a slaughtering knife: the heavy blade used to kill and to cut a body apart
Hebrew has an ordinary word for a sword (חֶרֶב) and, in one proverb, a borrowed everyday word for a knife (שַׂכִּין). This word is neither. It names the heavy blade a person picks up to kill an animal and cut the carcass into pieces, the tool of the slaughter yard rather than of the battlefield or the dinner table.
The name is transparent to any Hebrew ear: it is built on the common verb for eating, so it means something like "the thing you eat with," which in practice is the blade that turns a living animal into meat. Hebrew also speaks of weapons that "devour" flesh, and readers from the early rabbis onward have heard that darker overtone in the name, a knife called "the eater."
All four appearances put the same picture in front of the reader, a blade raised over a human body:
- Abraham carries it up the mountain along with the fire and the wood.
- Abraham reaches out his hand and takes it to kill his son.
- A husband takes it and cuts his dead wife into twelve pieces.
- A greedy generation in a proverb has teeth like swords and knives like these, ready to devour the poor.
Because the word is so rare and its four uses are so alike, many scholars think the writer of Judges reached deliberately for the word Genesis had used, so that the horror at Gibeah reads as a dark echo of the mountain in Genesis. In the first scene a hand is stopped; in the second nothing stops it.
Nuances
Whether the use of this rare word in Judges 19:29 is a deliberate echo of Genesis 22, where the same rare word appears.
- majorityA deliberate literary echo: the Levite takes up the very knife known from the mountain in Genesis, and this time nothing stops it.; Jeremiah Unterman, "The Literary Influence of 'The Binding of Isaac' (Genesis 22) on 'The Outrage at Gibeah' (Judges 19)," Hebrew Annual Review 4 (1980): 161-166; Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror (OBT 13; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 80-81; Daniel I. Block, Judges, Ruth, NAC 6 (Nashville: B&H, 1999), 541-543; Trent C. Butler, Judges, WBC 8 (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009), 425-429; J. Clinton McCann, Judges, Interpretation (Louisville: WJK, 2002), 130-132; Sara J. Milstein, "Saul the Levite and His Concubine: The 'Allusive' Quality of Judges 19," Vetus Testamentum 66 (2016): 95-116
- minorityThe word is striking but carries no compositional weight here; the Sodom episode of Genesis 19, or an editor's political aim, better accounts for the chapter.; Robert G. Boling, Judges, Anchor Bible 6A (Garden City: Doubleday, 1975), 277, 279; J. Alberto Soggin, Judges: A Commentary, OTL (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981), 288-298
Disputed
How narrowly the word can be defined: whether it names a butcher's cleaver in particular, or simply a large knife whose exact type cannot be recovered from four occurrences.
- majorityA large slaughtering knife, the blade used for killing animals and cutting up carcasses.; HALOT, s.v. מַאֲכֶלֶת (Leiden: Brill, 1994-2000), II: 579-580; BDB, s.v. מַאֲכֶלֶת (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), 38; TWOT, entry 85e (Chicago: Moody, 1980), I: 40; Nahum M. Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis (Philadelphia: JPS, 1989), 152-153
- minorityA butcher's cleaver in particular, belonging to the vocabulary of butchery rather than of sacrifice.; E. A. Speiser, Genesis, Anchor Bible 1 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), 162-163; Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 108
- minoritySimply a knife: four appearances are too few to fix a precise technical sense, and there is no ordinary biblical word for knife against which this one stands out as technical.; Hillel Halkin, "How to Judge Robert Alter's Landmark Translation of the Hebrew Bible," Mosaic (February 2019)