Commentary

The stele of Naram Sin commemorates the victory of Naram-Sin over the mountain tribe of the Lullubi and their king Satuni. Pictured above is the… 

The Stele of the Vultures commemorates the victory of Eannatum, king of Lagash, over the people of Umma. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks states in Deuteronomy: Renewal… 

I hope you are having an exceedingly good day today!

This is our second installment of a series of posts about the double count Hebrew words. In this installment we are doing a basic word study using both kosher and non-kosher dictionary sources.

Parsha Shelach contains two double counts. One deals with Joshua and Caleb’s report of the land. The other deals with HaShem dealing with the bad report from the other spies.

Let’s look at them now…

No this is not tennis; its Hebrew. Hebrew is like no other language. Deeper studies are very nuanced and sometimes the Rabbis examine the letters, their shapes, the space they occupy and even the space they don’t occupy. It creates some very interesting ideas.

Once while studying for this website I was looking at Hebrew stats — word counts and similar stuff.  I noted a stat called “double count”. I was clueless; so I asked around about this stat and this is what was told to me.

Rambam and others have created lists of the 613 mitzvot (commandments) of the Torah. The mitzvot are scattered throughout the Torah. There are five of them in parsha Beha’alotcha.

• Three of them are positive and two are negative
• Four of them are given in direct correlation of the second Pesach offering
• The fifth one is repeated in two verses

This is another one of those things I really wanted to have a compiled list. I will begin here because, “why not?” I will include the Scripture, English translation,  whither it’s positive or negative, the number it is on the list and other small details I can quickly find about them.

Before we jump into the list, I must explain …