(1) When you enter the land that your Eternal God is giving you as a heritage, and you possess it and settle in it, (2) you shall take some of every first fruit of the soil, which you harvest from the land that your Eternal God is giving you, put it in a basket and go to the place where your Eternal God will choose to establish the divine name. (3) You shall go to the priest in charge at that time and say to him, “I acknowledge this day before your Eternal God that I have entered the land that God swore to our ancestors to assign us.” (4) The priest shall take the basket from your hand and set it down in front of the altar of your Eternal God. (5) You shall then recite as follows before your Eternal God: “My father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation. (6) The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us; they imposed heavy labor upon us. (7) We cried to the Eternal, the God of our ancestors, and the Eternal heard our plea and saw our plight, our misery, and our oppression. (8) God freed us from Egypt by a mighty hand, by an outstretched arm and awesome power, and by signs and portents, (9) bringing us to this place and giving us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. (10) Wherefore I now bring the first fruits of the soil which You, Eternal, have given me.” You shall leave it before your Eternal God and bow low before your Eternal God. (11) And you shall enjoy, together with the Levite and the stranger in your midst, all the bounty that your Eternal God has bestowed upon you and your household.
...And according to the intelligence of the son, his father teaches him. He begins with disgrace and concludes wit glory. And he expounds from the passage: “An Aramean tried to destroy my father” (Deuteronomy 26:5), until he concludes explaining the entire section.
Go out and learn what Lavan the Aramean sought to do to Ya'akov, our father; since Pharaoh only decreed [the death sentence] on the males but Lavan sought to uproot the whole [people]. As it is stated (Deuteronomy 26:5), "An Aramean was destroying my father and he went down to Egypt, and he resided there with a small number and he became there a nation, great, powerful and numerous."
(2) ארמי אבד אבי — He mentions the loving kindness of the Omnipresent saying, Arami Oveid Avi, which means: “Laban wished to exterminate the whole nation” when he pursued Jacob. Because he intended to do it the Omnipresent accounted it unto him as though he had actually done it, for as far as the nations of the world are concerned the Holy Blessed One accounts unto them intention as an actual deed (cf. Sifrei Devarim 301:3; Onkelos).
(1) ארמי אובד אבי, my father Avraham was an Aramean, lost, and exiled from his birthplace Aram. God had told him in Genesis 12:1 “go forth for yourself from your homeland, etc.” Later on, (Genesis 20,13) that God had made him wander, away from his father’s house, etc. The meaning of אובד is similar to תועה, walking around in exile, as in Psalms 119:176 תעיתי כשה אובד בקש עבדך, “I have strayed like a lost sheep; search for Your servant, etc.!” We also find the word in this connotation in Jeremiah 50:6 עמי רועיהם התעום, “My people were lost sheep; their shepherd led them astray.” In other words, from a foreign land our ancestors came to this land and the Holy Blessed One gave it to us.
(2) A WANDERING ARAMEAN. The word oved (wandering) is an intransitive verb. If Aramean referred to Laban then Scripture should have read mavid or me’abbed. Furthermore, what reason would Scripture have had for stating, Laban sought to destroy my father and he went down to Egypt? Laban did not cause Jacob to descend to Egypt. It thus appears to me that the term Aramean refers to Jacob. Scripture, as it were, reads, when my father was in Aram he was “perishing.” That is, he was poor, he had no money. Similarly oved (perish) in Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish (Prov. 31:6). Let him drink, and forget his poverty (Prov. 31:7) is proof. The meaning of our phrase thus is, a perishing Aramean was my father. Its import is, I did not inherit the land from my father, for my father was poor when he came to Aram. He was also a stranger in Egypt. He was few in number. He then became a large nation. You O Eternal took us out of slavery and gave us a good land. Let the one who disputes not argue, “How could Jacob be called an Aramean?”. Look, we find the same with Ithra the Ishmaelite who, as Scripture clearly states, was an Israelite.
Did an Aramean Try to Destroy our Father?
by Prof. Rabbi Marty Lockshin
In the twelfth century, a number of famous Jewish Bible commentators wrote explicitly that the phrase arami oved avi could not reasonably be interpreted as meaning, “An Aramean would have destroyed my father.” Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (= Rashbam; born c. 1080), Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra (born 1089), and Rabbi David Kimhi (born 1160) all explained the verse in a non-traditional way that conformed better with biblical Hebrew usage. Their understanding is now found in all modern academic translations of the Bible: “My father was a wandering Aramean.”
Using Hebrew grammar and syntax, areas of study newly created in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, these rabbis offered detailed technical arguments to show that the more traditional understanding could not be the peshat, the plain sense of the words.
The verb oved, they argued, has to be an intransitive verb here, as it is throughout the Bible, i.e. it cannot take a direct object. So avi (my father) cannot be, as Rashi and the Haggadah held, the object of the verb (“. . . destroyed my father”) but must be the subject of the sentence (“my father was . . .”). Furthermore, oved (a qal form) never means “destroy” in biblical Hebrew. “Ma’avid” (a hifil form) is the transitive verb that means “destroy”, but ma’avid is not the form of the verb that appears in this verse.
The version of the Haggadah used in the homes of Rashbam, ibn Ezra and Kimhi certainly used the traditional explanation that arami oved avi meant that Laban tried to destroy Jacob. But those three great rabbis felt free to look anew at the biblical text and apply new scientific tools to its understanding.
R. Yitzhak said: “If it just wanted to teach us that he was from Padan-Aram, what does ‘Laban the Aramean’ teach us? It comes to teach us that her father was a trickster and her brother was a trickster, and even the people who lived there were tricksters, and that this righteous woman who came from there can be likened to ‘a lily among the thorn-bushes’ (Song 2:2).”
Arami Oved Avi: The Demonization of Laban
by Naomi Graetz
One uncomfortable truth the Rabbis may have been facing is that Jacob is depicted as every bit as cunning as his uncle. Jacob’s name can mean the deceiver—certainly that is how Esau understands it when he accuses Jacob of tricking him twice, once out of his birthright and next out of his blessing (Gen 27:36).[15] Later, after being duped by Laban into marrying Leah, he gets Laban back with his peeled-stick trick, to ensure that the baby sheep all come out speckled or spotted.
By calling Laban the deceiver, the rabbis distance themselves from Jacobs’s long history of deception. As Grafius points out, “the monster is a paradoxical embodiment of both Otherness and sameness, seeming to reflect our fears that we are not really as different from the Other as we would like to think.”...
The rabbinic polemic against Arameans likely reflects more than just discomfort with the biblical text. The linguistic hegemony of Aramaic extended past the Persian period and into the Rabbinic period, even when Aram no longer had any political influence. Not only did all of the rabbis’ neighbors speak Aramaic, but the rabbis themselves spoke Aramaic. For them, although “Aramean” became a euphemism for outsiders, these were outsiders with whom they shared a land and a language, and whom the Bible ties together with Israel from its inception.
This is likely the reason that the rabbis felt the need to draw a razor-sharp line between “us” and “them.” What better way to do this than to turn our “Aramean ancestor” referenced in Deuteronomy, into our wicked “Aramean uncle” who tried to destroy us for hundreds of years in his various different guises. And thus the rabbinic villain “Laban the deceiver,” who tried “to destroy our father” was born.