When I was in eighth grade, I asked a rabbi a question. If we believe in only one God, why is God’s name in Hebrew a plural? I know I was th...

The Shabbat before Pesach is known as Shabbat Hagadol שבת הגדול - "The Great Sabbath". While the phrase " shabbat hagadol ...

In the post on simcha , we saw that there is a connection in Hebrew and other Semitic languages between words meaning light and sprouting, b...

We're all familiar with the word simcha שמחה - "joy" (and hopefully with the concept as well!). This noun is based on the ...

We previously discussed blo בלו , a tax first mentioned in the book of Ezra. Blo is mentioned together with two other taxes that are not us...

Lately there has been a lot of news about the proposed increase (and subsequent decrease) in Israel's excise tax on gasoline. Until I ...

We previously discussed the Hebrew word for fruit - p'ri פרי . Now lets look at a particular fruit - eshkolit אשכולית - "grapefru...

In honor of Tu B'Shvat, the Academy of the Hebrew Language posted a page about the Hebrew word for fruit: פרי - p'ri ( I prefer th...

Reader Zvi writes: With the impending partition of Sudan in the news lately, it would be interesting if you could address the multiple use...

In our post discussing sochen סוכן - "agent" - I wrote that it "is connected to segan סגן - in Biblical Hebrew a governmen...

We previously discussed a number of words with the root סכן. One word that might seem missing in that discussion is sakin סכין - "kni...

In the beginning of Shemot, the Israelites were forced to build arei miskenot ערי מסכנות - "storage cities" (Shemot 1:11). The ...

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, ...

This week, in Bereshit 37:3, we read about Yosef and his ketonet passim כתונת פסים. We've already discussed how ketonet means "c...

Last week, when leaving work in Jerusalem, a friend and I spotted an animal that looked like this (I wish we had a chance to take a picture ...

A word that in some ways is equivalent to olam עולם - "world" is teva טבע - "nature". The word is very common in Hebr...

In the prayers of Rosh HaShana, we say hayom harat olam היום הרת עולם. Artscroll translates this phrase as "today is the birth(day) o...

In the previous post , we mentioned se'ora שעורה - "barley", so this is a good opportunity to finish the discussion of the fi...