HATRED and Bible Translation

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.

RESIDUAL HUMANITY

RESIDUE    SaReeYD      Sin-Resh-Yod-Dalet

SAH-REED            שריד        [SRD à RSD]

ROOTS: RESIDE and RESIDENCE are said to come from Latin re (back) plus sedere (to sit). "Sitting back" may or may not infer RESIDENCY, but RESIDUE (what is left over) is another matter. Old French residere (remainder, rest) has nothing to do with occupation, so the linkage of RESIDENTIAL to RESIDUAL ought to be suspect.

Hebrew offers an SRD etymon which could well have given rise to RSD words like residere, RESIDUARY, and RESIDUUM.

 שריד SaReeYD is a remnant or survivor (Numbers 21:35, Job 18:19).     שרד SaRaD is to leave over.  שאר SHA’ahR is to remain, to be left  (was left – I Samuel 16:11) . The extension with the SR + dental that fits this entry is     שארית SH’AyReeYT (remnant – Genesis 45:7).  These are  is not the SOLE fricative-liquid-dental Edenic words of SOLITARY existence;  see   זולת ZOOLaT, except,  at "ABSOLUTE" and "SOLITARY."

BRANCHES:  Registered in 1656 by Spanish-Portuguese Jews, there is a tiny Shearith Israel Graveyard at 55-57 St James Place in Lower Manhattan. They were right to think of themselves as a remnant, even though Hebrews and Hebrew survive and thrive in the 21^st Century.   Both שאר SH’ahAR and שארית  SHih’AyReeYT (remnant or a remainder) are used for human survivors, as opped to the RESIDUE of a teacup.  The sense of human survivor is kept alive in the Polish SRT word for orphan: sierota.  The similar SLAVIC family is documented below:

שריד SaReeYD, survivor, remnant

OSiRoTyavam (to orphan) -- Bulgarian

SieRoTa (orphan) -- Polish

SiRače (orphan) -- Macedonian

SiRaTa (orphan) -- Belarusian

SiRoTa (orphan) -- Slovak, Russian сирота, Slovenian

SiRoTan (orphan) -- Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian

SiRoTek (orphan) -- Czech

Another world for “orphan” with residual SRD is Basque umezurtz. Basque, frozen in time in the Pyrenees between Spain and France,  is considered a unique remnant of some long-extinct, pre-Indo-European language.

The Edenic “survivor” makes a fine “orphan” word, but the standard word for “orphan” is יתום YaTOAM or Ya(S)OAM (Exodus 22:21). YiTOAMim or “orphans” of note include Albanian and Kazakh jetim, Amharic yemuti liji; Azerbaijani, Turkish and Uzbek yetim --(the Arabic yatim came to Indonesian and Kyrgyz … Swahili is yatima); Bengali, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Nepali, Punjabi and Sinhala anātha; Chichewa wamasiye; Hindi anaath अनाथ; Japanese  minashigo -- almost a nasalized version of the Hmong: ntsuag; Samoan mātuaoti; Tajik and Tamil aṉātai  and Telugu anādha.

 The Ancient Egyptian sherit (a small piece of something) should be related to שארית  SH’AyReeYT (remnant  --  from Kressel Housman). 

REST (remainder) is related; the Latin etymon here is restare (to remain). RESTING (dormancy), RESTIVE and RESTLESS are from a different root.

 Simon Perlman traces REST (remainder)  to  שריד  SaReeYD. An M213 metathesis with S-D (dental shift from Dalet to T) is required.

French rester,  to stay, remain, cements the relationship between REST (remainder) and RESIDUE above from the Old French. More remote is tracing Latin cētĕrus, the others, the rest, (source of ET CETERA) to an M132, S-D of  שריד  SaReeYD. [RW]