This is perhaps because what it means to be a neighbor in the pastoral context of nomadic shepherds implies a complex set of relationships and mutual expectations that are not implied of neighbors in the urban context of great cities such as Alexandria. The relationship between Judah and Hirah, therefore, seems richer and more complex than the generic term “neighbor” conveys. This mission requires discretion and once again has a pastoral element: the transportation of a live goat. Second, it is to Hirah that Judah entrusts the delicate mission of paying his debt (a young goat) to the woman he assumes to be a temple prostitute (the disguised Tamar) and of retrieving from her his signet and staff: “Judah sent the kid by his rēaʿ the Adullamite to recover the pledge from the woman” (Gen 38:20). First, the narrator describes Hirah as Judah’s rēaʿ in a pastoral context: Judah “went up to Timnah for the shearing of his sheep in company with his rēaʿ Hirah the Adullamite” (Gen 38:12). The text, however, contains two added features. Judah has pitched his tent next to Hirah, and thus, Hirah is his neighbor. In this context, the description of Hirah as Judah’s rēaʿ seems at first to pose no difficulty. For example, the story of Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar begins with a description of Judah pitching his tent “near a certain Adullamite named Hirah” (Gen 38:1). When one looks at the Torah as a whole, one discovers that rēaʿ most often signifies “neighbor” or even just a generic “other.” 3 As such, the Alexandrian translators regularly translate rēaʿ as plēsion, the Greek equivalent of “neighbor.” 4 In several places, however, a more specific sense of rēaʿ seems to be intended. In what follows, we shall study features of this scriptural account of divine friendship and consider some of the implications of this account for our understanding of the Christian life. Specifically, the Alexandrian translators began the tradition of describing divine intimacy as a type of friendship with God. 2 Their translation of this passage will influence how subsequent biblical authors and early Church Fathers portray the call to divine intimacy. What does this Hebrew word mean in this context? The first to confront this question were the Jewish scholars in Alexandria who, in the third century BC, undertook the task of translating the first five books of the Old Testament into Greek, a project that became the foundation of the translation subsequently known as the Septuagint (LXX). The Lord spoke to Moses the way “a man speaks to his rēaʿ” (Exod 33:11b). To explain this face-to-face colloquy, the text offers a comparison that employs the Hebrew word rēaʿ. “The Lord spoke to Moses face to face” (Exod 33:11a). T he b ook of E xonus contains a brief passage that expresses the unique intimacy that the Lord accorded to Moses during the people’s sojourn in the desert.
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