Page 234 - Coincidences in the Bible and in Biblical Hebrew

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CHAPTER 15 LABAN: THE CASE OF A LOST IDENTITY
CHAPTER 15 LABAN: THE CASE OF A LOST IDENTITY 213

Rachel and Lea, Bethuel and Nachor , monotheism and paganism, Hebrew and

’
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Aramaic, Laban s property and Jacob s: Laban is devoid of any sense of identity.
Parents, children, religious faiths, languages, property—they are indistinguishable
and exchangeable. They can all be mixed together.
15.7 What is Laban in Hebrew?

Laban, in Hebrew, means “white.”

This is indeed extraordinary. Throughout the Old Testament, and as in other
cultures, “white” always carries connotations of purity, cleanliness, and celebra-
tion. White always appears with extremely positive undertones. Thus, when God
calls on the people of Israel to remove the evil from their deeds, he promises: “If
your sins will be like red garments—like snow will they whiten” (Isa. 1:18).
Yet Laban , the epitome of mixture, always appears in the negative. In fact, the
(repeated) qualifying of Laban as “the Aramean” would yield, by permutation
6
of the letters sequence, “the deceiver” (Laban the Ramai). Furthermore, read in
7
reverse, Laban yields Naval, Hebrew for villain. This is indeed how Jewish tradi-
tion has perceived Laban over the centuries, based on the accounts of his conduct
in Genesis.
A further extraordinary feature of Laban s name: it is the only one throughout
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the Bible that means also a name of a color.

In 1666, Isaac Newton discovered that white light is a mixture of all colors.

Every scientist since Aristotle had believed that white light was a basic single
entity. The chromatic aberration in a telescope lens convinced Newton other-

wise. When he passed a thin beam of sunlight through a glass prism, Newton

noted the spectrum of colors that was formed. He therefore argued that white
light is really a mixture of many different types of rays that are refracted at
slightly different angles, and that each different type of ray produces a differ-
ent spectral color. (Refer, for details, for example, to the BBC site at
http:// www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/newton_isaac.shtml.)

The Bible, in a bizarre coincidence, opted to call the champion of the “mixing
of all colors” by the name of a color. And the selected color, of all possible colors,
was … white.

These are all coincidences … maybe.