Citazione Commento su I Samuele 25:37

ויהיו לתנינם, “they (the staffs of the sorcerers) turned into snakes.” The Torah refrained from saying ויהיו תנינים, which would have meant that they actually became snakes. The sorcerers did not have the power to do that. They could only create the illusion not the real thing. The wording of the Torah here is similar to Joshua 7,5: “their hearts melted into water.” This was a description of people losing courage. It did not describe a phenomenon literally. We have another example of this in (Samuel I 25,37) וימת לבו בקרבו והוא היה לאבן, which translated literally would mean “his heart (Naval’s) died within him, and it turned into stone.” The word אבן is merely a figure of speech.
You may well counter that the expression ויהי לתנין is also used when Moses’ staff turned into a snake, so what is so peculiar about the Torah not writing תנין when describing what happened to the staffs of the sorcerers? We have to explain that in the case of Moses’ i.e. Aaron’s staff, this was a true transformation of the staff into a snake and that a similar wording is found in Genesis 2,7 ויהי האדם לנפש חיה where the letter ל at the beginning of the word לנפש certainly does not speak about something illusory. However, by way of contrast, what the sorcerers did was merely sleight of hand. Seeing that the wording lent itself to two different interpretations, the Torah had to write immediately that Aaron’s staff swallowed all the staffs of the sorcerers in order the show the qualitative difference between what Aaron had done and what the Egyptians had been able to do. The fact that the Torah describes “their staffs” as being swallowed instead of “their snakes” being swallowed, shows that their staffs had remained staffs in spite of appearing to be snakes. Another proof that the sorcerers only created an illusion is that the Torah does not describe them as having performed their art in the presence of Pharaoh and his servants as the Torah had been at pains to emphasise concerning Moses’ miracle.
Alternatively, supposing that the חרטומים had really been capable of turning their staffs into snakes as the Talmud Chulin 7 suggests, why then were they called sorcerers instead of prophets? The answer is that they denied the power of the celestial forces. We could interpret the words ויהיו לתנינים to mean that their staffs did indeed turn into live snakes. The letter ל would be justified seeing that later on these snakes reverted to being staffs. The qualitative edge of Moses’ staff was simply that it swallowed the staffs of the sorcerers. According to Shemot Rabbah 9,7 when Pharaoh observed that Moses’ staff (as a staff) was able to swallow the combined staffs of his sorcerers he reflected that it might equally be capable of swallowing him and his throne. The word ויבלע means that something inert was able to swallow both something else inert and something live. We have a parallel in Numbers 16,32 when the earth swallowed both Korach and family as well as his tents and belongings.

“Strike him down in the chariot, etc.” And in Divrei Hayomim it states, “And he sought Achazyohu, and they captured him when he was hiding in Shomron, and they brought him to Yeihu. ”¹¹II Divrei Hayomim 22:9. The verses can be reconciled as follows: “And [he] fled by way of the Beis-Hagan,” from Yizre’el to Shomron, and Yeihu pursued him. There is, however, a discrepancy in the matter, because Yeihu did not reign in Shomron until the following day, as it is explained in this account, “Yeihu wrote letters and sent them to Shomron, etc.”¹²Below 10:1. Our Rabbis explained in the Aggadah [entitled] “Cheilek,”¹³Maseches Sanhedrin 102b. “When he was hiding in Shomron,”¹⁴II Divrei Hayomim 22:9. that he would cut out the Divine Names and write [names of] pagan deities in their place. According to their opinion, one can say that his hiding was not because of Yeihu, rather the following is its explanation: “And he sought Achazyohu, and they captured him when he was escaping by way of the garden.” He had been acting wickedly from the beginning, for he would come to Shomron and hide from the officers of Yehudah, to commit this abomination, because the inhabitants of Shomron were idolaters. “And they brought him to Yeihu,”¹⁵Ibid. [i.e.,] Yeihu’s men, who had pursued him, [after which it states,] “And he said, ‘Strike him in the chariot.’”¹⁶Alternatively, Achazyohu was wounded on the way up to Gur, and he fled to Megido where his condition worsened. The verse therefore uses the expression וַיָמָת [literally=“and he died”] to express his condition although he was still alive. See I Shmuel 25:37 where “וַיָמָת” is used to express the condition of a live person. He then went to hide in Shomron where he was discovered by Yeihu’s men. They brought Achazyohu to Yeihu in Yizre’el and he was executed there.—Radak

Let your heart live: – the interpretation of which is on the lines of, “and the spirit of Jacob lived” (ibid. 45:27), the converse of “and his heart died” (1 Sam. 25:37); for the living spirit is in the heart, and when man is in trouble his heart dies, as he (the Psalmist) says (Ps. 109:22), and when he passes out from trouble to relief, behold, his heart lives. And the significance of