hora and horim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tweet

av and em

I'd like to start a new series about kinship terms. I've written about some of them before, and you can find all of them by clicking on the label below this post, or in the categories section in the sidebar.

I think the Hebrew terms for mother - אם em, and father אב av. Klein writes that both of them "probably derive from a child's word", i.e. baby language. Similar sounds are used in many languages. In modern Hebrew we have the terms aba אבא - "dad" and ima אמא - "mom". Klein writes that they come from Aramaic, where they mean "the father" and "the mother" respectively. However, Kutscher points out that in Talmudic Hebrew aba and ima can mean "my/our father/mother". As a proof of this, he brings the story from Pesachim 4a (according to the version of Rabbeinu Chananel), where Rabbi Chiya asked Rav if "Abba" is alive. Rav didn't want to say anything offensive - so he said "Abba" is alive. Kutscher writes that Rabbi Chiya was asking if his own father was alive, and Rav knew that he wasn't. So when Rav said "Abba" was alive, he meant, "yes, my father is alive".

Because of the similar sounds in other languages, it can be difficult to determine if a word in a non-Semitic word that sounds like em or av was borrowed from Hebrew or a related language. However, there are a few examples where this seems to have happened.

For example, the Online Etymology Dictionary claims that the English word "aunt" might be connected to em:

from Anglo-Fr. aunte, from O.Fr. ante, from L. amita "paternal aunt" dim. of *amma a baby-talk or non-I.E. word for "mother" (cf. Gk. amma "mother," O.N. amma "grandmother," M.Ir. ammait "old hag," Heb. em, Arabic umm "mother").

While the origin of aunt is questionable, the words "abbot" and "abbey" definitely come from Hebrew. Kutscher, quoted here, writes as follows:

Another instructive example is the use made in Christian times of words derived from the Hebrew אב (av – “father”). In Mishnaic Hebrew we find the Aramaic אבא (abba), the earliest written form of which appears in the New Testament in Mark 14:36. The word followed hard in the wake of the spread of Christianity throughout Europe. In medieval Latin it took the form of abbas, a name for a monk, whence abbatia, a monastery, still retained in French abbaye. Furthermore, by the addition of a Greco-Roman suffix a feminine form was created, abbatissa. In English one finds abbot (and abbess), in German Abt the head of a monastery, in French abbé a priest. Likewise we have in German Äbtissin head of a nunnery by adding in, a German feminine suffix.

It is strange that the female head of an abbey would have a title deriving from the Hebrew word for "father" - but that's how language goes!

Tweet

neter and nitrogen

In my last (real) post, I discussed the origin of the word soda, and its derivative sodium. Well, have you ever noticed that the chemical symbol for sodium is Na (as in NaCl - sodium chloride)? Clearly Na is not an abbreviation for "sodium", so where did it come from?

Let's discuss the development of the symbol. It might not surprise you to see that there's a connection to Hebrew here as well...

We begin with the Egyptian word ntr (I've also seen it spelled netjeri / netjry /ntrj / ntry). The word originally meant "divine" or "pure". It referred to a salt called sodium carbonate, also known as "washing soda" or "soda ash" (and sometimes simply "soda"). It was found in the area of Wadi El Natrun (apparently the wadi was named after the salt, not the other way around), in salt lakes. It was used both for soap as well as in the process of mummification.

From Egyptian the word was borrowed into Semitic languages - Akkadian nit(i)ru, Aramaic nithra, and Hebrew neter נתר. This word appears twice in the Bible - Yirimiyahu 2:22, where it talks about its use in cleaning and Mishlei 25:20, where it describes the effect of mixing it with vinegar (remember those volcano experiments from grade school where you mixed baking soda - sodium bicarbonate - and vinegar? Same thing here.)

However, in Israel, outside of Egypt, neter didn't only refer to soda (sodium carbonate) but primarily to potash (potassium carbonate), which was derived from plant ashes. (Note that we've previously discussed the Semitic origin of the symbol K for potassium, and its connection to plant ashes.) By Talmudic times (Shabbat 90a), they distinguished between the two types: Alexandrian neter, which came from the Egyptian salt lakes, and Antipatrisian neter, which came from the town of Antipatris - made from the ashes of plants.

The Greeks also had a term for this kind of soda - nitron (sometimes spelled litron). There's some debate as to whether the term was directly borrowed from Egyptian or perhaps entered Greek via Hebrew / Phoneician. From Greek the word entered Latin as nitrum and Arabic as natron.

If we continue following the word in the European languages, we see that from here it splits into two different paths. The Arabic natron enters as is into Spanish and then French, where it meant both potash and soda. The word natron is still used in English (where it appeared first in 1684), but mostly to refer to the older use of the salt.

In the 18th century, chemists began the process of identifying the various chemical elements. As discussed here, there was a split between Germanic speaking countries and the English and French speaking countries. Sir Humphry Davy was able to isolate the element sodium. As it came from "soda" - sodium was the name he chose, and this is the name used in French and English speaking countries. However, the Germanic speaking countries follow the chemists Gilbert and Klaproth who first called the element natronium (the suffix -ium means "metal", i.e. this is the metal component of soda), and then later Berzelius who came up natrium. And as we saw with Potassium and K, while the name of the element is sodium in English, the symbol of Berzelius was adopted - Na.

In Hebrew the word for sodium is natran נתרן. I haven't seen its coinage discussed extensively, but I imagine that on the one hand the influence of German science is felt here, as well as a desire to connect it to the Biblical word neter.

We've now followed the path of the word natron. However, we find another word that derived from the Greek nitron and Latin nitrum in European languages - nitre. The word is first found in French, and from there to English, where it is spelled nitre in the UK and niter in the US. Nitre does not refer to sodium or potassium carbonate, but potassium (or sodium) nitrate - better known as saltpeter (US) or saltpetre (UK). This substance isn't used as a detergent, so the translations of the Biblical neter as nitre are incorrect. Nitre was used as a fertilizer and as an explosive (for an interesting description about the connection between fertilizers and explosives, read Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.)

Again in the 18th century, Rutheford discovered the chemical nitrogen, but the name was given by the French chemist Chaptal because it produces ("generates") nitre. So we actually have two elements - nitrogen and sodium, that derive from the same word.

The only question that still remains is why did nitre come to mean potassium nitrate instead of sodium carbonate? I've seen a few theories. This book (The World's Greatest Fix: A History of Nitrogen and Agriculture by G. J. Leigh, page 89) tells us that

the alchemists who first described these salts were not then able to distinguish clearly between the two types of salt.

It also points out that "nitre" stopped meaning "natron" in English in the middle of the 17th century, around the time that English began using the word natron (which must have helped with the clarity necessary to begin identifying elements like sodium and nitrogen in the following century).

This article indicates that the confusion between nitre (saltpeter) and natron (sodium carbonate) goes back very far:

It seems established that Greek nitron and Latin nitrum were used for both saltpeter and soda, which were not recognized as different substances. Pliny definitely used nitrum for both.
...
With better chemical knowledge, brought to the West by the Arabs, came also an Arabicized form of nitron, natrun, which existed beside the native Arabic word for soda, qali, meaning a plant ash, or milh qali "ash salt." As now two words were available, and two substances were distinguished, soda was called natron, while nitrum was specialized for saltpeter.

One other theory is presented by this book from 1844 (I don't know how well it has aged):

Their nitrum, however, must have been exceedingly various in its properties. For this incrustation is not always calcareous saltpetre; it is often soda, mixed with more or less calcareous earth ; and sometimes it consists of salts of sulphuric acid.
...
Substances so different ought not indeed to have been all named nitrum ; but before natural history began to be formed into a regular system, mankind in general fell into an error directly contrary to that committed at present. Objects essentially different were comprehended under one name, if they any how corresponded with each other even in things accidental. Whereas at present every variety, however small, obtains a distinct appellation; because many wish to have the pleasure, if not of forming new species, at any rate of giving new names. The elephant and rhinoceros were formerly called oxen ; the sable and ermine were named mice, and the ostrich was distinguished by the appellation of sparrow. In the like manner, calcareous saltpetre and alkali might be called nitrum. The ancients, however, gave to their nitrum some epithets, but they seem to have been used only to denote uncommon varieties.
...
But were the ancients, under the ambiguous name of nitrum acquainted with our saltpetre? There is certainly reason to think that it became known to them by lixiviating earths impregnated with salts. There are, as already said, not only in India but also in Africa, and particularly in Egypt, earths which, without the addition of ashes or potash, give real saltpetre, like that of the rubbish-hills on the road from new to old Cairo, and like the earth in some parts of Spain. It is a knowledge only of this natural kind of saltpetre, which required no artificial composition, that can be allowed to the ancients, as it does not appear by their writings that they were sufficiently versed in chemistry to prepare the artificial kind used at present.

But even admitting that they had our saltpetre, where and by what means can we be convinced of it ? Is it to be expected that any of the before-mentioned characters or properties of this salt should occur in their writings? They neither made aquafortis nor gunpowder; and they seem scarcely to have had any occasion or opportunity to discover its deflagration and the carbonization thereby effected, or, when observed, to examine and describe it. No other use of our saltpetre which could properly announce this phenomenon has yet been known. How then can it be ascertained that under the term nitrum they sometimes meant our saltpetre? Those inclined to believe too little rather than too much, who cannot be satisfied with mere conjectures or probabilities,but always require full proof, will acknowledge with me, that the first certain accounts of our saltpetre cannot be expected much before the invention of aquafortis and gunpowder. It deserves also to be remarked, that the real saltpetre, as soon as it became known, was named also nitrum ; but, by way of distinction, either sal nitrum, or sal nitri, or sal petrae. The first appellation, from which our ancestors made salniter, was occasioned by an unintelligible passage of Pliny, which I shall afterwards point out. The two other names signify like sal tartari, sal succini, a salt which was not nitrum but obtained from nitrum. Sal-nitri, therefore, or salniter, was that salt which, according to the representation of the ancients, was separated by art from nitrum, yet was essentially different from the nitrum or soda commonly in use. Birin-goccio says expressly, that the artificial nitrum, for the sake of distinction, was named, not nitrum, but sal nitrum.
...
In the course of time men became acquainted with the purer, more useful, and cheaper mineral alkali which was furnished, under the name of soda, by the Moors and inhabitants of the southern countries, who had learned the method of preparing it. The vegetable alkali also was always more and more manufactured in woody districts, as an article in great request, and sold under the name of potash, cineres clavellati. All knowledge of the impure alkali from the incrustation of walls was then lost ; and as there was no further need of guarding against confusion, it was not longer thought worth while to name saltpetre sal nitri: it was called nitrum and the oldest signification of this word being forgotten, it was admitted without further examination, that the nitrum of the ancients was nothing else than our saltpetre.

At this point the answer of when the terms diverged is not entirely clear. But I do very much like the quote above: "many wish to have the pleasure, if not of forming new species, at any rate of giving new names". I suppose if it wasn't so, I would have a lot less to write about...

Tweet

twitter on balashon

When I started this site over two years ago, I often wrote a post daily. Since then, my knowledge in the field has increased, and with that has come exposure to more and more resources, both online (websites, Google Books, JSTOR) and offline (I have no room in my house for any more dictionaries!). Additionally, I've met a great number of very knowledgeable people through this site, many of whom I like to consult before publishing a post.

So the research needed to prepare a post has increased dramatically. That, together with my consistently shrinking "free time", has made my posts less frequent. From once nearly daily, I'm down to one a week - on a good week.

But it is important for me to let my regular readers and the new ones who visit this site all the time (Hi! Welcome!) that my interest obsession with Hebrew words and their history is constantly active.

So I've joined the site Twitter (would that be צִיּוּץ in Hebrew?). Twitter here will sort of serve as a "blog inside a blog". You can find it in the sidebar to your right, and I'll try to update it frequently with a sentence or two about the words I'm thinking about, questions I have, sources I'm looking for, etc. Feel free to email me with any ideas you have about my Twitter updates.

And one unrelated side note: Firefox 3 was recently released, and I found that Balashon was linked to in a Mozilla forum as an example of problems with Hebrew in the new version. I'm not sure there's anything I can do from my side, but if you have trouble reading the Hebrew, or the vowels don't show properly, please let me know.

Tweet

sod

We're now at the last of the posts on the PaRDeS words, and we'll be discussing the word sod סוד. Unlike remez which doesn't appear in the Tanach at all, and derash which has many possible meanings in Biblical Hebrew, sod has two usages. Even Shoshan's concordance lists 16 verses where the word means "assembly" and five where it means "secret" - the more common meaning today. The development between "secret" and "assembly" isn't very hard to grasp, when we place the term "secret advice" in between them. A parallel set of terms in Hebrew is moetza מועצה - "assembly" and etza עצה - "advice". In English we also have the related terms "council" and "counsel".

However, for our purposes, it is important to determine which meaning came first. Without looking at other evidence, I can easily see either one leading to the other. But if we want to see if there are related words in Hebrew or in other Semitic languages, we need to know which meaning came first.

In this regard, we have a number of opinions amongst the sources I've checked. Klein, for example, provides the following order:

1. counsel
2. secret counsel
3. council, assembly
4. (Post Biblical Hebrew) secret

And he gives this etymology:

Related to Syriac סודא, סוודא (= friendly, confidential speech), Arabic sawada (= he spoke in secret).

Kaddari has a similar order: 1) secret thought, 2) consultation with trusted friends, 3) consultation with a group, 4) assembly.

The Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament in its comprehensive entry on sod, writes that the word might be related to the Arabic root swd, meaning "to be black". If this is the case, it would be related to the country Sudan:

from Arabic Bilad-al-sudan, lit. "country of the blacks," from sud, pl. of aswad (fem. sauda) "black."

As well as the word "soda" (and the related "sodium"):

"alkaline substance," from It. sida (or M.L. soda) "a kind of saltwort," from which soda is obtained, probably from Arabic suwwad, the name of a variety of saltwort exported from North Africa to Sicily in the Middle Ages, related to sawad "black," the color of the plant.

(It should be noted, however, that Klein gives a different etymology for "soda":

Med L. soda, from sodanum, lit: "headache remedy", from soda (=headache), from Arabic suda, in vulgar pronunciation soda (= splitting headache), from sada'a (=he split).

I have not found a Hebrew cognate for this Arabic root.)


However, the Daat Mikra claims that the primary meaning of sod is assembly (and actually gives a higher percentage of usage to that meaning than does Even-Shoshan.) For example, Amos Chacham writes on Tehillim 25:14 that "sod in Biblical Hebrew means proximity and connection, not necessarily in secret, but even in public, as in Tehillim 111:1 - אוֹדֶה ה', בְּכָל-לֵבָב; בְּסוֹד יְשָׁרִים וְעֵדָה. - 'I praise God with all my heart; in the assembled congregation of the upright'".

Jastrow seems to follow this same line of thought, and writes that sod derives from a root סדד, meaning "to join". He lists a number of other words from this root. One is sad סד, a Biblical word meaning "stocks for torturing, blocks", which he connects to the Arabic sadda - "to obstruct, to block". This is the source of the English word "sudd" - "a floating mass of vegetation that often obstructs navigation in tropical rivers". Jastrow also writes that the word sadan סדן - "block, anvil" is related to sad. From here we get the modern word sadna סדנה - meaning "workshop".

(Klein connects Arabic sadda to the Hebrew שדד, meaning to "overpower, rob". I would therefore assume he would not connect sadda to sod.)

Another derivative he provides is yesod יסוד, meaning "foundation". According to Jastrow, the development is "to join, to fasten, to found, to establish". From here we get the word musad מוסד - "establishment, institution", well known as the Mossad - Israel's intelligence agency (institution).

Steinberg has a similar theory to Jastrow - also connecting sod, sad and yesod. However, unlike Jastrow, who writes that the common root means "to join", Steinberg feels it means "to establish on a base, to sit in a place". Therefore the original meaning of sod was "sitting together of friends". He also connects the word sadin סדין to the same root. This I have trouble with. I can put aside the fact that current research says that sadin derives from a Sumerian word, since I'm guessing Steinberg didn't have access to that information. However, while in Mishnaic (and current) Hebrew sadin means "sheet", in Biblical Hebrew sadin meant "garment". His attempts to show that based on Mishnaic use the word originally meant "sheet" (which covers the the base where one sleeps) is a bit of a stretch.

However, Steinberg does present a theory which I did find some more modern support. He writes that the root סוד - meaning "to establish, sit" has Indo-European cognates, in the Sanskrit sad, the Latin sedere, and the English "sit". He's referring to the base *sed, which is the source of many related words in English. Starostin connects the IE root here to our Semitic root here (although if I follow it correctly, only to yesod, not sod.) Of course all the normal caveats apply to the Nostratic hypothesis, but Steinberg might have been on to something.

So we can see from here that if sod originally meant "secret", then it might be related to "soda". If it originally meant "assembly", then there's a chance it's related to "sit". But there's almost no possibility it's related to both.

Another thing to rule out is my own theory from before I started researching this post. I thought perhaps the original root meant "to cover up" - which would have connected it to the Biblical word sid שיד - "whitewash". In Talmudic Hebrew the root becomes סוד, but no one makes any connection to our sod. I did even find a theory that the town Sedom (Sodom) סדום is related to שיד, as it was found in Emek HaSidim עמק השדים.

Had that theory worked out, I would have been able to connect sawad - black to sid - white, via sod. But while that connection didn't work out, if you'd really like to connect black to white - you can read this post from almost two years ago that did the same thing...

Tweet

derash

The next word in our series of PaRDeS words is derash דרש -'interpretation" or "exegesis". The root דרש is unlike the previous word, remez. First of all, רמז does not appear at all in the Tanach, where as דרש appears well over 100 times. And the meaning of remez is fairly simple - "hint", but darash has many definitions, of which none can explain all of the occurrences. Sometimes when a word has a variety of usages, it is possible to point to the earliest, "original", meaning. This does not seem to be easy with darash. The dictionaries didn't help much. I looked at six Hebrew dictionaries, all of which pay attention to the history of the word. Usually, the first definition listed is considered to be the original one. But as you'll see below, each dictionary came up with a different list, with a different order:

Most of these meanings appear somewhere in the Tanach (with the exception of "preach, lecture"). So we can't claim biblical usage as a sign of original meaning.

Klein actually provides an etymology:

JAram.-Syr. דרש, Mand. דרש (= he examines; he instructed, taught). Arabic darasa (= he learned, studied), Ethiopian darasa (= he expounded, interpreted) are Aramaic loan words. The original meaning of this base probably is 'to tread, trample, rub', hence ultimately identical with base דרס.

Klein defines דרס as "to tread, trample" but doesn't explain the connection to darash there either. Perhaps one of you can see the connection between דרס and דרש, but nothing seems obvious to me.

Stahl, in his Arabic dictionary, connects דרש to both דרס and also to דוש, which means "to tread, thresh" (possibly based on Gesenius here). He writes (my translation):

studying requires repetition, as does the threshing of grain

He points us to the word "studio" for similar development. From the Online Etymology Dictionary for the word "study":

c.1125, from O.Fr. estudier "to study" (Fr. étude), from M.L. studiare, from L. studium "study, application," originally "eagerness," from studere "to be diligent" ("to be pressing forward"), from PIE *(s)teu- "to push, stick, knock, beat"

The problem with this theory is that darash only appears once in the Tanach with the meaning "to study" - in Ezra 7:10. This seems to be a pretty late source, and none of the dictionaries put that meaning near the top. Heschel, in Heavenly Torah: As Refracted through the Generations,   (pages 251-252) describes the shift of meaning in Ezra's time:

Scripture says that Ezra "dedicated himself to seek out the meaning [lidrosh] of the Torah of the Lord" (Ezra 7:10)

and in footnote 45, there continues:

It is worth noting that this verse expresses something of historic importance. Previously, the root drsh was used for seeking out God, that is, for consulting an oracle, a priest or a prophet. Now it is used for the teaching of God, for the Torah. Ezra begins to inquire of a test, and thus we are signaled that the era of prophecy is at an end.

The Encyclopedia Judaica article on "Midrash" (found here), also points to the Latin studium, but has a somewhat different description than Stahl:

The term Midrash itself derives from the root drsh (דרש) which in the Bible means mainly “to search,” “to seek,” “to examine,” and “to investigate” (cf. Lev. 10:16; Deut. 13:15; Isa. 55:6; et al.). This meaning is also found in rabbinic Hebrew (cf. BM 2:7: “until thou examine [tidrosh] thy brother if he be a cheat or not”). The noun “Midrash” occurs only twice in the Bible (II Chron. 13:22 and 24:27); it is translated in the Septuagint by βίβλοs, γράφη i.e., “book” or “writing,” and it seems probable that it means “an account,” “the result of inquiry (examination, study, or search) of the events of the times,” i.e., what is today called “history” (the word history is also derived from the Greek root ίστορὲω which has a similar meaning). In Jewish literature of the Second Temple period the word Midrash was first employed in the sense of education and learning generally (Ecclus. 51:23), “Turn unto me, ye unlearned, and lodge in my house of Midrash,” which the author’s grandson translated into Greek, “house of instruction or of study”; compare the similar development of the Latin studium which originated in the verb studeo which means “to become enthusiastic,” “to make an effort,” “to be diligent,” etc. and only in a secondary sense, in the post-Augustan era, in the sense of learning (with diligence and the noun studium passed through the same stages of meaning; cf. Ger. studium; Fr. étude, etc.).

So if I understand Moshe David Herr's EJ article, he says that first the word darash meant "to search" or "to seek", and from there developed to the sense of "to study", with a similar pattern in Latin. However, that leaves an obvious question. Where would the connection to דרס fit in to Herr's theory?

In the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, Wagner has an extensive discussion about the usage and meaning of the root דרש, on pages 293-307. In the section on etymology, he writes:

The root drs is found in several Semitic languages: Aramaic, Arabic, Ethiopic, Syriac and Mandean, and is attested in Ugaritic (as yet only once, according to Bauer's reconstruction). It is debatable whether Akkadian darasu has anything to do with the same root. The original meaning of drs is hard to determine. It is probably correct to translate it by the English words "seek," "ask," "inquire (of)" (Ugar. "interrogate, question"?). The root must have undergone a change of meaning in the course of its use. In late Semitic languages such as Middle Hebrew, Jewish Aramaic and Syriac one encounters meanings like "interpret," but also "tread," "trample".

So Wagner basically reverses Klein's theory and says that דרס followed דרש.

Gesenius supports Klein, by saying that the original meaning was "to tread a place, i.e. to go or come to it, to frequent" and from there "to seek, to search for". I'm not sure who's right. Gesenius is the only one to flush out Klein's theory (of course Klein read Gesenius, not the other way around), but it seems somewhat forced. And the fact that darash never actually means "to tread" in Biblical Hebrew leads me to give more weight to Wagner's theory.
Regardless of the original meaning, by Talmudic times the verb darash came to be almost exclusively associated with study, meaning "to expound, interpret" or "to teach, lecture". The former sense gave us the word מדרש midrash (actually appearing once in the Tanach - Divrei Hayamim II 13:22) meaning "homelitical interpretation", and the latter sense we find in both the words derasha דרשה - "sermon" and beit midrash בית מדרש - "house of study".
This Philologos column discusses the connection between the Hebrew beit midrash and the Arabic madrasah - "school":

Madraseh, like many terms used by the world's Muslims, comes from Arabic, in which it is a nominal form of the verb darasa, "to study." In contemporary Arabic, however, madrasa does not necessarily mean a religious seminary. It is the generic word for "school," so that a second-grader learning to read and write is attending a madrasa, too. It is only in non-Arabic languages spoken by Islamic peoples that the word specifically refers today to a religious institution of higher learning.
...
As for the Jewish beit midrash, or "house of study," it comes from the verb darash, "to seek" (exactly as the talib of "Taliban" comes from talaba, "to seek"), and goes back to early rabbinic times in Palestine — that is, to the very beginning of the Common Era. Jewish education in this period began with a beit sefer, a "house of the book" (the generic Hebrew word for "school" to this day) in which young children were taught reading, writing and Bible; continued with a beit talmud, or "house of learning," in which some Mishna and simple rabbinic jurisprudence was taught to older children, and progressed to a beit midrash, in which advanced students sat at the feet of famous rabbis. The original beit midrash was thus similar to what eventually came to be known among Jews as a yeshiva, literally, "a sitting." Over the centuries, however, as the word yeshiva replaced beit midrash for an institute of higher Jewish learning, beit midrash came to denote an informal place of study in which anyone could sit and learn on his own in the presence of a library of sacred books.
...
The interesting question is whether the linguistic connection between the Muslim madrasa and the Jewish beit midrash is more than a matter of the general kinship between Arabic and Hebrew and actually has a causal element — i.e., whether the word madrasa was modeled on beit midrash. Although I can't think of any way of proving or disproving this, my instincts tell me that it was probably what happened. Rabbinic Judaism had an enormous influence on early Islam, and many Islamic institutions and concepts were knowingly or unknowingly taken from it. Moreover, when one reflects that pre-Islamic Arab society had no system of formal education at all; that the word kuttab is allied to kitab, "book," like sefer in beit sefer, and that the original beit midrash was an institution of higher religious learning just as the madrasa was, it seems likely that early Islam borrowed its terminology for different kinds and stages of schooling at least partly from Jewish sources.

In Modern Hebrew, as often happens, we've returned to the Biblical sense, and the most common usage of דרש is "to require".
In the spirit of seeking and studying, I'd like to ask (not demand!) from my readers some help. In the course of researching this post, I found this page. In the section discussing Sanskrit, they write:

Among the derivative verbal systems are the causative and the desiderative ("desire to"); the former has an affix -ay- (gam-ay-a-ti "makes to go," kar-ay-a-ti "has do") or, after roots in -a, -pay- (stha-pay-a-ti "sets in place"). The desiderative is formed with -sa- and reduplication (repetition of a part of the root)--di-drk-sa-te "desires to see" (root drsh). The desiderative also has an agent noun in -u--di-drk-s-u "who wishes to see."

Does anyone know if there's a suggested connection between the Sanskrit and the Hebrew drsh? Let's keep the suggestions in the realm of peshat, not derash...

***********
Update: I've given the question of darash / daras some more thought, and I think I overlooked something. In addition to daras, we have another verb that clearly means "tread" - דרך darach. Klein says that darach is related to דרג - also meaning "to walk". So now we have three roots that mean "to tread/ walk", which leads me to believe that perhaps we're talking about an early two-letter Hebrew root. We might also be able to add דדב - "to be accustomed, be trained" and דרר - "to flow abundantly, run swiftly". In that case, it's not so farfetched to think that darash is also connected, maybe similar to Gesenius. First "to walk", then "to seek".

Tweet

remez

Back in December, I started a series of words, but never finished them. Do you remember the series? I'll give you a hint...

I was discussing the words that make up the acronym PaRDeS, and I had already reviewed the word peshat. Today we'll look at the word remez רמז, meaning "hint".

Klein says the verb רמז means "to wink, beckon, hint, allude, make signs", and is related to the Arabic ramaza - "he winked with the eyes". Stahl points out that the Arabic name Ramzi, meaning "symbol" derives from this root. In Modern Hebrew we have the word ramzor רמזור, "traffic light", which is a compound of רמז - "he made a sign" and אור or - "light".

Remez only appears in post-Biblical Hebrew. However, many feel that a metathesized form of the word appears in the Tanach. The problem is it only found once, in Iyov 15:12

מַה-יִּקָּחֲךָ לִבֶּךָ; וּמַה-יִּרְזְמוּן עֵינֶיךָ.

This is in the section where Eliphaz is criticizing Iyov's attitude toward God. The classic commentaries (Rashi, Ibn Ezra) as well as Klein in his dictionary say that the root רזם here means wink, and is a form of רמז. They would therefore translate the verse as:

"How your heart has carried you away, and what do your eyes wink / hint at."

This article says that perhaps the Talmudic name murzema, cognate to the Arabic mirzam, meaning "flamingo", might derive its name from remez as "hint", as a euphemism for the bird's loud call.

Kaddari, however, thinks that the two roots are not necessarily related. He says that רמז is borrowed from Aramaic and Syriac, but רזם appears in the Lachish letters.

Ben Yehuda also claims the roots are not related, but he goes further, and says that the root רזם means "to weaken", and only in the Middle Ages was the root used as a synonym for רמז. It would seem that if רזם means "weak", it might be related to the root רזה, meaning "thin, lean". This is the New JPS Translation as well, "how your eyes have failed you", although they do note that "meaning of Hebrew uncertain".

In the footnote for Ben Yehuda's entry on רזם, he refers us to the commentary of Tur-Sinai on Iyov (actually it was probably Tur-Sinai himself doing the referring, since he was the editor of the volume.) Tur-Sinai disagrees with Shadal, who emends the verse in Iyov to read ירומון instead of ירזמון. (See footnote 25 here, and here for a full discussion of Shadal and textual emendation. Tur-Sinai was no stranger to emendation - his Biblical commentary seems to suggest one for every difficult verse.)

Shadal's suggestion of ירומון - "how you have raised your eyes" or "why are your eyes lifted up" does make sense in the context. "Raised eyes" - עינים רמות - enayim ramot, is a common biblical image for pride (see Mishlei 6:17, 21:4, Tehillim 18:28, 101:5). Eliphaz is criticizing Iyov for excessive pride. He asks him, "Were you the first man born ... Have you sole possession of wisdom ... What do you know that we do not know?" So certainly it would make sense that he was accusing Iyov of pride - perhaps more so than winking or failing eyes.

However, in this case, I think Shadal might have relied on something more than the contextual meaning. The Septuagint translates ירזמון as ephnegkan - επηνεγκαν, which means "carry, lift up." The root of this word is pherein - "to carry", and is the source of the words infer, aquifer and fertile (and we've also seen it in the Hebrew word apiryon אפריון).

But if Shadal's emendation was based on the Septuagint, I might have a suggestion that would not require changing the text. We've mentioned the theory that רזם might mean "weak" based on an Arabic root. But רזם in Arabic can also refer to a "bundle or package". Maybe "carrying (a bundle)" was the meaning of רזם that the Septuagint was trying to convey?

Stahl writes that the word ruzmeh (or rizmah) went from the general meaning of "bundle" to the specific meaning of "bundle of paper". From here we get the English word "ream (of paper)":

from O.Fr. reyme, from Sp. resma, from Arabic rizmah "bundle" (of paper), from rasama "collect into a bundle." The Moors brought manufacture of cotton paper to Spain. Early variant rym (1470s) suggests a Du. influence (cf. Du. riem), probably during the time of Spanish Hapsburg control of Holland.

The American Heritage Dictionary has a similar entry for the Semitic root rzm:

Arabic root, to bundle. ream, from Arabic rizma, bundle, from razama, to bundle.

In the end, with the word ירזמון only appearing once in the Tanach, we may never really know. But these kinds of words leave a lot open to interpretation, which is why the Tanach has so many levels - one of which is remez (allegory)...

Tweet

balashon logo

I'd like to add some sort of logo or graphic to Balashon, that I could use to represent the site, and use to dress up the site a bit. I have no real graphic skills, so if any of you readers out there would like to try to come up with something, it would be great. I was thinking maybe something with the word בלשון with each letter in a different Hebrew script (Ivri, Ashuri, Rashi, etc), but I'm open to ideas. A link to my email is in the sidebar. Thanks...

*** Update: Thanks to Joel Nothman, I've updated the page header. As always, I'd appreciate your feedback on any issues of layout...

Tweet

why not in hebrew?

(This post is explaining why this site is not written in Hebrew).

לפעמים שואלים אותי, "אם אתה כותב על לשון העברית, למה האתר לא בעברית?"

יש שתי סיבות:

א) למרות שאני אוהב ללמוד על עברית, ויש לי נסיון בכתיבה בעברית, יש לי עדיין הרבה טעויות, בדקדוק ובאיות. אני חושש שהשגיאות האלה יסיחו את דעתו של הקורא מתוכן המאמר.

ב) אני כותב הרבה על השינויים של משמעויות של מילים בעברית במשך הדורות. קשה מאד לעשות את זה בכתיבה בעברית, כי אז לא ברור אם אני מדבר על המילה או על המושג. קחו את המאמר הזה לדוגמא. אני טוען שמה שקוראים "חורף" היום זה בעצם סתיו, ו-"סתיו" הוא חורף.

הרבה יותר קל לעשות את זה באנגלית, שבה אני יכול להגיד ש:

While today stav means "autumn", originally it referred to winter

בעברית זה היה "היום סתיו זה סתיו אבל במקור היה חורף"

רואים את הקושי?

אז אני מתנצל לאלה שקשה להם באנגלית, אבל אני מניח בסוף גם הם ילמדו משהו על העברית...

Tweet

degel

Degel דגל is an interesting word. Ask any Israeli - or any Hebrew speaker for that matter - and they will tell you that it means "flag". That certainly is the uncontested meaning in Modern Hebrew. But I imagine that only a precious few will know the meaning the word had in Biblical Hebrew (do you?). And as far as when that meaning changed? I'm still working on it myself...

In the Tanach, the word degel primarily appears in the beginning of the book Bamidbar, in the section describing the arrangement of the camp. Verse 1:52 says:

וְחָנוּ, בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, אִישׁ עַל-מַחֲנֵהוּ וְאִישׁ עַל-דִּגְלוֹ, לְצִבְאֹתָם

The JPS translation is: "The Israelites shall encamp troop by troop, each man with his division and each under his standard". The translation of degel here is "standard", which originally meant a "flag or other conspicuous object to serve as a rallying point for a military force".

Similarly, verse 2:2 -

אִישׁ עַל-דִּגְלוֹ בְאֹתֹת לְבֵית אֲבֹתָם, יַחֲנוּ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל: מִנֶּגֶד, סָבִיב לְאֹהֶל-מוֹעֵד יַחֲנוּ.

is translated, "The Israelites shall camp each with his standard, under the banners of their ancestral house; they shall camp around the Tent of Meeting at a distance"

However Milgrom, in his (JPS) commentary on Bamidbar, disagrees with the translation of degel as "standard". On 2:2 he writes:

Hebrew degel possibly originally meant a military banner. This is supported by the Akkadian dagalu, "to look", and diglu, "sight". The meaning "banner" was later extended by association to include the army division, just as shevet and matteh, the two terms for "tribe", were probably derived from the "rod" that served as the official tribal insignia (cf. 1:45; 14:17-18). The meaning "unit" better fits the context here, as verse 3 shows, and is supported by the Targums and the Septuagint as well as by Aramaic usage as evidenced from the Persian period by an ostracon from Arad (no. 12) and the papyri from Elephantine. It comprised a garrison of 1,000 men that lived together with their families and, as attested by the Aramaic documents of the Persian period, was an economic and legal unit as well as a military one. This situation corresponds closely to the makeup and function of the Israelite tribes in the wilderness, as depicted in the Book of Numbers. The meaning "military unit" is also present in the War Scroll from Qumran.

Verse 3 that Milgrom refers to says:

וְהַחֹנִים קֵדְמָה מִזְרָחָה, דֶּגֶל מַחֲנֵה יְהוּדָה לְצִבְאֹתָם

The JPS translates it as "Camped on the front, or east side: the standard of the division of Judah, troop by troop." But Milgrom notes that the translation should read

Rather, "camped ... the unit". The verb "camped" renders the translation of degel
more likely as "unit" than "standard"

(As an interesting side note, there are those who claim that the Akkadian word dagalu can be traced even further than its Semitic roots, and is related to the Indo-European root *deik, meaning "to show", and is the source of many English words including "teach" and "diction". My friend Mike Gerver, who is more familiar with this theory than I am, recommended that I add "a caveat that it is highly speculative (but still respectable).")

Moskowitz in the Daat Mikra on Bamidbar also agrees that "unit" is the meaning of degel here. He writes that this was the meaning not only in the Tanach, but in Rabbinic Hebrew as well, as in the Midrash (Shmot Rabba 16:7) - אין דגלים אלא צבאות "Degalim means none other than troops". He writes that the word is related to the Arabic dajjalah - "a large crowd". Unlike Milgrom, he claims that the meaning of "flag" is secondary, and derived from the original meaning of "division, unit".

Either the development from "flag" to "the unit under the flag", or from "unit" to "the flag representing the unit" is easy to accept. However, most scholars say that throughout the Tanach, degel meant unit. (The other instances - a few in Shir HaShirim and one in Tehillim, are often translated as if degel means "flag", but are explained by the Daat Mikra and others as either relating to sight or to a military unit). In Talmudic Hebrew, all the examples of degel that I could find were discussing or quoting the section above from Bamidbar. (The word digla דגלא appears in Beitza 30a and Bava Metsia 83a, but other manuscripts have the word appearing with a different spelling.)

So it would seem that the adoption of degel as flag happened in the post-Talmudic period. Rav Saadia Gaon on 1:52 translates degel as מרכז merkaz - which Kapach says means "the designated place that a soldier is assigned" - i.e. a military unit.

If we go even further, we get to Rashi. Rashi writes on 2:2 -

כל דגל יהיה לו אות מפה צבועה תלויה בו

Before I continue, I'd like to note that I often get asked why I don't write this site in Hebrew. Aside from the fact that my inevitable mistakes in Hebrew grammar would distract from my content, I think there's an inherent difficulty in writing about a language in that language. This Rashi is a good example of that. I'm sure Rashi knew exactly what he meant when he wrote the word degel. But it is not as clear to his readers, and so I have found two different translations of Rashi, each with an entirely different meaning of degel.

The first is the Metsudah edition of Rashi, as quoted here. They translate the commentary as:

Each banner shall have [as] its insignia a colored cloth hanging from it

They translate degel as "banner", which is certainly the popular understanding of the word. However, it does not make much sense in this context - why would a banner have a cloth hanging from it?

Judaica Press, brought here, changes the translation, so that degel means division:

Every division shall have its own flag staff, with a colored flag hanging on it

They translate ot אות, as "flag staff", which is likely to having a flag hanging from it. (This site says that degel actually means flagpole. This would be a fitting parallel to shevet and matteh, which Milgrom mentioned above - however, I have not found their source. Perhaps it's their own interpretation of Rashi.)

Artscroll also offers "division" for degel, with a slight variation in translation from Judaica Press:

Every division shall have for itself a sign, namely, a colored sheet of cloth hanging in its midst.

The main difference is how they translate ot - Artscroll says that the ot was the cloth. In their notes on Rashi on 1:52, they write:

Unlike other commentators, who understand דגל as "flag", Rashi sees it as "division, disposition of forces, military formation." This is indicated by his comments to 2:2 ... See Rashi to Isaiah 5:26, s.v. נס לגוים, where he describes a flag in detail, yet never once uses the word דגל. See also his comments to Psalms 20:6, Song of Songs 2:4 and 5:10

Who are these "other commentators"? Probably the earliest one I could find is Ibn Ezra, who on 2:2 writes that "the insignia were on every degel" and goes on to describe the images on the degel of each tribe (he's also the earliest example given by Ben-Yehuda). By the 19th century, Shadal needed to write that

degel didn't originally mean banner or flag, because that is the meaning of ot, as in "each with his degel, under the banners (otot)". But rather it is like Onkelos and all the early translations, "an ordered grouping" ... and you will see that throughout the section degel refers to people, not banners ... But after time, the word was borrowed for the meaning "flag", since every degel had a flag...

And in the end, as I mentioned above, Ben-Yehuda writes that today, in both speech and literature, the only meaning of degel is "flag".

So we've seen a word transform from referring to an actual group of people, to a flag that symbolizes them. My father often quotes the Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski, who said that "the map is not the territory". (We've already noted that the English word map comes from the Hebrew word mapa - meaning banner.) The idea here is not to confuse the description of something with the thing itself.

And in a way, that concern is mentioned in the official song for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel (click here for the song with Hebrew subtitles). In this great song, which blogger Esther Kustanowitz describes as follows:

Subliminal's collaborating with the legendary Israeli band Givatron, creating a new version of their song "Bat Shishim" (sixty years old) in commemoration of Israel's 60th birthday this spring. The song, written 26 years ago for Russian olim to Israel, now gets reborn as part folk, part hip-hop.

we find the following lyrics:

כי אמיתית היא ולא סמל ולא דגל ולא אות העבר מאחוריה היא צופה אל הבאות

which Esther translates:

For she is true, and not a symbol, nor a flag, nor a sign.
The past now behind her, she looks forward to what is coming.

So all I can add is that maybe the State is much more real than a degel according to its current meaning, but I hope (by looking to the past?) that we are becoming a chevra mesuderet חברה מסודרת - "organized society" - as Shadal wrote...

Tweet

mangal

Israel celebrates its Independence Day this week - Yom HaAtzamaut. And in recent years, one of the most widespread symbols of the day, perhaps even competing with the flag, is the mangal מנגל - Israel's barbeque. What is a mangal - and where does the word come from?

A number of years ago, David Bogner of Treppenwitz asked the same question. In the end he was less concerned about the etymology than he was about how much he enjoyed manning the grill for the soldiers in the area. Some of his readers suggested that the origin was Turkish. Another veteran blogger, Allison Kaplan Sommer, agreed, and wrote:

I made my little etymological discovery this year on my vacation in Istanbul, Turkey. I was touring one of the palaces, and they were showing us the little portable stoves that would be moved from room to room so that the sultans and their families could enjoy fresh tea anywhere. And the stoves were called....Mangals! So I guess the term is leftover from the Ottoman Empire days.

The best English translation for mangal is brazier, as defined here:

1. A metal pan for holding burning coals or charcoal.
2. A cooking device consisting of a charcoal or electric heating source over which food is grilled.

In Ottoman Turkey the mangal was primarily used for heat, and cooking over it was a secondary function. I found a number of sources from the 19th century describing the mangal (see here, here and here). The last one, from 1868, describes the mangal as follows:

The "mangal" is a large dish of live charcoal, and on the introduction of this into the room or ward they are dependent for warmth.

Other regions under Ottoman rule also borrowed the word, and so we find in Romanian, Albanian and other regional languages that mangal means "charcoal". In modern Hebrew, mangal came to mean almost exclusively a stove for grilling, and now refers also to the barbecuing event itself.

However, where did the Turks get this word? According to an article by Amnon Shappira of the Hebrew Language Academy (Leshonenu Le'Am 45:3), the Turks borrowed it from the Arabic word mankal (מנקל) - also meaning stoves. Where did the switch from mankal to mangal occur? Shapira brings up the theory that it could be from Bedouins or even Yemenite Jews, who substitute "g" for "k". However, he writes that the use of the mangal was not as common on the Arabian peninsula, but more likely entered Turkish via Persian, which makes a similar consonant switch.

What does mankal mean in Arabic? The root of the word is נקל, which means "transport, transmit, convey". So as Allison wrote, the "little portable stove" became known as mankal. (The Hebrew acronym for CEO - מנכ"ל, is not related).

This Arabic root is the source of the word nagla נגלה - which originally meant "load" (as in donkey-load) and took on the meaning "round" or "trip" in Modern Israeli slang. In this case, according to Stahl, the switch from nakla to nagla is via Bedouin pronunciation.

Another word deriving from the same root is the game mancala (also mankala / manqala). This game (popular with my kids, although I haven't actually played it yet), involves transferring stones around a board.

There is actually one classical Hebrew word that might be cognate to the Arabic. That is the word makel מקל - meaning "staff" or "walking stick", and it is found in the Tanach (although far less frequently than the words mateh מטה and shevet שבט, of similar meaning.) The etymology of the word is unclear, and Ben-Yehuda lists many theories. One of them is that it is related to נקל. Stahl says this because the stick was used to move animals from place to place, as in Bamidbar 22:27:
וַיַּךְ אֶת-הָאָתוֹן בַּמַּקֵּל "and he struck the donkey with his stick"

I think perhaps another verse that could show a connection would be Bereshit 32:11, where Yaakov says "with my staff I passed over this Jordan" - כִּי בְמַקְלִי, עָבַרְתִּי אֶת-הַיַּרְדֵּן הַזֶּה

However, in the end, both Klein and Even-Shoshan say that makel might actually derive from the Egyptian word ma-qi-ra.

Let's end on a slightly more patriotic note. The official Hebrew word for mangal is matzleh מצלה, and nagla is masov מסוב. I haven't heard one yet for mancala...

Tweet

shoah and holocaust

This week Israel observes Yom HaShoah - יום השואה, whose full name is Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laGvura יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה. This is generally translated as "Holocaust Remembrance Day". However, it is very common for Jewish writers to use the Hebrew word "Shoah" instead of the English word "Holocaust". Why is that?

Let's start by looking at the word "holocaust". Here's the Online Etymology Dictionary entry:

c.1250, "sacrifice by fire, burnt offering," from Gk. holokauston, neut. of holokaustos "burned whole," from holos "whole" + kaustos, verbal adj. of kaiein "to burn." Originally a Bible word for "burnt offerings," given wider sense of "massacre, destruction of a large number of persons" from 1833. The Holocaust "Nazi genocide of European Jews in World War II," first recorded 1957, earlier known in Heb. as Shoah "catastrophe." The word itself was used in Eng. in ref. to Hitler's Jewish policies from 1942, but not as a proper name for them.

The word "holocaust" referring to a burnt offering sacrifice can be seen clearly in this Jewish Encyclopedia article on sacrifices. In the article, written over 100 years ago, the term holocaust as a sacrifice appears frequently. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum discusses the development of the term:

While the word holocaust, with a meaning of a burnt sacrificial offering, does not have a specifically religious connotation, it appeared widely in religious writings through the centuries, particularly for descriptions of "pagan" rituals involving burnt sacrifices. In secular writings, holocaust most commonly came to mean "a complete or wholesale destruction," a connotation particularly dominant from the late nineteenth century through the nuclear arms race of the mid-twentieth century. During this time, the word was applied to a variety of disastrous events ranging from pogroms against Jews in Russia, to the persecution and murder of Armenians by Turks during World War I, to the attack by Japan on Chinese cities, to large-scale fires where hundreds were killed.

Early references to the Nazi murder of the Jews of Europe continued this usage. As early as 1941, writers occasionally employed the term holocaust with regard to the Nazi crimes against the Jews, but in these early cases, they did not ascribe exclusivity to the term. Instead of "the holocaust," writers referred to "a holocaust," one of many through the centuries. Even when employed by Jewish writers, the term was not reserved to a single horrific event but retained its broader meaning of large-scale destruction. For example:

You are meeting at a time of great tragedy for our people. In our ... deep sense of mourning for those who have fallen ... we must steel our hearts to go on with our work ... that perhaps a better day will come for those who will survive this holocaust. (Chaim Weizmann, letter to Israel Goldstein, December 24, 1942)

What sheer folly to attempt to rebuild any kind of Jewish life [in Europe] after the holocaust of the last twelve years! (Zachariah Shuster, Commentary, December 1945, p.10)

By the late 1940s, however, a shift was underway. Holocaust (with either a lowercase or capital H) became a more specific term due to its use in Israeli translations of the word sho'ah. This Hebrew word had been used throughout Jewish history to refer to assaults upon Jews, but by the 1940s it was frequently being applied to the Nazis' murder of the Jews of Europe. (Yiddish-speaking Jews used the term churbn, a Yiddish translation of sho'ah.) The equation of holocaust with sho'ah was seen most prominently in the official English translation of the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948, in the translated publications of Yad Vashem throughout the 1950s, and in the journalistic coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961.

Such usage strongly influenced the adoption of holocaust as the primary English-language referent to the Nazi slaughter of European Jewry, but the word's connection to the "Final Solution" did not firmly take hold for another two decades. The April 1978 broadcast of the TV movie, Holocaust, based on Gerald Green's book of the same name, and the very prominent use of the term in President Carter's creation of the President's Commission on the Holocaust later that same year, cemented its meaning in the English-speaking world. These events, coupled with the development and creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum through the 1980s and 1990s, established the term Holocaust (with a capital H) as the standard referent to the systematic annihilation of European Jewry by Germany's Nazi regime.

Clearly, it can be understood why it might be considered offensive to describe the murder of millions as a sacrifice, particularly a religious one. So even though the term had been so used before the Nazi genocide, once the phrase "The Holocaust" came to describe the acts of the Nazis, there was a need for a more appropriate term, and many began using the Hebrew "Shoah" in English as well. This is Yad Vashem's explanation of the use of the term Shoah in languages other than Hebrew:

The biblical word Shoah (which has been used to mean “destruction” since the Middle Ages) became the standard Hebrew term for the murder of European Jewry as early as the early 1940s. The word Holocaust, which came into use in the 1950s as the corresponding term, originally meant a sacrifice burnt entirely on the altar. The selection of these two words with religious origins reflects recognition of the unprecedented nature and magnitude of the events. Many understand Holocaust as a general term for the crimes and horrors perpetrated by the Nazis; others go even farther and use it to encompass other acts of mass murder as well. Consequently, we consider it important to use the Hebrew word Shoah with regard to the murder of and persecution of European Jewry in other languages as well.

What is the origin of Shoah? The word שואה meaning "catastrophe, devastation" derives from the root שאה. According to Klein, this root originally meant "to make a din or crash", then "crash into ruins", and then "to ruin, lay waste". The original sense of making noise can be found in the related word teshua תשואה - "noise, tumult", which doesn't have a negative connotation at all (see Zecharia 4:7).

Tweet

bagel

One of the columnists who inspired this site is Philologos of The Forward. He writes about Jewish words and phrases, and specifically has a good knowledge of Yiddish (which I do not share). Nowhere on the site is his name given, but most of the speculation on the internet indicates that it's the writer Hillel Halkin. I have no inside knowledge to confirm or deny this, but there are some hints in his writing. For example, in this week's column he quotes Prof. Meir Bar-Ilan, who happens to be Halkin's cousin. (We've also seen him quote Halkin's uncle Rabbi Saul Lieberman before, but Lieberman was such a well known expert that it doesn't necessarily indicate a family relationship.)

Until recently, I hadn't read any of Halkin's identified writings. But not long ago, I started reading a very interesting book by him called Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist's Polemic. The book consists of long letters that Halkin, living in Zichron Yaakov in the 1970s, wrote to an American friend. The letters discuss the roles of Israel and the diaspora, and the importance of making aliya. I haven't finished the book yet, but although it's over 30 years old, I think it still seems very relevant (and some of the anachronisms are fun too.)

At one point reading the book, I got a feeling that if Halkin isn't Philologos, they certainly share an interest in Hebrew etymology (as of course, I do.) On page 22, Halkin quotes his anonymous American correspondent:

It's a little like that butt of so many old jokes, the bagel. What other item of food is more quintessentially Jewish in America? And then you come to Israel and discover that there is something called a bagel there too, or rather, a bageleh (Moisheleh, Saraleh, imaleh, why not bageleh?), and that it shares certain properties with the bagel you know: it's round, there's a hole in the middle, etc. ... only the taste just isn't the same. (For one thing, it's sprinkled with sesame, and I happen to hate sesame. The hole is too big, the dough is too soft, I won't even mention cream cheese or lox, which you can look high and low for - a grilled porkchop is far easier to find in your Jewish state.) One could, I suppose, investigate the common European ancestor of the two to determine which is more authentic, but this would lead to the discovery of a third bagel, resembling the first two yet unique unto itself. And why should one have to choose among them?

And regarding the bagel, Halkin responds:

Concerning the real sesame on your metaphorical bagel, by the way, it certainly is not European in origin; in fact, it derives from the Arabs, who bake a hard, round doughnut calld ka'ak similar to the Israeli; yet this only complicates the problem, since it's likely that the Arab ka'ak is a descendant of an ancient Palestinian Jewish bagel or ka'ach that is referred to in the Mishnah. Such are the strange dialectics of the return of a people to its land.

So this is one of those anachronisms - today it's easy to find in Israel lox, cream cheese and "American bagels". (Haven't tried looking for pork chops for comparison). But lets look a little further at how the Israeli bageleh and the American bagel diverged.

Clearly the words have the same origin. The Online Etymology Dictionary provides the following origin for "bagel":

1919, from Yiddish beygl, from M.H.G. boug- "ring, bracelet," from O.H.G. boug, related to biogan "to bend" and O.E. beag "ring"

William Safire (the first language columnist to inspire me) writes in this 1994 column:

The bagel, according to the Yiddishist Leo Rosten, was first cited in the community regulations of Cracow, Poland, in 1610; the toroidal roll was said to be a gift to women in childbirth. (That strikes me as apocryphal; next we'll hear that the Civil War expression about bearing pain, to bite the bullet, was rooted in to bite the bagel. Not so.)

The word for the medieval jawbreaker was imported into English from the Yiddish beygl, which in 1919 was spelled beigel and in 1932 was shortened to bagel. According to the Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, it is rooted in the Old High German boug, related to biogan "to bend," from the Proto-Germanic biuzanan and the Indo-European bheugh-, the pronunciation of which is a melancholy exhalation.

If bending, ring shaped dough reminds you of another food - the pretzel - that's not a coincidence. In her book Classic Russian Cooking, Elena Molokhovets writes that

Pretzels are a very old form of baked goods and were referred to in Jewish sources as early as the first half of the thirteenth century. (A bagel is simply a type of pretzel.) Bagels, with many local variations, were known throughout the historic territory of the Ashkenazi Jews.

The term bageleh in Hebrew therefore refers to pretzels. The original association of course is with soft bagels, not the hard ones found in vending machines, but the term applies to both.

If you're finding it difficult to make the connection between bagels and pretzels, take a second and try to describe the difference (other than the sesame seeds mentioned above - I always been a fan of sesame bagels.) It turns out that the difference is in the boiling process:

Homemade pretzels and soft pretzels are often made much the same way as bagels, by poaching them in boiling water before baking, the difference being that bagels are usually poached in salt water rather than water and baking soda.

So we today find in Israel bageleh בייגלה - pretzels and bageleh amerikai - American bagels. What about ka'ach כעך?

While it might be the more official word, it seems to be much less popular than bageleh. This is evidenced by the discussion on the Hebrew Wikipedia page, where the writers aren't sure whether a ka'ach is a bagel or a pretzel.

Stahl writes that the word ka'ach was chosen in Modern Hebrew because of its use in Talmudic Hebrew (see Pesachim 48b and Brachot 38a where it appears as כעבין). Then it seemed to mean small loaves of bread. Klein defines it as "ring-shaped cake", and provides the following etymology:

Aramaic כעכא, borrowed from Persian kak, whence also Arabic ka'k.

Stahl says that there are even earlier references in Ancient Egyptian and Coptic. The word kahk seems rather similar to the English word "cake", with cognates in other European languages. However, Stahl writes that linguists do not feel that the words are connected, but perhaps both developed independently from baby-talk, similar to "mama" and "papa".

I'll end with a cute joke I found while researching this topic.

שני בייגלה יושבים על המדף בחנות.
פתאום בא מישהו
ולוקח אחד מהם, אז השני צועק: "לאא!!!! היינו כאחים!!"

"Two bagelach were sitting on the shelf of a store. Somebody comes and takes one of them, and the other shouts - 'No!!! We were k'achim!! (literally 'like brothers')"

Tweet