almanac and menucha

There are a lot of theories as to the origin of the word "almanac." Here's what the Online Etymology Dictionary has to say:

late 14c., "book of permanent tables of astronomical data," attested in Anglo-Latin from mid-13c., via Old French almanach or directly from Medieval Latin almanachus, a word of uncertain origin and the subject of much speculation. The Latin word is often said to be ultimately from Arabic somehow, but an exact phonological and semantic fit is wanting: OED connects it to a supposed Spanish-Arabic al-manakh "calendar, almanac," which is possibly ultimately from Late Greek almenichiakon "calendar," which itself is said to be of Coptic origin. But the author of English words of Arabic Ancestry makes a detailed case  "that the word almanac was pseudo-Arabic and was generated within the circle of astronomers in Paris in the mid 13th century."

Those are all interesting suggestions, but one not mentioned in that entry allows for a connection to a Hebrew word. Stahl mentions a theory that does in his Bilingual Etymological Dictionary of Spoken Israeli Arabic and Hebrew, and it also appears in other sources, such as this and this. He points out that in Arabic manakh means "weather, climate" and derives from a word meaning "where the camels kneel and rest." That place was a camp, and for nomadic tribes, it took on the sense of a permanent settlement. This sense of permanence, became associated with other constant or expected things - in this case, the weather. And so an almanac was a book which included certain astronomical predictions (like the times of sunrise and sunset), dates for holidays, and meteorological forecasts.

This Arabic root - either via nakha, "kneel" or manakh, "camp" - is cognate with the Hebrew word root נוח meaning "to rest." That root gives us the word menucha מנוחה. In Modern Hebrew menucha means the condition of "rest, respite" or "calm, serenity." But in the Bible, it generally (perhaps always) means a resting place. In many verses it is synonymous with nachala נחלה - "inheritance", as in Devarim 12:9 where both refer to the Land of Israel:

כִּי לֹא־בָּאתֶם עַד־עָתָּה אֶל־הַמְּנוּחָה וְאֶל־הַנַּחֲלָה אֲשֶׁר־ה' אֱלֹהֶיךָ נֹתֵן לָךְ

Now you have not yet come to the resting place [menukha] and hereditary land that God your Lord is giving you.

Another verse with the same meaning is Bereshit 49:15, which compares menucha  to aretz (land):

...וַיַּרְא מְנֻחָה כִּי טוֹב וְאֶת־הָאָרֶץ כִּי נָעֵמָה

But he sees that the resting place [menucha] is good, and that the land is pleasant...

In this way, menucha is similar to the word meluna מלונה - "lodge" (and related to the word malon מלון - "inn"), which derives from the root לון - "to lodge, to pass the night." Meluna is clearly a place, and so too menucha means a resting place.

Of course, it's easy to conflate a resting place and a state of rest, and so there are some verses where it's not clear which meaning is intended. In the end, just as the Arabian nomads appreciated the chance to let their camels kneel and rest, so to did the nomadic tribes of Israel appreciate the chance to stop wandering and settle in their homeland. The resting place caused a state of rest.

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shevet and matteh

There are two Hebrew words that are very similar: shevet שבט and matteh  מטה. 

They both have the same two non-synonymous meanings: stick (or staff) and tribe. And they both appear in parallel in Biblical Hebrew. How is that so?

Let's first take a look at the etymologies. The origins of shevet and matteh are actually very different, which contributes to the mystery.

Shevet comes from a root meaning "to strike."  It has cognates in other Semitic languages, including the Akkadian shabatu (= to beat, kill, destroy). That, according to Klein, is the root of the Hebrew month of Shevat - literally the "month of destroying rain."

Matteh comes from the root נטה meaning "to stretch out" or "to bend down." That root also gives us such words as mita מיטה - "bed" and mata מטה - "down" (as we discussed here.) Perhaps this is either how a stick or branch stretches out (or comes down) from a tree, or because a stick or a staff is brought down on the ground when walking or pointing.

As I mentioned, both appear in Biblical Hebrew. While they each appear more frequently in some books than others, they do appear in the same books, and sometimes even in the same verse, such as this one:

וְגַם אֶת־אַחֶיךָ מַטֵּה לֵוִי שֵׁבֶט אָבִיךָ הַקְרֵב אִתָּךְ וְיִלָּווּ עָלֶיךָ וִישָׁרְתוּךָ וְאַתָּה וּבָנֶיךָ אִתָּךְ לִפְנֵי אֹהֶל הָעֵדֻת׃

You [Aharon] shall also associate with yourself your kinsmen the tribe [matteh] of Levi, your ancestral [literally father's] tribe [shevet], to be attached to you and to minister to you, while you and your sons under your charge are before the Tent of the Pact. (Bamidbar 18:2)

In his JPS commentary here, Milgrom writes that "synonyms are used to avoid monotonous repetition." But he adds, referring to this more detailed article of his, that matteh is more precise (referring specifically to one of the 12 tribes), whereas shevet can be also a smaller group (like in this verse, Aharon's father's family) or to the entire nation of Israel (like in Tehilim 74:2). 

How did these two words with distinct origins come to mean both stick and tribe? And why did "stick" develop into "tribe" (twice)?

There are a number of theories:

• Some say that between "stick" and "tribe" the term meant "scepter." (The Hebrew word for scepter - sharvit שרביט - may have derived from shevet  as well.) That symbol of leadership became associated with the leader of the tribe itself, and then to the tribe he led. This intermediate stage is found in Bereshit 49:10, for example. Based on how he presents the order of the definitions of shevet, I think this is Kaddari's approach. Since he presents that development for shevet, and not for matteh, perhaps he holds that matteh was influenced by shevet in that regard. (For more detail about how the meanings of the words developed, see this Hebrew article by Athalya Brenner. She finds the "missing link" of shevet referring to the actual leader, but that link is not found with matteh.)
• Stahl has a similar approach, and points out that the the shevet as a scepter signified the leader's power to beat and punish, which connects back to the etymology of the root.
• Ben Yehuda says that shevet (as stick) became "tribe" in the way a branch splits off from the main part of a tree. In the same way multiple tribes would be divisions of a single nation.
• Radak takes a different approach. He says that the "original" word was matteh. He writes that one leans (relies) on a matteh (as implied by the root of the word), and both shevet and matteh as "tribe" refer to something you can rely upon. Perhaps he means that in tribal group everyone helps one another.
• Gesenius combines some of the above approaches, saying that shevet came to be tribe from the authority of the scepter, and matteh represents the branching out (as Ben Yehuda wrote about shevet). I suppose he viewed the developments of shevet and matteh as parallel, but independent.

Before researching this, I thought that there was a parallel development in English, with the word "staff" meaning both "stick" and "group (of people employed by an organization.) But that was a very late entry into English, first appearing only in 1702. It originally had a specifically military sense, as it came "from the notion of the 'baton' that is a badge of office or authority." 

The early Zionist leader and Hebrew linguist Nahum Sokolow adopted this meaning of staff as a group of military officers, and adopted the word matteh for that purpose. So today, the commander in chief of the Israeli army is the rosh hamatteh haklali ראש המטה הכללי - "the Chief of the General Staff" (frequently abbreviated to רמטכ"ל Ramatkal.)

And while in Modern Hebrew matteh has a primarily military connotation, shevet has much more of a civilian tone, used either for groups in youth movements, or to represent an ethnic or large family group (sometimes in a derogatorily way, similar to the English "tribal.") 

As I've said before, Hebrew just can't handle synonyms...

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lion

The English word "lion" may have Semitic origins. Klein, in his Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, writes that lion comes from the Latin leo and Greek "leon" which

is of uncertain, possibly Semitic, origin; cp. Heb. labhi, Akkad. labbu 'lion'

And in his Comprehensive Dictionary of the Hebrew Language, under lavi לביא (a term for an older lion), he says that it is also related to the Ugaritic lbu and Arabic labu'ah - all meaning "lion".

However, Hebrew has more than one word for lion. Let's look at them.

Perhaps the most familiar term (in Modern Hebrew at least) is ari ארי or aryeh אריה. Klein writes that ari is related to Ethiopian 'arwe (=wild beast), Akkadian aru (= eagle) and Arabic 'arwa ( = ibexes). A post on the forum here quotes the HALOT entry for ari, mentions some additional Semitic language with other cognates and animal terms, and writes that the word originally meant "wild animal."

Klein also writes that the word ariel אריאל, which he defines as "hero" and appears only once in the Bible (Shmuel II 23:20), literally means "lion of God" (as does אראל erel - a term for an angel).

Aryeh, Ari and Ariel are all common Hebrew names. The phenomenon of naming people after lions is very widespread as we'll continue to see. The German word for lion, löwe, is cognate with the English, and led to the Yiddish loeb or leib. In Yaakov's blessing to his son Yehuda, he compares him to a lion (Bereshit 49:9). So the names Yehuda, Aryeh and Leib became somewhat interchangeable. In fact, I've seen my great-great-grandfather on gravestones (of his children) mentioned as Yosef Yehuda, Yosef Aryeh and Yosef Leib.

Other biblical names for lions are kfir כפיר and shachal שחל, which along with lavi, are popular Israeli first and last names. Perhaps they gained popularity because aryeh was viewed as old fashioned. Klein writes that kfir - a young lion - might derive from the root כפר, to cover (see this post), and is "properly denoting a lion already covered with a mane".

Two other Hebrew terms for lion are layish ליש and shachatz שחץ, but I have not seen them used for names. (For more discussion of lions in the Bible and in Judaism, see this Encyclopedia Judaica article).

Arabic uses lion terms for names as frequently as Hebrew does. This article discusses the practice, and we'll look at a few examples that have Hebrew cognates.

assad - The Assad family from Syria get their names from the Arabic word for lion, and Hafez al-Assad was known as the "Lion of Syria". (His first name, hafez means "guard or protect" - cognate with the Hebrew חפץ. I recall that in about 1999 a clever Israeli columnist pointed out that the then Director General of the President's Residence, Arie Shumer אריה שומר had a Hebrew name that matched up exactly with the then president of Syria). The Arabic assad is cognate with the Hebrew אשד - a root meaning "to pour" and the source of the words eshed אשד - waterfall and asheda אשדה - slope and waterfall. Klein says the connection to the Arabic word for lion is due to the original meaning of the root being "he rushed, plunged" which became "he pursued" - reflecting the actions of lions

osama - The article gives the following explanation as to the origin of osama:

Meanwhile, the root of Osama/Usama is wasama, which is to brand or stamp (eg, cattle). By extension, wisaam is a mark of distinction or honor and wasaama is grace or beauty—both things that lions have, even if the late Mr bin Laden was sorely lacking in either.

We looked at the same root in our discussion of the etymology of the word monsoon, where we saw that wasama is cognate with the Hebrew shem שם - "name".

abbas - this name for a lion comes from an Arabic root meaning "strict or stern". The Arabic word abasa means "he frowned" (see more discussion here). In A Comparative Lexical Study of Qurʼānic Arabic, Martin Zammit provides us a Hebrew cognate:

Arab 'abasa - 74:22 "Then he frowned and he scowled!": Heb. 'abas: The primary sense is connected with 'contracting' and 'shriveling', with Arab. restricting the usage to the human face and Heb. applying the root to grains.

He is referring to the Hebrew root עבש - to shrivel, to grow moldy. This is used in Modern Hebrew in the word עובש ovesh - "mold".

So admiring lions seems to be one thing Arabs and Jews can agree on. Sadly, the Asiatic lion, formerly found in this region, went extinct at the time of the Crusades.

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hora and horim

After discussing av and em, lets discuss the more generic term for mother and father: horim הורים - "parents". An informal survey I took of both native and non-native Hebrew speakers found that many of them thought that word was related to the word for teacher - moreh מורה and teaching - horaah הוראה. However, the word has a different root altogether. Moreh derives from the root ירה - "to teach", which is also the root of the word תורה - torah. Horeh comes from the root הרה - "to conceive, become pregnant". From this root we get the word herayon הריון - pregnancy.

The word is of biblical origin, but the story is a little strange here. Twice in the Tanach we find the word hora הורה - in Shir HaShirim 3:4 and Hoshea 2:7. In both instances, the word clearly means "mother". And that makes sense - the one who becomes pregnant is indeed the mother.

We do find the word horim, actually horai הורי, in one verse - Bereshit 49:26, in Yaakov's blessing to Yosef:

בִּרְכֹת אָבִיךָ, גָּבְרוּ עַל-בִּרְכֹת הוֹרַי, עַד-תַּאֲוַת, גִּבְעֹת עוֹלָם

The JPS translates this as: "The blessings of your father surpass the blessings of my ancestors [horai], to the utmost bounds of the eternal hills."

However, Sarna comments on the translation "my ancestors":

Hebrew horai is so rendered based on postbiblical usage. However, the stem h-r-h in the Bible can only mean "to become pregnant" and is, of course, solely used in the feminine. Seeing that "mountain(s)" - "hill(s)" is a fixed pair of parallel terms in Hebrew poetry, occuring more than thirty times in that order, Rashbam is undoubtedly correct in connecting horai here with har, "mountain." The Septuagint indeed reads here "ancient mountains," joining the word to the following 'ad. The phrase harere 'ad, "ancient mountains," appears in Habakkuk 3:6 in parallel with give'ot 'olam, "eternal hills." The Blessing of Moses to Joseph in Deuteronomy 33:15 employs the same imagery, though in variant form: "With the best from the ancient mountains, / And the bounty of hills immemorial..." Therefore it is best to render here, "the blessings of the ancient mountains".

I find Sarna rather convincing here. Hora certainly seems to mean mother, and the verse in Bereshit does look like it is referring to mountains. So biblically we only had a word referring to the mother, and in post-biblical Hebrew the generic term horeh for "parent" developed. The word "parent" itself in English had a similar development:

from O.Fr. parent (11c.), from L. parentem (nom. parens) "father or mother, ancestor," noun use of prp. of parere "bring forth, give birth to, produce," from PIE base *per- "to bring forth"

I haven't seen proof of this, but it wouldn't surprise me if the Latin parentem (or an earlier version) originally meant "mother", since she is the one who gives birth.

What I do find strange is how the words are listed in the dictionary. Both Klein and Even-Shoshan have listings for hora, horeh and horim. Even if they accept the more traditional understanding of Bereshit 49:26 as "my parents", I don't see why they need to have a separate entry for the plural form of the word. I suppose it's to say that the singular horeh means "father", not "parent", whereas only the plural horim is truly generic. But that's not the way it is used in Modern Hebrew. The popular online Hebrew-English dictionary Morfix translates horeh only as "parent", and doesn't have an entry for hora - as mother - at all.

Morfix does, of course, have an entry for another meaning of hora - the folk dance. And no, they're not related. As Philologos discusses here:

“Hora” comes from ancient Greek khoros, which also gives us such words as “chorus” and “choir.” Traditional circle dances deriving their names from khoros can be found all over the Balkans and southeastern Europe. They include the Turkish and Romanian hora, the Bulgarian horo, the Montenegrin and Macedonian ora, and the Russian khorovod, and they are all very old and highly similar in the way they are danced.

And the Online Etymology Dictionary provides the following background to "chorus":

from Gk. khoros "band of dancers or singers, dance, dancing ground," from PIE *ghoro-. In Attic tragedy, the khoros gave expression, between the acts, to the moral and religious sentiments evoked by the actions of the play.

And just in case I have any readers who are accustomed to the Ashkenazi kamatz - there is also no connection to the hora found in the terms "loshon hora" or "yetzer hora". I'll be sure to let you know if I stop using Israeli pronunciation...

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achbar

Last month, Treppenwitz, one of my daily reads and a fellow resident of Efrat, wrote a very funny post about how his wife Zahava thought that the word akbar in the Arabic phrase "Allahu Akbar" ("God is Great") meant "mouse" (like the Hebrew achbar עכבר). The Arab worker in the supermarket corrected her and said:

"No... 'Achbar' [with the 'ch sound scraped deep in the back of his throat] meant mouse. Akbar [with the 'k' sound coming percussively from the roof of his mouth] , was... something completely different."

I had enjoyed the story, but hadn't given much thought to the linguistic side of it, until last Friday. In our local library, I found a very important entry in the Encyclopedia Mikrait (Biblical Encyclopedia) called Milim Zarot (Foreign Words in the Bible) by the important Israeli linguist Chaim Rabin. The article mentions dozens of words that may have entered the Bible from neighboring languages, and as you can expect, it has provided me with many ideas for future posts.

While I was familiar with words of Akkadian, Egyptian and even Greek origins, I didn't realize that there were Biblical words that derived from Arabic (actually proto-Arabic or Ancient North Arabian). One of the Hebrew words that Rabin suggests comes from Arabic is none other than עכבר achbar, mouse! He writes that it probably meant "great / big one", in a euphemistic way. It would then very much be related to the Arabic akbar, which is אכבר in Hebrew, from the root כבר - "great". He writes that in certain Arabic dialects in the region it was common to switch between alef and ayin.

From the root כבר we get a number of other words, including the adjective kabir כביר - "great" and perhaps the Greek gods - the Cabeiri.

Two other homonyms to כבר may be related as well. The verb כבר means "to sift", and a kvara כברה is a sieve. Klein suggests a connection:

According to some scholars כבר ( "to be great") is identical with כבר ( "to sift"), the sense development of this base having been "to interturn, twist, make strong". They compare the bases גדל ( "to be great") and גדל ( "to twist, to plait") which seem to have undergone a similar sense development.

Another word with the same letters is kvar כבר - "already". In the Bible it appears only in Kohelet, and in the Gordis book on Kohelet, he writes the following:

It is frequent in Mishnaic Hebrew, but rare in Targumic Aramaic. It occurs also in Syriac, where it usually means "perhaps", though it occurs as "already" in Mat. 11:21; Heb 10:2 and in Mandaic כבאר. Its root is common in all Semitic languages in the meaning "be great", hence כבר = lit. "length of time:, while כברה is "length of land" (Genesis 35:16, 48:7, II Ki. 5:19)

In regards to kivra כברה, Ben-Yehuda does mention the approach that it is related to kabir, but primarily goes along with most other scholars that I read who claim that the kaf in kivra is not radical, and the root of the word should be seen as ברה or ברת.

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mat

Is there any connection between "mat" and "mattress"? Well, their etymologies are entirely distinct, but they both do come from Semitic sources. A while back we looked at "mattress", today we'll see the background of "mat".

From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

O.E. matte, from L.L. matta "mat made of rushes" (4c.), probably from Punic or Phoenician (cf. Heb. mittah "bed, couch")

While we might not associate a mita מיטה with a mat, the sense of "mat" actually preserves the original meaning more than "bed".

The word mita, according to Klein is:

From נטה (= to stretch out; to incline, bend). For sense development, compare Greek kline (=bed) which is related to klinein (=to cause to slope, slant, incline).

(Two English words that are connected to each of the Greek are clinic and incline).

Stahl points out that the Biblical mita was a blanket or rug that was spread out on the floor - a "mat". The difference between the mita of old and the mita of today might be seen in the Talmudic mourning practice of כפיית המיטה - "turning the bed over". The later halachic sources say that we do not keep this custom of mourning because our mita is different - it's much easier to turn over a mat than a bed.

Mita in Talmudic times developed the meaning of "family, offspring" - as in a description of Yaakov - מטתו שלמה - mitato shleima, "his (conjugal) bed was perfect", i.e. "his children were all righteous".

From the root נטה we get two other words that are spelled the same as mita (when it is spelled without a yod, as it does in the Tanach). The word מטה can also mean mata - "downward, down" and mateh - "stick, rod, staff".

Based on this confusion (the original text had no vowels), there are different readings of Bereshit 47:31. The Masoretic text has עַל-רֹאשׁ הַמִּטָּה "al rosh hamita" - "at the head of the bed". However, the Septuagint translates it as "over the head of his staff" - in other words "al rosh hamateh".

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kachol

Unlike the other two primary colors we've discussed so far, kachol כחול (blue) does not appear in the Torah at all. In fact, the only appearance of any form of the root כחל is in Yechezkel 23:40: כָּחַלְתְּ עֵינַיִךְ - "you painted your eyes." The verb כחל meant exactly that - painting of the eyes (eyelids). We find it mentioned for cosmetic purposes (this is the source of the expression בלא כחל ובלא שרק - meaning "without additions". It literally means "without any makeup" and in Ketubot 17a, was used as praise for the bride - she would be beautiful even without any makeup.) The word מכחול - painters brush, has its origins here. The word kohl still has the meaning of "a cosmetic preparation, such as powdered antimony sulfide, used especially in the Middle East to darken the rims of the eyelids."

It was also used for medicinal purposes for the eyes, as found in Shabbat 78a. Stahl writes that the Arabic word for optometrist - כחאל - derives from this sense of the word.

Most of the sources I have read simply (Klein, for example) say that the color used in the eye makeup was blue, and from here we derive the name of the color kachol. I'm not fully convinced of this. While I can't really use Jastrow as a full concordance of the Talmudic literature, in none of his examples does he identify kachol - or any of its cognates - with "blue". He does, however, give a few examples where it actually refers to another color. For example, he identifies the stone כוחלין as carbuncle, which is red (see more about that here.) He also says that the origin of the Hebrew word for a cow's udder - כחל - is due to its reddish color. (Steinberg also says that the root כחל is related to חכל - which everyone agrees means "red"**.)

Jastrow also identifies the stone כוחלא (Kiddushin 12a, Bava Batra 4a) as being black. Perhaps he is being a bit biased here. In Bava Batra, while Rabbeinu Gershon does define כוחלא as black, Rashi suggests kachol - which clearly meant to him "blue". But even if Jastrow for some reason is choosing to deliberately ignore the possibility that כחל could mean blue, there are still a lot of open questions. My guess? I think probably כחל originally only meant "to paint", and later - at least by Rashi's time - kachol fully meant blue.

One interesting etymology that comes out of this word is that of the English word alcohol. Klein writes:

Arab. alkohl, vulgar pronunciation of alkuhl, from al (= the) and kohl, resp. kuhl (= antimony used for painting the eyelids), which is related to Hebrew כחל (= he painted the eyes with antimony). Its modern sense ('highly rectified spirits') is due to the analogy of the fitness of this powder.

Others say that the process of producing the makeup was similar to that of producing alcohol - hence the name.

According to Rosenthal, in Modern Israeli slang, k'cholim refers either to police officers or soldiers in the Air Force - both based on the blue color of their uniforms.

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** After publishing this post, I have found a notable source that disagrees. The Ramban on Bereshit 49:12 says that חכלילי means kachol, not red. However, it does not seem that he meant "blue" but rather "dark". For more information, see the Daat Mikra on the verse, and this article by Prof. Aaron Demsky: here in English, and here in Hebrew. There is an interesting archeological discovery with a First Temple jar saying "wine kachol". (A picture can be found in the Daat Mikra).

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