The Use of Two Synonymous Prepositions Lema'an and Le- in Ezekiel 21

In Ezekiel 21, the prophet announces the coming destruction of his country and Jerusalem its capital. As part of this, three verses contain a description of God’s sword, descriptions which include very similar pairs of parallel phrases. The phrases use the nouns tevah (“slaughter”) and baraq (“lightning”) as parallel terms, along with similar passive-voice verbs. Interestingly, the phrases sometimes use the preposition lema’an (“in order to/that”) and other times the synonymous preposition le-. The verses, reproduced here for comparison, are vv. 15a, 20b and 33b.¹

V. 15a reads: Lema’an tevo-ah tevah huhadah // lema’an heyeih-lah baraq moratah (In order to wreak slaughter it has been sharpened // In order that it have lightning it has been polished).

V. 20b reads: ’asuyah levaraq me’utah letevah (it is made for lightning, it is polished for slaughter).

V. 33b reads: petuhah letevah merutah lehachil lema’an baraq (it is open — i.e. unsheathed — for slaughter, it is polished to the utmost for lightning).

This article considers why the author chooses different synonymous prepositions in parallel phrases which are otherwise so similar, suggesting that he does so for a stylistic reason, as well as to allow his poetic structure to mirror the impending destruction of his country.

The First Two Verses

In v. 15a, the phrases constitute a poetic bicolon: each colon begins with lema’an and ends with a passive-voice verb, huhadah and moratah, and each contains an infinitive-plus-noun phrase, tevo-ah tevah and heyeih-lah baraq. In v. 20b, two parallel two-word phrases contain the same nouns tevah and baraq, but here both are preceded instead by le-. In both verses the parallel phrases are balanced in length, suggesting the author worked within the rules of biblical Hebrew poetic parallelism. One possible explanation is that lema’an is preferred before an infinitive, while le- is preferred before a bare noun — BDB notes that lema’an often is followed by an infinitive, meaning “in order to X.”² This possibility is worth testing against v. 33b.

Verse 33b

Verse 33b again uses two passive-voice verbs, petuhah and merutah, and the same two nouns — but here tevah is preceded by le-, while baraq is preceded by lema’an. This argues against the theory that lema’an tracks infinitives and le- tracks nouns, since in this verse it is baraq, a noun, that takes lema’an. Moreover, on the analogy of v. 20b we might expect a symmetrical two-word phrase, e.g. merutah levaraq; instead the second phrase runs to four words, including lehachil and the longer preposition lema’an, leaving the two phrases seriously unbalanced in length.

Moshe Greenberg proposes resolving the imbalance by parsing the half-verse into three two-word “versets”: petuhah letevah, merutah lehachil, lema’an baraq.³ This has problems of its own: hachil never appears elsewhere in biblical Hebrew as a noun, so lehachil cannot function as a preposition-plus-noun the way the analogous phrases in vv. 15a and 20b do; the two occurrences of le- in the verse function differently (one indicating purpose, the other extent); and Greenberg’s third “verset” breaks apart the tevah/baraq parallel that structures all three verses. It isn’t necessary, per BDB, to revocalize baraq as an infinitive (beroq) simply because it follows lema’an, since lema’an is equally at home before a noun, where it means “for” or “for the sake of” — the same sense as the shorter le-.

The Use of Both Prepositions Before the Same Infinitive: V. 20a

Verse 20a in the same chapter presents an even stranger case: Lema’an lamug leiv veharbeih hamichsholim (In order to, to weaken their heart and multiply the fallen) — both prepositions preceding the very same infinitive, mug. Greenberg notes that stacking two prepositions of purpose is characteristic of late biblical Hebrew, though nowhere else in the Bible is lema’an followed by an infinitive introduced with l-.⁴ Radak already flagged this strange wording, suggesting the author uses both the word that introduces a purpose (lema’an) and the grammatical marker that does so (the la- of lamug) to emphasize that a reason is being given.⁵ This article argues instead that the two phrases in v. 20a are equal in weight rather than cause and effect, and that a later scribe may have added the la- of lamug without adding a parallel le- before harbeih — a different sort of textual problem than the one in v. 33b, and one that does not, on its own, explain v. 33b’s imbalance.

Conclusion, With Two New Suggestions

Two synonymous prepositions, lema’an and le-, are used in three pairs of phrases in Ezekiel 21, each pair sharing the same tevah/baraq parallelism and passive-voice verbal structure — evidence that the author was working within the tradition of biblical poetic parallelism. Yet the prepositions used are not always the same: in vv. 15a and 20b, the same preposition is used in both parallel phrases, preserving balance; in v. 33b, each noun takes a different preposition, unbalancing the verse. None of the explanations considered here — infinitive versus noun, or scribal expansion — are entirely convincing on their own, and it is more likely that v. 33b was written as we have it by its original author rather than expanded by a later scribe.

A reader of this article’s draft suggested that the poetic imbalance in v. 33b might itself be a literary technique: the sequence begins with a formally balanced bicolon in v. 15a, proceeds to a pair of shorter balanced phrases in v. 20b, and finishes with a half-verse in which the parallelism, though still visible, is disturbed and unbalanced in v. 33b. Read as a structural progression, this breakdown of poetic convention — including the jarring double use of synonymous prepositions — mirrors the impending destruction of Jerusalem that the prophecy foretells.