malta

In this comment, Lonnie asked:

Someone once suggested to me that "Lot" is a play on the word "lehimalet" (See Bereishit 19:17(x2), 19, 20, 22) - or perhaps that should be that the verb lehimalet plays off the name Lot. Admittedly, a play on words does not necessarily reflect a real etymological connection.

It is an interesting theory - I've never seen it before. Certainly Lot was the first person to have the verb מלט -to escape -associated with him. Steinberg and Klein both point out that מלט -also to escape - is related to פלט - mem and peh, both labials, can alternate. In Modern Hebrew they've come up with a nice sounding phrase for input-output: kelet-pelet קלט-פלט.

Steinberg says that melet מלט - mortar (from Yirmiyahu 43:9) is related to the verb מלט, which can mean "to slip away", and mortar smooths the walls of a building (the verb חלק also means both "to be smooth" and "to be slippery".)

Lastly, as the title of this post hints, the name of the island country Malta may be related to the root מלט . As the Online Etymology Dictionary writes:

from L. Melite, perhaps from Phoenician melita, lit. "place of refuge," from malat "he escaped."

bint

Due to fierce battles taking place there, the news has been filled with reports from the Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil (alternatively spelled Bint Jbail / Bint Jubayl / Bint Jubail). We have seen the etymology of the Arabic jabal, meaning mountain (and how it is connected with Hebrew gvul גבול). But what does bint mean?

Bint in Arabic means "daughter" (and woman in British slang). As we've seen earlier this week, Hebrew words have a tendency to drop the letter nun. The word for son in Hebrew is ben בן. So the word in Hebrew for daughter should have been bint בנת as well, but the nun dropped out, and we were left with bat בת. We still see traces of the "original" form in the plural - banot בנות. We see a similar phenomenon in Aramaic, where bar בר means son (as in "bar mitzvah") and ברת berat means daughter.

What about the expression b'vat achat בבת אחת - "simultaneously, all at once"? Klein explains that it derives from a different meaning of bat. A bat (often rendered "bath") also was a liquid measure equal to one ephah איפה. Therefore, the expression originally meant "with one measure".

(There is a silly joke told of someone who wants to electrocute his enemy. He goes to an electrician for help, who asks kama vat כמה וואט? (How many watts?). The guy replies b'vat achat בבת אחת...)

Lets pray for a speedy and full recovery for those soldiers injured in the fighting in Bint Jbeil, and condolences to those families who lost loved ones...

bible

We know the Bible was composed of Hebrew words. But is the word Bible itself of Hebrew (or related) origin?

In his Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language, Klein writes:

The Bible [L. biblia, from Gk. biblia (= collection of writings), pl. of biblion (= paper, scroll, book), which is the dimin. of biblos, byblos ( = the inner bark of papyrus; book), from Byblos, Gr. name of the famous Phoen. transit port, whence the Greeks received the Egyptian papyrus. Gk. Byblos has been assimilated from גבל, the Heb.-Phoen. name of the city (=lit.: 'frontier-town') cp. Heb. גבול (= frontier, boundary), Arab. jabal (=mountain). cp. jubayl, the actual Arab. name of ancient Gebhal (jubayl properly is a dimin. formed from the original name of the city).

And the Online Etymology Dictionary (which often borrows from Klein's Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language), writes in the entry for Bible:

early 14c., from Anglo-L. biblia, from M.L./L.L. biblia (neuter plural interpreted as fem. sing.), in phrase biblia sacra "holy books," from Gk. ta biblia to hagia "the holy books," from biblion "paper, scroll," the ordinary word for "book," originally a dim. of byblos "Egyptian papyrus," possibly so called from the name of the Phoenician port from which Egyptian papyrus was exported to Greece. The port's name is a Gk. corruption of Phoenician Gebhal, lit. "frontier town" (cf. Heb. gebhul "frontier, boundary," Ar. jabal "mountain").

So I'm a little confused. There doesn't seem to be much disagreement that "bible" comes from Byblos. But did Byblos come from papyrus, or was it a corruption/assimilation of Gevul? As this site writes:

Byblos was the port for papyrus export to the Aegean countries, and their name for papyrus was byblos. Yet, it is not certain whether 'byblos' is derived from the town or if the town was named after the product exported.

Klein writes that papyrus (the source of the English "paper") is "of unknown etymology; said to be of Egyptian origin". Stahl provides two theories as to the source of papyrus - either from the Caananite/Hebrew pif-yeor פיפ-יאור - meaning "fringe of the Yeor (the Nile)", or the more likely Egyptian pa-p-yeor "this is of the Yeor" (or pa means "a plant".) Interestingly, the Hebrew word for paper, niyar נייר, according to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, has a similar etymology: it is an abbreviation of ni-yeor ני-יאור - a sheet from the Yeor.

So while Byblos may come from papyrus (which might have a Semitic origin), let's look at the other possibility - the town of Gevul. This is a very ancient port town, between Beirut and Tripoli. It is mentioned in Yechezkel 27:9, and its inhabitants may be referred to in Malachim I 5:32.

The Hebrew word gvul גבול can mean either territory or boundary, and has cognates in Phoenician, Punic and Arabic. It originally meant "mound" - often used to mark borders, and this is related to the Arabic jubal or jabal, meaning mountain. Horowitz points out that the two letters גב provide many words that mean prominent, high, upper. Here are a number of them:

• גבוה - high
• גבעה - hill
• גבור - strong man
• גבב - heap up, pile up, the source of גב - back
• גבן - hunchback - the back rises high
• גבוש - pile of stones, גיבוש - crystallization
• גבח - high, tall, as well as גבחת - high forehead, baldness in front
• גבל - knead, give the shape of a mound

utica

I've already mentioned here how the Phoenician colony of Carthage has a Semitic etymology: "Qart-Hadasht, related to the Hebrew kirya hadasha קריה חדשה - 'new city'."

Well, Carthage had an older sister, the colony of Utica, also in modern Tunisia. It was settled about 300 years before Carthage, around 1100 B.C.E. A number of sites mention that just as Carthage means "new city", Utica means "ancient city". But unlike Carthage, no one conjectures as to the etymology. Well, that's what I'm here for.

There are two words for ancient or old in Hebrew which could have led to Utica. I supposed that the source could be either atik עתיק or vatik ותיק. But while atik appears in the Tanach, vatik only began to mean "veteran" in modern Hebrew. In its earliest sources (post-Biblical), it meant "straightforward, reliable".

I recognized Utica having grown up in Upstate New York - there's a town with the same name in the area. Many towns in Upstate New York have Greek origins - Troy, Syracuse, even Greece. But one other town actually sounds a lot like Utica - Ithaca, the home of Cornell University. And according to this site, one of the theories as to the origin of the name of the Greek Ithaca is "Utica". Cornell claims that it is "the first American university". That title is debatable, but the name of the hosting town may very well mean "ancient" in one of the most ancient languages on Earth.

sefarad

In yesterday's post, I discussed the Greek name of Gibraltar, Calpe. Today we'll travel across the sea in our exploration of Hebrew and its related languages.

When we look at the transfer of words between the Semitic languages and the Indo-European languages, we can notice two trends. The Jews were a minority in many lands, and adopted numerous words from their host countries. On the other hand, there were nations from the Semitic family who gave their names to locations, either as sea explorers like the Phoenicians or empire builders like the Arabs.

So to return to Gibraltar, the name comes from the Arabic Jebel el Tarik "the Mountain of Tarik." Jebel derives from the Semitic root גבל - the same as the Hebrew word גבול gvul - meaning border.

Far earlier, the Phoenicians (also known as Punics) explored the Mediterranean and gave many distant places Semitic names. Perhaps the most famous Punic colony was Rome's rival Carthage, whose name in Phoenician was Qart-Hadasht, related to the Hebrew kirya hadasha קריה חדשה - "new city".

According to a theory in the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Phoenicians gave the name to Gibraltar's neighbor Spain (Hispania) as well. One theory claims that the name derives from tsepan - rabbit or hyrax (in Hebrew shafan שפן) and so another name could be "The Land of Rabbits". Another theory posits that Hispania comes from sphan - north (tzafon צפון in Hebrew) due to Spain being north of Carthage.

The Jews had a different way of exploring the world - they did not by ships, but by the text. The 20th verse of the Book of Ovadia states that the exile of Jerusalem in Sefarad (or: Sfarad) will inherit the cities of the Negev:

וְגָלֻת יְרוּשָׁלִַם, אֲשֶׁר בִּסְפָרַד--יִרְשׁוּ, אֵת עָרֵי הַנֶּגֶב

Researchers (D. Neiman, E. Lipinski) have suggested that Sfarad may have been Sardis (capital of Lydia in Asia Minor), suggested by a Lydian-Aramaic bilingual inscription that refers to Sardis as S-p-r-d in Aramaic. But as this article describes well, over time, Sefarad began to be associated with Spain. Targum Yonatan translated the term Sefarad in Ovadia as Espamia, and later the Radak explicitly identified Sefarad with Spain. Now of course, Jews whose families originated in Spain are known as Sefardim.