[Mesorah] LeChol Ba'ei Sha'ar Iro

[Toby Katz]

 In a message dated 11/25/2019 8:19:32 AM Eastern Standard Time, mesorah at lists.aishdas.org writes:

"Lechol Baei Sha’ar iro" is transated to “those who entered the gate of his town”.
In Parashat VaYishlach it says: “kol yotzei sha’ar iro”. Will the translation there be “all those who left out the gate of his town”?Seems to me that this is an idiom, that means “the inhabitants of his town”.

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The inhabitants of a town would be yoshvei ha'ir.  A town with a gate is obviously a town large enough to be walled, not just a little village.  People who come in and go out are not only the people who live in the town but also people from the surrounding areas who come for the market, for the court or whatever else people do in town.  Rashi on the words "_all_ those who come to the gate" comments that everyone, obviously including farmers from outside the walls, left their work and came to pay their last respects to Sarah.
Why are the people of Shechem (in the story of Dinah) referred to as "those who go out of the gate" while in Chayei Sarah the people of Chevron are called "those who come in the gate"?  That I do not know, but I can speculate that people come in early in the day and go out late in the day.  Sarah's funeral would have been early in the day while the people of Shechem being persuaded to have themselves circumcised would have been at the end of the day.  It probably took a lot of persuasion.

--Toby Katzt613k at aol.com
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