Opinion | 'GRASSHOPPERS' (ROUND 3)

In my column of April 15, I made the point that when Yitzhak Shamir

said of his Palestinian enemies that they were "as grasshoppers in our

sight," he was saying that they are weak and defeatable and, therefore,

not to be feared. He was not saying, as some commentators had suggested,

that they are insect-like and subhuman. The commentators did not realize

that Shamir was quoting from the Biblical story of the spies in Numbers

13:33, where the same phrase, "as grasshoppers in our sight," appears

and clearly refers toone's size and strength and not to one's humanity.

Leon Wieseltier disagrees {op-ed, April 20}. His annotation of my

text challenges both my premise (the origin of the quotation) and my

conclusion (its meaning).

He asks: "What makes Krauthammer sure that the prime minister was

referring to Numbers 13:33 and not, say, to Isaiah 40:22 . . . or to

Ecclesiastes 12:5 or to Leviticus 11:22," where the word grasshopper

(hagavim) also appears? What makes me sure is that while the word

grasshopper appears five times in the Bible, the expression "as

grasshoppers in our sight" is unique. It appears only once, in Numbers

13:33. Which is why Shamir's phrase is so instantly recognizable as a

quotation from the report of the spies in Numbers. (For example, The

Jerusalem Post identifies Shamir's phrase as "the expression used by the

first spies on return from their mission from Moses to the land of

Canaan.") There are dozens of references to horses in Shakespeare. Yet

if someone says "my kingdom for a horse," it is safe to assume that one

is quoting Richard III and not Hotspur.

Now, as to meaning. What does the Biblical verse mean? What did

Shamir mean?

Wieseltier writes: "In fact, 'anyone who is familiar with Hebrew

culture' would know . . . that the plain sense of the Hebrew verse is

precisely that the spies felt 'insect-like'. . . ." A single piece of

evidence is offered to support what is otherwise argument by assertion.

He points us to the verse immediately following the one Shamir was

quoting: "All the congregation lifted up their voice, and cried; and the

people wept that night. And all the children of Israel murmured against

Moses. . . ." That verse (separated from the grasshopper verse by a

chapter break) tells us absolutely nothing one way or the other about

how to interpret the grasshopper reference.

What does tell us how to interpret the reference are the two verses

immediately preceding it. In Verse 31, the spies say "we are not able to

go up against the people {of Canaan}; for they are stronger than we." In

Verse 32, they say "all the people that we saw in the land are men of

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great stature {anshei midot}." Hence, verse 33: we were as grasshoppers.

The metaphor speaks precisely to size and strength, not to one's

humanity or insect-like character. The meaning of the grasshopper

metaphor is so clear that the Encyclopedia Judaica cites this verse to

establish that, in the Bible, "the small grasshopper hiding in the tall

grass symbolizes the puniness of man when viewed from above."

As for Flora Lewis, Wieseltier writes that she "lucked out" in

suggesting that the correct translation of hagavim in this context might

be "locusts." No luck. The Biblical word for locust is arbeh (e.g., the

fourth plague of the Exodus story). Except for one ambiguous reference

in 2 Chronicles 7:13, "in the Bible, hagav applies to the grasshopper

and not to the locust" (Encyclopedia Judaica, Volume 7, page 856).

Since the meaning of the Biblical phrase is clear, Wieseltier says

that the likely origin of Shamir's phrase is not the Bible but

contemporary Hebrew. Anyone familiar with modern Hebrew, he says, would

know that the adjectival form, hagavi (grasshoppery), implies "beneath

consideration, beneath contempt." Evidence? He cites the entry for

hagavi in the standard Hebrew dictionary, and passes off his

interpretation of an illustrative citation as the dictionary's. It is

not. This is slippery scholarship. Readers who do not have the

three-volume Even Shoshan "New Dictionary" at hand would not know from

Wieseltier that it gives a clear, precise and simple definition of

hagavi that fully supports mine and offers his no support at all:

"Hagavi: small (katan) like a grasshopper; tiny (paut)."

Moreover, if we're going to rely on modern Hebrew and modern Hebrew

users to tell us what Shamir's use of the word hagavim means, I have a

more contemporary source: The Jerusalem Post of last week. Its editors'

aversion to Shamir and familiarity with Hebrew are at least equal to

Wieseltier's. They write: "Poor Mr. Prime Minister, as though it were

not enough for him to be rightly criticized for the truly offensive

statements he sometimes makes, now he has to suffer the slings and

arrows of ignorant critics who castigate him for what they only think he

had said.. . . {W}hat Mr. Shamir had in mind was merely that the

historic rules had been reversed. Today's giants are the Jews in their

own land, and they have nothing to fear from their enemies."

What's left? Wieseltier cites a repulsive reference to Palestinians

("drugged roaches in a bottle") made by someone else (the former Israeli

chief of staff) in order to tar Shamir with guilt by association. Again,

The Jerusalem Post: "Unlike a certain former IDF chief of staff who had

in fact done so, the premier was most certainly not referring to

Palestinians as non-human, as insects. . . . A little learning, as

Alexander Pope warned, is a dangerous thing."

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