"Most of the time, the letter quf is a reference to Abraham"

The first verse (Exodus 13:17) in this week's portion, Beshallaḥ, reads as follows:

וַיְהִ֗י בְּשַׁלַּ֣ח פַּרְעֹה֮ אֶת־הָעָם֒ וְלֹֽא־נָחָ֣ם אֱלֹהִ֗ים דֶּ֚רֶךְ אֶ֣רֶץ פְּלִשְׁתִּ֔ים כִּ֥י קָר֖וֹב ה֑וּא כִּ֣י ׀ אָמַ֣ר אֱלֹהִ֗ים פֶּֽן־יִנָּחֵ֥ם הָעָ֛ם בִּרְאֹתָ֥ם מִלְחָמָ֖ה וְשָׁ֥בוּ מִצְרָֽיְמָה׃

And it came to paſſe when Pharaoh had let the people goe, that God led them not through the way of the land of the Philiſtines, although that was neere: For God ſaide, Leſt peraduenture the people repent when they ſee warre, and they returne to Egypt.

Our commentator comments on the word קרוב, near:

כי קרוב. ק' מצויינת בתגין. רמז על אברהם כי הקו"ף סימן לאברהם ברוב מקומות לפי שילד לק' שנה

For it was near (qarov). The quf is adorned with tagin.* This is an allusion to Abraham.** For the quf refers to Abraham in most instances, for he sired [Isaac] at age 100, [the numerical value of the letter quf].

*In the manuscript, the quf has two tagin protruding from its head, thus:


**Presumably, this means either that God took the Israelites out of Egypt in the merit of their ancestor Abraham (if we read the tagin as referring to the broader context of the passage); or that God kept the Israelites away from the Land of the Philistines, so as not to violate the treaty which Abraham had made with the Philistines in Genesis 21 (if we read the tagin as referring to the narrow context of the specific sentence).

What is fascinating here is that our commentator says that quf refers to Abraham "in most places". The idea that a letter of the alphabet could have one and only one specific meaning, and mean this in all (or even, as he says here) most places (in Scripture? in the language?) seems bizarre. And yet, that is the kind of reading we find here. (Of course, if quf almost always refers to Abraham, then why does only this specific one get tagin?

Incidentally, Douglas Hofstadter uses this kind of reading as an absurd example, and assumes that his readers will agree:

Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 332:

Anteater: Imagine you have before you a Charles Dickens novel.

Achilles: The Pickwick Papers — will that do?

Anteater: Excellently! And now imagine trying the following game: you must find a way of mapping letters onto ideas, so that the entire Pickwick Papers makes sense when you read it letter by letter.

Achilles: Hmm ... You mean that every time I hit a word such as "the", I have to think of three definite concepts, one after another, with no room for variation?

Anteater: Exactly. They are the `t'-concept, the `h'-concept, and the `e'-concept-and every time, those concepts are as they were the preceding time.

Achilles: Well, it sounds like that would turn the experience of "reading" The Pickwick Papers into an indescribably boring nightmare. It would be an exercise in meaninglessness, no matter what concept I associated with each letter.

Anteater: Exactly. There is no natural mapping from the individual letters into the real world. The natural mapping occurs on a higher level between words, and parts of the real world. If you wanted to describe the book, therefore, you would make no mention of the letter level.

See also Moshe Idel's article "Midrashic versus Other Forms of Jewish Hermeneutics", in The Midrashic imagination: Jewish exegesis, thought, and history (SUNY, 1993):



I think that what Idel describes as the Sefer Yetzira approach, that the important thing is not the semantic meaning of the Torah's narratives, but merely the power of each platonic letter in the alphabet, can be related to today's common practice of always adding ziyyunin to שעטנ"ז ג"ץ, whereas the midrashic approach, which is interested in reading and re-reading the stories and laws, can be related to the older approach of adding specially significant tittles to specific letters of the text.