eshdat being the strange word.
Actually, perhaps not a hapax. The ketiv only occurs three times, but the krei has a different vocalization than the other two times, and the ketiv separates it into two words.
The other two times are also in sefer Devarim, in Devarim 3:
and in Devarim 4:
The absolute, singular form of this is asheida, meaning slope, but in Biblical poetry the syntax often becomes arcane and archaic.
And, look at the pasuk in veZot haBeracha in which it appears! It is full of references to Biblical geography. Perhaps we can reder this as "slopes" or as the verb "sloping," thus "approaching."
Thus:
And he said: The LORD came from Sinai, and rose from Seir unto them; He shined forth from mount Paran, and He came from Revevot Kodesh {say it is the name of a place}, to the right hand side of the Slopes, to them.Or:
And he said: The LORD came from Sinai, and rose from Seir unto them; He shined forth from mount Paran, and He came from the myriads holy, at His right hand sloping/approaching unto them.Or something approximating that. It seems to me to be a plausibility.
We also have the classic explanations of Rashi:
a fiery law for them It was originally written before God in [letters of] black fire upon [a background of] white fire. — [Tanchuma Bereishith 1] He gave it to them on tablets, inscribed, [as it were,] by His right hand [thus it is said here, “from His right hand”]. Another explanation of אֵשׁ דָּת : As the Targum renders it, that He gave it to them from amidst the fire.Here, the words esh and dat are separating, and thus mean "fire" and "law." According to Rashi's first explanation, the esh is an adjective modifying the dat, and thus it was written on black fire on white fire -- kind of like the photons from your computer monitor sends these words in a black text on a white background -- and it was written my his right hand. The second explanation of Rashi is based on Targum Onkelos who says:
מגו אשתא אורייתא יהב להוןWhere the giving would seem to be stresses. Here the law is not fire, but comes out for fire and is given to them.
I would note that this is Biblical poetry and many of these concepts are echoed in proximity. Thus, we have in the following pesukim:
medabrotecha is the giving of the Torah, the law, and the Torah was commanded to us by Moshe. And kol kedoshav beyadecha parallels miymino. And in the pasuk itself, it has Hashem come from Sinai.
I would suggest another, quite plausible (at least IMHO) explanation, which works with this separation of words:
Esh can mean fire. But dat does not mean law, but rather is a contraction of de-at, "that comes." We see Aramaisms in Biblical poetry, just as arcane words. For example, ata meaning "come" earlier in the same pasuk, "ha laHashem" in parshat Haazinu meaning "behold" like the Aramaic "ha," and so on. We might expect the archaic word to be zu or zi meaning "that," for that is the usual arcane word, but it parallels the Aramaic di and de- being just a switch in convention of which letter to use to approximate the dh sound -- with a zayin or a daled.
That takes care of the dalet. The kametz tav, as we have a mesora for, is at, or rather, aleph kametz tav, meaning "comes." Indeed, we see this archaic word earlier in the same pasuk:
de+`at was contracted to dat. We see this in Yerushalmi all the time. For example, דמר as a contraction for de-amar, דאמר.
This is then a very particular kind of Biblical parallelism, in which we have AB, where B uses the same verb as A, but adds an idea. We find this in other Biblical parallelisms. Just randomly grasping at a close one, in Haazinu, in last perek, we have:
Meaning-wise, Hashem is "shining to them," וְזָרַח מִשֵּׂעִיר לָמוֹ, such that "coming from fire to them," lamo, is a nice parallel. So is "shining forth from Paran."
Or "from His right hand, a fire coming towards them." If you wish to interpret this fire coming towards them as God's law, based on context of other pesukim, so be it.
As such, the separation of esh dat works out nicely in context.
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