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'Arami 'oveid 'avi
(from Deut 26: 5-9)
This founding Story of our people spoken, according to Deuteronomy, by every farmer when they came up to the Holy House of God in Jerusalem at the pilgrimage Harvest festival of Shavuot, is written in highly poetic language.
Chock full of alliteration. It is designed to be memorised and declaimed out loud.
By using the words it does, it opens with three Aleph "glottal stop" sounds 'Arami 'Oveid 'avi, followed by "m" sounds, then gutteral sounds. Then more Aleph sounds and more gutteral sounds. And more. Lots of word triplets and mostly short phrases. Strung together by a "vav" at the start of each line, running though it all.
I made the picture to try to point out the alliteration and the structure of the Hebrew text (so far I haven't managed to work out how to upload it into this blog post so here's a link)
my-torah.dreamwidth.org/file/350.jpg
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The chiasmic structure, surrounds the central key passage:
"And we cried out to YH" God of our fathers,
and YH" heard our voice,
and he saw our suffering and our labour and our pressure."
What was the Israelite farmer thinking when he said these words?
How did it sound to those who heard it?
I have tried to make a translating into English that as far as possible reproduces the alliteration
and retains the meaning of the Hebrew.
I used Cockney English, not to be funny, but because in English it is only London Cockneys who have retained the "glottal stop" - probably close in sound to the ancient Hebrew 'Aleph sound.
("glottal stop" is as in 'es go"a lo"a bo"al - for He has got a lot of bottle ("bottle" being cockney rhyming slang for courage) so, by using cockney, I hope I can get across some of the sound of the original farmer's recitation.
Here it is:
