The of Ararat, Lubar And: Mountains Mount
The of Ararat, Lubar And: Mountains Mount
The of Ararat, Lubar And: Mountains Mount
RICHARD C. STEINER
BERNARD REVEL GRADUATE SCHOOL
YESHIVA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK
and Abarbanel assumed (like Jubilees) that the journey began at "'1;
t:3b2S15 taking p13 to mean 'from the east'. The problem with this view is
that the land of Ararat16 is certainly not east of Babylon. Taking 1Tp31 to
mean 'to the east', as do Jubilees'7 and some modern scholars, does not
solve the problem completely, for the centre of Ararat is not very far to the
west of Babylon either; it is best described as north of Babylon.
Rashi and Meyuhas, on the other hand, equated O7p in this verse with
DTpfl r1 , asserting that the journey began at that mountain. The
abbreviation of [rpol V;t to 1tjp is perfectly natural (cf. mountain names
like PIS, 710% and p3n:); a similar fluctuation between 'Mount Lubar' and
'Lubar' alone is found in Jubilees. The problems with this view, as noted by
Bekhor Shor and Ramban, are (a) that 10:30 describes the territory of Shem
alone, whereas 11:2 presumably refers to all of the descendants of Noah,
and (b) that 10:30 seems to refer to a time period later than that of 11:2, i.e.
after the dispersion which resulted from the Tower of Babel incident. These
criticisms assume, probably correctly, that Rashi did not locate tlrpf Vt in
Ararat.
My suggestion that 13TIM ;1f is the Hebrew equivalent of kN-lt "12*
makes it possible to combine these two views, accepting the best points of
each: the journey to Shinar began at WT'pl V1 which is one of the 'ifl
W11H.515 This combined interpretation does not suffer from the problems
inherent in its components: all of the descendants of Noah travelled from a
place which was later to belong to Shem alone, and the southward direction
of their journey is perfectly compatible with the phrase 3Tp?1.
15 This is the plain sense of the Genesis narrative, as was pointed out to me by my colleague
S. Z. Leiman before either of us had investigated the problem. It was his comment that led to
the second half of this note.
16 This country, located around Lake Van in present-day Armenia, is mentioned several
additional times in the Bible (11 Kings 19:38; Is., 37:38; Jer. 51:27) and frequently in Assyrian
inscriptions (as Urartu).
II 'For they departed from the land of Ararat eastward to Shinar' (X.19); cf. Gen. 13:11
that of R. Eleazar b. Shimeon in Genesis Rabba, which interprets OnjP as D137yv 111-Tj13.