Hebrew word study – spitting – yaraq ירק   Yod Resh Qop

Numbers 12:14: “And the LORD said unto Moses, If her father had but spit in her face, should she not be ashamed seven days? let her be shut out from the camp seven days, and after that let her be received in again.”

This is a very curious thing for God to say: “If her father had but spit in her face, should she not be ashamed seven days?”  To us in the Western world for a father to spit in a daughter’s face would indicate she had committed something very disgusting.  We would also not be very understanding to this father.  In fact, he could be arrested for child abuse. Yet, all Miriam did was challenge Moses’s authority because he sent his wife Zipporah back to her father. She wasn’t challenging Moses’s authority so much as just a specific decision he made. She declared rightfully that she also hears from God and she heard something different. She was the older sister who actually saved Moses’s life when he was a baby.  She clearly loved her brother but did disagree over the separation between Moses and his wife.  Where had she really offended God such that God would reference something as disgusting as a father spitting in his daughter’s face? 

The word in Hebrew for spit is yaraq which is really your Hebrew word for green.  Spatial generally is a yellowish-green. In the Targum which is the Aramaic version of the Torah used around the time of Christ the word used means to correct and is rendered as: “If a father corrects her should she not be ashamed for seven days?”  The Jews who translated the Torah into Aramaic were not changing the meaning but actually recapturing the true meaning.  Spitting in one’s face grew to mean something very disgusting and vulgar as it is today.   

Christian commentators universally point to spitting in the Middle East as an indication of the utmost degree of abhorrence and indignation.  Yet, in ancient Jewish culture as well as into the present, Jews do a lot of spitting. For instance, after the first line of the aleinu (which means it is our duty) prayer in the Synagogue that concludes every service the participants spit. Sounds disgusting and it would sure mess up the carpet in the shul.  Many, however, simply spit into a handkerchief to avoid desecrating the carpet. Still, in our minds, it sounds disgusting.  But in the Jewish mind, they are not spitting at something they are spitting out something.  That is a big difference. 

The Jews will spit after they use their mouths to speak about idol worship. They want to cleanse their mouths from the spit that participated in speaking those words before bowing in worship to God.  They don’t even want to benefit from their spit which participated in speaking of idol worship by swallowing their spit after speaking those words.  It also creates a hephsek (hefsek) which means a pause.  Hephsek is usually a pause associated with the time needed to perform a cleansing. Thus, spitting is a sign of cleansing oneself from idolatry or something evil.  

In the Book of chapter Ruth, in the fourth chapter, there is a chalizah ceremony of sorts.  This is a ceremony to release a man from a levirate marriage. If a man dies, the man’s unmarried brother is bound to marry his widowed sister-in-law so his brother’s name will not die. In Ruth 4 the kinsman-redeemer refuses to marry his brother’s widow to build his name. To be released from this obligation a ceremony called a chalizah is performed. 

In a chalizah ceremony the widow removes the chalizah shoe from her brother in law and tosses it over her shoulder and then spits on the floor and says: “This is what shall be done unto the man who will not build up his brother’s house and his name shall be called in Israel, “the house of him that hath his shoe loosed.”   Here again, spitting is a sign of rejection of something that is distasteful, you don’t even want the words you say to be a part of your being.  

Traditionally in ancient Judaism, a Jew would spit three times in reaction to something that is especially good or evil.  This evolved to just saying pooh three times as spitting grew to be an offensive custom.  Hence when it came time for the sages to translate this passage into the Aramaic they used the word turatsa which means to correct. In the time of Moses, the father would spit in the daughter’s face to show how ashamed he is of her behavior.  But as that grew to become such an offensive gesture the sages used the word turatsa to bring the gesture more to the expression it was originally used which was to correct a behavior by making a child realize that they shamed their parent or broke their hearts by their behavior. 

The child would be given seven days of isolation to consider the shame he or she brought upon their loving parent. Sort of like being grounded for seven days.  During those seven days, the parent would bring food and comfort to the child and after emotions have settled down they would talk over the offense and there would be a time of repentance.   Hence the sages call it correction rather than spitting in the face. 

God did not literally spit in Miriam’s face but he was likening it to that gesture.  As today we see this gesture to be gross and ugly if not completely unsanitary just as the sages saw it when they translated the Torah into Aramaic they sought to use a word which expressed the cultural picture of that day which was a gesture to correct a behavior and not to shame the person, but to show the shame they brought upon their parent. During the time of Moses spital was not considered as gross as we consider it today,  In fact spitting on a person was done by healers as it was believed there was a medicinal benefit in one’s spit.  More than that is was an act of cleansing.

So too, God does not seek to shame us when he corrects us but to show how much he has been shamed by our behavior and our love for Him will make us so ashamed that we brought this heartache upon him that such knowledge will correct our behavior.

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