Q&A: Gad—a troop shall troop upon him… and what will happen in the end? He shall troop upon their heel. No less and no more.
Originally published:
This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.
Gad—a troop shall troop upon him… and what will happen in the end? He shall troop upon their heel. No less and no more.
Question
“Gad, a troop shall troop upon him, and what will happen in the end?
He shall troop upon their heel.” Exactly like that.
Onkelos wrote: “and with abundant possessions they will return to their land.”
How did Onkelos know that they would return to their land on the other side of the Jordan with great wealth?
Does this appear somewhere?
Rashi wrote that they all returned home from the war and none of them died in battle at all.
Maybe that is the “abundant possessions”?
Maybe by virtue of being the vanguard force they were the first to see and take the spoils?
Does the Rabbi have an explanation for Onkelos?
Answer
I have no idea. Not for nothing do I avoid biblical interpretation.
A friend sent me an explicit verse, Joshua 22:8,
which says that Joshua gives them abundant spoils when the war ends.
There is also logic not to give them any,
because his inheritance came to us on the eastern side of the Jordan.
So that was their portion.
And everything they came to do on the western side of the Jordan was a kind of repayment of an obligation, and one might have thought that they were not entitled to the spoils, but only the local tribes for whom that territory was conquered.
That is what we are being taught: that they did receive some, and that is what Onkelos meant.