Here, this is cool.

In this week's Torah reading, Leah is fecund. It's really really sad actually, although officially this is a post about scribal errors and not about why I feel sorry for Leah. Scribal errors, here we come.

Here's the reading - Gen 29:32-35

Leah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Reuven, as she said, God has seen my affliction, and now my man will love me.	ותהר לאה ותלד בן ותקרא שמו ראובן כי אמרה כי ראה יקוק בעניי כי עתה יאהבני אישי
She conceived again and bore a son, and she said, As God has heard that I am hated, he has given me this one also, and she called his name Shimon.	ותהר עוד ותלד בן ותאמר כי שמע יקוק כי שנואה אנכי ויתן לי גם את זה ותקרא שמו שמעון
She conceived again and bore a son, and she said, This time my man will become attached to me, as I have borne him three sons. Accordingly, he called his name Levi.	ותהר עוד ותלד בן ותאמר עתה הפעם ילוה אישי אלי כי ילדתי לו שלשה בנים על כן קרא שמו לוי
She conceived again and bore a son, and she said, This time I will praise God. Accordingly she called his name Yehudah, and she laid off bearing.	ותהר עוד ותלד בן ותאמר הפעם אודה את יקוק על כן קראה שמו יהודה ותעמד מלדת

Isn't that just so sad? I mean, childbirth then was rottenly painful and rottenly dangerous, and to keep on having sons and hoping that your husband will love you because of it? Hoping and hoping that this time he'll love her and it never does come true. (Don't keep hoping that if you're good enough someone will love you, kids. It's a big lie. Be yourself, and to hell with being good.)

Anyway, look at the verb קרא - "call." Comes up four times, once in each verse.

First verse: in the form vatikra, "and she called."
Second verse: likewise in the form vatikra, "and she called."
Third verse: it says kara shemo, which can mean "he called his name," or just "his name was called."
Fourth verse: karah shemo; which means "she called."

Not tidy, that, is it? Where did that "he" come from in the third verse?

Me, I'm awfully inclined to put that third verse down to scribal error. קרא and קראה sound just the same, and it's jolly easy to forget to write a final letter hey at the end of a word. This I know only too well. The whole sequence would be so much tidier if it was vatikra:vatikra:karah:karah - Leah doing all the calling. Not that I would go around changing the text, you understand, but if I wanted to posit how it got like that, I'd be inclined to say scribal error lost in mists of antiquity.

Rashi thinks it's weird too - this masculine verb in a run of feminines. But Rashi is much cooler than I am, so he brings a midrash, thus:

God sent the angel Gavriel, bringing him before him, and he called him by this name, and assigned to him the 24 priestly gifts, and because of this he was called Levi.

תמהתי שבכולם כתיב ותקרא, וזה כתב בו קרא, ויש מדרש אגדה באלה הדברים רבה ששלח הקב"ה גבריאל והביאו לפניו וקרא לו שם זה ונתן לו עשרים וארבע מתנות כהונה, ועל שם שלוהו במתנות קראו לוי

The wordplay's a bit lost if you aren't following the Hebrew at all - why assign leads to Levi. You'll have to take my word for it.

But anyway, I like that. Little me says "gosh that looks like a scribal error isn't that interesting." The translation I have here takes the safe option, the this-is-a-linguistic-thing: "his name was called." The Rashbam takes it literally and says Jacob came along and named this baby, even though he didn't bother with 1, 2, or 4. And Rashi comes along and looks at this oddness and reckons there's something more to it than just plain old what-seems-to-be-there, and tells us this whole thing about an angel foreshadowing the priesthood, that we never ever would have guessed, but the oddness in the letters is a clue.

For those not used to rabbinic text study, this is one of the characteristic ways we come at Torah. We take a word, and there's a whole drop-down menu of possible ways of understanding it, and depending on who you are and what you're interested in, you can take whichever one you like, and see what that says to you. This is Torah.