or across a series of texts, in a way that carries meaning. If you follow the repetitions, Buber argued, the meaning of the passage is disclosed, or at least shows itself more plainly, without the narrator ever stating it.

The idea depends on a fact about Hebrew you met in Module 4. Most Hebrew words grow from a three-letter root, and a root can surface as a verb, a noun, an adjective and a participle in the same chapter. A Hebrew ear hears the root under all of them. English cannot do this. When the Hebrew of Ruth 1 uses one root twelve times, the BSB says leave, go back, return, turn and bring back, because good English avoids saying the same word twelve times. The translators are not wrong to vary it. But the pattern a Hebrew listener could not miss becomes invisible.

So Buber and Rosenzweig translated concordantly: wherever they could, one Hebrew root got one German root, even at some cost to natural German. The result was admired and attacked. The critic Siegfried Kracauer, reviewing the first volume in 1926, found its German artificial and archaic, and later readers have often agreed that it can be hard going. In English the nearest equivalent is Everett Fox's The Five Books of Moses (1995), which follows the Buber-Rosenzweig method closely and is worth borrowing if you can find it, because it lets an English reader see repetitions that every other English version smooths away. Robert Alter's own translation of the Hebrew Bible, completed in 2018, takes a middle course, keeping repetitions where he judges they matter.

You do not need any of those books. A free interlinear and a concordance will show you every repetition in the Hebrew, and that is the skill this lesson teaches. But hold Buber's claim at the right strength. He was a great reader of the Bible and his idea has proved itself many times. It is still a claim about how a text works, and every leading word you think you have found has to be shown, not assumed. The last section of this lesson is about how to test one.

Open the anchor verse in the Hebrew of the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC). It begins וַיְהִי יְהוָה אֶת־יוֹסֵף (vayhi YHWH et-Yosef), and the LORD was with Joseph. The little word אֶת (et) needs a second look. It is not the marker of a direct object, which is spelled the same way. It is a different word, a preposition meaning with, and the tools give it a different Strong's number, H854 rather than H853, which is a good reminder to check the number rather than the shape. The verse goes on: וַיְהִי אִישׁ מַצְלִיחַ (vayhi ish matsliach), and he was a man who prospered, and he was in the house of his Egyptian master.

Now follow the phrase. Verse 3: his master saw כִּי יְהוָה אִתּוֹ (ki YHWH itto), that the LORD was with him, the same preposition with a suffix. Then the story turns. Joseph is accused, and in verse 20 he is in prison. Verse 21 repeats the opening words exactly: וַיְהִי יְהוָה אֶת־יוֹסֵף (vayhi YHWH et-Yosef), and the LORD was with Joseph. Verse 23, the last of the chapter, says it again with the suffix: בַּאֲשֶׁר יְהוָה אִתּוֹ (ba'asher YHWH itto), because the LORD was with him. Two occurrences at the start of the slavery, two at the start of the prison. The chapter is framed by the same sentence at its two lowest points.

The second repeated word in the anchor makes the frame tighter. מַצְלִיחַ (matsliach) is a hiphil participle of the root tsalach, to prosper or succeed. In verse 2 it describes Joseph: a man who prospered. In verse 3 it describes the LORD: יְהוָה מַצְלִיחַ בְּיָדוֹ (YHWH matsliach beyado), the LORD was making everything prosper in his hand. In verse 23, the last words of the chapter, it describes the LORD again: יְהוָה מַצְלִיחַ (YHWH matsliach), the LORD made it prosper. The same form, three times, first of the man and then twice of God. Read in order, the repetition tells you where Joseph's success came from without a sermon from the narrator. The man who prospered in verse 2 is, by verse 3, a man in whose hand the LORD causes things to prosper.

Hear what the frame claims. It does not say the LORD kept Joseph out of prison. It says the LORD was with Joseph in the house and with Joseph in the prison, in the same words. The narrator's theology is in the arrangement: the presence of God is the constant, and the change of fortune between verse 6 and verse 20 does not touch it. A preacher who says 'God was with Joseph, so things went well for him' has read verses 2 to 6 and stopped. The repetition at verse 21 forbids that reading. God is with him on the way down as well.

Now the word the BSB hides. יָד (yad), hand, occurs nine times in the chapter, by the count of the free Open Scriptures morphology, and the occurrences fall into a pattern. In verse 1 Potiphar buys Joseph מִיַּד (miyyad), from the hand of the Ishmaelites. In verse 3 the LORD makes everything prosper בְּיָדוֹ (beyado), in his hand. In verse 4 Potiphar puts all he has in his hand. In verse 6 he leaves all he has בְּיַד־יוֹסֵף (beyad-Yosef), in Joseph's hand, and knows nothing about it except the food he eats. In verse 8 Joseph says it himself to his master's wife: everything my master has, he has put in my hand.

Then verses 12 and 13. She seizes him by his garment, וַיַּעֲזֹב בִּגְדוֹ בְּיָדָהּ (vayya'azov bigdo beyadah), and he left his garment in her hand, and fled. The narrator repeats it in the next verse, as she sees that he has left his garment in her hand. Everything has been placed in Joseph's hand; the one thing he leaves in someone else's hand is the thing that will convict him. Then the prison, and the pattern resumes as though nothing had happened: in verse 22 the warden puts all the prisoners בְּיַד יוֹסֵף (beyad Yosef), in Joseph's hand, and in verse 23 he does not look into anything that is in his hand. Entrusting, seizing, entrusting again. The word traces the plot.

Two smaller repetitions confirm it. בַּיִת (bayit), house or household, occurs eighteen times in the chapter: Potiphar's house, the house that the LORD blesses, the house where no man of the household is present, and then בֵּית הַסֹּהַר (beit hassohar), the house of confinement, the prison. Joseph moves from one house to another and the narrator calls both by the same word. And מְאוּמָה (me'umah), anything, comes three times: Potiphar knew nothing in his house but his bread (39:6), he withheld nothing from Joseph except his wife (39:9), and the warden looked into nothing in Joseph's hand (39:23). What was true in the first house is true in the second.

Now watch what the woman does with the word. Telling the servants in verse 15 and her husband in verse 18, she says that he left his garment אֶצְלִי (etsli), beside me. The narrator said twice that the garment was in her hand. In her version the hand has gone. A garment in her hand means she took hold of it; a garment beside her means he took it off. The change is one Hebrew word, and you can only see it if you have followed the leading word through the chapter. The next lesson looks at what speech like this reveals, and you will return to this verse there.

This is what Buber meant. Nobody in Genesis 39 says that Joseph's hand is the place of trust and that the woman's hand is the place of false witness. The narrator does not say it either. He says hand nine times, and the pattern says it for him. It is also why a student with an interlinear can see more here than a student with the best English translation, and why that student has a responsibility to check the pattern before preaching it.

Robert Alter took up Buber's term in The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981) and placed it on a scale of repetition, from the smallest unit to the largest. At the bottom is the Leitwort, the repeated word or root. Next is the motif, a concrete image, quality or object that recurs, such as fire, stones, water or garments. Then the theme, an idea that is part of the story's value system and is carried by the repetitions, such as obedience against rebellion. Then a sequence of actions, often in threes or a three-plus-one pattern, like the three calls of Samuel and the fourth that changes everything. At the top is the type-scene, which the Hermeneutics lesson introduced: a recurring situation with fixed elements, such as the meeting with a future bride at a well.

The scale helps you say precisely what you have found. Take the garments of the Joseph story. Joseph's brothers strip him of his כְּתֹנֶת (ketonet), the robe, in Genesis 37, dip it in the blood of a goat and send it to their father. In Genesis 38 Tamar takes off בִּגְדֵי אַלְמְנוּתָהּ (bigdei almenutah), her widow's garments, and later puts them back on. In Genesis 39 Joseph leaves his בֶּגֶד (beged), his garment, in a woman's hand. Garments in three chapters, each one used to deceive or to expose. But the robe of chapter 37 is a different Hebrew word from the garment of chapter 39. So this is a motif on Alter's scale, a recurring object, and only partly a leading word, since beged does connect chapters 38 and 39. Saying so is more exact, and more honest, than claiming one key word runs through all three.

Now a true leading word across chapters. In Genesis 37:32 the brothers bring the bloodied robe to Jacob and say הַכֶּר־נָא (hakker-na), examine it, or recognise it, please, whether it is your son's robe. In Genesis 38:25 Tamar sends Judah his own seal, cord and staff with the same two words: הַכֶּר־נָא (hakker-na), examine them. The verb is the hiphil imperative of nakar, to recognise, with the same particle. Judah, who helped deceive his father with a piece of clothing and the words recognise this, is now confronted with his own pledge and the same words. The rabbis of the midrash noticed the echo long ago, and Alter made it the centrepiece of the first chapter of his book. The word keeps going: in Genesis 42:7-8 Joseph recognises his brothers and they do not recognise him, and in 42:7 the same consonants come twice in a row, וַיַּכִּרֵם וַיִּתְנַכֵּר (vayyakkirem vayyitnakker), he recognised them and made himself a stranger to them. Lexicons debate whether to recognise and to act as a stranger are one root or two, and the free morphology files them as separate entries under the one Strong's number, H5234. Either way the narrator has set them side by side. And behind it all is Genesis 27:23, where Isaac does not recognise Jacob, disguised in his brother's garments and the skins of young goats. A family that deceives with garments and goats, and a word for recognising that follows it from generation to generation.

The scale also keeps you from inflating a finding. Not every repetition is a leading word, not every leading word is a theme, and not every recurring situation is a type-scene. Name what you have found at the level the evidence supports, and you will preach it with more confidence because you will not be claiming more than you can show.

Here is the honest test, and it is the step most preachers skip. Count the same word in the chapters on either side. By the Open Scriptures morphology, yad occurs seven times in Genesis 38, twice in Genesis 40 and four times in Genesis 41. Chapter 38 nearly matches chapter 39. So the number nine proves very little. Hand is one of the most common nouns in the Hebrew Bible, and a chapter about property, pledges and a birth will use it often. What makes the case in Genesis 39 is not the count but the function: almost every occurrence is about what is entrusted to Joseph or left in someone's hand, the occurrences track the turns of the plot, and the one character who suppresses the word is the one who is lying. In chapter 38, for what it is worth, hand also has a pattern, the pledge that passes from Judah's hand and the twin's hand at the birth. Either way, the argument is made from what the word does.

Second, beware of words that are common everywhere. אָמַר (amar), to say, and הָיָה (hayah), to be, will appear many times in any chapter of narrative, and a list showing that a passage uses them often shows nothing. A useful rule: a candidate leading word should be either unusually frequent in the passage compared with its neighbours, or placed at the turning points, or both. Third, beware of roots. Two words that share three consonants are not always related in meaning, and even when they are, the meaning of the root does not flow into every word built from it. James Barr's The Semantics of Biblical Language (1961) made that warning famous, and Module 2's lesson on Hebrew myths applies it. Buber's method works with roots, which makes it especially open to this error.

Third, hear the historical critics. Scholars who see the Pentateuch as woven from earlier sources often read repetition as the seam where two accounts were joined, not as a deliberate signal. Genesis 37:25-28 and 37:36 is a standard example: the Ishmaelites and the Midianites both appear in the sale of Joseph, and many have taken the doubling as a trace of two versions. Literary readers reply that a final editor could weave sources into a deliberate pattern, and Alter himself called that composite artistry. You do not have to settle the history of the text to read it well. You do have to know that a repetition can have more than one explanation, and you should not tell a congregation that one explanation is the only one possible.

Fourth, beware of number patterns. Umberto Cassuto, in his commentary on Genesis, counted sevens in the creation account and elsewhere, and some of his patterns are striking. Others depend on which forms you include and which you leave out, and a reader who wants to find sevens will usually find them. If a pattern only appears when you count in one particular way, it is your pattern, not the narrator's. The test is the same as for hand: does the repetition do something in the story that you can show a listener from the text itself?

Your step this week: on a new page headed Key Words, take the narrative you chose for your Narrator page. Read it in the BSB and write down three candidate words that seem to recur or seem to matter at the turning points. For each, tap the word in the interlinear on Blue Letter Bible or STEP to find its Strong's number, then use the concordance to count it in your passage and in the chapter before and after. Write the three counts side by side. For each word, list the verses where it occurs and the BSB's English at each, and mark the ones where the English hides it. Then write one sentence on each word: what does it do in the story, at which turn? Cross out any word whose only argument is its count. Keep the page; Lesson 5 and the capstone both use it.