Little Letters in Eicha, part 2
Little Letters in Eicha, part 1
3:36
לעות אדם בריבו אדני לא ראה To subvert a man in his cause, the LORD approveth not.
Tzvi Ron in Sefer Katan u-Gadol again (trans. G. Wasserman): “The small ‘ayin in the word לעות (verse 3:36) is explained as a reference to the numerical value of the letter, namely seventy. This verse says that God did not agree with the perversion of justice, and the number 70 is associated with this if we relate it to the seventy judges of the Sanhedrin, or the seventy years of Babylonian exile which God’s justice decreed for the Jewish people.”
Now call me a sceptic, but this sounds a bit forced to me. Surely there’s more to it than that? But if so, we’ve forgotten what it ever was (or Tzvi Ron didn’t find it yet, anyway). By way of compensation, someone more recent (like, in the last 1000 years) came up with this one. Numerical symbolism is a tool in the interpretative toolbox.
2:10
טבעו בארץ שעריה אבד ושבר בריחיה מלכה ושריה בגוים אין תורה גם נביאיה לא מצאו חזון מיקוק Her gates are sunk into the ground; he hath destroyed and broken her bars: her king and her princes are among the Gentiles: the law is no more; her prophets also find no vision from the LORD.
The numerical symbolism here is a date - Tet is 9, and “In Midrash Haseroth Vi-yetheroth, it says the allusion is to the destruction of the Temple, which took place on the date 9 (i.e., ט) Av; this explanation appears also in the Minhath Shai and in the book Yesod Ohel Mo‘ed.” Okay, very nice, but it gets much better.
A whole big collection of mouseover interpretations follows. Choose your mouseover, really.
Other commentators have explained the small teth as being a reference to some particular smallness in the sinking of the gates. Thus, in Mesoreth Ha-berith Ha-gadol, it says: “The reference here means that they did not sink very deeply, but only a small sinking.”
In the book Em La-miqra ve-la-Masoreth, it says that the small teth is an allusion to the word טוב, good: “It hints that their sinking was not to their disadvantage, but for their own good - it was so that the enemy’s hands would not have control over them.” In the same book, it lists a number of allusions associated with the word טוב - the goodness which was decreased at the time of the Destruction, the good Torah which the Jews had abandoned, and more.
In Sefer Elyashiv, it says that the reference is to טוב רואי, the one good in appearance, i.e., the handsome King David, in whose merit the gates were not destroyed, but merely sank into the ground. In the book Yesod Ohel Mo‘ed, the same connection to טוב רואי is mentioned, except that here, it is explained as referring to the fact that the gates, which now sank, had originally been made by King David.
So - a small letter tet, with all kinds of allusions about the destruction of the temple floating around it. In the next post, we’ll see how this isn’t just a mouseover tet, it’s actually a hyperlink tet, connected to a tet in Kohelet.
Mirrored from hasoferet.com.