Khartoum and hartumim

Reader Zvi writes:

With the impending partition of Sudan in the news lately, it would be interesting if you could address the multiple uses of the Hebrew word

חרטום

In Exodus 7:11 and 7:22, it's the word used for the Egyptian magicians.

In modern Hebrew, it's used for the prow of a ship, an elephant's trunk, and a rocket nose cone

And it's also the name of the capital city of Sudan.

What, if anything, is the relationship between these?

Good question - I've been meaning to write about this for a while.

First of all, chartom חרטום meaning "beak, nose, trunk", as well as the borrowed meanings you mentioned, is, as Klein writes, "enlarged" from the Hebrew chotam חוטם, meaning "nose, snout".  (I discussed earlier the background to the more popular word for nose, af אף.)

The name of the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, is certainly related, as described in Placenames of the World:

Founded in 1821 as an Egyptian army camp, the city has an Arabic name, from al-khurtum, a short form of ras al-khurtum, "end of an elephant's trunk," from ra's, "head," "end," al, "the," and khurtum, "trunk." The reference is to the narrow stretch of land here between the White Nile and Blue Nile.

But what about the hartumim חרטמים of Egypt? There are a number of theories. Ben Yehuda, in the footnote to his dictionary entry, writes that the etymology is unclear. He says that some derive from the root חרט, to engrave. Those that follow this theory claim it refers to their ability to write the hieroglyphics. He then quotes a theory that the word is related to chotam, "nose", because it was the practice of these sorcerers to speak through their nose. In the end, however, he says it is likely a word borrowed from Egyptian, even though no such word has been found yet. (Interestingly, Ibn Ezra in his commentary on Bereshit 41:8, says perhaps the word is from Aramaic or Egyptian. However, I'm not sure what form of Egyptian Ibn Ezra is referring to.)

I'm not sure when this footnote was written (although I believe most of the footnotes were written by Tur-Sinai, not Ben-Yehuda, so it could have been well after the latter's death in 1922). Driver makes the same comment in his 1900 commentary on the Book of Daniel - perhaps that influenced the dictionary footnote.

In any case, at some point since that was written, there have been such Egyptian inscriptions discovered, for we now find quotes such as in On the Reliability of the Old Testament:

The term for Pharoah's scholars or sages is hartummim, which goes back to the Egyptian term hery-tep, best translated "expert" and often found in the combination  kheri-hab hery-tep, which means "lector-priest and expert" and not simply "chief lector-priest" as was formerly thought

(A challenge to this theory is discussed in footnote 25 in this book.)

So while the hartumim and Khartoum both have Egyptian origins, it appears they are not connected. Now we need to see whether Sudan itself will stay connected...

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yavan

I hadn't really noticed before, but the Hebrew word for Greece, יוון yavan, is related to the name of one of the ancient Greek tribes, the Ionians. As Klein writes:

A blend of יון, name of a son of Shem son of Noah (see Genesis 10:2) and orig. Greek Iaon, gen. Iaonos contracted into Ion, gen. Ionos (=Ion), ancestor of the Ionian race. 

The gemara (Yoma 10a) identifies a number of Noach's descendants with peoples of the region (such as Tiras with Thrace, and Madai with Macedonia), but says that Yavan is the (understood) meaning - e.g. Greece.

In addition to the mention in Bereshit, the word also appears in Yeshayahu (66:19), Yoel 4:6), Yechezkel (27:13, 19), Zecharya (9:13), Divrei Hayamim I (1:5,7) and Daniel (8:21, 10:20, 11:2).

The Ionians crossed the Aegean sea and settled the west coast of Asia Minor, in today's Turkey. Besides Hebrew, many other languages to the east of the Greeks (Akkadian, Sanskrit) used a form of Ionia to refer to Greece, since this was the first tribe they encountered.

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mitzrayim

Since we discussed the father (Cham), let's talk about the son - Mitzrayim מצרים - the Hebrew name for Egypt. In the last post we ran into difficulties reconciling the Hebrew word cham with the Egyptian kmt. However, with Mitzrayim, there are less difficulties, since this word is only found in Semitic languages - the ancient Egyptians didn't use it themselves. Here's the entry for the etymology of Mitzrayim in the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament:

The Hebrew name for Egypt, misrayim, corresponds to Ugar. msrm, Phoen. msrym, Egyptian Aram. msryn, Syr. mesrem, Akk. Musur/Musru/Misri, Old Persian Mudraya, Arab. Misr; the word is not, however, attested in Old Egyptian. The Egyptians themselves called their land ... t3.wy, the "two lands" (referring to Upper and Lower Egypt) ... If misrayim constitutes a genuine dual form, and if it is connected with Akk. misru, "border, region", and Arab. misr, "border, land, capital city," it might be a translation of t3.wy, although this explanation is extremely uncertain. Meir Fraenkel's derivation of misrayim, associating it with matar, "rain," "water," is untenable.

The singular form masor also occurs in the OT (Mic. 7:12; 2 . K 192:24 par Isa. 37:25; Isa. 19:6) and the gentilic form misri is richly attested.

A few notes about this entry:

1) There is a Hebrew cognate to the Akkadian misru -metzer מצר, which also means "boundary". According to Klein, the word only appears in post-biblical Hebrew (e.g. Bava Batra 61b, 62b) and is a secondary form of the biblical word metzar מצר. That word is said to mean either "distress" or "a narrow place" ("strait" in modern Hebrew). It is familiar from the phrase בין המצרים bein hametzarim - which is used to describe the three weeks preceeding Tisha B'Av. The origin of the phrase is Eicha 1:3 -

כָּל-רֹדְפֶיהָ הִשִּׂיגוּהָ, בֵּין הַמְּצָרִים

The JPS translates this as "all her pursuers overtook her in the narrow places", but adds their common note to "in the narrow places": "Meaning of Hebrew uncertain". The Daat Mikra says that "narrow places" is probably the plain meaning of the verse, but says there are those that explain it as meaning "distress", so the verse would mean "all her pursuers overtook her when she was in distress." Interestingly, they also quote the Rashbam as saying the word here means "border" - in the borders of the Kingdom of Yehuda, and that whenever the Jews would flee to the border, their neighbors would hand them over to their enemies. So perhaps the word does have a biblical origin.

2) The Arabic misr meaning "capital city" explains how Cairo is referred to as Masr in modern Egyptian Arabic. Stahl, in his Arabic etymological dictionary, writes that this title originally applied to Fustat. He quotes Maimonides, in a letter to Ibn Tibbon, where he writes, "I reside in Mitzrayim [meaning Fostat]; the king resides in Cairo."

3) The Daat Mikra generally writes that Matzor מצור is simply a poetic form of Mitzrayim, and not a singular form (however in their commentary to Bereshit 10:6, when the word Mitzrayim first appears in the Tanach, they write that it might be a double form, indicating the two kingdoms.) In a footnote to Melachim II 19:25, they note that Matzor might preserve an earlier form of the name, and that the suffix "-im" in Mitzrayim might be locative, like Yerushalayim. This explains the Akkadian and Arabic forms, which otherwise might appear to be singular.

4) Steinberg, while clearly aware of the division of Egypt into the Upper and Lower Kingdoms (he mentions it in his entry), writes that the plural nature of Mitzrayim is due to the Nile river splitting the country into east and west (or as this book writes, "the two banks of the Nile"). This could help answer the question raised in this book, who after acknowledging the theory that Mitzrayim is a dual form, writes:

However, prophetic texts from Jeremiah [44:1] and Isaiah [11:11] differentiate between מצרים [Mitzrayim] and פרתס [Partos] as Lower and Upper Egypt, indicating that מצרים [Mitzrayim], if it is to be located as a geographic reference, at least in these prophetic texts refers to Lower Egypt or the Nile delta.

This site writes that:

Northern or Lower Egypt is called Mazor, .. while Southern or Upper Egypt is Pathros, the Egyptian Pa-to-Res, or "the land of the south" (Isa. 11:11). But the whole country is generally mentioned under the dual name of Mizraim, "the two Mazors".

However, this explanation ignores the fact that Mitzrayim and Patros are listed together in Yishayahu and Yirmiyahu.

One unexpected derivative of Mitzrayim - actually the Arabic Misr - is the song Misirlou. Even if you don't recognize the name (it means "Egyptian girl"), there's a good chance you know the song. Listen to this brief NPR story, and you'll hear how the song spread all over the world, including to the niggunim of rabbis and to klezmer bands. I guess you can take the Jews out of Mitzrayim, but you can't really take Mitzrayim out of the Jews...

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alchemy

In my last post I dabbled in chemistry, so I thought it made sense to discuss the origin of the word.

Today we might view chemistry as real science, as opposed to the unrealistic pursuit of a way to turn common metals into gold - alchemy. However, both the word and the discipline of chemistry derived from alchemy:

1605, originally "alchemy;" the meaning "natural physical process" is 1646, and the
scientific study not so called until 1788.

And from the Columbia Encyclopedia:

The alchemists became obsessed with their quest for the secret of transmutation; some adopted deceptive methods of experimentation, and many gained a livelihood from hopeful patrons. As a result, alchemy fell into disrepute. However, in the searching experimental quests of the alchemists chemistry had its beginnings; indeed, the histories of alchemy and chemistry are closely linked. Transmutation of elements has been accomplished in modern chemistry.

What is the origin of the word "alchemy"? Klein gives the following in his CEDEL:

alchemy, n. medieval chemistry. -- OF. alquemie (13th cent.), alchimie (14th cent.) (F. alchimie), fr. ML. alchemia, fr. Arab. al-kimiya, fr. al-, 'the', and MGk. chimeia, chimia, 'the art of the black land (Egypt)', fr. Gk. Chimia, 'Black-land, Egypt', fr. Egypt. khem, khame, 'black'. The derivation from Gk. chymeia , 'pouring', from the stem of cheein, 'to pour', is folk etymology. See W. Muss-Arnolt, Transactions of the American Philological Association, vol. XXIII, p. 149

Muss-Arnolt writes in that article that the Greek word Chimia is

borrowed from the Egyptian (Coptic) kam (chame), 'black'

Now when I see Egypt and kam or khame - I can't help but thinking of חם Cham, the son of Noach, the father of Mitzrayim - the biblical Egypt. And indeed, in Tehillim (78:51, 105:23,27, 106:32) Egypt is called Cham.

It's important to note that Muss-Arnolt wrote this article in 1892. Doing a search of articles and books from the 19th century and early 20th century finds many sources that connect Cham and Khemia. For example, from this 1929 book:

It appears to be the Land of Kham or Ham, the oldest traditional name for Egypt, and a usual name for that land and its people in the Hebrew Old Testament ... The Greeks called Egypt sometimes Khemia or Khimia (Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 33)

Now I'm certainly aware that not everyone agrees with this theory. This 1812 book already writes that "the derivation of Chemia from this son of Noah, rest with me on grounds too slight and fanciful to be implicitly relied on". And since Noach's curse of the "dark" Cham and his son Canaan was often used to justify the slavery of blacks, it's not surprising that many more modern sources would challenge the whole proposition, including the etymology. For example, David M. Goldenberg's 2003 book "The Curse of Ham" spends many pages discussing the issue. He mentions a possible connection:

A derivation of Ham (ham) from kmt 'Egypt', also seemed like a good choice despite the differences between the first and last letters of the two words, and scholars until about a generation ago entertained the notion that Ham was a Hebraized form of this Egyptian word for "Egypt"...Not only Coptic documents provide us this information, but Plutarch (d. after 120 CE) does too. He noted that the Egyptians called Egypt "Chemia". With the loss of the final t and the realization of k as kh or the Greek [chi], the word looked very much like the biblical Ham. This theory too had more than phonology on its side. First, from a political-geographic perspective, the extent of Egypt's rule during the New Kingdom is neatly circumscribed by the four areas that the Bible allocates to Ham's sons...

However, he clearly rejects the theory:

Despite the attractions of the various theories, however, not one of these etymological suggestions is acceptable.

He goes on to give a thorough argument, which includes the fact that the Hebrew letter chet "is not transliterated at all or is transliterated by a vowel" in Greek - as in Noach נח becoming "Noah".

He concludes:

One thing is, however, absolutely clear. The name Ham is not related to the Hebrew or to any Semitic word meaning "dark," "black," or "heat" or to the Egyptian word meaning "Egypt". To the Early Hebrews, then, Ham did not represent the father of hot, black Africa and there is no indication from the biblical story that God intended to condemn black-skinned people to eternal slavery.

While I agree that the Bible did not justify the slavery of Africans, I'm still not fully convinced of the etymological proof. People from one language can refer to another nation by a word that sounds like what they call themselves, without fully matching up with the lingustic laws that generally determine word borrowings. Just look at how the Europeans "converted" the indigenous place names when they came to the New World. Some are so far off that it's hard to even see a connection (for example see here for the etymologies of the U.S. state names).

One person who did believe that there might be a connection between Cham and Khemia was Yitzhak Avineri. In a 1945 article published in Yad HaLashon (page 202), he complains about how recently the spelling of the Hebrew word for chemistry - chimiya - has changed from חימיה (with a chet) to כימיה (with a kaf). While the linguist pushing for the change base it on the Arabic cognate al-kimiya, he gives two proofs: 1) that chimiya might originate either in the chum (dark) color of the Nile soil, or be related to Cham, and 2) everyone pronounces the word chimiya, not kimiya. If it was to be spelled with a kaf, it would require a dagesh in the beginning, making it kimiya (my guess is the pronunciation is influenced by those of European languages, such as the Russian khimiya.) Avineri quotes a couple of dictionaries that still spell the word with a chet, but the new spelling won out, and only כימיה is found today.

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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."

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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...

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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

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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.

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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.

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