One Voice, Seventy Tongues

הֲלוֹא כֹה דְבָרִי כָּאֵשׁ נְאֻם־ה׳ וּכְפַטִּישׁ יְפֹצֵץ סָלַע

"Is not My word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that shatters rock?" (Jeremiah 23:29)

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If God gave a speech today, what language would it be in?

The question sounds childish until you try to answer it. Hebrew, because the Torah is in Hebrew? Then most of the world is shut out. Every language, one after another? Then most of the world is waiting its turn. The sages of Shabbat 88b give an answer that is stranger and better than either: every language at once. Each word that left the mouth of God at Sinai, says Rabbi Yochanan, split into seventy tongues. Seventy, in the sages' count, is the number of the nations of the earth. One voice; seventy hearings.

The first three essays in this series were about the receiving of the Torah: the mountain over the people's heads, the creation that waited on their answer, the two words they said before they heard. This essay is about the giving, about what it was like, in the sages' description, to stand at the foot of the mountain while the voice spoke. And their description is physical to the point of violence. The words, they say, filled the world with perfume. The words killed the people who heard them, and God brought them back to life for the next word. The words threw them twelve miles backward, and the angels walked them home. This is not how we usually picture revelation. It is how the sages described it, and they had reasons.

The text

אָמַר רַבִּי יוֹחָנָן: מַאי דִּכְתִיב ״ה׳ יִתֶּן אֹמֶר הַמְבַשְּׂרוֹת צָבָא רָב״ — כׇּל דִּיבּוּר וְדִיבּוּר שֶׁיָּצָא מִפִּי הַגְּבוּרָה נֶחֱלַק לְשִׁבְעִים לְשׁוֹנוֹת

Rabbi Yochanan said: What is the meaning of the verse, "The Lord gives the word; those who bear the tidings are a great host" (Psalms 68:12)? Every single utterance that went out from the mouth of the Almighty divided into seventy tongues.

The Psalm says God "gives the word," singular, and that the bearers of the news are "a great host." Rabbi Yochanan reads the host as the word itself, multiplied: one thing given, a multitude carrying it.¹ And the school of Rabbi Yishmael supplies the image the passage is remembered for: "And like a hammer that shatters rock" (Jeremiah 23:29). Just as the hammer blow divides into many sparks, so every single utterance that went out from the mouth of the Holy One divided into seventy tongues.

Then the passage turns, without warning, from the word's reach to its danger. Rav Chananel bar Pappa asks why the Torah's words are compared to a prince ("Hear, for I will speak princely things," Proverbs 8:6). His answer: just as a prince has the power to put to death and to give life, so the words of the Torah have the power to put to death and to give life. And Rava sharpens it:

הַיְינוּ דְּאָמַר רָבָא: לַמַּיְימִינִין בָּהּ סַמָּא דְחַיֵּי, לְמַשְׂמְאִילִים בָּהּ סַמָּא דְמוֹתָא

This is what Rava said: for those who go to the right with it, it is a drug of life; for those who go to the left with it, a drug of death.

A sama is a drug, the same substance that cures in one dose and kills in another. Rava's right and left are not politics. Rashi explains them as the difference between those who labor in the Torah with all their strength and for its own sake, and those who do not. The same words, the same page. Life to one reader, death to another.

Then Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, in three sayings, each more physical than the last.² With every utterance that went out from the mouth of the Holy One, the whole world filled with fragrance. And since the world was filled by the first word, God brought out the wind from His storehouses and carried each fragrance away, to make room for the next.³ Then:

כׇּל דִּיבּוּר וְדִיבּוּר שֶׁיָּצָא מִפִּי הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא יָצְתָה נִשְׁמָתָן שֶׁל יִשְׂרָאֵל, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: ״נַפְשִׁי יָצְאָה בְדַבְּרוֹ״. וּמֵאַחַר שֶׁמִּדִּיבּוּר רִאשׁוֹן יָצְתָה נִשְׁמָתָן, דִּיבּוּר שֵׁנִי הֵיאַךְ קִיבְּלוּ? — הוֹרִיד טַל שֶׁעָתִיד לְהַחֲיוֹת בּוֹ מֵתִים וְהֶחְיָה אוֹתָם

With every single utterance that went out from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He, the souls of Israel left them, as it is said, "My soul went out when he spoke" (Song of Songs 5:6). And since their souls left them at the first utterance, how did they receive the second? He brought down the dew with which He will one day revive the dead, and revived them.

And finally: with every utterance, Israel fell back twelve mil, and the ministering angels walked them back. The proof is Psalm 68:13, where the verse's "they flee, they flee" is read as "they lead them": medadin otan, the verb used for helping a small child take steps. Twelve mil is about twelve kilometers, and the sages say elsewhere that the whole camp of Israel in the desert was twelve mil across. At each word, on this reading, the people were driven back the entire length of their own camp, and the angels brought them to the mountain again, step by step.

The lessons

Start anywhere in this passage and you run into a question. If the Torah is in Hebrew, what does it mean that every word was heard in seventy languages, and who was listening in the other sixty-nine? Why does the Talmud move, in one breath, from the word's reach to its danger, a prince who kills and gives life, a drug that cures or poisons? If the Torah can be a drug of death, why teach it? And why does Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi insist that the people died at each word and fled twelve miles and had to be walked back? Is that praise or a warning? I think the sayings form a single meditation on what it is to be addressed by God. A word strong enough to make a world is too strong for the people who have to hear it. And that fact, rightly understood, changes how anyone should open the book afterward.

1. One word, seventy hearings

Rabbi Yochanan's seventy tongues come first, because everything else follows from them.

The claim is not that there were seventy Torahs. It is that one word, spoken once, was heard in seventy ways: a single utterance dividing as it reached its hearers, as the hammer blow on the rock divides into sparks. The rock is one. The hammer is one. The sparks are many, and each is a real spark. No spark is the whole blow; no spark is false.

This is the sages describing their own relationship to the text. In Sanhedrin 34a the same school of Rabbi Yishmael uses the same verse for interpretation: just as the hammer divides into many sparks, so one verse goes out into many meanings. The men who taught this spent their lives disagreeing about what the Torah meant: Hillel and Shammai, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yishmael, Rabbi Yochanan and Reish Lakish. They did not believe that all but one of them were wrong. They believed the word was larger than any single hearing of it, and that the hearings, taken together, come closer to the word than any one alone.

And the seventy tongues add something that "many meanings" does not. Languages belong to peoples. Rabbi Yochanan is saying that the word at Sinai was, from the first instant, translatable: it went out in forms every nation could hear. That is a remarkable thing for a people to say about its own scripture. It means the Torah is not diminished by being carried into other languages; being carried into other languages was part of how it was given. The Hebrew is the rock. The sparks are for everyone.

2. A drug of life, a drug of death

The prince and the drug are the hardest lines in the passage, and the most candid. The words of the Torah have the power to put to death and to give life. Not one or the other. Both.

The sages do not pretend the danger away. Words this powerful can be taken up wrongly. Rava's formula puts the difference where it belongs: not in the text but in the reader. For those who take it in the right hand, the hand of full strength, a drug of life; Rashi explains, those who labor in it wholly and for its own sake, who bring to it the best of themselves. The one who takes it in the left hand brings less, or brings something else: ambition, or anger, or the wish to be proved right. And the text, which is a power and not merely a message, does to each of them what such powers do.

All the passage's images agree on one point. The hammer strikes. The perfume surrounds and enters. The prince commands life and death. The drug changes the body. Not one of them is a picture of information being handed over. The sages did not think of revelation as a message delivered, to be filed and consulted. They thought of it as something that acts on the hearer, that happened to the people at the mountain and, in seventy tongues, to the nations around them, and happens again, in a lesser key, whenever the words are really heard.

This is also the passage's answer to its own hardest question: if the Torah can kill, why teach it? Because a drug that cannot kill cannot cure either. What has no power to harm has no power at all. The sages chose a dangerous word over a harmless one, and they knew what they were choosing. The safety lies not in weakening the drug but in how it is taken. That is what the study hall, the teacher, the whole of the Oral Torah is for: to teach people to take the words in the right hand.

3. Struck down, and walked back

Then comes Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi. At every utterance their souls went out. At every utterance they fell back twelve mil. Why describe the greatest moment in Israel's history as a series of deaths and retreats?

Because the sages took seriously what the Torah says the people felt. In Deuteronomy the people beg Moses: "if we hear the voice of the Lord our God any more, we shall die" (5:22), and ask him to listen for them.⁴ The sages did not read this as weakness of faith. They read it as accuracy. A word strong enough to make heaven and earth, the word of the second essay in this series, is too strong for a human body to bear. The people did not shrink from God because they trusted too little. They shrank because they were human, and God is God, and the distance between them, when it is actually crossed, is not crossed gently.

And yet what they heard, they received. How? He brought down the dew with which He will revive the dead. The angels walked them back. The moment of revelation, in this telling, is not a single heroic standing-firm. It is a rhythm: struck down, revived; driven back, led home; and again. And the tradition adds that the rhythm reached its natural end. The people heard the first two commandments directly from the mouth of the Almighty, and then asked Moses to stand between them and the voice: "You speak to us, and we will hear; but let not God speak to us, lest we die" (Exodus 20:16). The rest they heard through him.⁵ The people did not survive Sinai by being strong enough. They survived it because, every time the word overwhelmed them, they were brought back and stood again. And when even that was too much, they were given a human voice to hear the rest from.

Anyone who has lived through something too large for them knows this rhythm. Grief is like this; so, at the other end, are great joy and the birth of a child. You are not equal to it. You go out of yourself. Then something, or someone, brings you back, and you stand again, and it comes again. The sages are saying that this is what it was to hear God, and that the bringing-back was as much His doing as the word. The dew that will one day undo death was not saved for the end of time. It was used at Sinai, on people who could not otherwise have borne what they had asked to hear.

And the walking back deserves its own sentence. The verse says the hosts "flee, flee," and the sages read: the angels led them, medadin, the word for walking a child who cannot yet walk alone. There is no hurry in that word. It is the pace of the weakest. The same angels who, in the next essay, will argue that the Torah is too holy for human beings are here doing the humblest work in the passage: going out twelve miles, and bringing everyone home to be spoken to again. A tradition that remembers Sinai only as fire and thunder has forgotten half of it. The other half is the hand that helps you up.

Coda

Every synagogue on earth, on the festival of Shavuot, reads the Ten Commandments aloud. The congregation stands. Most people hear them in a language they half understand, chanted in a melody older than any living memory, and go home. It is a modest ceremony for the event it commemorates.

But read the passage again and the modesty is the point. The sages did not think anyone could hear the voice as it was. It killed the people who heard it; it drove them the length of the camp. What can be heard is the spark, not the blow: the word in one of its seventy tongues, in a melody, in a room, by a person who has brought to it whatever he has in his right hand. That is not a lesser thing. It is the only way the word was ever received, even at the mountain: in pieces, by people who were overwhelmed and brought back, and stood again, and listened.

The Torah, says Rabbi Yochanan, went out in seventy tongues. One of them is yours.

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Notes

1. Seventy, in the sages' reckoning, is the number of the nations descended from Noah's sons in Genesis 10, so "seventy tongues" means every language on earth. The midrash gives the idea several other forms: the voice at Sinai had no echo; it turned to the south, the north, the east, and the west; it addressed each hearer according to his strength. The Talmud's version is the most compressed, and leaves the rest to us.
2. The speakers span two lands and two centuries. Rabbi Yochanan, head of the academy of Tiberias in the third century, is the sage whose name appears most often in both Talmuds; we met him in the second essay. The school of Rabbi Yishmael goes back to the generation after the destruction of the Temple and is known for its rules of interpretation, among them the principle that the Torah speaks in the language of human beings. Rav Chananel bar Pappa and Rava are Babylonians of the fourth century. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, of Lydda in the land of Israel, early third century, is remembered for sayings like these; the whole of the next essay in this series is his as well.
3. The proof is Song of Songs 5:13, "his lips are lilies dripping with flowing myrrh," with a play the sages loved: do not read shoshanim, lilies, but she-shonim, "that repeat." Each repetition of the word had its own fragrance. Fragrance is the gentlest image in the passage, and it sits next to the harshest; the same voice fills the world with perfume and stops the hearers' hearts.
4. Deuteronomy places the people's fear in their own mouths: "This great fire will consume us; if we hear the voice of the Lord our God any more, we shall die" (5:22), and God answers, "They have done well in all that they have spoken" (5:25). The sages took both verses at full weight: the fear was justified, and it was praised.
5. Makkot 24a: the Torah's 613 commandments divide into 611 that "Moses commanded us" (Deuteronomy 33:4; the word "Torah" has the numerical value 611) and two, "I am the Lord your God" and "You shall have no other gods," which "we heard from the mouth of the Almighty" directly. On that reckoning, the utterances of our passage, each one "from the mouth of the Holy One," are the words the people heard directly; the rest they received standing at a distance, through a man. The plea of Exodus 20:16 is where the one telling passes into the other.