fanfare and parpar

I would never have guessed that the word "fanfare" might have Semitic origins, but the Online Etymology Dictionary has this entry:

c.1600, "a flourish sounded on a trumpet or bugle," from French fanfare "a sounding of trumpets" (16c.), from fanfarer "blow a fanfare" (16c.), perhaps echoic, or perhaps borrowed (with Spanish fanfarron "braggart," and Italian fanfano "babbler") from Arabic farfar "chatterer," of imitative origin.

Now while the source might be from Arabic, if farfar is only of "imitative origin" (i.e. that's what chatter sounds like), there's not much more of a story to tell. But as with much of what we discuss here, there's more than one opinion.

Prof. Reuben Ahroni, in his book The Jews of the British Crown Colony of Aden: History, Culture, and Ethnic Relations, includes a glossary of Arabic words and writes the following regarding farfar:

farfar, mifarfar, to crush into small pieces (probably derived from Heb. porer, to crumble, shatter, smash)

And then with a footnote, includes this addition:

Ar. farfara "to flutter (of a bird)"

So now we have a Hebrew connection. Klein provides three related roots for פרר:

• to crush, crumble, break into crumbs
• to break, violate, annul, frustrate (this is the source of הפרה hafara - "violation")
• to shake, shatter

And he also mentions two forms of the pilpel form of the root, פרפר

• to break, crumble, crush
• to shake, shatter

And from this sense, Klein derives the modern Hebrew word for butterfly - parpar פרפר (flutter is related to shake). Klein doesn't say who coined parpar, but other linguists point to Eliezer Ben Yehuda. For example, this article by Shoshana Kordova:

This is another one of the slew of words the Ben-Yehuda family coined in the early 20th century.
At the time, Hebrew writers used the word "tziporet" (from the word for bird) or "tziporet kramim" (tzi-po-RET kra-MIM, meaning vineyard bird) [ציפורת כרמים] for butterfly. Tziporet appears in the Mishna, but there it means generic "flying insect" -- most likely the original reference was to the locust. But since Hebrew had other words for locust ("arbeh"[ארבה]), and none for butterfly, it was appropriated for that use.
...
They [Eliezer and his son Itamar] chose the word based on this verb [pirper פרפר - to flutter] -- and on the name of a Biblical river: “Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?” (2 Kings 5:12)
It had the additional appeal of sounding (a little…) like the French word for butterfly, papillon.
The word parpar itself first appears in a poem written by Ben-Yehuda the younger in 1910 titled “Parpar.”  

A commenter on this page says that the French papillon is less likely the inspiration, and suggests the Italian *farfare. I did not find that word in Italian (at least not meaning "butterfly"), but there does exist the similar farfalla, and there certainly are precedents of Ben Yehuda using Italian as an inspiration for new Hebrew words (there are those that make the claim that his glida גלידה for "ice cream" was influenced by the Italian gelato). So while the origin might be Hebrew, the similarity to French or Italian could have played a role.

And one last note. While there is an Italian butterfly shaped pasta - farfalle - Gil Marks points out that is not the origin of the egg noodle "farfel". That comes from the German word for noodles, varvelen.

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alcatraz, albatross and kad

The Online Etymology Dictionary gives the following etymology for albatross:

1670s, probably from Spanish or Portuguese alcatraz "pelican" (16c.), perhaps derived from Arabic al-ghattas "sea eagle" [Barnhart]; or from Portuguese alcatruz "the bucket of a water wheel" [OED], from Arabic al-qadus "machine for drawing water, jar" (from Greek kados "jar"), in reference to the pelican's pouch (compare Arabic saqqa "pelican," literally "water carrier"). Either way, the spelling was influenced by Latin albus "white." The name was extended, through some mistake, by English sailors to a larger sea-bird (order Tubinares).
Albatrosses were considered good luck by sailors; figurative sense of "burden" (1936) is from Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798) about the bad luck of a sailor who shoots an albatross and then is forced to wear its corpse as an indication that he, not the whole ship, offended against the bird. The prison-island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay is named for pelicans that roosted there.

The connection to the Arabic and Greek words for "jar" is interesting. We're familiar with the Hebrew word kad כד - also meaning jar, going all the way back to Bereshit 24:46, in the story of Rivka and the well. Is there a connection - and which came first?

Klein, in his entry for kad (jug, pitcher) says that the Greek kados (and following that, the Latin cadus - "jar") derive from the Hebrew. Other sources seem to agree, and while stating that it's hard to trace the roots of such old words, the likelihood of Greek borrowing from a Semitic root is higher than the other way around.

So we see here a Hebrew (or other Semitic word) being borrowed into Greek (and later Latin), and from there to Arabic, from there to Spanish and Portuguese, ending up in English. And if we want to go one step further - the modern Hebrew word for albatross - אלבטרוס - is borrowed from the English. Quite the journey.

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cholent

A number of years ago, when discussing the origin of the word daven, I said that in the future I would explain the origin of another early Yiddish word - cholent. Well, the future is now.

In the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, Gil Marks provides the following background for "cholent":

Cholent is a slow-simmered stew, often based on beans, that is served hot for Sabbath lunch.
Origin: France
Other names: Alsace and southern Germany: schalent; Austria: scholet; Hungary: sholet, solet; Lithuania: chulent; Poland: cholent; tshholnt
Sometime after the First Crusade, around the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, the Sephardic Sabbath stew, hamin/adafina, probably traveling by the way of Provence, eventually reached the Jews of France to become an indelible part of their Sabbath... From France, the stew moved eastward to southern Germany and later to eastern Europe. Among the French Ashkenazim, the stew received a news name, spelled schalet in Western Yiddish and tsholnt in Eastern Yiddish, probably from the Old French for warm, chald/chalt (chaud in modern French) or some contend, from chald-de-lit (warmth of the bed), Alternatively, some insist that the dish flowed to France directly from Spain, the name emerging from the Spanish escallento (warm).

In Eat and Be Satisfied: A Social History of Jewish Food (page 106), John Cooper quotes Max Grunbaum as saying it could also derive from the Spanish escalentar, "kept warm". Both the French and the Spanish derive from the Latin calentem - "that which is warm". This in turn comes from the Latin calere - "be hot". You can probably already guess that calere is the origin of word calorie (used to measure heat). Other heat related words sharing the same root include scald, cauldron, chowder (named for the pot it was cooked in), and my favorite: nonchalant - literally someone who doesn't get heated up.

Marks dismisses the folk etymology of cholent deriving from "shul ende", reflecting the time of day when the dish was eaten, because the name emerged in France before the development of Old Yiddish.

The Wikipedia article for cholent offers a few more folk etymologies:

One widely quoted folk etymology, relying on the French pronunciation of cholent or the Central and Western European variants shalent or shalet, derives the word from French chaud ("hot") and lent ("slow"). Another folk etymology derives cholent (or sholen) from the Hebrew she’lan, which means "that rested [overnight]". This refers to the old time cooking process of Jewish families placing their individual pots of cholent into the town baker's ovens that always stayed hot and slow-cooked the food overnight. Yet another etymology is Old French chaudes lentes hot lentils.

A similar dish to Ashkenazi cholent is shkanah - which Marks defines as "a dish of baked beans cooked overnight for Sabbath lunch." He writes that it originated in Spain, and the Jews expelled from there brought it with them to the Netherlands. In an interesting twist, he points out that the Pilgrims spent time in the Netherlands after they left England but before going to America. These Puritans tried to take the bible much more literally than other Christians at the time, and so they were eager to adopt this Sephardic dish, allowing them also to eat hot food on the Sabbath. This dish, when they came to America, became known as Boston baked beans (the British had no previous tradition of baking beans). And from there came Boston's nickname - Beantown.

I imagine many of my readers today would like an nice warm dish, and where I am the forecast for Shabbat is particularly cold. So enjoy your cholent!

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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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al panav and al hapanim

Here are two Hebrew expressions that sound very similar, but have very different meanings.

"Al Panav" על פניו  - literally means "on it's face", and can be translated as "apparently".

"Al Hapanim" על הפנים -  literally means "on the face" and is a slang term meaning "the [situation/thing] is terrible."

The origin of al panav is easier to determine. It comes from the English "on the face of it", which likely originates in the Latin prima facie (at first face). It's not an ideal Hebrew phrase, as there is an existing word in Hebrew with the same meaning - לכאורה lichora. However, as this site points out, if you really want a similar sounding phrase, then al pnei hadevarim על פני הדברים is closer to being correct.

Al hapanim is a harder one to crack. According to the same article I quoted above, it doesn't appear in the older slang dictionaries. All I've seen so far are speculations, but they all seem reasonable.

In Rosenthal's Dictionary of Hebrew Slang, he suggests it comes from the English "to fall flat on your face" (an expression which fully translated into Hebrew made it into Yehudit Ravitz's 2000 song געגוע - which contains the lyrics איך לא ידעתי לא ליפול על הפנים).

Nissan Netzer in his Hebrew in Jeans - the Image of Hebrew Slang, says the origin might be from Yiddish, which also have expressions meaning "to fall on the face".

This article (not sure who the author is) has a few more suggestions. They quote another Yiddish phrase meaning "his face fell", which is similar to the biblical נפלו פניו naflu panav (see Bereshit 4:6). They also mention that Yiddish, Russian and English all have phrases meaning "a slap in the face" - so perhaps one of them influenced the Hebrew.

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kasha, kishke and kutach

In my last post on Balashon a few years ago, I noted that I was more or less suspending my writing here due to another project I've been working on. Well, the project is still going on, but I think I'd like to return to updating this site as well.

When I originally started Balashon, I would write short pieces, almost daily. But as time went on, my library - both physical and virtual - got much bigger, and I often felt that if I didn't come up with some original insight in my research, it wasn't worth posting anything. While that might have led to some posts I'm rather proud of, it became fairly intimidating to start anything new, particularly if I didn't have the time required to work on something so big.


So now, I think I'd like to return to my original format. I'll try to write frequently, and often I'll just quote one or two sources. I'll be much more willing to return to a topic later if I don't have everything in front of me when I'm writing. So Balashon will be less comprehensive, but hopefully still accurate and interesting. We'll see how it goes.


For today's post, I'd like to quote from a fascinating book -the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food by Gil Marks. Gil was a brilliant food writer, who sadly passed away last month. His book is full of interesting information about the history of food - as well as great recipes - and I hope to refer to it frequently in the future. May his memory be a blessing.


In an earlier post, I wrote extensively about the etymologies of both the English word "buckwheat" and the Hebrew kusemet. Many of us know the term for cooked buckwheat by the Slavic or Yiddish form of "kasha". Here's a part of the entry for "kasha" in the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food:

Cooked cereals subsumed under the term kasha were once served at all Slavic feasts and important occasions ... By the second century CE, a standard Persian dish was kashk (kutach in the Talmud and later kishk in Arabic), originally denoting a porridge made from cracked grains fermented with whey, then dried. Later, some Middle Easterners began using keshek or kishk to denote any type of cooked cereal. The Persian name eventually travelled to eastern Europe, becoming the Slavic kasha and encompassing all grain porridges - fine and coarse, thick and thin, sweet and savory. Incidentally, when leftover kashk was stuffed into animal intestines, the dish became kishke (stuffed derma). .... The Slavic word for buckwheat became grechka or grecha ... Consequently, buckwheat porridge is grechnevaya kasha.... Among eastern Ashkenazim, who were not prone to making hot cooked cereals, kashe or kasha in Yiddish took on the meaning of "husked and toasted buckwheat groats."

For those who can't imagine kasha without noodles - kasha varniskhes - Marks provides a brief origin of that term as well. He begins by describing a Russian and Ukrainian dish from the 16th century of meat or cheese filled pasta. 

Ukrainians took to calling these filled pasta vareniki (little boiled things), from the Slavic var meaning "to boil" ... Pasta stuffed with this [buckwheat] filling was known as kasha vareniki. Eventually, cooks figured out that it was easier to simply mix the kasha with some cooked noodles than to go through the tedious process of filling the pasta; the resulting dish was called kasha varnishkes.

As I've written frequently in the past, food etymologies are among my favorites. Culinary terms are easily borrowed between cultures and lead to stories that are both fascinating and relatively easy to trace. I had read the word kutach כותח many times in the Talmud but would never have guessed it was related to kasha or kishke.


In his entry for kashk/kutach (now that is a comprehensive dictionary!), Marks defines it as "dried balls of fermented cracked wheat or barley and yogurt whey that are usually simmered with water into a thick soup", and points out that "Kutach ha'Bavli is among the most commonly mentioned foods in the Talmud", and the fact that the "citation of kutach in the Mishnah, at least four centuries before the earliest record of kashk in a non-Jewish source, reveals that it was well established by 200 CE."

While kutach was loved by the Jews in Central Asia, Marks writes that it "merited extreme scorn among the residents of Israel." I've personally never tried it - but it does sound interesting. Kasha, on the other hand, is one of my family's favorite comfort foods.

 

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kasha, kishke and kutach

In my last post on Balashon a few years ago, I noted that I was more or less suspending my writing here due to another project I've been working on. Well, the project is still going on, but I think I'd like to return to updating this site as well.

When I originally started Balashon, I would write short pieces, almost daily. But as time went on, my library - both physical and virtual - got much bigger, and I often felt that if I didn't come up with some original insight in my research, it wasn't worth posting anything. While that might have led to some posts I'm rather proud of, it became fairly intimidating to start anything new, particularly if I didn't have the time required to work on something so big.


So now, I think I'd like to return to my original format. I'll try to write frequently, and often I'll just quote one or two sources. I'll be much more willing to return to a topic later if I don't have everything in front of me when I'm writing. So Balashon will be less comprehensive, but hopefully still accurate and interesting. We'll see how it goes.


For today's post, I'd like to quote from a fascinating book -the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food by Gil Marks. Gil was a brilliant food writer, who sadly passed away last month. His book is full of interesting information about the history of food - as well as great recipes - and I hope to refer to it frequently in the future. May his memory be a blessing.


In an earlier post, I wrote extensively about the etymologies of both the English word "buckwheat" and the Hebrew kusemet. Many of us know the term for cooked buckwheat by the Slavic or Yiddish form of "kasha". Here's a part of the entry for "kasha" in the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food:

Cooked cereals subsumed under the term kasha were once served at all Slavic feasts and important occasions ... By the second century CE, a standard Persian dish was kashk (kutach in the Talmud and later kishk in Arabic), originally denoting a porridge made from cracked grains fermented with whey, then dried. Later, some Middle Easterners began using keshek or kishk to denote any type of cooked cereal. The Persian name eventually travelled to eastern Europe, becoming the Slavic kasha and encompassing all grain porridges - fine and coarse, thick and thin, sweet and savory. Incidentally, when leftover kashk was stuffed into animal intestines, the dish became kishke (stuffed derma). .... The Slavic word for buckwheat became grechka or grecha ... Consequently, buckwheat porridge is grechnevaya kasha.... Among eastern Ashkenazim, who were not prone to making hot cooked cereals, kashe or kasha in Yiddish took on the meaning of "husked and toasted buckwheat groats."

For those who can't imagine kasha without noodles - kasha varniskhes - Marks provides a brief origin of that term as well. He begins by describing a Russian and Ukrainian dish from the 16th century of meat or cheese filled pasta. 

Ukrainians took to calling these filled pasta vareniki (little boiled things), from the Slavic var meaning "to boil" ... Pasta stuffed with this [buckwheat] filling was known as kasha vareniki. Eventually, cooks figured out that it was easier to simply mix the kasha with some cooked noodles than to go through the tedious process of filling the pasta; the resulting dish was called kasha varnishkes.

As I've written frequently in the past, food etymologies are among my favorites. Culinary terms are easily borrowed between cultures and lead to stories that are both fascinating and relatively easy to trace. I had read the word kutach כותח many times in the Talmud but would never have guessed it was related to kasha or kishke.


In his entry for kashk/kutach (now that is a comprehensive dictionary!), Marks defines it as "dried balls of fermented cracked wheat or barley and yogurt whey that are usually simmered with water into a thick soup", and points out that "Kutach ha'Bavli is among the most commonly mentioned foods in the Talmud", and the fact that the "citation of kutach in the Mishnah, at least four centuries before the earliest record of kashk in a non-Jewish source, reveals that it was well established by 200 CE."

While kutach was loved by the Jews in Central Asia, Marks writes that it "merited extreme scorn among the residents of Israel." I've personally never tried it - but it does sound interesting. Kasha, on the other hand, is one of my family's favorite comfort foods.

 

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my absence

I realize that I haven't posted on Balashon in several months, and I think I should post an explanation. Here's the story:

When I started the blog, I was writing and posting almost every day. That was partly because my hours at work made it easier to do so, but also because the resources I used in researching my posts were limited - a few books and a small number of web sites. In fact in the first few months, I could publish while traveling by simply taking everything with me!

As time went on, I discovered more and more books, more web sites, and more people to consult with about any topic I was researching (many of them readers of this site - thanks!) And eventually, I discovered how to use the National Library at Hebrew University (which now is pretty close to where I work). And as a perfectionist (if not a particularly effective one), I'm rarely satisfied posting anything unless I've researched it as much as I feel I can. So naturally, that makes more work in writing a post.

Additionally, I've become less satisfied with my earlier posts, where I simply shared a few interesting etymologies. I still do that sometimes, but I prefer to write about a topic where I've discovered something new. I think I've done that with some of my more recent posts, and it's a lot more fun. But again - a lot more work.

Add that to more pressure for time at work and home, and you can see why my posting has become more erratic, to say the least. But I haven't given up on Balashon, nor do I plan to. Actually, since my last post in January, I started working on one of the most interesting and complicated posts I had ever done - the origin and meaning of the phrases "mazal tov" and "b'shaa tova". Dozens of sources, and some really interesting revelations. But I need some serious free time to start putting it all together. And then the new project came.

What new project? Last December I noticed something that I had never paid attention to before: why does the Torah not explain the reason that Avraham (Abraham) was chosen by God? I started looking in to the question just as a curiosity in the beginning, with no idea what this would lead me to. As it happens, this question affects almost every aspect of Jewish philosophy.

Now this has turned into a huge project, which I hope will end up published at the end - perhaps even as a book. Interestingly, this quest has connections to Balashon as well: both to my yet unwritten "mazal tov" post, and about the significance of the Hebrew language in general (something I'm often asked by readers).

I do hope to go back to writing posts on Balashon before I'm done with the Avraham question, but I can't promise when that will be. I do still have all of your emails and comments, and still have my index file with almost 2000 words and the sources that discuss them. But please be patient.

One more note - my old comment system is closing down in October, and you all have written great comments over the years. After trying to import the comments in bulk to the new system (which you currently see on the site), I've determined that to keep them I'll need to copy them manually. This is a tedious process, and is using any of my "Balashon" time that I had at all.

Again, thank you all for continuing to follow the blog - and I hope to be writing again soon!

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gafrur

In our discussion of dalak דלק - "burn", I didn't mention one derivative - madlek מדלק. That's because you've probably never heard of it. It was Ben Yehuda's attempt to come up with a Hebrew term for "match" - as in a match used to start a fire. In his dictionary Ben Yehuda writes that the word is "used in Hebrew speech in the Land of Israel, and has already been used in newspapers and books."

I first found the word mentioned in this article in his newspaper, HaZvi, in 1897, as well as in this article in the newspaper HaMeliz by Dr. HaEtzioni¹. Neither article explains what the word means, so it must have been in use for some time beforehand. In the same article, before using "madlek", HaEtzioni also writes "tzita" ציתה. This was the term suggested for "match" by Rabbi Zeev Yaabetz (1847-1924), based on the root צתת - "to kindle" (a related root is יצת). Another form found is tzitit צתית. (Klausner claims that this is based on Shabbat 119a - רבי זירא מצתת צתותי - Rabbi Zeira would "metzatat tzitutei" - light small sticks of wood.")

And these aren't the only suggested Hebrew translations for match following the development of the modern match in the 19th century (see the Wikipedia article for an interesting history of the match). The earliest ones were two word phrases, mentioning both the wood and the sulfur coating, such as etz-gofrit עץ-גפרית ("sulfur wood") or kesam megupar קיסם מגופר ("sulfur stick") - both used by Mendele Mocher Sforim in his early works -the latter in 1872. (Gofrit  גופרית - "sulfur" is found in Bereshit 19:24, and is cognate with the Akkadian kubritu, and Klein says that it is "probably a loan word from some non-semitic language." It is not related to gofer גופר - the wood used to make Noah's Ark in Bereshit 6:14, although Yaakov Etzion discusses a midrashic connection in his comprehensive article here.)

However, one of the changes from Hebrew of the Haskala to modern Hebrew was the replacement of two word phrases with single word ones (Reuven Sivan lists 57 of them in his essay "חליפות ותמורות בלשון ימינו" in Leshonenu L'Am 31:9-10, 1980). Other one word suggestions (besides madlek and tzita) included madlik מדליק, mav'er מבער, and alit אלית (by Eliahu Sapir, based on the Talmudic phrase in Tamid 29a - מציתים את האליתא).

But the word that stuck was gafrur גפרור,  gofrit. Sivan claims the word was coined by Mendele, and used in his revised 1909 edition of his book HaEmek HaBacha. I found gafrur used (again, without explanation) in this 1905 article in the newspaper HaZman. It is not clear to me if Mendele used, and perhaps popularized a word coined by someone else, or if the article in HaZman was using a word Mendele had coined, but Sivan only noted the later revision of the earlier book as an example.

Klein suggests that gafrur was coined "under the semantic influence of Yiddish שוועבעלע (=match), derived from שוועבל (=sulphur), or of German Schwefelholzchen (= lucifer match) from Schwefel (=sulphur)." This similarity might have helped its popularity.

But it wasn't a smooth road to its adoption. In a 1925 essay (האנארכיה הלשונות - "Linguistic Anarchy"), Klausner writes that different families in Jerusalem use different words for "match".  Agnon made fun of the number of options in his 1941 story לבית אבא (L'Beit Abba - "To Father's House"), where he had a character intentionally use the term gafrir גפריר, even though that was not one of the terms suggested. But in the end, gafrur was - how shall we say? - a perfect match...

~~~~~~~~~`
1. It appears that this is Dr. Yehuda Holzman HaEtzioni (mentioned here). He was likely related to Shmuel Holzman, who purchased the land for Kibbutz Kfar Etzion in the 1930s, and named it after himself as well ("holz" in German and "etz" עץ in Hebrew both mean "wood".)

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dalak

On Chanukah we light the candles - מדליקים את הנרות madlikim et ha nerot. The root of madlik מדליק - is dalak דלק - "burn, kindle", and is familiar from many related words such as delek דלק - "fuel", the verb tadlek תדלק - "to refuel" (the tiphel - like hiphil and shaphel, also a causative form of the verb), and daleket דלקת - which likely meant fever in Biblical Hebrew (Devarim 28:22) and today means "inflammation".

The verb dalak appears nine times in Biblical Hebrew as well, and in about half the appearances it also means "to burn". However in the other half it has a different meaning - "to pursue, chase," such as in Bereshit 31:36 - מַה חַטָּאתִי, כִּי דָלַקְתָּ אַחֲרָי  - "What is my sin that you should pursue me". (In some of the verses there is some disagreement as to which meaning applies, such as Yeshaya 5:11. Rashi and Radak say it means "burning" while Ibn Ezra says "chasing". Kutscher (p. 88) writes that perhaps this is a play on words and both senses are alluded to.)

What is the connection, if any, between "burning" and "chasing"?

Not surprisingly, there are a few opinions on this issue. One opinion is that the original meaning was to burn, and the concept of "chasing" came later - in the sense of "hot pursuit", as we say in English. Kaddari finds a similar development in Akkadian, where hamatu means both to burn and to hasten.

A second opinion is that the first meaning was "to chase", and later came the idea of burning, because of the way the fire chases the wick. This idea can be found in Rashi on Tehilim 7:14, who says that "every delika דליקה is chasing". Shadal on Bereshit 31:36 writes that dalak is related to dalag דלג - "leap" and both mean to ascend, which is why kindling the lamps in Shemot 25:37 is called וְהֶעֱלָה אֶת-נֵרֹתֶיהָ - literally, "raise up the lamps", because the fire ascends (also discussed in his Igrot Shadal, p.14).

The last opinion is that of Ben Yehuda, who feels that the two meanings are unrelated, as they each have separate Arabic cognates (and begin with different letters). Klein follows this approach as well, and says that the meaning "to burn" is cognate to the Arabic dhaliqa (=was sharp), but the sense "to chase" is cognate with the Arabic dalaqa (=he advanced, proceeded).

Whatever the connection - Chanukah is almost over. So make haste, get in hot pursuit, go up - and light those candles!

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tag

The word tag תג has some new popular usages: tag mechir תג מחיר - the "price tag" reprisal attacks carried out by extremists in Israel, and "tagging" photographs in Facebook - known in Hebrew as tiyug תיוג. A reader asked - is there a connection between the English word "tag" and the Hebrew one?

The answer is "well, maybe, maybe not".

Let's look first at the Hebrew word tag. Meaning "crown", it is first found in Talmudic Hebrew (also used for the "crowns" on tops of Hebrew letters) - and is borrowed from the Aramaic תגא taga. Taga is related to the Arabic taj, and both were borrowed from the Persian word taj of the same meaning (as appears in the famous Indian building Taj Mahal - the "crown of palaces"). Klein writes that the Persian word comes from the Indo-European base *steg meaning "to encircle, crown". In Greek this root gives us the word stephein (to surround, encircle, wreath), which is the origin of the name Stephen (meaning crown).

The English word "tag" has an entirely different origin. The Online Etymology Dictionary has the following entry:

"small hanging piece," c.1400, perhaps from a Scandinavian source (cf. Norw. tagg "point, prong," Swed. tagg "prickle, thorn") cognate with tack. Meaning "label" is first recorded 1835; sense of "automobile license plate" is recorded from 1935, originally underworld slang. Meaning "an epithet, popular designation" is recorded from 1961, hence slang verb meaning "to write graffiti in public places" (1990). The verb meaning "to furnish with a tag" is from mid-15c. To tag along is first recorded 1900.

So no connection between the two terms. So why was I hesitant earlier?

Because today in addition to the meaning crown, the Hebrew tag also has the same meaning in the word in English - "badge, label". (There is also the related word mutag מותג meaning "trademark, brand"). To me it seems crystal clear that this sense of the word is borrowed from the English. However both Klein and Even Shoshan, while providing the definition "badge" only mention the "taga" etymology. Stahl (in his Arabic/Hebrew etymological dictionary) goes so far as to say that the Hebrew tag used for labels on merchandise and army uniforms comes from the meaning "little crowns". (Mordechai Rosen his new book Sipurei Milim also has a full entry on tag and mutag with no mention of the English word "tag").

So if all these experts are correct, then there is no connection between any of the meanings of tag in Hebrew and "tag" in English. But I'm rather doubtful. Do any you have more information? Tag - you're it!

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tris

In our discussion of the word shelet שלט, we said that Targum Yonatan on Divrei Hayamim translated שלטים as "shields". The word used in his translation is תריסין - terisin, or in the singular, tris תריס.

Klein writes that tris as shield comes from the Greek thyreos, meaning shield, which in turn derives from the Greek thyra - "door". (Going back to the Indo-European root, Klein shows that thyra is cognate with the English word "door" as well.) However, the connection between thyreos and thyra is strange to me. He writes that thyreos is a "stone put against the door". I don't see how that means shield.

I have an easier time understanding the entry in the Online Etymology Dictionary for "thyroid", which also derives from thyreos:

1690s (in ref. to both the cartilage and the gland), from Gk. thyreoiedes "shield-shaped" (in khondros thyreoiedes "shield-shaped cartilage," used by Galen to describe the "Adam's apple" in the throat), from thyreos "oblong, door-shaped shield" (from thyra "door") + -eides "form, shape." The noun, short for thyroid gland, is recorded from 1849.

The Hebrew word for thyroid reflects this origin as well - בלוטת התריס balutat hatris.

Another meaning of tris - and unlike shield, this one is still used in modern Hebrew - is "shutter, blind". Here Klein points out that it comes from the Greek thyris - "window", which in turn also derive from thyra - "door".

We also have a verb that derives from tris - התריס - "to contradict, oppose". Klein is not clear about which sense - shield or shutter - led to this verb. First he has an entry for התריס meaning "he shielded, protected", and then figuratively meaning "he protested against, contradicted, debated." His second entry for התריס is defined as "to contradict, oppose", but the etymology is given as "denominated from תריס (=shutter)".

In his dictionary, Even Shoshan agrees with the former, and says it derives from shield, but doesn't explain why. He does, however, say that the great debaters known as baalei terisin בעלי תריסין (mentioned in Berachot 27b), knew how to argue in the "wars of Torah". (According to Rashi; the Aruch says they were literally soldiers). So perhaps this military imagery - Jastrow calls them the "shield bearers" - led to the connection between tris as shield and hitris התריס as "to contradict, oppose".

Yaakov Etsion in this article suggests that perhaps the development went like this: these were people who were willing to shield and defend themselves, and not give in to others. From here the concept progressed to those who took the offensive, and contradicted others when necessary.

Perhaps therefore this is an early version of the adage "The best defense is a good offense". But as comedian Norm Macdonald noted, "The second best defense is a good defense"...

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shalit and shelet

Both before and after Gilad Shalit's release, we've seen many signs related to the campaign.

His surname Shalit שליט means "ruler, leader" in Hebrew. Is there any connection to the word shelet שלט - meaning "sign"?

Let's first look at the word shalit. It derives from the root שלט, meaning "to rule". Klein provides the following etymology:

borrowed from Biblical Aramaic שלט (= he ruled, was master of, had dominion), which is related to Jewish Palestinian Aramaic and Syriac שלט (of same meaning), Ugaritic shlt (=ruler), Arabic saluta (he overcame, prevailed), Akkadian shalatu (=to rule), shaltu, shitlutu (= powerful, mighty), Ethiopian shallata (=he gave power.)

From this root we get the words shilton שלטון - "authority, government", sholtan שָׁלְטָן - "dominion" (note the kamatz katan, as this word that appears in the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur prayers - שהשלטן לפניך - is often mispronounced), and shlita שליטה - "control" (the honorific for living rabbis שליט"א is not related, but is an acronym of שיחיה לאורך ימים טובים אמן - "may he live many long and good days, Amen".)

Another related word is the Arabic sultan. The Online Etymology Dictionary has this entry:

1550s, from M.Fr. sultan "ruler of Turkey" (16c.), from Arabic sultan "ruler, king, queen, power, dominion," from Aramaic shultana "power," from shelet "have power." His wife, mother, daughter, concubine, or sister is a sultana.

What about shelet - "sign"?  The word appears in the Bible six times, always in the plural, and always relating to military matters. The exact meaning, however, is not clear. Some (Rashi on Shir Hashirim 4:4, based on the usage in Yirmiyahu 51:11) say it means the quiver that holds the arrows, and others say it means "shield", perhaps specifically of leather (Ibn Ezra; Targum Yonatan on Divrei Hayamim I 18:7 and Divrei Hayamim II 23:9). Ben Yehuda writes that as a military term, shelet is related to שלט in the sense of power and might.

The German word for shield is "schild", and this apparently led to the word shelet taking on the meaning sign. Klein writes:

Borrowed from שלט shelet = (shield), on analogy of the homophonic German Schild, which has both meanings 'shield', and 'signboard' (however, there the two meanings are artificially differentiated inasmuch as Schild in the sense 'shield' is masculine, in the sense 'signboard' it is neuter).

Philologos, in this interesting article discussing why the Magen David מגן דוד is translated as "Star of David" instead of "Shield of David" notes:

Why did medieval Jews change David’s star to a shield? The obvious answer is that whereas stars have no great resonance in Jewish religious tradition, shields do. In numerous passages in the Bible, God is referred to as the shield of those who trust in Him, including more than a dozen times in the book of Psalms, of which the supposed author was David himself. And in the Songs of Songs we have the verse, referring to the mail-like plates in the necklace of the poem’s beloved, “Thy neck is like the tower of David built for an armory, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers [magen], all shields of [shiltei, the plural possessive of shelet] mighty men.”

It is undoubtedly a pure coincidence that shelet, which is a biblical synonym for magen, sounds very much like the English “shield” and the German and Yiddish Schild, which means both “shield” and “coat of arms” or “sign.” (It was under the influence of Schild, in fact, that shelet came to mean a store or street sign in contemporary Hebrew.) But can it be that the double-triangled hexagon, which was adopted by Yiddish-speaking Prague Jews as the emblem of their flag, was first called by these Jews of Prague a Schild, in the sense of a coat of arms, and then translated into Hebrew as magen and re-interpreted as the warrior’s shield that protected David? I wouldn’t rule out this possibility

So yes, the words shalit and shelet are connected. However, I think it's a good thing that we no longer need to associate Gilad Shalit with the signs requesting his release, but rather with the shielding and protection he finally received. May he live many long and good days, Amen!

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koshiklach

One of the strange sounding words from Sukkot is koshiklach קוישיקלך (or sometimes spelled koishelach קוישלך). It refers to the woven holders used to bind the lulav to the hadasim and aravot. But what is the etymology?

Let's start by taking off the suffixes and then we'll see what's left. The Yiddish suffix -ach indicates a plural, as in rogelach or kinderlach. So removing the -ach leaves us with koishekil (or koshikel)- and "-il" is a diminutive suffix. So koishiklach is the plural of "little koishik". But what's a koishik?

While much of Yiddish comes from German and Hebrew, there's a significant amount that comes from the Slavic languages, and this is where we find the meaning of koishik - "basket". For example, basket in Polish is "koszyk" and in Czech and Slovak - "košík" or "koš". In fact, the Yiddish translation for basketball is koyshbol.


Are there any cognates to these words in English? I think so. The Online Etymology Dictionary provides the following etymology for "chest":

O.E. cest "box, coffer," from P.Gmc. *kista (cf. O.N., O.H.G. kista, O.Fris., M.Du., Ger. kiste, Du. kist), an early borrowing from L. cista "chest, box," from Gk. kiste "a box, basket," from PIE *kista "woven container."

This seems to me likely to be the origin of kos(ik) as being a basket in the Slavic languages as well.

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azazel

On Yom Kippur we read about the service in the Temple that was performed on that holy day. Part of the service involved sending away a goat, marked "to Azazel"  לעזאזל (Vayikra 16:8). The meaning and origin of the word Azazel עזאזל is subject to much debate. Levine, in the JPS commentary to Vayikra, writes the following (I've added Hebrew text to his transliteration):

The precise meaning of Hebrew 'aza'zel עזאזל, found nowhere else in the Bible, has been disputed since antiquity and remains uncertain even to the present time. Over the centuries, exegesis of this name has followed three lines of interpretation.

According to the first, Azazel is the name of the place in the wilderness to which the scapegoat was dispatched; the term is taken as synonymous with 'erets gezerah ארץ גזרה, "inaccessible region," in verse 22. Verse 10 may also suggest this interpretation. When translated literally it reads: "and send it [the he-goat] off to Azazel, to the wilderness." Yoma 67b understands 'aza'zel as "a fierce, difficult land," taking the first part of the word to mean 'azz עז, "strong, fierce".

According to the second line of interpretation, Azazel describes the goat. The word 'aza'zel is a contraction (notarikon) comprised of 'ez עז, "goat" and 'azal אזל, "to go away," hence "the goat that goes away." This interpretation occurs both in the Septuagint and the the Vulgate, and underlies the rabbinic characterization sa'ir ha-mishtalleah שעיר המשתלח, "the goat that is dispatched," in Mishna Yoma 6:2. This is, in fact, the interpretation that led to the English rendering "scapegoat" (from "escape-goat"), which first appeared in Tyndale's English translation of the Bible in 1530. [See this Philologos column for more about the considerations in the creation of the phrase "scapegoat."]

Both of the above interpretations are contrived. The third line of interpretation is preferable. Azazel in later myth was the name given to the demonic ruler of the wilderness. The derivation of the word is uncertain, but the thematic relationship of Azazel to the se'irim שעירים, "goat-demons," of 17:7  suggests that the word 'ez, "goat," is represented in it. The form 'aza'zel may have developed through reduplication of the letter zayin: 'ez'el, "mighty goat," was pronounced 'ezez'el and, finally, 'aza'zel.

Bula, in the Daat Mikra, quotes the "fierce, difficult land" interpretation mentioned in Yoma (and by Rashi on the verse). In a footnote, however, he offers some additional options. First of all, he points out that the letter lamed might be added to the root עזז, as we find in a number of other nouns like barzel ברזל and karmel כרמל, and the alef was also added in, like in the word tzavar צואר. This would make azazel related to the Arabic azaz, meaning "hard, unworkable land".

He then goes on to say that he doesn't think the theory that Azazel refers to a place of idol worship is likely, but even if it is true, it doesn't mean that the service was still associated with idol worship. He points out that there are many phrases in Hebrew that originally had idolatrous connotations, but received new meaning according to the monotheistic Hebrew approach. For example, he says that the phrase ריח ניחוח - "pleasing odor to God" (Vayikra 1:9) also was adopted by the Torah from the language of idolators, even though Judaism doesn't believe that God actually takes pleasure from smells.

His last theory, based on the BDB Lexicon, is that perhaps it is related to the Arabic root עזל 'azzala, meaning "he removed", so this would refer to the removal of the sins, by means of the goat.

In Modern Hebrew the phrase "lech l'azazel" לך לעזאזל means "go to hell". I don't think that this is due to an association with demons. The Even Shoshan dictionary quotes the responsa of the 17th century Chavat Yair as saying לך לעזאזל המדברה! - "go to Azazel in the desert!" So I think the idea here is just to send to an uninhabitable place, in a similar way that the Dead Sea is referred to in Talmudic Hebrew.

So for those of you who don't have access to water to do Tashlich, perhaps casting off your sins to the uninhabitable desert could have the same effect...

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tekiah

In the previous post on teruah, we mentioned that while teruah refers to the short blasts (of the trumpet or shofar) and tekiah תקיעה refers to the long blasts, the verb taka תקע simply means "blowing on an instrument" (regardless of the length of the blasts). Klein writes that the verb fully means "to thrust, clap, give a blow, blast", and he point out that the sense development is similar to the German stossen - "to thrust, to give a blast, blow" and das Horn stossen - "to blow the horn". Ben Yehuda writes that perhaps the origin of the root comes from the sound of the tekiah.

Kaddari writes that the biblical meanings of the root include: a) to strike - with hands to clap, or to shake hands (to guarantee),  b) to drive in - with a sword (e.g. Shoftim 3:21), with a peg (Shoftim 16:14, Yeshaya 22:23), or a tent (Bereshit 31:25), c) to thrust - in regards to wind (Shemot 10:19), and of course d) to blow on an instrument. He quotes the linguist Eliezer Rubinstein from an article in this book as saying that the basic meaning of the Biblical root תקע is "to cause an object to change its location". This is interesting, because in Modern Hebrew it refers to something much more permanent, as seen by the related words takua תקוע - "stuck" and teka תקע - "(electrical) plug".

Steinberg, and many others say that the Biblical town of Tekoa (not far from my home in Efrat) originally meant "place of setting up a tent". This also inspired the founders of the city of Tekoa, Washington. On the town's website they explain how in 1884:

Mrs. Dan Truax, standing on the porch of her house on the west bank of Hangman Creek, looked at the large number of tents in the city, temporary shelters for the railroad workers and others. She suggested to her husband that they accept the counsel of Amos in the Bible and call the community Tekoa, from the Hebrew word meaning "city of tents", which was about all that Tekoa was at the time. And so the name stuck.

I wonder if they understood the play on words when they wrote "the name stuck..."

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teruah

Rosh Hashana is coming up this week, and I thought I'd look at some of the words associated with the shofar sounds heard on that day. Since the biblical name for Rosh Hashana is Yom Teruah יום תרועה (Bamidbar 29:1) or Zichron Teruah זכרון תרועה (Vayikra 23:24), lets start by looking at the word teruah תרועה.

In the section of the Torah detailing the laws of the trumpets (Bamidbar 10:1-10), a distinction is made between the tekiah תקיעה - "the long blast" and the teruah, "the short blast". The tekiah is used for gathering the camp together and happy occasions, whereas the teruah indicates the camp should move, and is used at times of war. However, the verse (10:5) uses a combination of the roots to describe the blowing of the teruah: וּתְקַעְתֶּם תְּרוּעָה (ut'kat'em teruah). Milgrom, in his JPS commentary there, explains as follows:

short blasts:  Hebrew teru'ah, verbal form heri'a, in contrast to "blow long blasts," taka'. It should be noted that the term "blow long blasts" is expressed simply by the verb taka' (vv. 3-4), but "blow short blasts" requires the compound expression taka' teru'ah (vv. 5-6). The reason for these distinct forms is twofold.

(1) The term teru'ah and its corresponding verb heri'a refer elsewhere to a vocal shout by warriors (e.g. Josh. 6:5,10, 16, 20) and worshipers (e.g. Pss. 47:2; 95:2), whereas the sole verb signifying the blowing of a horn is taka' (e.g. Josh. 6:13). Hence when the text wishes to express the idea of blowing the teru'ah signal on the trumpet it must either use the verb taka', signifying blowing on an instrument, and the object teru'ah to indicate the appropriate signal, or, if it uses the verb heri'a, it must specify that the sound was produced by a trumpet (v. 9).

(2) Teru'ah can refer to a battle cry (cf. Amos 1:14, Jer. 14:19); and hence, its use in breaking camp implies signaling the Israelites to move from an encamped peaceful position to a mobile battle formation. Thus the trumpets taken into the Midianite war are actually called "the trumpets of teru'ah" (31:6, cf 2 Chron 13:12).

So we see from Milgrom that teruah (or the verb heria הריע) can be used to refer both to the noise of a trumpet/shofar, or the noise of people. Dr. Nissan Netzer discusses this in the latest issue of the parasha sheet Me'at Min Ha'or. He writes that the original meaning of the verb heria (from the root רו"ע) meant to blow on a shofar or trumpet, and later that was expanded to mean the shouts of a crowd of people (Klein seems to indicate the reverse development). Netzer then goes on to point out than in Rabbinic Hebrew, the verb hitria התריע was created by adding the letter tav from the word teruah (similar to the process we saw in the verb taram from teruma). Whereas originally the Biblical and Rabbinic forms of the verb had the same meaning, in Modern Hebrew they diverge: heria has a positive connotation - "to applaud", whereas hitria has a negative one - "to protest, to warn" (and neither meaning today refers to blowing a shofar; for that we only have the verb taka).

It is very easy to mix up hatra'ah התרעה - warning, with the similar sounding hatraah התראה - which also means warning. But the former means also "alert, alarm" (think of the shofar, and the original distinction of teruah), while the latter also has the sense of "give advance notice" (for example, as witnesses are required to do in capital cases). Or as the site Safa Ivrit has it, התראה means "warning someone not do something" and התרעה means "warning about something that is about to happen" (see also this explanation by the Hebrew Language Academy).

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delpak

In my previous post on the word "bar" בר, I mentioned that there was one more meaning I hadn't discussed. That, of course, is the identical meaning in English - "tavern", which is borrowed from English for use in Modern Israeli Hebrew. The "bar" in that bar refers to the counter on which the food or drinks were served.

The Hebrew word for "counter" is delpak דלפק (particularly the counter of a bank or a kiosk). Klein has the following entry:

1. Post-Biblical Hebrew: small tripod, small table. 2. New Hebrew: counter [Perhaps of Greek Delphike (= a table from Delphi)]

In the mishna we find alternate spellings: according to Albeck in Kelim 22:1 it is vocalized dulpeki דלפקי, and in Avoda Zara 5:5 dulbeki דלבקי.

One theory as to the origin of the name of the Greek site Delphi is that it derives from the "Greek delphis 'dolphin'. Supposedly Apollo assumed this form to found the shrine." In Modern Hebrew we also use the word "dolfin" דולפין to refer to the aquatic mammal, but there are those such as Yehuda Felix (quoted in the Daat Mikra on Yechezkel 16:9) and Sarna in in the JPS Shmot (25:5) who say that the Biblical tachash תחש was a dolphin (due to the similarity with the Arabic tuhas, meaning dolphin).

According to Klein and others, the Greek delphis for dolphin is related to delphus, "womb", in allusion to the womb of the female (unlike other non-mammalian sea creatures). A related word is the Greek adelphos "brother," literally "from the same womb," as is found in the city Philadelphia - the city of "brotherly love".

The older name for Delphi was Pytho, which gave the name "python", which was originally a "fabled serpent, slain by Apollo, near Delphi". Since at this oracle the gods would speak through the body of the priestess (who sat on a tripod), in Rabbinic Hebrew a pitom פיתום came to mean a ventriloquist. (And if you think this has anything to do with the phrase Ma Pitom - well, no way!)

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bar

In my post about bar mitzva, I wrote

bar בר means "son" (primarily in Aramaic, but also in Hebrew, see Mishlei 31:2)

The question is what is the connection between bar and the Hebrew word for son - בן ben? And does bar as "son" have a connection to any of the other meanings of the word bar, such as "outside", "pure" or "grain"?

In his entry for ben, Klein writes that

The change of n to r in Aramaic, Syriac, and Mehri is difficult to explain; it may be due to regressive dissimilation.

(See more detail in the article The Forms of 'Son' and 'Daughter' in Aramaic, by Steven Fassberg in the book Aramaic in its Historical and Linguistic Setting.)

Regarding the other meanings of bar, Klein doesn't connect them to "son", but does show how they are related to each other.  He discusses them all under the root ברר, meaning "to purify, select, set apart, separate". In his Hebrew etymological dictionary, he derives from this root the following words:

• bar בר - threshed grain or corn, from ברר (to purify, select)
• bar בר - pure, clean, related to ברר
• bor בור - lye, alkali, potash, from ברר. Related to another word for lye, borit בורית. Surprisingly, he makes no connection to "borax", which has the same meaning, but is of Persian origin (this book does connect the two).
• bar בר - exterior, outside. May have developed from another meaning of bar - "open field". Also related is the adverb bar, meaning "except, outside of". 
• beram ברם - but, however. A contraction of the Aramaic בר מא - "except what".
• baraita ברייתא - the Tanaitic sayings not incorporated in (excluded from) the Mishna.
• barur ברור - chosen; clear, distinct, certain
• borer בורר - arbitrator 

An English word with the same source is "barrio".  The Online Etymology Dictionary has the following:

"ward of a Spanish or Spanish-speaking city," sometimes also used of rural settlements, from Sp. barrio "district, suburb," from Arabic barriya "open country" (fem.), from barr "outside" (of the city). Main modern sense of "Spanish-speaking district in a U.S. city" is 1939; original reference is to Spanish Harlem in New York City.

It's worth noting that Stahl, in his Arabic etymological dictionary, disagrees with Klein, and connects bar as "son" with bar as "out". He notes the Hebrew word for "offspring, descendant", צאצא tze'etza, which derives from the root יצא - "to go out". So too does the child "go out" from his parents.

One other word that Klein thinks may be related to ברר is ברית brit (actually better spelled berit/b'rit, but that's not at all common) - "covenant". He writers:

Of uncertain etymology. Meyer derives it from ברה (= to eat bread); it would have been so called because in ancient times it was customary for those concluding a treaty or alliance to partake of a meal. Several scholars, with less probability, derive the noun ברית from ברה (= to choose.)

There's one more "bar" I didn't discuss, but I'll save that for the next post...

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bar mitzva

As you may have noticed, I have not written a post in several weeks (actually a few months). While life always has other distractions (like work), this time my biggest reason for not writing was my son's Bar Mitzva - both the preparation for it and recovery from it took up a lot of time. It was a wonderful event and we're very proud of him. And so in honor of the occasion, I thought I'd discuss the phrase a bit.

Since bar בר means "son" (primarily in Aramaic, but also in Hebrew, see Mishlei 31:2), and mitzva מצוה is generally translated as "commandment", a popular translation for bar mitzvah בר מצוה is "son of the commandment(s)", which would be understood as "a son, a boy, to whom the mitzvot apply (since he reached the age of 13)."

However, that translation isn't actually the best one. Bar, as well as ben בן (the more common Hebrew term for "son"), is a prefix found in many phrases with a meaning that is hard to pin down, but includes such senses as "belonging to", "worthy of", "capable of" and the one most relevant to us, "obligated in".

While in many cases mitzva can refer to an individual commandment, there are many times in the Torah where it refers to the Law as a whole, and actually is a synonym for the word "Torah". See for example Devarim 5:28 and 6:25. where we find the phrase כל המצוה. Some translations aren't consistent here, such as the Living Torah, who translates the phrase in the first verse as "all the rules" (despite the fact that it says "hamitzva" and not the plural "hamitzvot") and in the second as "the entire mandate". The JPS, however, uses the word "Instruction" throughout, noting that while the word mitzva literally means "commandment", here it refers to the entire legal corpus. In his JPS commentary on Devarim 4:1, where the additional synonyms חוקים ומשפטים chukim and mishpatim - "laws and rules" are found, Tigay explains them as well as edot עדות and mitzva. He then writes, regarding all these terms, that the Torah "employs the terms without distinction, just as English uses phrases like 'rules and regulations' and 'laws and ordinances'."

So bar mitzva simply means "one who is obligated in the Torah". (We might think that the phrase ben torah בן תורה or the Aramaic equivalent בר אוריין bar orayan would be synonymous, but they diverged into a different sense, with the meaning "one who has learned much Torah, a scholar"). And this meaning of bar mitzva is how it first appears in the Talmud, as in Bava Metzia 96a, where it compares a messenger who is a bar mitzva (i.e. obligated in the mitzvot of the Torah) to a slave, who is not a bar mitzva, since he is not obligated in the mitzvot. (We also find the the phrase bat mitzva בת מצוה in the Talmud, for example Bava Kama 15a, meaning a woman obligated in mitzvot.)

Only late in the Medieval period do we find bar mitzva refer to the boy who has turned 13. But the phrase always refers to the person himself - "he is a bar mitzva". I don't know when it first began to refer to the event or the celebration, but I suspect it is a Yiddishism.

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baal and adon

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 thinking of the name Elohim אלו-הים, but I might have also been thinking of Adonai אדנ-י (which would seem to mean "my Lords"). I don’t believe the rabbi ever directly answered me, but did say something like, “Now that’s a good question.” My understanding at the time was that there was some significant theological significance to the plural forms. In more recent years, I would have assumed that some secular biblical scholars might attribute the plural forms to a polytheistic origin of the Israelite religion.

But due to a question a friend recently asked me, I’ve realized that the plural form doesn’t necessarily say much about the nature of God at all.  She asked why is it that a husband (in Hebrew) is a baal בעל, but the (single) owner (of a pet, or a company) is called baalim בעלים. (We've seen the phenomenon of a plural noun being treated as a singular one before, in our discussions about tavlin and Artzot Habrit.) At first I thought this might be a phenomenon only in Modern Hebrew, but I found baalim meaning "owner" a number of times in Biblical Hebrew (e.g. Shemot 21:29, Yishaya 1:3, Kohelet 5:12) and in the Mishna (Bava Metzia 8:1) as well. After digging a little deeper, I found that the same rule applies to the synonym adon אדון. While the singular form (referring to people, not God) is found in the Tanach (also on one occasion meaning “husband”, Bereshit 18:12), it is frequently found in the plural form adonim אדונים, even though that word is used as a singular meaning "lord, master" (see Yishaya 19:4, Malachi 1:6, and the many cases of אדוניך adonecha and אדוניו adonav in the story of Avraham's servant and the story of Yosef. In no place in the Tanach do the words אדונו or אדונך appear.)

Why is this? Both Rav Hirsch in his commentary on Bereshit 1:1 and Shadal in his essay "Tzelem Elohim" (printed in the collection Mechkerei HaYahadut, pg. 225) explain it as showing full sovereignty and authority over the subject (see also Rashi on Bereshit 35:7).

Hirsch writes:

Using a plural form to designate a plentitude of powers combined in one person is moreover by no means unusual in expressions of mastery and power in the Hebrew language, such as אדנים, בעלים. They always designate a person who possesses the various powers which rule over any object, to whom, accordingly, this object completely subjected in every direction.

Shadal adds that if adon was written in the singular, you might think that the subject would have this master, and additional masters as well.

Some people have claimed that because baal means both owner and husband, this implies that in Judaism the husband "owns" his wife. But as we have seen, there are two different words - baalim for owner, and baal for husband.

The case in Hoshea 2:18

וְהָיָה בַיּוֹם-הַהוּא נְאֻם-ה', תִּקְרְאִי אִישִׁי; וְלֹא-תִקְרְאִי-לִי עוֹד, בַּעְלִי

where in the future we will call God ishi אישי instead of baali בעלי (in the analogy of God as the husband and Israel as the wife) is referring to the negative connotations the word baal got from association with the Semitic deity “Ba’al”, as evidenced from the following verse:

וַהֲסִרֹתִי אֶת-שְׁמוֹת הַבְּעָלִים, מִפִּיהָ; וְלֹא-יִזָּכְרוּ עוֹד, בִּשְׁמָם

For I will remove the names of the Baalim from her mouth, and they shall nevermore be mentioned by name.

So we should not learn from it the nature of the husband / wife relationship in Judaism, although there are those in Israel who prefer to use "ishi" for husband based on this verse.(For more on ish and isha, see this post.)

In any case, the above principle applies to the title Elohim as well. It too has a few uses in the Bible where it refers to people, although it overwhelmingly is a term used for God. But the plurality here is, as Ibn Ezra says in his commentary on Bereshit 1:1, a “plural of respect” (pluralis excellentiae in Latin). This is similar to the “royal we” (pluralis maiestatis/majestatis in Latin) except that in general we don’t find cases of the sovereign referring to themselves in the plural. (For an excellent review of the meaning and usage of Elohim in the Tanakh, see the chapter “The Knowledge of God” in Man and God: Studies in Biblical Theology, by R’ Eliezer Berkovitz.)

In addition to the definitions “husband” and “owner”, baal is a prefix in compounds meaning “possessing”, as in baal habayit בעל הבית – “landlord, host”, baal kriya בעל קריאה (or the Yiddish influenced, more popular, although less grammatically correct baal koreh בעל קורא) – “the Torah reader” (who possesses the knowledge of how to read), and baal teshuva בעל תשובה – a Jew who has returned to following the laws of the Torah, literally “master of return” (in Israeli Hebrew chozer b’teshuva חוזר בתשובה seems more popular.) However, the phrases baal-peh בעל פה - "orally", and baal-korcho בעל-כרחו - "against his will" do not use our word baal, but rather the letter bet as a prefix followed by the preposition al על.

Yet, while baal had the sense of “possessing” even in Biblical Hebrew, adon was used either to refer to God or a “master” even through Rabbinic Hebrew. Since slavery is no longer practiced, and even political leaders do not have full sovereignty over citizens today, that took the punch out of the second meaning of adon. Today it is almost entirely used to mean "mister" or “sir”. This meaning was lost (either deliberately or not) on the New York Times journalist David Shipler, who wrote in 1984 that Arab cab drivers in Israel refer to Israelis as “My Lord”. As Shmuel Katz (here) and David Bar-Illan (here) pointed out, calling someone “adon” or “adoni” does not necessarily suggest any respect, perhaps actually the opposite…

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shabbat hagadol

The Shabbat before Pesach is known as Shabbat Hagadol שבת הגדול - "The Great Sabbath". While the phrase "shabbat hagadol" appears in other contexts earlier in Rabbinic literature (such as in the Retze section of Birkat Hamazon), it is first mentioned as the shabbat before Pesach in the works of Rashi.

For example, in his book Sefer Hapardes, Rashi begins his explanation of the reason for this title by writing:

People are accustomed to calling the shabbat before Pesach "Shabbat Hagadol", but they do not know what makes this shabbat greater than any other. 

He then continues:

The Children of Israel went out of Egypt on a Thursday, as is recorded in Seder Olam. They prepared the lamb for the Pesach sacrifice on the previous shabbat, on the tenth of Nisan. When they were instructed to do so, they wondered: "If we sacrifice an animal which the Egyptians hold sacred, before their very eyes, they will surely stone us." But God told them: "Now you see the wondrous things which I will do for you." The Children of Israel thereupon each took a lamb and kept it for four days. When the Egyptians saw this, they wanted to rise up and take revenge, but they were stricken with all kinds of horrible afflictions and could do no harm to the Children of Israel. Because of the miracles which God performed on that day, the Shabbat before Pesach, it became known as Shabbat Hagadol.

This is a popular explanation, but it is possible to sense from his introduction that Rashi is giving one answer to a question that many people had asked over the years. And in fact, there are many other explanations given for the origin of the name.

Others say that the reason is found in the Haftara read on that day (according to the Levush only when that shabbat is the day immediately before Pesach), describing Messianic times,  and ends with the verse from Malachi 3:23:

הִנֵּה אָנֹכִי שֹׁלֵחַ לָכֶם, אֵת אֵלִיָּה הַנָּבִיא--לִפְנֵי, בּוֹא יוֹם ה', הַגָּדוֹל, וְהַנּוֹרָא

Behold, I will send you Eliya the prophet before the coming of the great (hagadol) and terrifying day of God.

Just like other special shabbatot are named for their haftara (Shabbat Chazon, Shabbat Nachamu, Shabbat Shuva), according to this approach so is Shabbat Hagadol. Some point out that because it is named for the word, the day is called Shabbat Hagadol instead of Shabbat Gadol.

Others use the verse to answer the question why, if the word shabbat is feminine, why isn't the day called Shabbat Hagedola? However, this isn't such a serious question, as we find shabbat as a masculine noun in Biblical Hebrew - shabbat b'shabbato שבת בשבתו (Bamidbar 28:10, Yeshaya 66:23) and shomer shabbat mechalelo שומר שבת מחללו (Yeshaya 56:2). And later in Rabbinic Hebrew, shabbat appears in the masculine in the Amida prayer of Shaharit on shabbat - veyanuchu bo וינוחו בו, and in the greeting shabbat shalom u'mevorach שבת שלום ומבורך.

However, there are those that reject this explanation, since the other haftarot are all named for the first word read, and Shabbat Hagadol does not fit this pattern. Fishbane, in the JPS Haftarot points out that the connection between Shabbat Hagadol and the "great day" in the haftara is too obvious: certainly Rashi and others would have mentioned it had they read this haftara on that day. According to this article, both the Tur and the Levush claim that the haftara was chosen after the day had already been known as Shabbat Hagadol.

Another possible explanation (mentioned by the Shibolei Haleket) relates to the custom on that shabbat of the rabbi giving a long drasha (sermon) - maybe the longest of the year. This shabbat is compared to Yom Kippur, which is also called a "great fast" צומא רבה (Peah 7:4) because of the long prayers (not because of the length of the fast, which is the same as Tisha B'Av).. There are those that temper the cynicism of this approach by saying that it does refer to the sermon, but the day is called "great" because of the importance of the speech, the congregation or the rabbi, not as a complaint to its length. Others say that the custom of the drasha came after the name had been established, but it was originally called a long shabbat because many additional prayers were added on that day.

Other less familiar reasons given include:

• Just like a child becomes an adult (gadol) when he accepts the mitzvot (bar mitzva), so too did the Jews when they accepted their first mitzva.
• In the Torah, the omer offering is brought ממחרת השבת - the day following shabbat. According to Rabbinic tradition (and in opposition to the Sadducees and Karaites) the "shabbat" referred to in the verse is the first day of Pesach. So Shabbat Hagadol refers to the seventh day of the week, as compared to a lesser type of shabbat (in terms of prohibitions) on the first day of the holiday.
• According to a midrash, during their slavery in Egypt the Jews did not work on shabbat. However, immediately following shabbat they would need to return to work (there's a parallel expression in the Israeli army - "every shabbat has a motzei shabbat", since soldiers can't be punished on shabbat itself). However, on this shabbat, the Jews were no longer slaves, so they didn't need to fear returning to their labors.
• Some sources, particularly from Medieval Italian Jewry, seem to indicate that perhaps the Shabbat before every holiday was called "Shabbat Hagadol". However, it is possible that the name spread from the Shabbat before Pesach to the other holidays, instead of the other way around.

Although we stated that the name Shabbat Hagadol first appears as the shabbat before Pesach in Rashi's time, there are those (such as Zunz and later Safrai in the Haggadah of the Sages) who believe that it was probably called that going back much earlier. They note that in early Christian sources, such as John 19:31, we find mention of a "great sabbath". Therefore the term must have been used by Jews at the time. However, others reject this approach. For example, Sacha Stern in Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar, 2nd Century BCE to 10th Century CE writes that the passage "is not relevant as it refers to the Sabbath following Passover" (along with other objections).

As usual, when we have so many explanations, the chance of any one of them being correct decreases. However, when it comes to Pesach - we have a tradition of asking many questions and studying as much as possible. So perhaps the origin of the name was not made clear so we could continue to learn about it every year...

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