אבן עזרא — ארמי אבד אבי וירד מצרימה

Q — "ארמי אובד אבי" — Chazal's reading, preserved in the Pesach Haggadah and Rashi, takes "ארמי" as Lavan, "אבי" as Yaakov, and "אובד" as "tried to destroy": Lavan the Aramean tried to destroy my father. Where does the peshat reading break with this, and what does it offer in its place?

A — Ibn Ezra rejects Chazal's syntax on two grounds. (1) *Grammar*: "אבד" in the קל (basic) conjugation is intransitive — it describes the subject itself, not what the subject did to someone else. To say "an Aramean *destroyed* my father" the Torah would have to use the hifil (מאביד) or piel (מאבד). The conjugation refuses the reading. (2) *Context*: "ארמי אבד אבי וירד מצרימה" reads as a continuous narrative — the Aramean episode caused the descent to Egypt. But Lavan had nothing to do with that descent. Ibn Ezra's reading inverts the syntax: "ארמי" describes the predicate, "אבד" is a modifier, "אבי" is the subject. Render: *Aramean and impoverished was my father* — "כאשר היה אבי בארם, היה אובד." "אובד" means "poor" — proof from Mishlei 31:6-7: "תנו שכר לאובד... ישתה וישכח רישו" (give beer to the perishing... he will drink and forget his poverty) — אובד is parallel to רש. Why call Yaakov "Aramean"? Because he lived in Aram — names track residence, not origin. Parallel: Yeter, who is called "הישראלי" in Shmuel II 17:25 and "הישמעאלי" in Divrei HaYamim I 2:17 — Yisraeli by origin, Yishmaeli by where he lived. So: *my father was an impoverished Aramean (i.e., a poor man living in Aram), and he descended to Egypt...* — the framing of the bikkurim declaration is "the Land is not my inheritance from a wealthy father; it is Hashem's gift from a poor refugee's descent." The peshat shifts the bikkurim recitation's entire emotional register from triumph-over-enemies to gratitude-from-poverty.