Vayishlach Study 5785

Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse. See at 24:59. died. Rebekah’s own death is never mentioned, so it is strange that her nurse’s death is worth noting.

Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, died…and was buried…under the…Oak of Weeping (35:8). The word bachut, “weeping,” is similar to the plural term b’chiyot, “weepings,” suggesting to the Rabbis that two deaths were being mourned here: the death of Deborah, and the death of Rebekah—an event not otherwise mentioned in the Torah. According to B’reishit Rabbah 81.5, this is why the next verse (35:9) relates that God appeared to Jacob…and blessed him: God performed the kindness of visiting and comforting Jacob while he mourned his mother. But why is Rebekah’s death not related directly? Midrash Tanchuma, Ki Teitzei 4, explains that it was impossible to have an honorable funeral for her. Abraham was dead; Isaac, blind and weakened, could not leave his tent; and Jacob had gone abroad and could not return in time. Only Esau remained, and the continued ill feeling between him and his mother made it unlikely that he would come. Because Rebekah’s life ended in such a lonely way, the Torah hints at her passing only obliquely (see also the medieval commentator Ramban on 35:8).

A ‘KIVRATH’ OF LAND. Menachem ben Saruk explained the word as having the meaning of kabir (much), i.e., great distance. A Midrashic explanation is: “At the time when the ground is full of holes like a sieve, when there was plenty of ploughed ground. The winter was past, but the dry season had not yet come.” This, however, cannot be the literal sense of the verse, for in the case of Naaman we find, And he departed from him a ‘kivrath’ of land, [which cannot possibly have this meaning since the sense there is that he had walked away but a small distance from Naaman when Gehazi immediately ran after him] . I think that it is a name for a measure of land. This is Rashi’s language.

The correct interpretation is that which Rabbi David Kimchi has advanced, i.e., that the letter kaph in the word kivrath is the kaph of comparison and is not a root letter of the word, the basic word being as in the verses: They were their ‘levaruth’ (food); ‘Vethavreini’ (and give me to eat) bread, meaning a small amount of food in the morning. And here the meaning of kivrath is the distance a pedestrian covers from morning to the time of eating, for all travelers measure distances in this manner.

This I originally wrote when still in Spain, but now that I was worthy and came to Jerusalem — praise to G-d Who is kind and deals kindly! — I saw with my eyes that there is not even a mile between Rachel’s grave and Bethlehem. This explanation of Rabbi David Kimchi has thus been refuted, as have the words of Menachem [ben Saruk, who said that there was a great distance between the grave and Bethlehem].

Rather kivrath is a name for a measure of land, as Rashi has said, and there is no adjectival part in the word but only a substantive as in most nouns, with the kaph serving a formative purpose to indicate that it was not an exact measure. And if the word be adjectival, modifying eretz, it is possible that brath is like bath, as in the expression, What ‘brie’ (my son)? and what “bar” (O son) of my womb? The word bath is thus the name for a small measure of land by which travellers measure the way, similar to the present day mile. It is called “bath of the land” for this small measure is as “a daughter” to the Persian mile or some other measure known in those days.And I have also seen that Rachel’s grave is not in Ramah nor near it, [as the plain meaning of the verse in Jeremiah, 31:15, would seem to indicate: A voice is heard in Ramah… Rachel weeping for her children]. Instead, Ramah which is in Benjamin is about four Persian miles distant from it, and Ramah of the hill-country of Ephraim is more than two days’ travel from it. Therefore, I say that the verse stating, A voice is heard in Ramah, is a metaphor, in the manner of rhetorical expression, meaning to say that Rachel wept so loudly and bitterly that her voice was heard from afar in Ramah, which was on top of the mountain of [the territory of] her son Benjamin. [She cried for her children who went into exile] because they were not there, and she was desolate of them. Thus Scripture does not say, “In Ramah, Rachel weeps for her children.” but it says that the voice was heard there.

It appears to me that Jacob buried Rachel on the road and did not bring her into Bethlehem in Judah, which was near there, because he saw by the prophetic spirit that Bethlehem Ephrathah will belong to Judah, and he wished to bury her only within the border of her son Benjamin, and the road on which the monument over Rachel’s grave stands is near to Beth-el in the border of Benjamin. And so the Rabbis have said in the Sifre: “Rachel died in the portion of Benjamin,” as it is found in the Parshath V’zoth Habrachah. Now I have seen in the Targum of Yonathan ben Uziel that he discerned this, and he translated: “A voice is heard high in the world.” [He thus interpreted Ramah, not as the name of a place, since Rachel was not buried in Ramah, as explained above, but rather on the basis of its root ram (high)], and he thus translated the whole verse as applying to the congregation of Israel rather than Rachel.

as her life was leaving her…she named him Benoni, but his father called him Benjamin (35:18). Commentators generally agree that by the word oni, Rachel meant “my pain” or “my sorrow.” Rabbi Moses ben Nachman (1194–1270)—usually known as “Nachmanides” or by his initials as “Ramban”— notes here that another meaning of on is “strength,” as in 49:3, in which Jacob blesses Reuben as “first fruit of my vigor (reishit oni).” So too y’min, the right hand, stands for strength in the biblical world. Thus, Jacob does not actually change the name given by Rachel—for all Jacob’s children bear names given to them by their mothers—but rather “translates” it to its most positive interpretation.