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Pivotal Events
Abraham Cut Off from His Past and Future by the Awkward Divine Command: “Go You!”
Two short Hebrew words connect two pivotal episodes in Abraham’s life.
The two Hebrew words are spelled identically in the consonantal Hebrew script: LH| LH|. They are pronounced differently, however, because the vowels, which are understood in biblical Hebrew, are different. The two-word phrase is pronounced lech lecha (emphasis on the last syllable). Literally, the two words mean “go you.”
This is an awkward phrase in English, and it is a problem for translators (more about this later). In Hebrew, the phrase has the resonance of a direct command.
These two words, lech lecha(!), appear together in this precise form only in two places in the entire Bible—in the two pivotal episodes in Abraham’s life. In both, it is God who says to Abraham, “Go you!”
The first time the phrase is used is in the first sentence of the opening episode in Abraham’s life, in Genesis 12:1. There God tells Abram (as he then was named) to leave his native land, his family and his father’s house and to go to a strange, unknown land that God would show him. The command of the Lord is, “Go you [!] out of your country and from your kinsmen and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1).
The second time the phrase appears is in an episode known as the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22). There the Lord commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering. Abraham proceeds to carry out God’s command, but at the last moment, when Isaac is already bound on the altar and Abraham has drawn his knife, Abraham is ordered to desist: “Lay not your hand on the lad … for now I know that you fear God, seeing that you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me” (Genesis 22:12).
This last clause (“Your son, your only son”) echoes God’s command at the beginning of the episode, where the words lech lecha appear. At the beginning of chapter 22 God orders Abraham to “Take your son, your only son, whom you love, even Isaac … ” (Genesis 22:2). According to Jewish tradition, this divine direction compresses a dialogue between Abraham and God in which Abraham, loath to understand, tries to avoid the awful meaning of God’s command to sacrifice the beloved son of his old age:
God: Take your son.
Abraham: I have two son (Isaac and Ishmael), and I do not know which of them you command me to take.
God: Your only son.
Abraham: The one is the only son of his mother (Hagar) and the other is the only son of his mother (Sarah).
God: Whom you love.
Abraham: I love this one and I love that one.
God: Even Isaac.1
Abraham can no longer avoid God’s meaning.
Then follows the thunderous phrase: lech lecha, “Go you [!] to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering.”
Some might see a parallel between the drum beat crescendo of the inexorable identification of “your son, your only son, whom you love, even Isaac” and the expanding circle of impending loneliness in chapter 12 when God commands Abram to get “out of your country, and from your kinsmen and [even] from your father’s house.”
In a way, the two episodes are connected by this means. But more directly they are connected by the phrase lech lecha, “go you!” In one case, the young patriarch is ordered to “go you out of … ”; in the other, the old man is ordered to take the beloved son of his old age and “go you to. … ”
In the first episode, Abram is asked (commanded) to give up his past—his land, his people, even his parental family. In the second, Abraham is asked (commanded) to give up his future—his son.
It has been suggested that lech lecha really means, not “go you,” but “go to yourself.” First, Abram was ordered to cut himself off from his past, and then Abraham was ordered to cut himself off from his future. He was completely alone—or perhaps alone 009with God. All that was left to him were his own inner resources.
According to the rabbis, as recalled in the Sayings of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot 5:3), Abraham had to go through ten painful trials to test his faith. The first and the tenth, according to Maimonides (the Rambam), a famous 12th-century exegete, were the ones we have been discussing, signaled by the introductory phrase lech lecha. Only after passing these tests does Abraham emerge as the man of perfect faith, worthy to be the father of “a great nation” in whom “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:2). Having passed the tests, God then promises Abraham “I will bestow my blessing” upon you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands of the sea-shore” (Genesis 22.17).
As if to emphasize Abraham’s aloneness—and his faith—in both episodes God specifically refrains from telling Abraham where he is to “go.” In Genesis 12:1, God tells Abram, “Go you … to the land that I will show you,” In Genesis 22, God tells Abraham “Go you … on one of the heights which I will point to you.” Bereft of his past and expecting to lose his future, Abraham is left with nothing but his trust in God.
Unfortunately, in English translations, the signaling connective power of lech lecha is lost. “Go you” is awkward. Almost every modern English translation omits “you,” thus eliminating the commanding force of phrase and transforming it into something so common (“go”) that it loses its force as a parallel signal to two related episodes.
Sometimes a translation will render the phrase simply “leave” in the first episode where God tells Abram, “Go you out of. … “ When this happens the parallel force of lech lecha is completely lost because it is translated “leave” in Genesis 12:1 and “go” in Genesis 22:2. (This occurs in the New English Bible, the Jerusalem Bible and the New International Version.)
The English translation that comes closest to retaining the force of the Hebrew is the King James Version of 1611. There the signal lech lecha is translated in the same way in both episodes and the commanding power of “you” is retained like the Hebrew, the language is also characterized by an appropriate majestic quality. In both Genesis 12 and Genesis 22 lech lecha is translated “Get thee.” In the first, God orders Abram to “Get thee out of thy country. … ” In the second, God orders Abraham to “Get thee unto the land of Moriah. … ”
It is too bad that the recent revision of the King James Version eliminates the original version’s adherence to the Hebrew.
In the New King James Version (NKJV, 1982), the commanding force of “you” (lecha) has been removed (as in the other modern English translations) and lech is translated in two different ways (so that the connecting parallelism is lost): In Genesis 12:1 we read in the NKJV, “Get [out of] … ” and in Genesis 22:2, we read “Go [to]. … ”
Perhaps that’s why so many people who have done so say there is no substitute for studying the Bible in the original, rather than in translation.
