Mistranslation Alert
שנואה
SNOOAH in Genesis 29:33 does not mean “hated”
(KJV). Rachel was not the hateful, hell-bound Pharisee that the Replacement-Theology
King James’ Brit-wits want to promote.
When Leah
births and names her second son שמעון
SHiM’[O]WN (Simeon /
Heard), she says that the Lord has heard her suffering as שנואה SNOOAH. Dictionaries
do translate this word as “hated,” but a Bible translation with a
modicum of respect would not paint the matriarch Rachel as a monster. There are
“bible critics” with Jewish genes who are this demeaning and
self-hating, but more gentility toward Hebrew Bible characters is expected from
gentiles.
Rachel
and Jacob were in love, and engaged for seven years. It took superhuman
restraint not to expose her sister Leah at Laban’s bait-and-switch marriage. Rachel
must have loved Leah very much, and empathized with her Tamar-like desperation
to marry into Jacob’s people, escaping the misogyny and idolatry of Mesopotamian
culture, or worse: marriage to Esau.
Leah
should not have been shocked that Jacob would still love Rachel the most seven
years later, while, as a woman and a sensitive human being, she can feel hurt
as second-fiddle.
Without losing the intensity of Leah’s
feelings, a translator has no right to simply render שנואה
SNOOAH as "hated." The ש-נ Shin-Noon root captures Leah’s feeling second-best
(שני SHaiNeey) and thus less-loved,
relatively estranged. The new JPS Tanakh upgrades
שנואהSiNOOAH from the KJV’s
repulsive “hated” to the kinder, more correct “unloved.”
Leah may have been SHUNNED by Rachel when their relationship as co-wives became impossibly
awkward. SHUN (to avoid) is traced to Old English scunian (to abhor). The
shifting of this שונא S-N “disdain-abhor” verb to “avoidance” may be captured in S-N words like Albanian shmang (avoid, evade,
avert, shun) and Polish odSuNąć (push away, withdraw, dismiss). The שׂ-נS-N theme of being different, strange and hated, feeling second-rate or
making another feel so emerges from Greek xenos
(foreign, strange). See “XENOPHOBIA.” For all their
later rivalry and estrangement, the two sisters were not שונאים SOANEeYM (enemies). It is wrong, even
hateful, to suggest that they were.