Terumah - The Jewish Unicorn?

What Was the Tachash Covering in the Tabernacle? by Dr. Rabbi Norman Solomon

LXX and Josephus – Hyacinth Blue

Our earliest source for interpretation of the word Tachash is the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Torah. (The Pentateuch translation dates back to the third century BCE.) Throughout Exodus and Numbers, and in Ezekiel, the Septuagint consistently translates Tachash by derivatives of hyacinth (huakinthos). עורות תחשים is rendered “hyacinth skins” (δέρματα ὑακίνθινα; dermata huakinthina) i.e., hides, presumably of goats or sheep, dyed the color of hyacinths. Tachash, then, is not an animal but a dye. Josephus, too, lists among the materials provided for the Tabernacle “goats’ hair and sheepskins, some dyed blue (huakinthos)” (Antiquities 3:102)...

Badgers

In the Renaissance period, many scholars believed that the original human language was Hebrew, and that other languages retained elements of it, if corrupted (after all, gamal and camel are the same word, denoting the same animal). Someone noticed that the consonants T, Ḥ, Š of tachash resemble D, CH, S in German Dachs (‘badger’). Accordingly, Martin Luther, possibly on the advice of his friend and supporter, the humanist Georg Spalatin, translated tachash as Dachsfelle (“badger skins”) (Dalley 2000, 1). Luther’s German translation appeared in 1534, and influenced translations into other European languages including English.

Sea Mammals

The German scholar Gesenius, the first edition of whose Hebrew Lexicon appeared in 1812, offered “seal” as a possible translation, on the basis of Arabic تُخَسْ tuḥash “porpoise,” explaining that the ancient Hebrews would have used this term as a catch-all for many different creatures that “they neither knew nor distinguished with accuracy.” In 1907, Oxford’s Brown, Driver, Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament suggested “porpoise.” Nevertheless, in keeping with Genesius’ suggestion that the Hebrews were merely “approximating” with this term, “porpoise” has been modified by subsequent translators of the Bible to assorted aquatic mammals—not only Gesenius’ “seals” but “dolphins” (a kind of porpoise at least) and even “dugongs.”

Dr Gillian Eastwood-Vogelsang in Leiden, working on the clothing in the tomb of Tutankhamun, has identified specific items imported from western Asia, by certain features of design. One of those items consists of beaded sandals which she describes as ’embellished with an intricate design of gold bosses and beadwork in carnelian, turquoise and possibly lapis lazuli’.

In the Amarna letter EA 22 the Mittanian king sent to Akhenaten one pair of duhsu-shoes, studded with ornaments of gold, of hiliba stone, etc. If duhsu here means some kind of beadwork, the description would match not only Tutankhamun’s sandals but also certain beaded objects which have been found intact on excavations in Mesopotamia. (Dalley 2000, 12)

Once, there were unicorns… by Kohenet Yael Tischler 2020

In this same text, Rabbi Meir says that the tachash, the unicorn, “came to Moses’s hand just for the occasion and he made the [covering of] of the tabernacle, and then it was hidden (נגנז – nignaz).” I shared this text with my friend, Yael Roberts, who is an amazing Jewish educator and artist – and she had a reading of this that broke my heart. You realise that means they went extinct, she said. From us using them. We killed the tachashim to make the mishkan and then there weren’t any left.

Viewed this way, the tale of the tachashim – the unicorns – is tragic. Once, there might have been magical creatures that roamed the earth, but then we killed them all in the name of creating sacred space.

The word translated above as “was hidden” is “נגנז – nignaz,” which is the passive version of a fascinating root in Hebrew (גנז – gimmel.nun.zayin), which has many different meanings. According to the Jastrow (a dictionary used to navigate early Rabbinic texts), it can mean “to disappear,” “to remove from sight,” or “to be suppressed,” which supports the reading that the tachashim went extinct because of human usage. However, it can also mean “to cut off,” “to set aside,” “to save,” or my personal favourite, “to hide (in order to prevent desecration).” This is also the same root as the word “גניזה – geniza,” the name given to places where Jewish sacred texts are stored once they are no longer in use. In Jewish tradition, Hebrew texts that contain Divine names are considered too holy to just throw out or recycle after we’re finished with them, so we bury them, with the same tenderness with which we’d bury living things. The texts remain in a geniza for safekeeping until they can be buried (and sometimes over the long-term). In some instances, a geniza can mean a treasury (Pesachim 118b), which is unsurprising, given how much we as a people treasure our words.

So, it’s possible that Rabbi Meir’s suggestion means that human behaviour caused the extinction of the tachashim, but it’s also possible that the building of the Tabernacle, which caused a threat to the tachash population, precipitated a need to protect them. Was the result of tachash overuse the creation of a “geniza” for them, a space to hide them in order to prevent their desecration? I’m imagining the ancient version of an animal sanctuary, meant to save our endangered unicorn friends.

Our tradition offers a dynamic tension: on the one hand, we have the concept of tsaar ba’alei chayim, the injunction to minimise animal suffering, and on the other hand, we do have a very clear tradition of animal products being used for ritual purposes. The tachashim are only one example; those reading this article probably picked up that there were ram skins used for the mishkan, as well, and that’s before facing the truth that the mishkan was used as a place of animal sacrifice, as was the Temple in Jerusalem after that. Before the destruction of the Temple necessitated the innovation of the use of words for prayer, sacrifices, including the sacrifice of animals, were how our ancestors prayed. We don’t make animal sacrifices any more for the most part (though the tradition of kaparot remains in some communities), but we do use ritual objects that traditionally are made from animal products – Torah scrolls, tefillin, mezuzot, tzitzit, shofars and more. It can be a difficult decision for the Jewish vegan to reconcile their beliefs about protecting animals with the ritual practices of their people. I believe that the way forward is a creative approach – a dance that honours our tradition, as well as our desire to create a “geniza”, a protective space, for the tachashim of today.