[Avodah] Billions and Millions

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

I am trying to render Nishmas into modern colloquial English. I'd like to strike a balance between the literal meaning and idiomatic meaning, and I'm coming to the chevra for help. 

One particular phrase that I'm having trouble with, refers to how we cannot adequately describe even one of the many favors He has done for us. In the Nusach Ashkenaz version, "many" is described as "alef elef alfay alafim v'reebay r'vavos".

As best as I can parse this, it contains three phrases:
- alef
- elef alfay alafim
- v'reebay r'vavos

The vav clearly separates the last two words from the rest, and I suspect that the kamatz in "alef" serves to separate the first word from the others. If so, "alef" means a thousand, and "elef alfay alafim" means a billion (a thousand thousand thousands).

"Reebay r'vavos" is the part that I'm having most trouble with. Literally, a "revava" is 10,000. If "reebay" is a form of this word, despite having only one beis, then the phrase means 100,000,000. But I doubt that this is what was meant. An effective piece of rhetoric would scale the numbers all in the same direction.

For example, one might say, "We are unable to thank Him for even one of the thousands and millions and billions of favors He has done for us." Or, one might say, "We are unable to thank Him for the billions, or the millions, or the thousands, or even for just one of the favors He has done for us." But if the text goes from 1000 to 1,000,000,000 to 100,000,000, then I am missing the point. I don't know what the Siddur is trying to say.

It's quite possible that I am being too pedantic about this. I may end up following DeSola Pool's translation (in the first RCA Siddur), "countless and infinite". But the original text still seems odd, repeating a form of the word "thousand" four times, and repeating the word "10,000" only twice. (I refuse to use the word "myriad", which I see as too archaic.) Why was it written this way?

I have no illusion that these numbers were intended to be exact. This is poetry. This is rhetoric. The most idiomatic translation might well be "thousands and millions and billions". But before I decide, I'd like to have a better sense of what the original is trying to convey. Have I even parsed the phrase correctly?

Siddur Otzar Hatefilos mentions some sources (medrashim perhaps?) which might be the sources for these phrases, but looking them up is beyond my current abilities. But in any case, those sources would be mostly of academic interest -- I don't think it would explain why the third number is smaller than the second; the sequence should have been different. If the answer is that a revavah is a more impressive number than an elef, well, that impressiveness gets ruined by dropping from four repetitions to two.

(By the way, the Edot Hamizrach text of this section is much simpler. "Elef alfay alafim, v'rov reebay r'vavot" could easily translate literally as "billions and trillions". What are the Ashkenazim saying?)

Akiva Miller

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