We scheduled our Word of the Week to go out on Monday as usual, but just see now that it did not go out. So here it is now, and we hope better late than never!
When Joseph the patriarch was dying, he asked his brothers to make sure that his bones would not stay in Egypt. “God will surely visit you,” he said, “and bring you out of this land, unto the land he promised to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” We might think of it as a strange request to make, since for a long time, next to the Pharaoh, Joseph was the most powerful, the most honored, and the wealthiest man in Egypt. But it was not his home, our Word of the Week. And yet, where was his home? When his brothers sold him into slavery, they were in the vicinity of Shechem, a town — then only about three hundred years old — in a narrow defile between two mountains, and thus fed by streams, always precious in so dry a land. Tradition has it that one of the mountains was where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac his son, when the Lord, who had thus proved Abraham’s faithfulness, prevented him. But there’s no sense that Joseph had any longing for the place, for the wild flowers, the birds, the look of the hilltops in the sun, the salt breezes coming in from the sea. That would be a human longing, sure enough. But what Joseph seems really to have wanted was to be with his people, in the place to which God would lead them. We might say that he had not had a home since he was a boy, and now he wanted never again to be parted from his kin, because they made the place a home — actually, it was God who made the home for them.
Said Thomas Wolfe, “You can’t go home again,” and though I don’t care for the novel in which his main character says so, there’s a sense in which he’s right, especially in our time. People move from one place to the next, and the more often they do it, the less likely they are to know their neighbors, much less that families should know other families over several generations. And buildings are torn down, others sprout up, woods are cleared, businesses disappear, even landmarks come to dust. When I go back to the small town where I grew up, it feels like home, and it doesn’t. At the corner where there used to be my barber’s house, across the street from where there used to be the town’s only inn, there’s now a sprawling gas station, such as you can find anywhere in the United States or Canada. I don’t recognize it. There’s a fair chance, though, that if I went in and the owner was around, I might recognize him — if I got his name first, because otherwise I might knit my brows and ask myself, “Do I know this fellow, or not? Isn’t he the kid I used to play baseball with? Or his brother? Or am I just imagining it?”
The home is more than a house — we all know that, right? You can have the finest house in the world and still have no home; while a lot of nomadic people have homes who don’t have a roof over their heads, because they have places they love, and they love them mainly because that is where their people roam. Let’s concede, though, that home implies something like stability. That would be in keeping with the word’s origin. It’s one thing to live and breathe and move about, but another to dwell, and that’s suggested by Proto-Germanic haimaz, which can mean a house or home, but it also means a village. Of course, because who could live alone two thousand years ago, unless he was content to live like a brute? We see the -home particle in place names all through the Germanic lands; in England (Notting-ham), in Germany (Hildes-heim), in Norway (Trond-hjem), and so on. It’s elsewhere, too. Its cousin is ancient Greek kome, which meant a village as opposed to a town; towns have walls, and villages don’t. Or it could mean a part of a city, a neighborhood, as people in New York used to say that they lived in Canarsie or Bensonhurst or Harlem: those were home.
The Albanian cousin, komb, doesn’t refer to a place, but to the people who live there: a community, the folk. The Irish cousin caoimh, pronounced KEE-veh, describes what you think about such a place or such people: they are dear, you treasure them. If your name is O’Keefe, it’s a cousin too. But Icelandic heimur opens the idea of home to include all the world. Whether that’s because the Vikings sailed and roved everywhere raiding or trading, I don’t know; I’m rather inclined to think that if you live in Iceland, it may seem to you not that the world is home, but that your home, Iceland, such a strange and marvelous place, is all the world.
I think that for man to be without a home is worse than being without eyes; it is to have something missing from the heart. But where is that home? Moses called his first son Gershom, for, he said, “I have been a stranger in a strange land.” Did he mean Sinai, where he was dwelling at the time, or Egypt, whence he had fled for his life? Or is our true home here at all? “I go before you to prepare a place,” said Jesus to his apostles.
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