The Patriarch's Nuts: Concerning the Testicular Logic of Biblical Hebrew

his is a study of the testicular logic or worldview (ideology) of the Hebrew Bible, with a specific focus on halatsayim, motnayim and yarekh.1 While the first two form a curious double pair, being both dual terms and two words for the same sense—testicles—the word yarekh has a far more complex semantic cluster, one that includes thigh, hip, hip joint, side, base and of course balls. In dealing with the first two terms, I seek to uncover the way a gonad linguistic economy stretches out to include courage, strength, fear and trembling, active participation in their own right, and the pressing need for males to bind them up and protect them from harm (usually rendered with the innocent “girding one’s loins”). From there I pass to the subtleties of yarekh, exploring the way this semantic cluster gives voice to the inner workings of a complex spunk economy. In particular, this section deals with the “yarekh shake” (Gen 24:2 and 9; 47:29); the excruciating knee in the nads experienced by Jacob in Genesis 32; the prairie oyster stew of Ez 24:3-4; the globular base of the lamp stand in Ex 25:31; and the vivid and active sense that attends yatsa’ halatsayim (Gen 35:11; 1 Kgs 8:19 and 2 Chr 6:9) and yots’e yerekh (Gen 46:26; Ex 1:5; Judg 8:30), which is really the burst of sperm from the end of a man’s cock as a designator of his offspring. Throughout, a consistent effort has been made to use a term for testicles no more than once.