bareket and emerald

On the breastplate of the High Priest, were affixed twelve gemstones (Shemot 28:17-20). There is almost no mention of most of them anywhere else in the Bible, aside from the parallel passage in Shemot 39:10-13. (A portion are mentioned in Yechezkel 28:13).

Because of the infrequent occurrences in the Tanach, along with the gap between current scientific precision and biblical nomenclature, it is difficult to identify with certainty the gems that appear in these verses. That said, let's take a look at one of them, the third stone - the bareket ברקת (mentioned in Shemot 28:17).

I have found many different translations for this stone, including:

agate, beryl, carbuncle, citrine, emerald, hyacinth, malachite, peridot, pyrite, rock-crystal, smaragd, topaz

And then some take either the easy way out or the more precise method (depending on your point of view), and translate it as "bareketh."

The etymology of bareket isn't much help. It likely derives from the word barak ברק - "lightning", and so means "flashing" or "sparkling" stone.  Since gems are almost by definition shiny, all of the stones mentioned above could fit that description.

The attempts to identify the bareket with a gemstone that we know today is based on seeing its translation in ancient translations, as well as explanations offered by midrashim and later commentaries. I won't go into all of the analysis here (to see a good summary of traditional Jewish sources, see the Living Torah commentary on the verse here).

I'd like to take a look at how the word bareket ended up in European languages, and perhaps that will help us identify the stone. 

Now, this is different from some words that entered European languages because they were borrowed as part of the Bible itself entering Europe (as I recently wrote about the words myrrh, aloe and cassia on the 929 site.) Rather, the name of the stone itself migrated into other languages.

From Hebrew (or some other cognate Semitic language, like the Akkadian barraqtu), bareket entered into Greek as smaragdos, which Latin borrowed as smaragdus, eventually becoming esmaraldus in Medieval Latin, esmeraude in French, and then "emerald" in English.  

This might seem like a strange journey, particularly from bareket  to smaragdos. But as this Philologos column explains (along with many other interesting linguistic details about the words we've discussed here and more) it's reasonable when you look at how certain letters are exchanged in phonetic shifts.

Philologos actually promotes a different theory than what I've presented here. He says that the Hebrew baraket may have its origin in a Sanskrit word - marakata:

Bareket strikes one at first glance as being an original Hebrew word that derives, quite appropriately for a gemstone, from the verb barak, to shine or sparkle. In Akkadian, the Semitic language of ancient Babylonia, we have the cognate noun barraktu, also meaning an emerald, and a similar verb. Perhaps indeed it was the influence of this verb that helped change an initial “m” into a “b” (a common shift in language, “m” being in essence a nasalized “b”), because scholars have known for a long time that the Akkadian word was borrowed from the Sanskrit marakata, an “emerald” or gem of green corundum. To this day, the marakata is one of the seven sacred stones of Hinduism, associated with the planet Mercury and the day Tuesday, on which it is traditionally worn.

Marakata is not only the ultimate source of Hebrew bareket. It is also that of Greek smaragdos, with which, except for the Greek’s initial “s,” it shares the same root consonants. (“Like “m” and “b,” “k” and hard “g,” and “t” and “d,” are similar sounds that frequently replace each other in speech.) 

Most of the sources I looked at, including Klein and the Online Etymology Dictionary say the Sanskrit word was borrowed from a Semitic source. (For further discussion see this page). Whichever direction the word ultimately traveled (the Ben Yehuda dictionary mentions both theories, although sides with a Semitic origin), the b/m, k/g and t/d replacements still work here. As far as the prosthetic "s" at the beginning of smaragdos - I'm not sure. But since all explanations have Greek borrowing from a foreign language, for some reason the Greeks found a reason to add the "s".

So we do seem to have a linguistic connection drawn between bareket and "emerald." I don't think that's proof that the emerald as we define it today was on the High Priest's breastplate, but it's certainly possible that the ancient Greek smaragdos was similar to the stone mentioned in the Torah.

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begilufin

Reader Mordecai asked the following question:

Many years ago, I attempted to discover the origin of the use of the Hebrew/Aramaic word "b'gilufin". I was reading an Israeli newspaper that described two woman throwing bottles off a roof. The police investigated and discovered they were "b'gilufin." This word is used regularly in Hebrew (and Yiddish) to mean "inebriated"

I tracked the word down to one of Isaac Luria's Shabbat table hymns - Atkinu S'udata for S'udah Shlishit.


While Lurianic Aramaic might be out of your expertise, my question is really how a word from a relatively obsure Kabbalistic poem whichs means "engraved" in Aramaic came to mean "drunk" in Hebrew.

Thanks!

Good question. I am familiar with the word, but it's origin (and perhaps meaning) is not widely known. This site collects comments on a Ynet article, where the writers (tongue-in-cheek) asked where the town of Gilufin is...

The word gilufin גילופין and other derivatives of the root גלפ appear in the Talmud Yerushalmi, midrashim and the Targumim (for example Shmot 39:6). It always means "to engrave, carve". Klein writes that it is a:

Hebraization of Greek glyphein ( = to hollow out, engrave, carve), which is cognate with Latin glubere ( = to peel, shell)

From glyphein we get the words hieroglyphic and glyph, and from glubere we get glume.

Hesder Oleh brings up an interesting question: is גלפ related to קלפ ? If the word can mean in Greek "to carve" and in Latin "to peel" then shouldn't these two Hebrew roots with the same two meanings also be connected? As Joel points out in the comments there, Jastrow connects the two. Neither Ben-Yehuda or Klein make a connection, but I think the jury's still out. They both have similar meanings, both entered Hebrew around the same time, and we've seen that gimmel alternates with kuf.

Ben Yehuda also mentions that Low writes that there is an Akkadian root gallabu, cognate to the Hebrew גלב (Yechezkel 5:1) meaning "to cut, shear", leading him to believe that perhaps the root is Semitic, and not Greek.

However, no where here have we seen any indication that any of these roots mean "intoxicated." Neither Ben Yehuda nor Klein include that meaning in their dictionaries. Assuming that this wasn't an early version of "hammered" or "smashed" (chiseled? carved?) - where'd the jump come from?

Mordecai's answer is hinted to in the question itself. First of all, he notes that b'gilufin means "intoxicated" in Yiddish as well. Secondly, he writes that he found the word in the piyut Atkinu Seudata (which he helpfully included as well):

יְהוֹן הָכָא. בְּהַאי תַּכָּא. דְבֵּיהּ מַלְכָּא בְּגִלוּפִין

This can be literally translated as "May they be here, at this table, where (the name / form of ) the King is inscribed."

Even-Shoshan does include a definition of b'gilufin as "lightly intoxicated", and writes that it was apparently borrowed, in a humorous fashion, from our piyut. But it still isn't clear how the connection developed.

Interestingly, Artscroll hints to it in their translation of the piyut, by including an extra word:

"May they be here at this table / in which is inscribed the King in joy"

Where did they get the word "joy" from? It certainly isn't one of the words of the piyut.

Yehuda Liebes provides us the answer in this article. He quotes Kaddari (of whose Biblical dictionary I refer to often, but here there's a book by Kaddari called מירושת לשון ימי הביניים - Meyerushat Lashon Yemei Habeinayim) and writes that the verse is saying that "The presence of God (the King) is hidden (carved) in the Shabbat table." The Hassidim, who would drink alcohol at Seuda Shlishit, felt that God's presence could be felt in their "higher spiritual level."

So this meaning of b'gilufin was most likely found in Yiddish, and only later entered Hebrew. Proof of this comes from an essay by the early Zionist Yehoshua Barzilai (1854-1918), a contemporary of Ben Yehuda, who writes here:

הביאוני לידי מצב רוח עליז מאד. הייתי "בגלופין", כמו שהחסידים אומרים

"... brought me to a state of great joy. I was 'b'gilufin', as the Hassidim say..."

Apparently at that time the word did not have widespread exposure, and therefore needed to be explained (and perhaps this is why the meaning didn't make it into Ben Yehuda's dictionary.)

If anyone has access to Kaddari's book, perhaps we can get even more of an explanation...

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pach

The famous jar of oil of Chanukah - the "pach hashemen". Is pach spelled with a chet - פח or with a chaf פך ?

Well, despite over 11,000 hits on Google for פח השמן (!!!) the correct spelling is פך השמן (which sadly only has 3000 more sites on Google.)

What is the cause of the confusion? It seems to me that besides both פח and פך being homonyms to most Israelis, in Modern Hebrew they both can refer to kinds of containers. Let's see how.

The word פך means "flask, jar, cruse". It appears three times in the Bible. Klein writes that the name is probably of imitative origin. Kil mentions this in the Daat Mikra on Melachim II 9:3 - when pouring from the jar it would make a pach-pach-pach sound. In Yechezkel 47:2 we find the phrase מַיִם מְפַכִּים - gushing water, which Kil says indicates the sound as well. (It should be noted that Kaddari and others write that the verb פכה derives from the noun פך ).

What about פח ? It originally meant "a thin plate of metal", and appears twice in the Bible (Shmot 39:3 and Bamidbar 17:3) - where the metal is gold or copper. Stahl writes that perhaps this word too is of imitative origin - from the pach! sound made from hammering the metal.

However, in modern Hebrew the word פח means "tin". I'm not sure how this developed. My first theory was that perhaps this was a misreading of Rashi on Bamidbar who uses the Old French word tenves to describe פחים . The word means "thin", but in Hebrew is spelled טינבי"ש - maybe someone saw the word "tin" in there.

But I've since noticed that the original (and more official?) word for tin is בדיל - b'dil. So perhaps pach went from "thin metal" to tin, in a similar process to the word "tin" in English:

In modern times, the word "tin" is often (improperly) used as a generic phrase for any silvery metal that comes in thin sheets.

From pach as "tin" we get pach as (metal) garbage can, and pachit פחית as (tin) can- even though most garbage cans are made of plastic, and the cans are made of aluminum. But both terms are types of containers, which probably leads to the confusion of spelling פך השמן.

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