Comentários de Citação sobre Oséias 5:10

כנגדו, she should be constantly present to attend to his needs; the prefix letter כ is to be understood as in Samuel I 9,13 כהיום, and as in Numbers 11,1 כמתאוננים, and as in Hoseah 5,10 כמסיגי גבול, in all of which instances the letter כ serves to emphasise what follows. (compare Genesis 25,31 where Yaakov insists that the sale of the birthright be effective immediately with the words כיום, “as of today”) Other explanations of the word כנגדו are that if and when her husband would embark on a sinful path of action, it would be woman’s task to prevent him from doing so by opposing it; these are familiar to all my readers, I am sure. The basic difference between man the species and woman his mate who were not initially created as two separate individuals as opposed to all the other living creatures, is to distinguish him favourably from all those other creatures. It draws attention to the fact that man is made from superior raw materials, and that as opposed to the other creatures among whom the male does not enjoy an advantage over the female, man, i.e. the male of the human species, does enjoy such an advantage. The male of the human species enjoys a position of authority vis a vis his female counterpart. The reason that he enjoys this right is the fact that woman is –after all- one of his own original limbs, and a person does have control over the various parts of his body. Seeing that the male of the human species had been the principal creation, woman became an adjunct to him, so that it is logical that man possesses superior strength to woman, and that also the power of his intellect is more manifest than that of his female counterpart.

Let me now explain the mystical element referred to by Ibn Ezra. Our verse refers to the celestial forces (which activate the effect of this water) as מרים. We know already from Job 3,5 that he called the day on which he had been born מרירי יום ואוררי יום, “a bitter day and a cursed day.” [Actually what Job said was that “if the day had been cursed he would not have been born; as it is was his misfortune that the day had not been cursed. Ed.] According to our author the letter כ in the words יבעתוהו כמרירי יום, (Job 3,5) is not to be understood as part of the root but as a prefix just as in Hoseah 5,10 כ-מסיגי גבול, “just as people who illegally move boundaries.” Job also said in verse 8 of that chapter יקבהו אוררי יום העתידים ערר לויתן, “may those who cast spells on the day damn it, those prepared to disable Leviathan.” Our sages (Baba Batra 75) have also predicted that the archangel Gavriel will instigate a hunt for Leviathan and were it not for G’d’s personal assistance to the archangel he would not be able to subdue this monster. They base this on Job 40,19: “He is the first of G’d’s works; only His Maker can draw the sword against him.”