kodesh and kadosh

 A reader asked me to write about the Hebrew words kadosh קדוש and kodesh קודש - generally translated as "holy" and "holiness," respectively. It's taken me a few months to get to the request, because while I agree that the root קדש deserves examination, the word is so loaded with religious meaning and pervasive in Jewish liturgy and culture that I found it somewhat intimidating to tackle. 

For example, here are just a few of the important terms that derive from the root קדש:

• kiddush קידוש - the prayer and blessing over wine inaugurating Shabbat or holidays
• kedusha קדושה - the section of the repeated Amida prayer which emulates the praise angels give to God
• kaddish קדיש - the Aramaic praise of God, which is part of all prayer services, and whose recitation is part of the mourning rituals
• kiddushin קידושין - betrothal - the first step of the marriage process
• hekdesh הקדש - property consecrated to the Temple
• mikdash מקדש - the Holy Temple

And looking in the Bible, there are over 800 words deriving from the root. Daunting, no?

But that doesn't mean I shouldn't try. So I'm acknowledging that I won't touch on every aspect of the words, and perhaps I'll update this post or write another one in the future with additional insights.

Let's start by looking at the forms of the verb.

• קָדַשׁ kadash: The kal form of the verb is not commonly used today, but it does appear a number of times in the Bible. According to Klein it can either mean "was set apart, consecrated" or "was forbidden." It is interesting to note that in the two verses quoted in the Even-Shoshan dictionary for this form (Shemot 29:37 and Devarim 22:9), קדש has a negative connotation, referring to something forbidden.
• נקדש nikdash: The nifal form, the passive of the kal, is more commonly found. Klein offers "was hallowed, was sanctified" and "was consecrated, was dedicated." The former is found in Biblical Hebrew (only used to refer to God), and the latter meaning seems to have begun in the Rabbinic period.
• קִדֵּשׁ kidesh and קֻדַּשׁ kudash: The piel (active) and pual (passive) forms also mean both "to sanctify" (or be sanctified) and "to dedicate" (or was dedicated). Other meanings associated with this root are "to cleanse, purify" (as in Shemot 19:10), and then in Rabbinic Hebrew, to sanctify the Shabbat and holidays (i.e., kiddush) and to betroth (i.e., kiddushin). 
• הקדיש hikdish and הוקדש hukdash: The hifil (active) and hufal (passive) forms in Modern Hebrew mean "to dedicate, allocate, designate, devote" - with either religious or secular connotations. But in earlier periods, it could mean "was set apart as holy, regarded as holy."
• התקדש hitkadesh: In the hitpael (reflexive) form, the root means "to keep (oneself) separated" or "purified (oneself)." It can also mean "to become sanctified," and this is how it used in the Kaddish prayer, when we pray that God's name become sanctified.

We can see from these various definitions, that the root קדש has two primary connotations.

1) "to be holy", in the sense of "lofty, exalted", even "perfect", and perhaps closer to divine. This is captured well by the English word "holy" (and the related "hallow") which derive from an earlier root meaning "whole, uninjured" (and is ultimately cognate with "whole" as well.)

2) "to set apart, separate." Perhaps this meaning could better be expressed with the adjective "sacred," and the verb "sanctify", both of which derive from roots indicating separation or consecration.

There are certainly occasions where that sense overlaps with the "exalted, holy" sense. Something dedicated to God has an exalted status, and anything holy would be separate and distinct from an object without that position. But when there is no such overlap, it allows for the "forbidden" meaning in Biblical Hebrew, and the "designated" meaning in Modern Hebrew.

According to Klein's etymology, the second connotation is the original one:

Related to Ugar. qdsh (= sanctuary), Phoen. קדש (= holy), מקדש (= sanctuary, holy place), Aram.-Syr. קַדֵּשׁ (= he hallowed, sanctified, consecrated), Palm. קדש (= to sanctify, consecrate), Arab. qadusa (= was holy, was pure), quaddasa (= he hallowed, sanctified, consecrated; he went to Jerusalem), quds (= purity, holiness), al-quds (= Jerusalem; lit.: ‘the holy place’), Akka. quddushu (= to cleanse, to hallow, sanctify,), Aram.–Syr. קְדָשָׁא (= ear or nose ring; orig. ‘holy thing’). The orig. meaning of this base prob. was ‘to separate’.

This is also the view of the BDB dictionary, who writes that the original idea behind the root may have been "separation, withdrawal" and translates kodesh as "apartness, sacredness."

However, others, such as Gesenius, claim that the original meaning was connotation 1, noting that the kal form of the verb (presumably the most basic one), meant "to be pure, clean, prop. used of physical purity and cleanliness." This approach does find support in the cognates found in other Semitic languages (as quoted by Klein above.)

I'd like to end with a quote from the philosopher and theologian Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits. He wrote a lengthy essay entitled "The Concept of Holiness" in his book "Man and God: Studies in Biblical Theology." I can't review the entire essay here (I do recommend reading it), but I think the last paragraph is very profound:

In our own analysis, interest was concentrated on the meaning of the term as it is applied to God and man, but we have not lost sight of its purely ritualistic significance either. We have found that the word, holy, does not stand for divine nature in whatever way that nature is understood, it is not a mere “otiose epithet” of God; but it is a specific attribute of the deity and it is consistently used all through the Bible in that specific sense. Rather than indicating transcendence, it seems to be inseparable from the idea of immanence. Far from meaning inaccessibility, it reveals closeness and association. It is not the mysterium tremendum; if anything, it is its very opposite. 

According to Rabbi Berkovits, even if kadosh does refer to separateness, that does not mean that God is distant from us, but rather shows just how closely involved God is with humanity.

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pilegesh

After writing about words deriving from the root פלג, a reader asked if there was a connection to the word pilegesh פילגש - "concubine." 

My first instinct was to consult Klein's Hebrew etymology dictionary, which did not make a connection to פלג, but had an interesting story nonetheless:

cp. Aram. פַלְקְתָא, Syr. פלקא (= concubine). cp. also Greek pallake, pallakis (= concubine). Avestic pairika (= beautiful women seducing pious men). All these words are certainly related, but it is difficult to establish the degree of their relationship to one another.

He also suggests a possible connection to the post-biblical Hebrew word palgas פלגס - which means "a sheep thirteen months old," and says that it derives from the Greek pallax, "youth, girl", which is a cognate of the Greek words pallake, pallakis that he mentioned in the pilegesh entry. 

In his CEDEL entry for "Pallas" (another name for the Greek goddess Athene), he expands on this further. He says the name of the goddess comes from the Greek pallados, "maiden" which is cognate with pallake, pallakis - "concubine."  After quoting some other Greek forms of the word, and the Avestic parika (quoted above), he mentions the Persian pari ("fairy", usually rendered as "peri" in English), and then suggests comparing with "Hebrew pileghesh, Aramaic pilaqta, 'concubine', and Arabic Bilqis, name of the queen of Sheba." And like his Hebrew entry, he isn't sure about how exactly these words are related. He notes that "the above cited Indo-European words are possibly Semitic loan words." 

Whether Hebrew borrowed from the Greek, or if the Greek borrowed from a Semitic language, that would make pilegesh cognate with the metallic element palladium, which was named after the asteroid Pallas, which in turn was named for the Greek goddess.

Other suggest additional languages as the source of pilegesh. BDB mentions a possible Hittite origin, and in the footnotes of the Ben Yehuda dictionary, Tur-Sinai writes that it's possible that Egyptian is the source. Egyptian is also mentioned in the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT), which also quotes Chaim Rabin as concluding that the word is Philistine in origin (which could certainly have Greek influences.)

But surprisingly (at least to me) is that TDOT also proposes a connection to פלג:

We can give no satisfactory explanation for the origin of pileges (Greek pallax, pallakis; Latin pellex; Jewish-Aramaic palqeta; Syriac palqa; Arabic in the feminine proper name bilqis). Scholars have sought its home in both the Semitic and the Indo-European language families and have put forward many conjectures about mutual influence. Suggested etymologies include the Hebrew root plg, "divide, cleave," or a back-formation from Greek pallakis, pallake, pallax, originally "youth" or "girl," or from the same source plgs, "marriageable."

 Gesenius, after quoting the same Greek and Latin words, writes:

The etymology is obscure, but the origin may be sought with some appearance of truth in the idea of softness and pleasure, with the Phoenicio-Shemitic roots פלג, פלק. 

I don't really follow what he's writing here. First of all, I'm not familiar with the root פלק, and he doesn't include it in his dictionary, so maybe that was a typo. But I also don't see how to connect פלג with "softness and pleasure." And I don't see any mention of those terms in his entry for פלג, so I don't know where to go from there.

I took at look at Steinberg's Milon HaTanakh, who is usually happy to come up with a Hebrew origin for potentially foreign words, but he wasn't very helpful either. He does write that the Greek and Latin words we've mentioned were borrowed, via the Phoenicians, from Hebrew. But aside from rejecting Levita's idea that pilegesh comes from פלג-אשה (I guess "split-wife, half-wife"?), because it is "against the spirit of the language", he doesn't make a proposal of his own.

So to answer the initial question, I think that it doesn't seem too likely that pilegesh comes from peleg, but if it does, I'd need a better explanation (not just a guess) as to why.

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folk, pelach and peleg

I recently finished reading John McWhorter's book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. Throughout the book, he claims that English arrived at its current state through the influence of other languages. Much of the book talks about how the Celtic languages influenced the grammar of English. But at the end of the book, he builds on a theory by the German linguist Theo Vennemann, which argues that the Germanic languages (including English) are different from the other Indo-European languages because of interaction with speakers of a Semitic language - probably seafaring Phoenicians or Punics from Carthage.

I won't go into the whole argument, but it does bring up some interesting questions, and I don't think the theory is entirely unreasonable. One particular example that caught my eye was this one (from page 184):

... folk started in Germanic as a word referring to a division of an army, and only later morphed into meaning a tribe or a nation. The Proto-Germanic word was fukla; the early Semitic root for divide -- i.e., as in making a division -- was p-l-kh:

p-l-kh
f-l-k

In the early Semitic language Assyrian, that root was used to mean district (i.e., a division of land), with the kh softening into a g (puluggu). In Hebrew today, a detachment is a plaga. Maybe in Northern Europe, that root came out as fulka in the same meaning.

The Online Etymology Dictionary has a different theory about the origin of "folk":

Old English folc "common people, laity; men; people, nation, tribe; multitude; troop, army," from Proto-Germanic *fulka- (source also of Old Saxon folc, Old Frisian folk, Middle Dutch volc, Dutch volk, Old High German folc, German Volk "people"). Perhaps originally "host of warriors:" Compare Old Norse folk "people," also "army, detachment;" and Lithuanian pulkas "crowd," Old Church Slavonic pluku "division of an army" (hence Russian polk "regiment"), both believed to have been borrowed from Proto-Germanic. Old English folcstede could mean both "dwelling-place" and "battlefield." According to Watkins, from PIE *ple-go-, suffixed form of root *pele- (1) "to fill," which would make it cognate with Greek plethos "people, multitude," and Latin plebes, "the populace, the common people." Boutkan thinks both the Germanic and Balto-Slavic could be a common borrowing from a substrate language.

The entry makes no mention of a Semitic connection. However, it does keep most of the cognate words to "folk" in the Germanic language family, and after quoting Watkins' theory about a connection to plethos and plebes (a theory which Klein rejects in his CEDEL, presumably because "people" and "multitude" were not the same as a division of warriors), there is mention of a "substrate language." That term refers to a language that influences another language by contact - which is exactly what McWhorter and Vennemann are saying that a Semitic language was in this case.

Whether or not they are the source of "folk", the two related Semitic roots that McWhorter mentioned - פלח (p-l-kh) and פלג (p-l-g) - gave us many Hebrew words.

The root פלח originally meant "to cleave, split", as McWhorter mentioned. That meaning is maintained in Hebrew in the word פֶּלַח pelach, meaning "section, slice of fruit."  But from there it developed into the specific sense of "to plow, till the ground." Arabic has a cognate to this meaning, falahah, which led to fallah "plowman", the source of the word for peasant, "fellah", which has entered into English. (No connection to "fellow", though.)

From working and serving the land, פלח expanded to a more religious meaning of divine worship, similar to how the root עבד can indicate both working the land and worshipping God (or "cultivate" and "cult" in English). This sense is most commonly seen in the word (originally from Aramaic) פולחן pulchan - "service." Pulchan originally was any kind of service, then became religious service / divine worship, but in Modern Hebrew it has returned to a more secular meaning, of any kind of ritual indicating extreme admiration and devotion (like a cult).

The cognate פלג provides even more words. As with פלח, the root means "cleave, split, divide." Here are a sample of some of the words deriving from that root:

• פִּלֵּג pileg - "to divide, separate"
• הִפְלִיג hiflig - "to depart (by ship), to set sail"
• התפלג hitpaleg - "to split"
• פֶּלֶג peleg - "section, faction", also "brook, tributary" 
• פְּלֻגָּה pluga - "army division" specifically a "company"
• פְּלֻגְתָּא plugta - "disagreement, argument". This is from Aramaic, and has a literary connotation, and is commonly found in the phrase בַּר-פְּלֻגְתָּא bar plugta - "scholarly opponent."
• מִפְלָגָה miflaga - "political party"

So what we have seen here is how many Hebrew words might be related to the English word "folk". And that's no folk etymology!

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ghoul and gorilla

The English word "ghoul" derives from Arabic. Here's the Online Etymology Dictionary entry for ghoul:

1786, goul, in the English translation of William Beckford's Orientalist novel "Vathek" (which was written in French), from Arabic ghul, an evil spirit that robs graves and feeds on corpses, from ghala "he seized."

The Arabic ghul as "demon" also gives us the name of the star Algol which is also known as the "Demon Star." The full name in Arabic is raʾs al-ghūl  - "the head of the demon" (because as part of the constellation of Perseus, it is the head of Medusa that Perseus is holding.) This name entered more modern mythology as a villain in the Batman comic books -  Ra's al Ghul.

Stahl, in his etymological dictionary of Arabic, quotes the historian and linguist Isaac Yahuda as saying that the word "gorilla" may have the same origin. While there is consensus on how "gorilla" entered English, its earlier history is unclear. For example, here's the Online Etymology Dictionary entry:

1847, applied to a species of large apes (Troglodytes gorilla) by U.S. missionary Thomas Savage, from Greek gorillai, plural of name given to wild, hairy beings (now supposed to have been chimpanzees) in a Greek translation of Carthaginian navigator Hanno's account of his voyage along the northwest coast of Africa, c. 500 B.C.E. Allegedly an African word.

In his book Mishley Arav ("Proverbs of Arabia") Yahuda identifies ghul with "gorilla". I don't know how likely it is that Hanno would have encountered Arabic speakers in that part of Africa, but perhaps this was a cognate in a different Semitic, or Afroasiatic language. Or maybe Arabic speakers later conflated their ghul demon with the scary gorilla. (See here for another example of that association in Arabic).

Yahuda also claims that gilul גלול - the Biblical Hebrew word for idols - is also cognate with ghul. Presumably, he's referring to the ancient practice of worshiping demons, which the Bible prohibits and denigrates. 

However, I couldn't find any other source that makes that claim. The popular view is Klein's position, that gilul refers to rolled (גלל) dung:

גִּלּוּל m.n. idol. [According to some scholars related to גָּלָל (= dung); according to Baudissin and to others גִּלּוּלִים derives from גלל (= to roll), and orig. meant ‘rolled blocks’. cp. BAram. אֶבֶן גְּלָל (= square stones), and see גּֽלָל. The form גִּלּוּל was influenced by שִׁקּוּץ (= abomination).] 

I'm still curious if ghul has a more solid Hebrew cognate. I didn't see anyone who made this connection, but Klein does discuss the root עול - "to give suck" (like a nursing mother), and says that it is "related to Arabic ghālat (= she gave suck)." Could ghala ("he seized") perhaps be related to ghālat? A nursing baby latches on to, "seizes", the mother. Maybe? If so, it would provide us with the words עוּל and עולל, meaning "baby, infant." 

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April

Last week on Purim we read the book of Esther, and next week we start the month of April. It turns out that Esther and April have more in common than just sharing the same few weeks.

One of my first posts on Balashon was about the etymology of the name Esther. Here's what I wrote then:

The name Esther - אסתר - is connected to the Babylonian deity Ishtar (yes, the same name as the notoriously unsuccessful movie.) They both derive from the Indo-European root ster, and the related Semitic root ʿṯtr which gave us the Greek goddess Aphrodite and the Phoenician goddess Astarte עשתרת. That same root gives us the English words star, astral, stellar and disaster (not in the stars.)

I briefly mentioned Aphrodite, but didn't focus any further on that name. The Online Etymology Dictionary provides this origin:

Greek goddess of love and beauty, personification of female grace, 1650s; the ancients derived her name from Greek aphros "foam," from the story of her birth, but the word is perhaps rather from Phoenician Ashtaroth (Assyrian Ishtar). Beekes writes, "As the goddess seems to be of oriental origin ..., the name probably comes from the East too. .... It may have entered Greek via another language." He concludes, "[I]t seems possible that the name came from the one languages [sic] which on historical grounds we should expect to be relevant: Cypriot Phoenician." 

Klein agrees that the idea that the name derives from aphros ("foam") is a folk etymology, but does suggest that perhaps her association with foam caused the change in pronunciation from Ashtoreth to Aphrodite. He gives other examples of "sh" turning into "f." He points out that garlic in Hebrew is שום shum, but in Arabic it is either thum or fum. Similarly, the Russian name Feodor derives from the Greek Theodore.

From Aphrodite, according to some theories, we get the name of the month of April. Klein writes that April, in Latin Aprilis, comes from Greek Ap(h)ro, a short form of Aphrodite, and so was "the month of Aphrodite." The Online Etymology Dictionary suggests (among other possibilities), an Etruscan origin, but still coming from Aphrodite. 

So we've shown connections between Esther and April, but one word I was surprised to discover isn't related is Easter, which usually falls in this time period as well. However, here is Easter's etymology:

Old English Easterdæg, from Eastre (Northumbrian Eostre), from Proto-Germanic *austron-, "dawn," also the name of a goddess of fertility and spring, perhaps originally of sunrise, whose feast was celebrated at the spring equinox, from *aust- "east, toward the sunrise" (compare east), from PIE root *aus- (1) "to shine," especially of the dawn.

I guess that connection wasn't in the stars... 

 

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gizzard

Several years ago, I wrote about the root gazar גזר - "to cut". After pointing out that it's not related to gezer גֶּזֶר - "carrot", I pointed out a number of Hebrew and Arabic words that likely derive from the root and its cognates.

Well, I recently discovered another word that may have גזר as its etymology: gizzard.

Admittedly, the Online Etymology Dictionary doesn't offer a Semitic origin:

"stomach of a bird," late 14c., from Old French gisier "entrails, giblets (of a bird)" (13c., Modern French gésier), probably from Vulgar Latin *gicerium, a dissimilation of Latin gigeria (neuter plural) "cooked entrails of a fowl," a delicacy in ancient Rome, from PIE *yekwr- "liver" (see hepatitis). The unetymological -d was added 1500s (perhaps on analogy of -ard words). 

However, Klein, in his CEDEL entry, does offer one. He also writes that the English derives from the French, but from there offers a different Latin one:

From Latin gizeria, 'cooked entrails of poultry', which is probably a Punic-Phoenician-Hebrew loan word. Compare Hebrew gezarim, construct state gizrei, 'pieces of sacrificed animals', plural of gezer, 'anything cut, a piece,' from the stem of gazar, 'he cut, divided'.

I assume that Klein's inspiration for gezarim being "pieces of sacrificed animals" comes from the story of the Covenant of the Pieces, where God tells Abraham to sacrifice a number of animals, and then after Abraham prophesized,

וַיְהִי הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ בָּאָה וַעֲלָטָה הָיָה וְהִנֵּה תַנּוּר עָשָׁן וְלַפִּיד אֵשׁ אֲשֶׁר עָבַר בֵּין הַגְּזָרִים הָאֵלֶּה׃ 

When the sun set and it was very dark, there appeared a smoking oven, and a flaming torch which passed between those pieces [ha-gezarim]. (Bereshit 15:17)

That is the only mention of gezer indicating a sacrifice in the Bible.

You may have noticed that Etymonline has the Latin gigeria, and Klein has gizeria. That is also addressed in his CEDEL:

In Latin, gigeria, a collateral from of gizeria, z has been assimilated to the preceding g.

From searching through Google Books (see here, here, and here), it seems that it's not clear which word Latin used - gigeria or gizeria - so that may have added to the confusion over the etymology.

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ikar, akar and akeret bayit

Let's take a look at the Hebrew root עקר. As a verb, in the kal form it means "to uproot, extract, displace" and in the piel form means "to neuter, spay, sterilize."  The adjective עקר akar, or in the feminine akara עקרה means "infertile, barren." And the noun ikar (spelled either עִקָּר or עיקר) means "essence, main thing/part, gist", with the associated adjective ikari עיקרי meaning "essential, fundamental, major" and the related ikaron עקרון - "principle" and ekroni עקרוני - "of principle, basic."

What is the connection between these various meanings?

They all derive from the sense of "root." That is the original meaning of ikar. That sense isn't found in Biblical Hebrew (although a related word, eker - "offshoot", appears in Vayikra 25:47), but is common in Aramaic, and can be found as such in the Aramaic sections of Daniel (4:12,20,23). Those verses all have the phrase עִקַּר שׇׁרְשׁוֹהִי, which is generally translated as "the stump with its roots." But since both words mean root in Aramaic, perhaps a more precise translation would be "root of the roots" or "the main root." From Aramaic, ikar entered rabbinic Hebrew, where it has the literal meaning of root (for example in Mishna Maasrot 3:10) and the more metaphorical sense of the "important thing" (as in Mishna Avot 1:17). 

English relates to the word "root" similarly, with it also having the meaning "the cause, source or origin of something." And just as in English, the verb "to root" means "to pull up by the roots, to uproot", so too does the Hebrew verb akar mean "to extract, uproot" (see for example Tzefania 2:4 and Kohelet 3:2). This is an example of a contronym (a homonym which is also an antonym, and we've seen them before).

From here we get to the words related to "barrenness." Klein says that they are "probably a special sense development" from the meaning "to pluck, root up, remove." Gesenius implies that this may derive from an original sense of "castration." (He makes a similar connection between shoresh שורש - "root" and saris סריס - "eunuch.")

One phrase that doesn't appear to be connected to any of the above is akeret bayit עקרת בית - "homemaker, housewife." The phrase originates from a biblical verse, Tehillim 113:9:

מוֹשִׁיבִי עֲקֶרֶת הַבַּיִת אֵם־הַבָּנִים שְׂמֵחָה הַלְלוּ־יָהּ

This is a difficult verse to translate. The new Koren translation offers:

"He sets the childless woman in her home as a joyous mother of children. Hallelujah."

Meaning that the phrase akeret habayit means "the barren woman in the house", and (as Ibn Ezra writes) it's not a conjunctive phrase at all. Others see akeret habayit as one phrase, meaning "the barren one of the house." Even if more translations today suggest the first possibility, the latter one seems to be more popularly accepted. (The grammatical structure does seem to suggest semichut, so I can see why). 

From this understanding of the phrase, a drasha developed, saying that this/the woman is not barren, but rather the ikar - the essence - of the home. For example, Bereshit 29:31 says that Rachel was barren (akara). The midrash (Bereshit Rabbah 71:2) reinterprets the verse to say that Rachel was the ikar, the main part of the household: וְרָחֵל עֲקָרָה, רָחֵל הָיְתָה עִקָּרוֹ שֶׁל בַּיִת.

It's not exactly clear when the phrase came to mean "housewife," (for a more detailed history see here) but it was very likely influenced by this  midrash and others like it (see also Bamidbar Rabba 14:8). However, instead of saying that the essence of the home was the wife, the meaning shifted to "the main part of the (this) woman is in the home." An early example of this is Rashi's commentary on Gittin 52a. The Talmud there mentions that Rabbi Yosei never called his wife "his wife" but rather "his home." Rashi explains his reasoning because "all the needs of the home are taken care of by her hands, and she is the essence of the home."

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naar

The Hebrew word naar נער has a number of meanings - two verbs and a noun. Let's look and see if they are related.

One verb means "to shake" or "to shake out." It appears 11 times with that meaning in the Bible. Sometimes the meaning is more than the simple "shake" as in Shemot 14:27, where it says that God "hurled" וַיְנַעֵר the Egyptians into the sea.

Here's Klein's entry for that meaning:

shake, shake out, shake off, stir.
    — Qal - נָעַר he shook, shook out, shook off, stirred.
    — Niph. - נִנְעַר 1 he shook himself free. 2 was shaken out; PBH 3 he bestirred himself; PBH 4 was poured out, was emptied.
    — Pi. - נִעֵר 1 he shook out; 2 he stirred up.
    — Pu. - נֻעַר NH 1 was shaken; PBH 2 was stirred; PBH 3 was emptied.
    — Hith. - הִתְנַעֵר 1 he shook himself; NH 2 he bestirred himself.
    — Hiph. - הִנְעִיר he encouraged. [Aram. נְעַר (= he shook, stirred), Syr. נְעַר (= he poured out), whence נָעוֹרָא (= waterwheel). Arab. nā‘ūra (= waterwheel with buckets, noria), is a Syr. loan word. cp. Arab. na‘ara (= it spurted, gushed forth — said of the blood of a vein), na‘āra (= earthen jug, pot).

Klein doesn't include it (perhaps it wasn't common in his time), but the hitpael form התנער hitnaer today means "to shirk" or "to renounce responsibility."

The other verb means "to bray, roar, growl" and only appears once in the Bible:

יַחְדָּו כַּכְּפִרִים יִשְׁאָגוּ נָעֲרוּ כְּגוֹרֵי אֲרָיוֹת

"Like lions, they roar together, they growl [na'aru] like lion cubs. (Yirmiyahu 51:38). 

While in this verse the metaphor is for the growl of a lion, in Rabbinic Hebrew the verb was designated for the bray of a donkey, and so it continues today. 

And here's what Klein writes about this meaning:

Aram.-Syr. נְעַר (= roared, growled, brayed), Arab. na‘ara (= rattled), Akka. nēru (= to growl), nā’iru (= roaring)

But by far the most common appearance of naar in the Bible is as a noun, meaning "boy, lad, youth", with sometimes the more specific sense of "servant" or "soldier." There are 240 occurrences with this meaning, and another 63 for the female form נערה na'ara (girl, maiden, servant.) Related words in Hebrew are noar נוער - "youth" and neurim נעורים - "adolescence."

So are any of these meanings related to each other? Klein does not connect the two verbs, but presents two theories as to the origin of the noun. 

The first says that the noun, meaning "youth," comes from the verb meaning "to shake", which he extends to the sense "to throw":

 נַֽעַר would lit. mean ‘that which is brought forth, young’; compare Ger. werfen, ‘to throw’, in the sense ‘to bring forth, young’

The other theory connects it to the braying and roaring usage, as an "allusion to the roughness of the voice at the beginning of puberty."

One word that is nearly certainly unrelated to any of these is the Yiddish nar meaning "fool" (the source of the familiar Yiddish word narishkeit - "foolishness."  The Yiddish nar derives from the German narr of the same meaning. The etymology of narr (or the related narre or narro) isn't clear. Some say it comes from the Latin naris, meaning "nose" (ultimately the source of the English "nasal"), developing from "sneering (with the nose)" to "mocking, jeering" to "fool." In any case, this word has been in German for a long time - which means that it's much more likely that Yiddish borrowed it from German instead of German borrowing it from Yiddish.

Our youth might need education, but we don't need to make them the source of all foolishness...

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yashfeh and diaper

In Shemot 28:15-20, there is a description of the breastplate of the high priest - the choshen mishpat. The breastplate contained 12 stones, in four rows of three. 

The identities of many of the stones listed are highly debated. It's very difficult to find two translations that render each of the stones in the same way. But one stone almost always gets the same translation, the yashfeh יָשְׁפֵה of Shemot 28:20. All the English translations I consulted had it as "jasper."

This should not be surprising, as the English word "jasper" very likely derives from yashfeh or a cognate Semitic word. Here's the Online Etymology Dictionary entry for jasper:

precious stone, c. 1300, from Anglo-French jaspre, Old French jaspre, with unetymological -r-, a variant of jaspe (12c.), from Latin iaspidem (nominative iaspis), from Greek iaspis "jasper," via an Oriental language (compare Hebrew yashpeh, Akkadian yashupu).

Klein has a similar entry for yashfeh:

Probably borrowed from yashupū (also ashpū), whence also Syriac יָשְׁפֵה, יַשֽׁפָא, Persian yashm, whence Arabic  yashb (= jasper). Greek. iaspis, whence Latin iaspis, is a Sem. loan word.

All of this isn't so surprising. Gems were rare, and so it makes sense that they would retain the name from where they came. However, the next development surprised me.

In Klein's CEDEL, he has the following entry for the word "diaper":

Middle English diaper, diapery from Old French diapre, from earlier diaspre (whence French diapre, 'diapered, variegated'), from Middle Latin diasprum (whence also Italian diaspro, Old Provencal diaspre, Spanish diaspero, Portugese diaspero, diaspro), 'jasper', from Latin iaspis, from Greek iaspis, 'jasper', ultimately from Hebrew yashpheh

I suppose I can see how the words are similar (although he doesn't explain where the added "d" comes from), but what is the connection between the meanings of "jasper" and "diaper"?

This site, quoting Webster's New World College dictionary, provides a possible explanation:

ME < OFr diapre, diaspre, kind of ornamented cloth < ML diasprum, flowered cloth, altered (after dia-, dia-, because of ML pronun. of initial j-) < jaspis < L iaspis, jasper

So it seems that the connection here is that just like jasper is an ornamental gem, diapers were originally ornamental cloth. A different gem actually appears in the first (archaic) definition that dictionary provides:

1.
a.  Archaic: cloth or fabric with a woven pattern of repeated small figures, such as diamonds
b. a napkin, towel, etc. of such cloth
c. such a pattern, as in art
2. 
a. a soft, absorbent cloth folded and arranged between the legs and around the waist of a baby to absorb and contain excretions
b. a piece of absorbent material with a waterproof outer layer, having the same function but intended to be discarded after a single use

It's interesting to see how the meaning of diaper progressed to an item of less and less value - from a fancy ornamented cloth, to a cloth in general, to a cloth used to wrap around babies, to the disposable kind popular today.

I'm just still not sure I understand why it begins with "d." For that, perhaps its worth looking at the Online Etymology entry for diaper. While they don't accept the "jasper" connection, they do say that the prefix "dia-" meant "thoroughly, interspersed", which could apply to the gem shapes (jasper) as much to the "white" that they suggest:

mid-14c., "costly silken fabric of one color having a repeated pattern of the same color woven into it," from Old French diapre, diaspre "ornamental cloth; flowered, patterned silk cloth," perhaps via Medieval Latin diasprum from Medieval Greek diaspros "thoroughly white," or perhaps "white interspersed with other colors," from dia "thoroughly" (see dia-) + aspros "white."

Now while the choshen was in fact a fancy woven cloth with stones interspersed, I don't recommend you call it a "diaper" unless you're willing to face some serious questions...

 

 

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cucumber and kishu

In 2007, we discussed the Hebrew word for "cucumber", melafefon מלפפון. In the end of the post, I quoted an article that stated:

the melafefon in the Talmud is a melon, and the cucumber should be called by its Biblical name - kishu קישוא (from Bamidbar 11:5 - זָכַרְנוּ, אֶת-הַדָּגָה, אֲשֶׁר-נֹאכַל בְּמִצְרַיִם, חִנָּם; אֵת הַקִּשֻּׁאִים, וְאֵת הָאֲבַטִּחִים, וְאֶת-הֶחָצִיר וְאֶת-הַבְּצָלִים, וְאֶת-הַשּׁוּמִים. "We remember the ... cucumbers (kishuim) ... that we ate in Egypt") and what we today call kishu (zucchini squash) ... should be called kishot קישות or kishu-bishul קישוא-בישול.

While that recommendation was not adopted by Hebrew speakers, I recently discovered a theory that connects kishu and "cucumber." 

I actually could have noticed it when I wrote my earlier post, since Klein mentions it in his entry for kishu:

1 cucumber (a hapax legomenon in the Bible, occurring Num. 11:5). 2 gourd, vegetable marrow. [Related to MH קָשׁוּת, Syr. קַשׁוּתָא, Punic kissou, Arab. quththā, qiththa, Ethiop. pl. qesāt, Akka. qishshu (= cucumber). Gk. sikuos (= cucumber) is a Heb. loan word. See ‘Sicyos’ in my CEDEL.]

However, even if I had noticed that the Greek sikuos is a Hebrew loan word, I didn't have his CEDEL dictionary at the time, so I couldn't have picked up the trail. Here's what he writes for "Sicyos", the genus of plants that includes the burr cucumbers:

Modern Latin, from Greek sikuos, 'cucumber', which [...] is borrowed from Hebrew *qishshu'ah (plural qishshu'im) 

He then points to his entry for "cucumber." The Online Etymology Dictionary includes some of his findings:

late 14c., cucomer, from Old French cocombre (13c., Modern French concombre), from Latin cucumerem (nominative cucumis), perhaps from a pre-Italic Mediterranean language.

But Klein goes further. He says that the Latin comes from Greek, which eventually connects to Hebrew. He writes that the Latin cucumis is

from Greek kukuos, assimilated from sikuos, 'cucumber', a collateral form of sikuh, of same meaning, which was probably formed through metathesis from Hebrew qishshu'ah, 'cucumber'.

Recalling that the Greeks pronounced the Hebrew sh as s (think Shlomo / Solomon), we can see how kishu could become sikuh. And from there, the path to cucumber is certainly possible (see the same theory  mentioned here as well). I wonder what additional insights I'll have when I look at this post 14 years from now...

 

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benzene and levonah

One of the most common queries I receive is if two similar looking words - one in Hebrew and one in English (or some other language) are related. More often than not, there's no connection. It's just a coincidence, no more significant than two unrelated people looking like each other. 

However, sometimes the two words are cognates, and that makes for a great post here, especially when despite the similar sounds and letters, the meanings don't seem to be connected at all (like our last post on cherry and keres).

Other times, however, the remnants of a Semitic origin in an English word are difficult to identify with the naked eye. They might only maintain one or two letters from that cognate. That's the case with the word "benzene."

The chemical benzene is found in crude oil, and when added to gasoline provides its sweet smell. In Hebrew, the equivalent word, בנזין, refers to gasoline (or petrol) in general. Other languages that call their equivalent of benzene for gasoline include German (Benzin), Italian (benzina) and Russian (бензин - benzin). 

Here's the Online Etymology Dictionary entry for benzene:

clear, colorless liquid used as a solvent, 1835, benzine, altered from German Benzin, coined in 1833 by German chemist Eilhardt Mitscherlich (1794-1863) from Benz(oesäure) "benzoic acid" + -in, indicating "derived from". Mitscherlich obtained it from a distillation of benzoic acid, obtained from benzoin. The form benzene (with hydrocarbon suffix -ene) was proposed in 1835 and began to be used from 1838 in English.

Klein credits A. W. Hofmann for the spelling "benzene." Since benzene came from "benzoin", we need to see the origin of that word as well. Here's the entry in the Online Etymology Dictionary:

balsamic resin obtained from a tree (Styrax benzoin) of Indonesia, 1560s (earlier as bengewine, 1550s), from French benjoin (16c.), which comes via Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian from Arabic luban jawi "incense of Java" (actually Sumatra, but the Arabs confused the two), with lu probably mistaken in Romance languages for a definite article.

From here we see that bezoin actually comes from two words: luban jawi. While this entry renders it as "incense of Java", a more precise translation for luban (as Klein offers here) would be "frankincense." Luban has a Hebrew cognate, levonah לבונה, which appears 21 times in the Bible, and was used in the Temple service, including in the incense offering, due to its pleasing aroma. 

Levona, in turn, gets its name due to its white - lavan לבן - color.  

So returning to "benzene", we can now see that two of the letters - "b" and "n" - are cognate with the Hebrew levonah and lavan. I'm sure that's a question that no one will ever walk up to me on the street and ask me, but I find it fascinating nonetheless.

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cherry and keres

 I was surprised to learn that the English word "cherry" may have Semitic roots.

The Online Etymology Dictionary has the following entry for cherry:

from Anglo-French cherise, from Old North French cherise (Old French, Modern French cerise, 12c.), from Vulgar Latin *ceresia, from late Greek kerasian "cherry," from Greek kerasos "cherry tree," possibly from a language of Asia Minor. Mistaken in Middle English for a plural and stripped of its -s.

The Etymology Nerd blog has a similar post:

A long time ago, the Akkadians associated the phoneme karsu with the morpheme concerning trees bearing tiny fruits. The rest is history, as the word passed into Anatolian and then Greek (following geographical lines, I might add), as kerasos and specifically applying to the bird cherry tree. This logically created another noun, that of kerasion, or "cherry", as an -ion suffix was affixed. As many Greek words did, this passed into Latin, and as all Greek words with a k that pass in to Latin change into a word with a c, as did did kerasion, which became the word cerasium, later ceresium​. In Vulgar Latin, this became ceresia, and in Old Northern French it became cherise (nothing to do with mon cheri). This then became a loanword as it crossed the English channel to become cherise, and here people began to use it daily until someone along the line "realized" that this was a plural, and that was incorrect, so that person decided to abridge it to something like cherri, which became cherry in due course.

Both note that the "s" was dropped when the word entered English from French due to a mistaken assumption that word was plural. (The same thing happened with the word pea.) That's a fun fact, but I'm more interested in the Akkadian etymology. Klein, in his CEDEL, provides a little more information. After tracing the word to the Greek like the sources above, he adds:

which probably derives from Akkadian karshu, 'stone fruit'

This piqued my curiosity. While many words in Akkadian have cognates in Hebrew (or Aramaic), Klein didn't offer one here. I tried looking up karsu, karshu or karashu in Akkadian dictionaries, but none explicitly gave a meaning of "stone fruit." 

However, there were other meanings that could provide a connection. One meaning of karasu in Akkadian is listed as "stone." For example, this Akkadian dictionary has an entry for karašu with these meanings:

1) a leek (cultivated, or wild in mountains) ; 2) (a kind of stone)

The meaning "leek" isn't so surprising. We've already discussed before the Hebrew word kreisha כרשה and the Aramaic word karti כרתי - both meaning "leek", and having karashu as a cognate seems logical. But what is the connection between leeks and stones?  

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD) has a far more detailed entry. In their entry for karašu (page 212) they first define it as "leek", then

in descriptions of stones … the stone whose color is green like leeks

And later there is mention of stones. While it is possible that this became the "stone" of stone fruits, it seems less likely to me, and is also rejected by "Rosół and Blažek" according to the Wiktionary entry for the Greek kerasos.

To me, a more likely candidate would be a different meaning of the Akkadian word. According to the CAD, karšu (page 223) can mean

1. stomach, belly, womb, body
2. mind, heart, plan, desire
3. inner or lower side

While there is no mention of stone fruits, or fruits at all, in their entry, it seems reasonable to me that the word could have been borrowed for stone fruits specifically (considering that the stone is inside the fruit, as if in the belly), or perhaps fruit in general (metaphorically the produce of the womb). 

If this is the case, there is a cognate with a Hebrew word: keres, also meaning "belly." It appears in Biblical Hebrew only once, with the spelling כרש, in Yirmiyahu 51:34:

 מִלָּא כְרֵשׂוֹ מֵעֲדָנָי

He filled his belly with my dainties

However, the word keres became more common in Rabbinic Hebrew, where the spelling changed to כרס. Klein confirms the cognate with Akkadian:

belly (a hapax legomenon in the Bible, occurring Jer. 51:34). In PBH spelled כָּרֵס (q.v.). [Related to Aram.-Syr. כַּרְסָא (= belly), Arab. karish, kirsh, Ethiop. karsh (= stomach, belly), Akka. karshu, karashu (= belly).] 

It does surprise me that he doesn't connect the entry for keres with his entry for "cherry", but I don't think that necessarily means he didn't connect them. In any case, the next time I fill my keres with cherries, I'll be sure to think of the etymological connection.

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marpek and rafiki

The Hebrew word for "elbow" - מרפק marpek is not of biblical origin. It first appears in Rabbinic Hebrew, for example in Mishna Shabbat 10:3. However, the word does derive from a root, רפק, that has one appearance in the Tanakh. Here is Klein's entry for marpek:

From רפק (= to support). cp. Aram. מַרְפְּקָא, Arab. marfiq (= elbow).

And here is what he writes about רפק:

רפק to support, lean.
    — Pi. - רִפֵּק MH 1 he supported, upheld; NH 2 he elbowed.
    — Pu. - רֻפַּק was supported, was upheld.
    — Hith. - הִתְרַפֵּק he leant against, clung to (a hapax legomenon in the Bible, occurring Cant. 8:5). [Arab. rafaqa (= he helped, supported), Ethiop. rafaqa (= he reclined at the table, leaned upon). Base of מַרְפֵּק (= elbow).] 

Let's take a look first at the last form of the verb, התרפק hitrapek, since it is the one that appears in the Bible:

מִי זֹאת עֹלָה מִן־הַמִּדְבָּר מִתְרַפֶּקֶת עַל־דּוֹדָהּ...

"Who is she that comes up from the desert, leaning [mitrapeket] upon her beloved?..." (Shir HaShirim 8:5)

This modern translation (New JPS) relies upon the same scholarship that Klein had, and therefore renders mitrapeket as "leaning." The medieval commentaries, such as Rashi and Ibn Ezra quote the Arabic cognate, but give that as proof that it means "to attach." In light of this Artscroll renders the verse "clinging to her Beloved" and the new Koren Tanakh has "entwined with her beloved." I'm not sure where this interpretation of the Arabic came from - perhaps they knew that rafik in Arabic meant friend, which is chaver חבר in Hebrew, and that recalled the root חבר meaning "to attach."

Jastrow writes that in Talmudic Hebrew the hitpael form of the verb meant "to endear one's self." He quotes Bereshit Rabba 45:4, where we find mention of women who were מִתְרַפְּקוֹת עַל בַּעֲלֵיהֶן בְּנוֹיָן - "endearing themselves [mitrapkot] to their husbands through their beauty." 

In more recent times, the verb has taken on another set of meanings: "to hug, to cling to; to remember fondly." The first - "to hug" - is perhaps influenced by the approach of the  medieval commentators. The latter - "to remember fondly" - I assume was a more creative interpretation of the verse in Shir HaShirim.

Klein also mentions a piel form - ריפק ripek. I've never heard it used today to mean "to support" or "to uphold," but the use "to elbow" does exist, but it's more commonly found today as ממרפק mimarpek. As Avshalom Kor points out here, that's one of the few uses of the root that doesn't have a positive connotation - instead of support, clinging and fond remembrance, to elbow is to rudely push your way into a place.

Returning to the Arabic cognate, we find that rafik provided the name Rafiq, meaning "friend" or "companion." From Arabic, the same word was borrowed into Swahili, where it became rafiki. That name may be familiar from the Disney movie, The Lion King, where it was the name of the mandrill who through magical and spiritual efforts, helped the protagonists. He was their "friend", and as it happened, was always leaning on a walking stick, while bending his elbow.

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cedar, citron and ketoret

If you haven't noticed, my recent posts have frequently referred to Klein's Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (CEDEL). I purchased the two volume set a few years ago, but recently decided that if I want to find the cases where he provides Semitic origins to English words, I'd have to just start reading it from the beginning. And that's what I've been doing for the past few weeks. It will probably take me several months to complete the project.

I can't say that every entry with a connection to Hebrew is entirely convincing, but I can say that Klein does seem to be doing his best with the tools he had, and often provides sources, which makes follow up research much easier.

One interesting aspect of this project has been noticing when the Online Etymology Dictionary (Etymonline), a very popular internet etymology resource (which I quote often), relies on the CEDEL for an etymology, but won't go the final mile and mention the Hebrew cognate that Klein suggests. 

An example of this can be found in the entry for "cedar" and related words. Etymonline has the following entry for cedar:

"type of coniferous tree noted for its slow growth and hard timber," late Old English ceder, blended in Middle English with Old French cedre, both from Latin cedrus, from Greek kedros "cedar, juniper," a word of uncertain origin.

After mentioning the Middle English, Old English, French, Latin and Greek origins (as also done by Etymonline), Klein continues:

which probably denoted originally 'a tree whose wood was used for burning sacrifices,' and derives from Hebrew qatar, 'it exhaled odor, smoked'; see Heinrich Lewy, Die semitischen Fremdwörter im Griechischen, Berlin, 1895, p. 35. 

We discussed qatar in a post about the etymology of "nectar", and its relationship to ketoret. But I wasn't familiar at the time with the possible connection to "cedar," so I didn't mention it then.

At the end of that entry, Klein recommends also looking at his entry for "citron" (the English name for the etrog tree and fruit.) He connects "citron" to "cedar", and then mentions that "citrus" comes from "citron" as well. Here Etymonline does make direct mention of Klein. Here's their entry for citrus:

any tree of the genus Citrus, or its fruit, 1825, from the Modern Latin genus name, from Latin citrus "citron tree," the name of an African tree with aromatic wood and lemon-like fruit, the first citrus fruit to become available in the West. The name, like the tree, is probably of Asiatic origin [OED] or from a lost non-IE Mediterranean language [de Vaan]. But Klein and others trace it to Greek kedros "cedar," perhaps via Etruscan (a suggested by the change of -dr- to -tr-).

And their entry for citron is connected:

"large, thick-rinded, lemon-like citrus fruit," late 14c., also citrine (early 15c.), from Old French citron "citron, lemon" (14c.), possibly from Old Provençal citron, from Latin citrus "citron-tree," and influenced by lemon; or else from augmentative of Latin citreum (mālum) "citron (apple);" see citrus.

To be clear, I don't object to Etymonline disagreeing with Klein's conclusions. I just think it would be easier for future investigations if they were quoted more inclusively.

One remaining question is what is the connection between the cedar and citron trees? In Italian the same word - cedro -  is used for both, so certainly some association is possible. This book quotes Galen (the Greek physician living in the Roman empire) who provided a few possible theories:

because the green unripe citron resembles the unripe cedar-cone; or because cedar and citron trees have spines around the leaves [...] or more fancifully because the the fruit and leaves had the smell of cedar...

(Regarding the first theory, there are those who claim that when the Bible refers to pri etz hadar פרי עץ הדר, it did not mean the etrog / citron, but rather the cedar cone. Others reject this, because the cedar tree has a common name in the Bible, erez ארז and no connection is made between erez and hadar in any biblical text.)

While all of Galen's theories may be a possible connections between cedar and citron, if we rely upon Klein's etymology for cedar, which goes back to the odor from the tree, then perhaps the citron tree was similarly named for its strong aroma. While the cedar may have got its name from the odor when the wood was burned, certainly anyone who has smelled a citron can attest to its powerful scent as well.  

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amazon, amitz and imutz

For the past few decades, Amazon has been one of the most recognized brand names worldwide. The founder chose the name because of the exotic nature and great size of the Amazon river. The river got its name from the women fighters of the native tribe who attacked the Spanish explorers, who reminded them of the Greek myth of the Amazons - a group of female warriors.

And where did the Greeks get the name Amazon? The Online Etymology Dictionary has this entry:

late 14c., via Old French (13c.) or Latin, from Greek Amazon (mostly in plural Amazones) "one of a race of female warriors in Scythia," probably from an unknown non-Indo-European word, or possibly from an Iranian compound *ha-maz-an- "(one) fighting together" [Watkins], but in folk etymology long derived from a- "without" + mazos, variant of mastos "breast;" hence the story that the Amazons cut or burned off one breast so they could draw bowstrings more efficiently. 

What was the non-Indo-European word? There are many theories, but I'd like to focus on Klein's suggestion in his CEDEL:

from Greek Amazon, which probably derives from Hebrew ammitz, 'strong'

Amitz אמיץ, derives from the root אמץ, meaning "to be strong." A synonym of the more popular chazak חזק (the verb חזק appears 290 times in the Bible, while אמץ only appears 41 times), it is the source of several words relating to strength:

• ometz אומץ - "bravery"
• ma'amatz מאמץ - "effort"
• hitametz התאמץ - "went to great lengths, endeavored"

But one meaning of the root does not seem to fit with the others: imetz אימץ - "adopted" and imutz אימוץ - "adoption." How did those uses come from a root meaning "be strong"?

Klein lists the meaning "was adopted (said of a child)" but does not explain the development. After going through meanings related to strength, Ben Yehuda adds:

"Some writers would say that someone imetz (adopted) to him a son or daughter." However, he does not indicate when this usage began, or give any examples of its usage.

There is one biblical verse, however, that some point to as an example of אמץ meaning "to adopt." This is Tehillim 80:16 

וְכַנָּה אֲשֶׁר־נָטְעָה יְמִינֶךָ וְעַל־בֵּן אִמַּצְתָּה לָּךְ׃

This is a difficult verse to understand, and there are many translations. The JPS, for example translates this verse (and the preceding one, which I've added for context as):

 "O God of hosts, turn again,

look down from heaven and see;
take note of that vine, the stock planted by Your right hand,
the stem [ben] you have taken [imatzta] as Your own." 

A footnote to their translation, on the word "stem," notes: "literarly 'son.'" So according to this translation, the literal meaning of the phrase would be "the son you have taken as Your own," which could imply something like adoption.

Robert Alter, in his translation, goes for that literal meaning, translating it as "the son You took to Yourself", and adds this note:

If the received text shows an authentic reading here, there is a slightly disconcerting shift from the vehicle of the metaphor (the vine) to its tenor (the people of Israel as God’s son). Some interpreters have understood ben as a poetic term for “branch” or as a scribal error for some other word that means “branch,” but the verb attached to it - ʾimatsta, which suggests adoption of a child—is appropriate for a son, not a plant.

It seems to me that Alter is perhaps putting the cart before the horse. Both verses 15 and 16 are clearly using imagery of plants. If there were other verses where imetz meant "to adopt", then they could be used to justify that translation here. But I haven't found any, and I suspect Alter is influenced by modern usage.

In fact, Ben Yehuda does quote this verse, in his entry for אמץ, under the meaning "to plant." He adds another verse, Yeshaya 44:14 -

לִכְרׇת־לוֹ אֲרָזִים וַיִּקַּח תִּרְזָה וְאַלּוֹן וַיְאַמֶּץ־לוֹ בַּעֲצֵי־יָעַר נָטַע אֹרֶן וְגֶשֶׁם יְגַדֵּל׃

By including it under the subentry, Ben Yehuda is implying that it means "to plant" here as well. What is the connection between "planting" and "strength"? That can be found in a number of translations to these two verses. For example the (old) Koren Jerusalem Bible translates the verse from Yeshaya as:

He hews him down cedars, and takes the pine and the oak, which he strengthens for himself [vay'ametz] among the trees of the forest: he plants a forest tree and the rain nourishes it. 

Part of the planting process, or a result of is, the strengthening of the tree. The new Koren Tanakh, in their translation of the Tehillim verse, uses similar language: "this shoot You nurtured as Your own." Kaddari, quoting these verses (and Tehillim 80:18) says it means גידלת, which can mean "to raise" or "to grow" (which also could imply adoption.)

Others, however, stick to a meaning related to "taking." The JPS translates the Yeshaya phrase as "He sets aside trees of the forest" and Alter suggests "he picks from the trees of the forest." How is choosing or taking related to strength? The BDB offers the meaning "assure, secure for oneself." Secure implies both strength and possession. 

Ultimately, the meaning of the verb אמץ is unclear in these verses (and the Daat Mikra, for example on Yeshaya 44:14, offers both "to strengthen" and "to set aside.") But one thing is clear - these verses weren't followed up with uses of אמץ to mean the adoption of a child in the remainder of Biblical literature, or any of Talmudic literature. In fact, a search of the Historical Dictionary Project of the Academy of the Hebrew Language shows the first clear example of that usage in an 1873 essay (page 143 and page 144) by the writer Peretz Smolenskin. And even following that, it wasn't a very popular usage. For example, see the results of this Google Books Ngram Viewer search. I looked for the word אימוץ, which as a gerund wouldn't be used for much else other than adoption. It only really picks up in the 1950s, growing to a much higher usage in the last twenty years.

So what happened here? I think this is an example of a phenomenon we've discussed many times before on Balashon. I don't know the technical name of the linguistic phenomenon (but I have a feeling a reader will enlighten me in the comments), but what happens frequently in Hebrew when there are two synonyms is that one will become the popular one for common usage and the other will take on a different meaning. This new meaning will generally fill in a semantic gap, becoming the word for a concept previously without a good word as a fit. (This is part of the process called semantic change, but I don't think it's exactly semantic narrowing, since the new meaning isn't necessarily less general than the earlier meaning - just different.) We saw it with etz and ilan, with atar and makom, with tzedek and tzedaka, and now with chizek and imetz. Hebrew today doesn't really need two words for "strengthen." So when a writer like Smolenskin borrows from a verse in Tehillim and turns imetz into adopt (a child), then the speakers will, well, adopt the usage with open arms. (Yes, the meaning of imetz has since expanded to mean adopting of any practice or idea.)

Perhaps the lesson here is just as Amazon the company takes over marketplaces, and the waters of the Amazon river flow through the land of South America, so too will words like imutz fill in the linguistic gaps if only given a chance.

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meged, almond and armageddon

We've previously discussed the Hebrew word שקד shaked, meaning "almond." But what about the etymology of the word "almond" itself?

The Online Etymology Dictionary provides the following origin:

kernel of the fruit of the almond tree, c. 1300, from Old French almande, amande, earlier alemondle "almond," from Vulgar Latin *amendla, *amandula, from Latin amygdala (plural), from Greek amygdalos "an almond tree," a word of unknown origin, perhaps from Semitic. Late Old English had amygdales "almonds." 

This makes it cognate with the part of the brain responsible for emotions known as the amygdala. Here's the Online Etymology entry for amygdala:

part of the brain, from Latin amygdalum "almond" (which the brain parts resemble), from Greek amygdale "almond" (see almond). English also had amygdales "the tonsils" (early 15c.), from a secondary sense of the Latin word in Medieval Latin, a translation of Arabic al-lauzatani "the two tonsils," literally "the two almonds," so called by Arabic physicians for fancied resemblance.

The connection between almonds and tonsils exists in Hebrew as well - shaked can refer to both.

However, I'd like to return to the mention above that the Greek amygdalos may be "perhaps from Semitic." In Klein's CEDEL, he expands on this idea. In his entry for "almond" he writes:

…according to H. Lewy, Die semitischen Fremdwörter im Griechischen, pp. 25-26, [amygdalos] is borrowed from Hebrew meghedh El, 'divine fruit'.

The Hebrew word referred to here, meged מגד, is not a very common one in the Bible, only appearing eight times. However, those familiar with the Torah reading for Simchat Torah will certainly recognize it, as it repeats five times during Moshe's blessing of the tribes of Yosef (Devarim 33:13-16) . The word is variously translated as "sweetness," "best", or "bounty." Some say it means "blessing", particularly when comparing the parallel blessing Yaakov gave Yosef in Bereshit 49:25. 

Klein's etymology for meged is not much more precise:

מֶֽגֶד m.n. choice of things, excellence. [Related to Aram. מִגְדָּא (= fruit, something precious), Syr. מַגְדָּא (= fruit), Arab. majd (= glory, honor).] 

In any case, based on all the biblical appearances of the word, it always refers to good crops or fruits, and so the possibility that it eventually was borrowed by the Greeks for their word for the fruit of the prized almond tree should not be dismissed.

Klein mentioned the Arabic cognate, majd. That Arabic word is found in a number of names of people and places, One such place, familiar to Israelis, is the Arab town of Majd al-Krum in the Galilee. While the English Wikipedia page says that the name translates to "watch-house of the vineyard" (perhaps cognate with the Hebrew migdal מגדל - "tower"), the Hebrew entry translates the name as "glory of the vineyards", which makes it cognate with meged.

Yet there is another town in northern Israel, even more well known, which may derive from meged as well. This is the Biblical city of Megiddo מגידו. Megiddo appears 12 times in the Bible, once (Zecharia 12:11) as Megidon. While its etymology is debated, the Encyclopedia Mikrait suggests that it may come from meged due to the produce grown there.

The mountain of Megiddo was known in Hebrew as har Megido הר מגידו (or perhaps har Megidon), and this led to another familiar word in English - Armageddon:

"cataclysmic final conflict," 1811, figurative use of the place-name in Revelation xvi.16, site of the great and final conflict, from Hebrew Har Megiddon "Mount of Megiddo"

Today many are concerned about the environmental impact of almond growing. Let's hope that instead of leading to an armageddon, they continue to be the divine fruit of blessing that we've enjoyed for millennia. 

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Syracuse

In an earlier post, we discussed the Semitic etymologies of two towns in upstate New York: Utica and Ithaca. Both are named for cities in the Mediterranean, and are claimed to ultimately have Phoenician origins. Well, if you drive from Utica to Ithaca, you will pass through another city with a similar story: Syracuse.

Having grown up in nearby Rochester, all of these cities were familiar to me. On a recent visit to Rochester, my brother and sister-in-law prepared Syracuse salt potatoes - a delicious dish that I hadn't tried before. Only later did I learn that Syracuse is nicknamed "The Salt City", due to the salty springs in the area, that led to it becoming a center of salt production. So I guess in a city like that, you can afford to cook potatoes in 1.5 cups of salt.

Those same sources of salt also led to the name of the city. In the 19th century, officials chose to name the city "Syracuse" after an ancient town of the same name in the Mediterranean island of Sicily. That older Syracuse also was known for producing salt, and had marshes like the one in upstate New York. It was a good fit.

According to some, those marshes provided the original name of the city. The Online Etymology Dictionary gives this origin:

city in Sicily, founded as a Corinthian colony, and with a name traceable to 8c. B.C.E., from a pre-Hellenic word, perhaps Phoenician serah "to feel ill," in reference to its location near a swamp. The city in New York, U.S., was named 1825 for the classical city.

The word serah mentioned here is a cognate with the Hebrew סרח, meaning "to stink". Klein has this etymology:

Aram. סְרַח (= it decayed, putrefied), Syr. סְרַח (= he sinned, was corrupt), Aram. סוּרְחָנָא (= corruptness).

It only appears in the Bible in one verse, Yirmiyahu 49:7, describing the nation of Edom. The prophet asks:

נִסְרְחָ֖ה חׇכְמָתָֽם

Has their wisdom gone stale?

But the verb became much more common in Rabbinic Hebrew. Jastrow offers the following meanings: "to evaporate, be decomposed; to decay; to smell badly." Today, the most common form of the verb is the hifil - הסריח "it stank."

(There is another root with the same letters - סרח, meaning "to stretch, spread out, extend", but it is unrelated to the meaning "to stink.")

This is not the only suggested etymology of Syracuse. The French diplomat Victor Bérard proposed that it originally derived from the Phoenician Sour-ha-Koussim, translated as "stone of the seagulls." This would be cognate with the Hebrew צור הכוסים. Tzur certainly means "rock", but kos, a bird mentioned in Vayikra 11:17 and Devarim 14:16 is usually translated as "owl" - a bird found in the desert, not at sea. However, Gesenius does write that kos should be identified as the "pelican" (whose pouch perhaps recalls the other meaning of kos - "cup, vessel.") Those are much more likely to be found around Sicily than desert owls.

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