Moses Our Nursemaid? Toward a Proper Understanding of Omen in Numbers 11:12

). He would like to acknowledge the research aid of Mitchell First and Tim Cravens in the preparation of this article.

It starts with the asafsuf, the “riffraff,” but soon it spreads throughout the people of Israel: a “gluttonous craving” for meat in the desert. Feeling overwhelmed by their demands, Moses cries out to God, Why have You dealt ill with Your servant, and why have I not enjoyed Your favor, that You have laid the burden of all this people upon me? Did I conceive all this people, did I bear them, that You should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom as ha-omen carries an infant,’ to the land that You have promised on oath to their fathers? Where am I to get meat to give to all this people . . . I cannot carry all this people by myself, for it is too much for me (Num. 11:11-14).

Note that I have left one Hebrew word untranslated: ha-omen. From the context, “the omen” would seem to indicate some kind of caregiver, but the precise meaning of the word is surprisingly difficult to pin down. Most of the classical Jewish commentators, including Rashi, are silent on the subject. Still, many different translations and interpretations have been offered, but I must say that I find none of them completely satisfying. In the following essay, I analyze the omen problem and make a new attempt to resolve it.

The thorniness of this issue first struck me when I was in the process of writing an English version of the Pentateuco, vol. 4, by Samuel David Luzzatto (“Shadal,” 1800-1865), which contains his Italian translation of, and Hebrew commentary on, the Book of Numbers. Frustratingly, he offers no explanatory comment on the word omen in Numbers 11:12, so all we have to go on is his Italian translation, balio. Even this word is enigmatic. Shadal was not first to employ it here; both his older contemporary Isaac Samuel Reggio and the 17th-century Calvinist scholar Giovanni Diodati, author of the first Italian Bible translation, render omen as balio, but this word does not appear in modern Italian dictionaries. I was thus compelled to turn to a reference work from Diodati’s era, the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (1612), which indicates that balio meant “a child’s tutor” and was the equivalent of the Latin nutricius [“tutor” or “foster father”], but that in more contemporary usage it referred to the husband of a balia [“wet-nurse, nursemaid”].

Which of these disparate definitions did Shadal mean to adopt as a translation of omen? There is no way to know for sure. One may further ask, do any of these definitions actually fit the meaning of omen, and if not, how can the word be properly understood? Let us now review and analyze the various interpretations that have been offered over the centuries. In evaluating each suggestion, it is useful to keep in mind two further questions: (1) why would Moses have compared himself to an omen in the particular sense at issue, and (2) why would Moses think that he could not meet the responsibilities of such an omen?

Nurse (Septuagint, Vulgate, Martin Luther, Tyndale, Coverdale, Geneva Bible, Revised Standard Version, New International Version, Jewish Publication Society 1962, Artscroll, and Many Others)

There is a longstanding and widespread tradition of understanding omen as “nurse,” starting with the Septuagint’s Greek rendering, tithenos, and the Vulgate’s Latin nutrix. Luther followed suit with the German Amme, and “nurse” appears in a host of English versions, from the earliest to some of the most recent. Some modern Italian translations, too, replace Diodati’s masculine balio, which does not mean “nurse,” with the feminine balia, which does. In all these instances, it is obvious that “nurse” or its equivalent is being used not in the modern sense of a medical health care provider, but in the traditional sense, denoting either a person whose job consists of the general care of a child (“dry-nurse,” “nanny”), or more specifically, a woman who is employed to suckle an infant (“wet-nurse”).

At first glance, it may seem only natural that Moses would refer to himself as a nurse, at least in the dry sense. He has been hired, so to speak, by God Himself to provide care for His children. Moreover, there is a hint in the text that Moses might have been comparing himself to an actual wet-nurse, for when he complains that God has effectively told him, ‘Carry them in your bosom as an omen carries an infant,’ the Hebrew word for “infant” is yonek, literally “suckling.” It may also seem obvious why Moses would feel that he was failing as a metaphorical nurse, either because he felt himself unable to provide the proper general care for his charges, or specifically, because he lacked the ability to “suckle” or feed them.

There is a difficulty with the nurse analogy, however. Moses frames his complaint, it should be recalled, by asking the rhetorical question, Did I conceive all this people, did I bear them, that You should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom as an omen carries an infant’…?¹ If Moses is the one who supposedly conceived or gave birth to the people, one would have expected him to continue the analogy consistently. That is, he should have asked why he was being ordered to carry the people as a mother carries an infant, rather than as a mere employee caring for someone else’s children. This anomaly is highlighted in Rabbi Yehudah Herzl Henkin’s 1992 commentary, Hibbah Yeterah.

Perhaps it can be argued, though, that Moses was indeed comparing himself to a “nursing mother.” As Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik movingly explained, “The people, in its early formative years, needed him as a baby needs a nursing mother; they were temperamentally impulsive, filled with uncontrollable desires, restively murmuring” — and yet “Moses doubted his capacity to become an omen; he knew that, in this role, he would be totally submerged in his work.”² However, Rabbi Henkin emphasizes that Moses was comparing himself not to a female omenet, but specifically to a male omen, a word used later on in the Bible to describe Mordecai’s role with respect to his orphaned cousin Hadassah/Esther (Esth. 2:7).

Henkin also raises another, equally important point: even the feminine omenet is not really synonymous with meineket, a Hebrew word that is derived from the same root as yonek and unequivocally means “wet-nurse.” To support this distinction, Henkin cites Ruth 4:16, where Naomi takes her grandson Obed, holds him to her bosom, and becomes his omenet. Without spelling out his reasoning, Henkin seems to imply that although Naomi may have been assuming a breastfeeder’s typical posture, it was unlikely that a woman of her age would become the wet-nurse of a baby that she had not given birth to.

Interestingly, the 1962 Jewish Publication Society version, which does translate omen as “nurse” with regard to Moses in Numbers 11:12, chooses to translate Mordecai’s title of omen as “foster father” and Naomi’s designation of omenet as “foster mother.” Whether this means that Moses in fact meant to refer to himself as a foster father will be discussed below, but this inconsistency on the part of the JPS translators does seem to weaken the case for understanding omen as some sort of nurse, especially a wet-nurse.

If any further evidence is needed that the word omen does not necessarily imply lactation, consider the phrase banayikh me-rahok yavo’u u-v’notayikh al tzad te’amenah (Isa. 60:4), which may best be translated, “Your sons from afar will come, and your daughters will be borne on the side” (or “carried on the hip”). The last Hebrew word of this phrase, te’amenah, derives from the same root as omen and omenet, but it would seem physically inconvenient for the Israelite daughters to be nursed from the side or the hip. According to many English Bible translations, they are simply being carried, not nursed.

Foster Father (New English Translation Bible, New Jerusalem Bible)

The Collins English Dictionary tells us that in American English, a “foster father” is defined as “a man who takes the place of a father in raising a child.” As we have seen, this definition seems quite appropriate when applied to the role of Mordecai as Esther’s omen, and besides, such an understanding of omen has the virtue of avoiding the difficulties presented by the attempt to define the term as “nurse.”

One possible objection to the “foster father” approach is the fact that Moses apparently employs exclusively female imagery at the start of his complaint: Did I conceive all this people, did I bear them…? Why then would he suddenly shift gears and complain about being assigned a male role? This difficulty can be overcome by revisiting the Hebrew phrase im anokhi yelidtihu, which we have been translating as, “Did I bear them?” As Nahmanides points out in his commentary, this phrase may just as likely be rendered, “Did I beget them?” — a male function that would open the way to an understanding of omen as a male figure.

However, we again run into the question of why Moses would first rhetorically compare himself to a parent and then wonder why God expected him to act as someone other than a parent, in this case a parental substitute. Was Moses, the sublime poet of the Song of the Sea, now so distraught that he could not help mixing his metaphors?

Nursing Father (King James Version, American Standard Version, Young’s Literal Translation, Jewish Publication Society 1917, Koren Jerusalem Bible)

What exactly, one might ask, is a “nursing father”? If we again consult the Collins English Dictionary, we learn that in British English, this is simply a biblical term for “foster father.” But as we have seen above, identifying omen as a foster father for purposes of Numbers 11:12 may answer some questions, but it raises others.

Another way of looking at the expression “nursing father” would seem to be objectionable as patently absurd: literally, a father who suckles his child. And yet there are sources that take this option seriously. Rabbi Yudan, an amora of the fourth century C.E., is quoted in Genesis Rabbah 30:8 as saying, “One time, he [Mordecai] went repeatedly to all the wet-nurses [meinikot] but could not find one for Esther without delay, and so he nursed her [meinikah] himself.” The midrash goes on to corroborate, “Rabbi Berechiah and Rabbi Abahu said in Rabbi Eleazar’s name, ‘Milk came to him and he would nurse her [meinikah].’” Although these statements are clearly based on the description of Mordecai as an omen (Esth. 2:7), it should be noted that the midrash employs the more explicit verb meinik.

If we are to credit another Talmudic source (TB Shabbat 53b:17), Mordecai had company: “There was an incident where one man’s wife died, and she left him a son to nurse, and he did not have money to pay the wages of a wet-nurse. And a miracle was performed on his behalf, and he developed breasts like the two breasts of a woman, and he nursed [ve-heinik] his son.” Similar accounts have occasionally surfaced closer to our time. The naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), visiting what is now Venezuela in 1799, encountered one Francisco Lozano, who claimed that about 14 years previously, he had breastfed his own son when his wife took ill after delivery. Allegedly, he did this two or three times a day for five months, and eye witnesses assured Humboldt that such feeding had provided the baby’s only nourishment.³ More recently, a news story from 2002 — often republished but vaguely sourced — reported that a 38-year-old Sri Lankan man, whose wife had died in childbirth, was able to breastfeed his two infant daughters.⁴

What does modern science have to say about men’s lactation? The short answer is, this phenomenon is theoretically possible but highly improbable. According to a 2016 study, men have “the basic anatomical structures for functional (lactating) mammary glands. What men generally lack is the appropriate hormonal milieu . . . A male mammal can be caused to lactate, by external hormonal treatments or tumor-driven prolactemia [elevated levels of prolactin, a hormone that stimulates milk production, in the blood], but true lactation remains a female trait.”⁵

In any case, it seems that even pre-modern authorities regarded the “nursing father” as a strange and rare phenomenon. After all, Genesis Rabbah 30:8 relates that when Rabbi Abahu stated in public that Mordecai nursed Esther, his audience laughed at him. And yet it was this very strangeness and rarity that induced the biblical scholar Avivah Zornberg to take the view that in Numbers 11:12, Moses was complaining that God indeed expected him to act as if he were an omen in the sense of a male wet-nurse. According to Zornberg, such an omen was “a fantasy figure of infinite constancy and compassion . . . a source of unbounded nurturance, of emunah, of trustworthiness.”⁶

As appealing and thought-provoking as this interpretation may be, another look at Numbers 11:12 casts it into doubt. In the words that Moses puts into God’s mouth, sa’ehu ve-heikekha ka’asher yissa ha-omen et ha-yonek (literally, “Carry them in your bosom as the omen carries the suckling”), the operative verbs sa’ehu and yissa denote “carrying,” not “nursing” (this point will be further elaborated below). Moreover, the simile “as the omen carries the suckling” sounds like a proverbial expression, reflecting a common, everyday activity, not a freakish one.

This impression is reinforced by the particular form of the verb yissa [“carries”]. This verb is in the imperfect tense and should be understood as a “frequentative,” indicating an activity that is repeated, habitual, or customary. A close parallel is found in Moses’ later admonition to Israel, The LORD will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the earth, which will swoop down like an eagle (Deut. 28:49), where the phrase ka’asher yid’eh ha-nasher (literally, “as the eagle swoops”) employs the imperfect-tense verb yid’eh in the frequentative sense. It is the “eagle” (nesher, more accurately “griffon vulture”) that commonly and proverbially swoops; it would have made no literary sense for Moses to say “as the flying hippopotamus swoops.” Ergo, it would have been every bit as unlikely for Moses to claim that he had been commanded to carry his people “as the lactating father carries the suckling.”

One last observation here: the image of the lactating father does in fact appear elsewhere in the Bible: You shall suck the milk of the nations, / Suckle at breasts of kings (Isa. 60:16), where the latter phrase in Hebrew is ve-shod melakhim tinaki. Note, however, that the image presented here is clearly fanciful and hyperbolic, referring as it does to a triumphant future return to Zion, when the great powers would share their wealth with Israel. This poetic figure is to be taken no more literally than the one presented just three verses later: No longer shall you need the sun / For light by day, / Nor the shining of the moon / For radiance (Isa. 60:19). Furthermore, neither the noun omen nor any of its associated verb forms appear here. It follows that this verse from Isaiah offers no support for an interpretation of omen in Numbers 11:12 as “nursing father.”

Nursing-Parent (Schocken Bible)

Everett Fox, a talented translator whose work on the Five Books of Moses comprises Volume 1 of The Schocken Bible (2000), seeks to avoid the anomaly of the “nursing father” when translating omen in Numbers 11:12, while at the same time recognizing that omen is not a feminine word. Accordingly, he carefully chooses the neutral term “nursing-parent.” This ingenious rendering avoids yet another pitfall mentioned above: having first rhetorically asked whether he had conceived or borne (or begotten) the entire people, why would Moses then complain that he was being ordered to act as a non-parent?

Yet on closer inspection, Fox’s solution does not entirely succeed. By definition, a “nursing-parent” must be either a nursing mother or a nursing father.⁷ If it is understood as “nursing mother,” we have already discussed the difficulties that arise when omen is taken to mean a female nurse. And if it is understood as “nursing father,” the resulting problems are all the more severe. Thus, the troublesome “nursing” element of “nursing-parent” must be excised, leaving us with “parent,” plain and simple. Such an interpretation would seem to accord with Nahmanides’ comment on ha-omen in Numbers 11:12: this word means “the father or the mother . . . and he said omen [in the masculine] because [as a man,] he was [properly classified as] an omen and not an omenet.” I believe “parent” is a step in the right direction, but our search must continue.

Teacher, Tutor, Educator (Onkelos, Jerusalem Targum, Peshitta, Diodati (?), Reggio (?), Shadal (?), Torah Yesharah)

The ancient Aramaic translations of the Torah are unanimous in understanding the omen in Numbers 11:12 as a person who served an educational function. Onkelos translates the word as turbeyana, and the Peshitta (a Christian version of the Bible in Syriac, an Eastern Aramaic dialect) uses the similar marbeyana. Jastrow defines both of these as “educator” and derives them from the root revei or rabbei [“to raise or rear”]. The Jerusalem Targum (in both the Neofiti version and the version ascribed to Jonathan ben Uzziel) uses the Greek loan-word pedagog. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, three Italian translators — Diodati, Reggio, and Shadal — give the translation balio, which in early Italian signified “a child’s tutor,” though one cannot be certain that this is how these authorities meant to employ the word.

A modern-day (1963) English translation, Torah Yesharah by Rabbi Charles Kahane, creatively renders the entire verse as follows: “Am I the father of all this people; or are they my children, that You should tell me to raise them in discipline – even as the teacher rears the infant – until they reach the land which You promised to their fathers?” (emphasis mine).⁸ On its own terms, this rendition is consistent and makes sense. However, it tries too hard with its translation of the words sa’ehu ve-heikekha as “raise them in discipline” rather than “carry them in your bosom,” and yissa as “rears” rather than “carries.”

Although Robert Alter translates omen as “guardian” (The Hebrew Bible, vol. 1, 2018),⁹ his accompanying commentary says that it means “a guardian or private tutor of the sort that wealthy families could hire to care for and instruct their children” (emphasis mine). To make room for this meaning, Alter engages in his own reinterpretation of sa’ehu ve-heikekha as “Bear them in your lap” and yissa as “bears.” Unlike Kahane’s treatment of these words, Alter’s is linguistically defensible. Heik may legitimately mean either “bosom” or “lap,” and the verb nasa not only bears the meaning of “carry,” but also carries the meaning of “bear.” Moreover, bearing a small child in one’s lap is a plausible posture for a tutor to assume.

But is it plausible to assume that the omen of Numbers 11:12 is a tutor? Why would Moses liken himself to such a figure? According to the online source Yad Meir, Moses was complaining that God had given him an impossible task. What an infant (yonek) needs is a meineket (wet-nurse), not an omen, whose responsibility is to provide spiritual guidance. “My role,” said Moses, “is to teach the people how to live according to the Torah, and therefore I am completely unfit to take on the burden of ensuring their physical nourishment.” The Yad Meir commentary goes on to note that Rabbi Meir Shapiro of Lublin voiced this very lament when he was compelled to set aside his yeshiva teaching and go wandering the earth on fundraising missions.¹⁰

One might further ask whether a yonek is, in any case, too young to require a tutor’s services. This point was addressed by Rabbi Mordecai Isaac Edelmann, who drew upon a surprising source. He said that a European king once asked “the English scholar Spencer” (evidently Herbert Spencer, 1820-1903, who originated the expression “survival of the fittest”) to serve as his one-year-old child’s tutor. Spencer refused, saying it was already too late, since the child’s training should have begun at the age of one month. The Torah alludes to this idea, said Rabbi Edelmann, by means of the expression ka’asher yissa ha-omen et ha-yonek; a person needs an educator and a spiritual guide from the earliest infancy.¹¹

While these explanations have undoubted homiletical value, it seems that we have not yet arrived at a fully satisfying way to understand the peshat, the plain meaning of the word omen in the context presented here. A hired tutor may well bear a child in his lap, but Moses seems to be complaining about a parental figure’s own heavier physical burden of “carrying” that child through the desert.

Wet-Nurse’s Husband (Diodati (?), Reggio (?), Shadal (?))

As discussed above, the earliest Italian Bible translation, followed by both Reggio and Shadal without comment, renders omen as balio, an Italian word that originally meant a child’s tutor or foster father, but later meant the husband of a wet-nurse (balia). Assuming for the moment that this later meaning is the one that the three translators had in mind, how might it fit into the context of Numbers 11:12?

In his commentary, Don Isaac Abravanel offers an intriguing thought. He says that Moses was complaining, “You are having me function like an omen, not like an omenet, for when the suckling infant carried by an omenet cries, she can pacify it by giving it her consoling breast and her milk. But an omen, who is the husband of the omenet, cannot pacify the baby, for he has no breasts or milk, and so the baby will cry inconsolably.”

According to this clever explanation – which was later endorsed by Rabbi Tzvi Meklenberg in his commentary Ha-Ketav ve-ha-Kabbalah – the omen (and perhaps the balio) is a hapless, helpless husband who serves no useful function of his own, and whose very title may be a mere back-formation of his wife’s, i.e., “Mr. Omenet.” In Yiddish, he might be termed a nokhshlepper, or one who is just trudging behind another. But was the role of the omen really so drastically limited?

If we re-examine the two definitions of balio, perhaps we can arrive at a different conclusion. It may be that the balio once served alongside the balia, with the pair functioning as an efficient husband-wife team. She was the wet-nurse, while he fulfilled other burdensome but essential tasks, such as carrying the child wherever they went, and perhaps also teaching the child its earliest lessons.

Quite possibly, the balio-balia team is hinted at in the Bible itself. In one of his visions of Israel’s idealized future, Isaiah says, Kings shall tend your children, / Their queens shall serve you as nurses (Isa. 49:23), where the first phrase in Hebrew reads Ve-hayu melakhim omnayikh, literally, “And kings shall be your omanim” (plural of omen). Some English translations, to be sure, follow King James, which has And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers, apparently taking omnayikh as a parallel of meinikotayikh, which is the Hebrew word for “nursing mothers” here. However, several Jewish commentators (Abravanel, David Kimhi, Metzudat Tzion) omit any reference to nursing, and instead understand omnayikh as the equivalent of megaddelayikh [“those who rear you”]. Significantly, the latter two commentators cross-refer to Numbers 11:12, clearly indicating that they understand omen in that verse in the same sense.

At last we are arriving at a fully intelligible interpretation of omen. To get all the way there, we must thoroughly examine the context of Numbers 11:12, and we must finally deal with the question posed more than once above: if Moses was complaining that God regarded him as a parent who had conceived or begotten the people of Israel, would he complain immediately afterward that God was expecting him to assume the task of a non-parent?

Starting from Numbers 11:11 and ending at Numbers 11:17, one word in particular appears repeatedly in various forms: Why have You dealt ill with Your servant… that You have laid the burden [massa] of all this people upon me? Did I conceive all this people, did I bear them, that You should say to me, ‘Carry them [sa’ehu] in your bosom as an omen carries [yissa] an infant’?… I cannot carry [laset] all this people by myself, for it is too much for me“…. Then the Lord said to Moses, “Gather for me seventy of Israel’s elders…. They shall bear [ve-nase’u] the burden [be-massa] of the people with you, and you shall not bear it [tissa] alone.”

Thus, the Hebrew root nasa [“to carry,” “to bear”], in several different noun and verb variations, is employed seven times in this text unit. Not only is nasa the leading word [Leitwort] here, but its seven-fold repetition is a fine example of the Torah’s use of the so-called “Seven Code,” which has been identified by Umberto Cassuto and other biblical scholars as a useful “interpretive Key for understanding the messages of the Torah.”¹²

It should now be abundantly clear that throughout this episode, Moses’ overriding concern is his ability or inability to “carry” the people of Israel. Consequently, the person whose role he feels he is being required to assume – the omen – must be one who is characteristically entrusted with the task of carrying an infant, and who is thoroughly, proverbially able and willing to do so. And because omen is a masculine noun, that person must be a man.

Who is such a man most likely to be? The child’s father – typically, though not necessarily or exclusively. In the father’s absence, the task could be accomplished by a volunteer or hired substitute, such as a foster father or perhaps the husband of an omenet. It follows that the word omen might best be understood to mean “a child’s primary male caregiver,” either the father or a proxy. With this specific yet flexible meaning in mind, we can now see why Moses, having resisted being labeled as the people’s biological mother or father, would then have recoiled from assuming the burdensome but crucial responsibility of any father or father-figure, namely, carrying the child where it needs to go. Perhaps Moses was thinking that it was God alone Who could or should have taken on this role, in keeping with his later statement while addressing the people: You saw how the LORD your God carried you, as a man carries his son, all the way that you traveled until you came to this place (Deut. 1:31).¹³

Such an understanding of the term omen successfully reconciles its other uses in the Bible. Mordecai served as Esther’s primary male caregiver [omen], i.e., foster father, and foreign kings [omnayikh] would provide Israel’s main caregiving and support in the ideal future. Similarly, Naomi assumed the principal female care of her long-awaited grandson as his omenet. In none of these cases do we have to wonder whether the job description of such caregivers included the actual nursing of their charges.

There is linguistic support for this understanding of omen/omenet. According to the Lexicon of the 19th-century scholar H. F. W. Gesenius, the verb root aman means “to prop, stay, support,” and specifically “to bear or carry a child,” and the noun form omen means “one who carries a child on his arm and takes care of it.” The root aman also yields the word emunah, denoting “faith,” “trust,” or “faithfulness.” It has been reasonably suggested that “the act of rearing a child provided the concrete referent from which the more abstract meaning of faithfulness was derived.”¹⁴ In other words, the sturdy, dependable omen or omenet served as the original role model of steadfast dedication.

Conclusion

Even when appropriately understood, the word omen in Numbers 11:12 remains stubbornly difficult to translate into English. For me, the task was doubly or triply confounding, because in attempting to provide the best English rendering of balio, Shadal’s archaic Italian word for omen, I had to be as faithful as possible to him and to the original text, while at the same time choosing an English word of the right literary quality. Finding that balio was considered to be an equivalent of the Latin nutricius [“tutor,” “foster father”] but also carried the meaning of “wet-nurse’s husband,” I ultimately chose to translate the word as “nurturer,” reasoning that this was a term that conveyed the meaning of “one who feeds or supports” as well as “one who educates or trains.”

If I were writing on a clean slate, however, I would probably not choose this word. Having examined in depth the many previously given interpretations of omen — nurse, foster father, nursing father, nursing-parent, educator, wet-nurse’s husband, guardian — and finding each of them wanting as misguided or overly restrictive, I have attempted to reason out the word’s meaning so as to fit the context of Moses’ complaint in Numbers ch. 11, as well as the usages of the word elsewhere in the Bible. The signs pointed the way to a man who was expected to carry a young child, to provide its main support.

My proposed interpretation of omen serves better as a dictionary definition than as a translation. It would hardly do to have Moses cry, “Did I conceive all this people, did I bear them, that You should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom as a child’s primary male caregiver carries an infant?’” It might be preferable to reduce the translation of omen here to “caregiver,” as one modern version (The Contemporary Torah, JPS 2006) actually does, but something would be lost in translation. When all is said and done, perhaps omen belongs to a class of exceptional biblical words, like avrekh and tahash, that might best be left untranslated altogether.

Footnotes

1. In Hebrew, the phrase “that You should say to me” is ki tomar elai. Although the versatile conjunction ki has many different meanings, almost all translations render it here as “that” or “so that.” Hence Moses is setting up a cause-and-effect relationship between his clauses: “Is it because I am this people’s parent that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom…?’” ↩

2. A. R. Besdin, Reflections of the Rav: Lessons in Jewish Thought Adapted from the Lectures of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (Hoboken: KTAV Publishing House, 1993), p. 157. ↩

3. A. von Humboldt, Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, vol. 3 (Paris, 1817), pp. 57-59. ↩

4. See, for example, N. Swaminathan, Strange but True: Males Can Lactate, Scientific American, September 6, 2007. Note that the article’s subheading reads, “Unless you are an Indonesian fruit bat, though, it probably won’t happen naturally.” ↩

5. M. L. Power and J. Schulkin, Milk: The Biology of Lactation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), pp. 90, 91. See also M. Daly, “Why Don’t Male Mammals Lactate?,” Journal of Theoretical Biology (1979) 78, pp. 329-330. ↩

6. A. G. Zornberg, Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers (New York: Schocken Books, 2015), pp. 79, 80. ↩

7. It seems safe to assume that Moses would not have been referring to a transgendered, intersex, or nonbinary parent in the modern sense. ↩

8. Charles Kahane (1905-1978), was a rabbi in Brooklyn and the father of Meir Kahane. His Torah translation, like the Jerusalem Targum, takes an interpretive rather than literal approach and incorporates many additions drawn from midrashic sources and traditional commentators. ↩

9. Another source for the use of “guardian” is the New King James Version (1982). Similarly, three German Jewish translations (Mendelssohn, Hirsch, and Buber-Rosenzweig) have Wärter, which means “attendant” or “keeper.” ↩

10. Alon Divrei Hayyim le-Farashat Beha’alotekha, 16 Sivan 5773 (2013). ↩

11. M. I. Edelmann, Hashkafot ha-Talmud be-ha-Olam (Bialystok, 1911), p. 190. ↩

12. A. Bonchek, Studying the Torah: A Guide to In-Depth Interpretation (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), p. 119. ↩

13. Thus it seems that even at the successful close of his mission, Moses could scarcely believe that it was he, even with the help of the 70 elders, who had transported the entire people all the way to the verge of their promised destination. The true omen, he seems to be saying, was God Himself. ↩

14. D. Aranoff, “The Biblical Root ’mn: Retrieval of a Term and Its Household Context,” Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination, ed. M. Lehman, J. L. Kanarek, and S. J. Bronner (Liverpool: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization and Liverpool University Press, 2017), p. 327. ↩