tichon

The word tichon תיכון is of biblical origin, but the precise biblical usage isn't found much today. It means "middle", from toch תוך (midst, interior), in the same way that chitzon חיצון - "external" derives from chutz חוץ (outside). In the Bible, it is mostly used in describing construction, as in Shemot 26:28  -  וְהַבְּרִיחַ הַתִּיכֹן בְּתוֹךְ הַקְּרָשִׁים  - "the middle bar in the midst of the boards".

However, today the word is found mostly in three Modern Hebrew phrases. Let's take a look at them:

a) Yam Ha-Tichon ים התיכון. This phrase refers to the Mediterranean Sea. It's a little frustrating that this is what the sea is called in Modern Hebrew, because Biblical Hebrew has no shortage of names for it: Yam HaGadol ים הגדול - "the great sea" (Bamidbar 34:6, etc.), Yam Pelishtim ים פלשתים - "sea of the Philistines" (Shemot 23:31), and Yam HaAcharon ים האחרון - "the Western sea (literally "rear" sea, as they oriented themselves to the east.)" (Devarim 11:24, etc.)

So where does Yam HaTichon - the "middle sea" come from? Not actually from "Mediterranean", which literally means "midland". Rather it is a translation of the German Mittelmeer, which means "middle sea".

b) Mizrach Ha-Tichon מזרח התיכון. This is a direct translation of the English "Middle East", which we all know refers to the countries of southwest Asia and northeast Africa. Except that it's not entirely true. As Joel Achenbach writes in his book Why Things Are:

Q: Why do we always hear about the Far East and the Middle East but never the Near East?

A: The Near East is the Middle East; there isn't a Near East anymore. We start in the Middle, then go to the Far.

For centuries the term Near East referred, sensibly enough, to everything from Morocco to the Persian Gulf. The Middle East extended from there to Southeast Asia. The Far East included the nations along the Pacific. When World War II broke out, Britain transferred its Middle East military command from India to Egypt, to be closer to the action. The new station kept the old name. Gradually almost everyone picked up the new British nomenclature.

This of course includes Hebrew, where mizrach hatichon is the name almost exclusively given to the region.

c) Beit Sefer Tichon בית ספר תיכון. This is the most confusing of the three - I'm still not sure I've tracked down the etymology fully. Today it certainly refers to "high school", but as you might have guessed, the literal translation means "middle school." At first glance, one might assume (and I've seen a number of websites who claim) that high school is placed in the middle of elementary school and university. However, the senior Hebrew linguist Yechezkel Kutscher wrote:

The German “Mittelschule” – “high school” was first translated literally bet sefer benayim and today bet sefer tikhon.

This translation is rather old - Ben Yehuda mentions it in his dictionary, and when searching historic Hebrew newspapers, I found mention of "beit sefer tichon" as far back as 1895, but no mention of Kutscher's earlier phrase - בית ספר ביניים beit sefer benayim.

What did mittelschule originally refer to?  Apparently, it was an "intermediate school" for the "middle ranks" or "middle class", as described here:

Parallel to the Volksschule was the Mittelschule, intended for the middle classes.

Or also here:

The tripartite secondary school system, with the Gymnasium or Oberschule for the children of the educated class, the Mittelschule for the middle ranks, and Hauptschule (main school) for the ordinary workers

I'm not familiar enough with either the German educational system or the early Zionist / Israeli educational system to fully described the influence of the former on the latter, but clearly it existed. For example, two of Israel's oldest high schools - the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium and the Hebrew Reali School, took their names from the German Gymnasium and Realschule respectively. In addition, as the Safa Ivrit website points out, the unusual nicknames for the high school classes: the 12th graders are called shministim שמיניסטים - "eighters", 11th graders are in shviit שביעית - "seventh", etc., is based on the German system, where secondary education would begin in fifth grade for eight years. This was the case in Israel as well until 1968, when the junior high schools - chativat beinayim חטיבת ביניים - were established, leaving high schools with only three or four years.

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parashat hashavua categories

For anyone who is looking for a linguistic connection to Parashat Hashavua, I've indexed and labeled all the posts by parasha. Look for the parshiot in the sidebar!

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tuval kayin and volcano

The volcano is in the news again, and its cloud may even be getting close to Israel. But are we close to an etymological connection between the word "volcano" and a Hebrew root?

Let's start by looking at the word "volcano". It gets its name from the Roman god Vulcan(us):

1610s, from It. vulcano "burning mountain," from L. Vulcanus "Vulcan," Roman god of fire, also "fire, flames, volcano" (see Vulcan). The name was first applied to Mt. Etna by the Romans, who believed it was the forge of Vulcan.

There is an interesting etymology that tries to connect "Vulcan" with the Biblical Tuval Kayin from Bereishit 4:22

וְצִלָּה גַם-הִוא יָלְדָה אֶת-תּוּבַל קַיִן לֹטֵשׁ כָּל-חֹרֵשׁ נְחֹשֶׁת וּבַרְזֶל וַאֲחוֹת תּוּבַל-קַיִן נַעֲמָה.

And Tzila, she bore Tuval-kayin, who forged all implements of copper and iron. And the sister of Tuval-Kayin was Na'ama.

Both based on the similarity of sound between (tu)val-kain and vulcan, and the fact that Tuval-Kayin was a smith (we've discussed the connection between Kayin and craftsmen and smiths here) there is an assumed connection between the two.

This is a very old theory, with perhaps Walter Raleigh being the first person to make the connection between the two figures. He wrote of Tuval Kayin:

whence came the name of Vulcan by aphaeresis of the two first letters

Many others promoted and developed this theory, and thousands of mentions can be found on the internet and in other sources. For example this 1825 book provides a number of "proofs":

M. De Lavaur, in his Conférence de la Fable avec l'Histoire Sainte, supposes that the Greeks and Romans, took their smith-god Vulcan, from Tubal-cain, the son of Lamech. The probability of this will appear —

1. From the name, which, by the omission of the Tu and turning the b into v, a change frequently made among the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, makes Vulcain or Vulcan.

2. From his occupation, he was an artificer, a master smith in brass and iron.

3. He thinks this farther probable from the names and sounds in this verse. The melting metals in the fire, and hammering them, bears a near resemblance to the hissing sound of צלה tsillah, the mother of Tubal-cain; and צלל tsalal, signifies to tinkle or make a sound like a bell, 1 Sam. iii. II, 2 Kings xxi. 12.

4. Vulcan is said to have been lame: M. De Lavaur thinks that this notion was taken from the noun צלע tsela, which signifies a halting or lameness.

5. Vulcan had to wife Venus the goddess of beauty: Naamah, the sister of Tubal-cain, he thinks, may have given rise to this part of the fable, as her name, in Hebrew signifies beautiful or gracious.

6. Vulcan is reported to have been jealous of his wife, and to have forged nets in which he took Mars and her, and exposed them to the view of the whole celestial court; this idea he thinks was derived from the literal import of the name Tubal-cain; תבל tebel, signifies an incestuous mixture of relatives, Lev. xx. 12. and קנא kana, to burn with jealousy ; from these and concomitant circumstances, the case of the detected adultery of Mars and Venus might be easily deduced.

He is of opinion that a tradition of this kind might have readily found its way from the Egyptians to the Greeks, as the former had frequent intercourse with the Hebrews.

Even Shadal makes a connection, and I've heard (but not found) that Cassuto may have as well.

So with this long and impressive list - am I convinced? Not really.

Why not? First of all, Klein in his entry for  וולקני (the Modern Hebrew word for "volcanic" - even though the word for volcano, הר געש, har ga'ash, has an adjective, געשי, ga'ashi, for some reason the adjective vulkani is much more common) does not mention the theory, only saying that the name Vulcan probably has an Etruscan origin. And Avineri (Yad Halashon p. 343) also says he's very reluctant to accept the theory.

But mostly, although the theory seems attractive externally, it doesn't seem to make much sense historically. We've discussed many times how the Greeks borrowed words from their Semitic neighbors to to the East - including even one of their gods, Adonis. But the Romans had far fewer exchanges of this kind, and the names of their gods, who they adopted primarily from the Etruscans would be even more ancient. (There's much similarity between Greek and Roman mythology, but the Etruscan/Roman names predate the connection between the two.)

A discussion of more reasonable etymologies appear in this book:

Vulcan is the god of fire. The etymology of the name is difficult to determine. G. Dumezil (Fetes romaines d'ete et d'automme [Paris 1925], pp. 72-76) reviews all the principal attempts to elucidate it and shows how precarious they are. They include a comparison with the the Cretan welchanos; an explanation by way of the Ossetic noun (Kurd-alae)-waergon; and an Etruscan hypothesis based on the abbreviation Vel from the Piacenza liver, which is arbitrarily completed to yield Vel(chans), whereas the Etruscan homologue of Hephaestus is Sethlans. Dumezil prefers a derivation from the Vedic varcas ("brightness," or "flash," one of the properties of Agni, the god of fire), but as a good comparativist, he hastens to point out the difficulty: "no verbal or nominal derivative of this version of the root exists in Latin" (ibid, p. 74.).

While there may not be a Semitic origin to "volcano" or "Vulcan", the word does appear in Israel today - the Vulcan factory got its name from the Roman god of fire, and from the factory we get the nearby Tzomet Vulcan intersection. (The Volcani Institute of Agricultural Research is not related - it was named for its founder, Yitzhak Elazari Volcani, who Hebraized his name from Vilkanski.) Let's hope that this is the only volcanic impact in our area...

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artzot habrit

The relationship between the United States and Israel is in the news often lately, so I thought I'd take a look at the Hebrew term for the United States - artzot habrit ארצות הברית, frequently abbreviated as ארה"ב. Where does the term come from?

Rubik Rosenthal writes here that at the time of the renewal of the Hebrew language, a number of terms were used to translate "United States", including some that seem to be a more precise translation: מדינות מאוחדות and ארצות מאוחדות - medinot me'uchadot and artzot me'uchadot (me'uchadot means "united"). He claims that the "freer translation" artzot habrit was coined by Mendele Mocher Sforim in chapter 17 of his 1868 novel "The Fathers and Sons" (האבות והבנים):

כי עברו איי אמריקה וראו, וארצות-הברית שלחו והתבוננו מאד

The sentence is a paraphrase of Yirmiyahu 2:10 (thanks ADDeRabbi!) so it would mean something like: 

Just cross over to the isles of America and look, and send to artzot habrit and observe carefully

However, as this article writes, Mendele wasn't the first to use the term:

The United States is called "Lands of the Covenant" (Artzot Habrit) in Hebrew.

It is commonly thought that this name was given in order to avoid confusion with the Hebrew name for the United Nations.

IMRA asked Israel Radio's "Moment of Hebrew" program for the source of the name.

They find that the term appears in Hebrew papers as early as 1857 - in the Hamagid L'Israel weekly.

I searched the archives of Hamagid, and found the 1857 quote, along with many more before Mendele's novel was published. I have a number of conclusions:

1) Since the paper was only founded in 1857, it doesn't seem likely that the author or editor of Hamagid was the one to coin the phrase, particularly because its first use doesn't have any explanation as to the meaning.

2) I have read in a few locations (such as this one) that there's significance to the use of the word brit ברית - and that therefore the phrase should be translated as "Lands of the Covenant." That seems to me to be a bit of a stretch. First of all, the word artzot ארצות is used frequently in Hamagid with the meaning of "countries" or "states". And brit is used as well -  for "treaty". In the second use of the phrase artzot habrit, there is a parenthetical comment (in Yiddish) explaining the phrase as meaning literally, "the United States". So I don't think it was trying to be a more "free" translation, or to be one more laced with meaning.

3) It turns out that in 1859, the phrase artzot habrit is mentioned in Hamagid to describe an entirely different entity - the German Confederation:

So perhaps Artzot Habrit Shel America wasn't even the first use of the phrase.

There's one remaining curiosity about the term. We often find headlines like this in the newspaper:

This literally means, "The United States voted." However, the word artzot is plural, whereas the verb for "voted" - הצביע - is singular! This trend started in the 1950s (Hamagid and Mendele both refer to Artzot HaBrit as a plural), and it seriously bothered linguist Yitzhak Avineri (Yad Halashon, pg. 55). He claims this is due to influence from English ("United States" is singular), and is foreign to the spirit of Hebrew. However, despite all his efforts to turn back the tide, it was to no avail; artsot habrit is singular. By 1969, only seven years after Avineri's last column on the subject, another prominent linguist, Reuven Sivan writes that using artzot habrit in the singular is perfectly legitimate. He brings an example from Yirmiyahu 48:41, where a place called Keriyot, which should technically be a plural, is considered one place and referred to in the singular: נִלְכְּדָה הַקְּרִיּוֹת.

Without getting into politics, it would be nice if the only disagreement Israel had today with the United States was whether it should be considered a singular or plural...

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agvania

Tomatoes are so ubiquitous in Israeli cuisine that you might think that the Hebrew word for them, agvania עגבניה, is as old as the language itself. But the word is much more recent, and the story is actually so interesting that the linguist Reuven Sivan wrote a booklet about it in 1971 for the Academy of the Hebrew Language.

He begins by pointing out that the tomato was first brought to Europe from its native South America in the 16th century, but the Europeans didn't eat it at first. Some thought that it might contain poison like many of its relatives in the nightshade family, or that it had aphrodisiac effects like its cousin the mandrake. So it was primarily used for decorative purposes until the 19th century. The Italians were the first Europeans to eat it extensively, and from there it spread throughout Europe and the Middle East. Philologos discusses in more detail about how Eastern Europe received the tomato later, with the Jews maintaining a high degree of suspicion about them. In fact, they called them "treyf apples" - as if they weren't kosher at all (this concern reappeared in more recent times). Sivan says that one of the reason for this title was a concern that they contained actual blood. There was no taboo against tomatoes in Eretz Yisrael, and he provides a number of entertaining stories about individuals (including rabbis) who came to Israel in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century and had serious concerns about eating tomatoes, but the locals convinced them they were fine. Some of them later came back to Europe and either had to eat their new favorite food privately or were castigated for eating it in public.

How the tomato was viewed affected its name as well. While the English word "tomato" comes from the Aztec name, the European names tended to describe the fruit. As Philologos writes:

One of the tomato’s effects was thought to be aphrodisiac; thus, already in the 16th century we find it referred to in English as a “love apple,” a term echoed by the now equally archaic German Liebesapfel and French pomme d’amour. But the first-known botanical description of the tomato, published in Latin in 1544 by the Italian Piero Andrea Mattioli, called it, because of its yellowish-red color, not a “love apple” but a “golden apple,” malum aureum. ... Malum aureum was then translated into Italian as pomo d’oro, which became pomme d’or in French and passed from French into Polish as pomedor.

An alternate theory (which Sivan rejects) is that the tomato was first known in Italian as a "Moor apple" - pomo dei Mori " (they were brought from Africa), and then became "pomi d'amore" - "love apple", and finally "pomodoro" - "golden apple."

Whatever the origin, the name pomodoro became bandora in Arabic, and from here Ben Yehuda suggested giving the name badura בדורה as the Hebrew version. However, this was one of the linguistic battles that Ben Yehuda did not win. A different name was coined in 1886 by Rabbi Yechiel Michel Pines, and promoted by his son-in-law Dr. David Yellin. Instead of using a word like badura which ultimately had a non-Semitic origin, they preferred a Hebrew word that reflected the European "love apple" - agbanit עגבנית, which later shows up as agbaniya, and now as agvania. The root עגב means "to love, desire", is the root of the Hebrew name for syphilis agevet עגבת, and according to Klein, perhaps ugav עוגב - "flute" as well:

Probably derived from base עגב, hence literally meaning 'instrument of love', and so called in allusion to its insinuating tunes. 

Ben Yehuda found this rather vulgar, and tried unsuccessfully  to prevent its use, as Robert St. John describes in Tongue of the Prophets:

Generally the Ben Yehuda "army" won its word battles, and most of the father's creations or discoveries were accepted, but some few words were so completely rejected that as years went by the only people who ever used them were the lexicographer himself and members of his own family. One such word was the one he introduced for "tomato." The common word already in use was agbanit, from a root which meant "to love sensuously." Ben Yehuda felt that a better word was needed, so he went back to colloquial Arabic and coined the word badurah.

After it had been announced in the paper, "the army" received its marching orders. Henceforth, if any Ben Yehuda went into a shop to purchase this vegetable, he was to ask for a badurah, and if the shopkeeper seemed perplexed, he was to be given a little lesson in modern Hebrew and was to be introduced formally to badurah.

Such tactics generally succeeded, but after many years of proselytizing, the only shoppers in Jerusalem who ever called a tomato a badurah were members of the Ben Yehuda family.

Sivan notes that other, less "explicit" names were suggested at the time: sumkaniya סומקנייה (from sumak סומק - "red"), ahavaniya אהבנייה (from ahav אהב - "love") or tama תמה (not sure about this one, perhaps from תם - "perfect" or תמה - "amazed".) In any case, none of these were adopted either.

Sivan mentions that the tomato doesn't actually have any aphrodisiac properties. However, the European sailors were likely lacking in vitamin C, so eating the healthy tomato may have returned some of their strength, leading to their mistaken conclusion. In any case, we do see that both the fruit, and its Hebrew name agvaniya proved to be so seductive that they both won out over strong opposing forces...

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tavlin

The Hebrew word for "spice" is tavlin תבלין, with the plural tavlinim תבלינים. This usage goes back to Talmudic times (e.g. Shabbat 119a, Nedarim 51a). However, this appears to be the result of a mistake, for originally the singular form for spice was tevel תבל, and the Aramaic form tavlin was the plural (In the Ben Yehuda dictionary, Tur-Sinai writes that the original reading was like the Sefardi tevalin, but the Ashkenazim read the word as tavlin.) This is clear from such sources as Beitza 14a, where tavlin is used as a plural: תבלין נדוכין.

Klein provides the following etymology:

Related to תבלא ( = spice, seasoning), Arabic tabil ( = coriander; spice, condiment, seasoning), tabbala, taubala (he spiced, seasoned). These nouns probably denoted originally a certain plant (compare Syriac תבלא - 'tordylium, hartwort, meadow saxifrage'), whence, with sense enlargement, 'any plant used for seasoning', whence 'spice' in general.

The Arabic word is the source of the salad tabbouleh (or tabouli) - meaning "little spicy".

Joseph Lowin, however, suggests a different origin here:

probably derives from an older, primary root, ב-ל-ל (bet, lamed, lamed), meaning "to mix." When you add spices to food you are creating a savory mixture; alternatively, many spices added to foods are in fact mixtures of different spices.

Both agree that the word tevel תבל, meaning "world" is not related.

We also find the verb form to spice - תבל. Ruth Almagor-Ramon writes that although tavlin overcame tevel as the singular noun for "spice" (after serious debate among linguists in the last century - see Yad Halashon p. 608), there's no reason to adopt תבלן as the verb. Similarly, metubal מתובל and not metublan מתובלן should be used for "spiced".

Mistaking a plural for a singular is perhaps more common in Modern Hebrew, where many words are borrowed from English, which uses "s" to indicate a plural. However, in Hebrew, the sound "s" has no such significance, so the plural of "jeans" becomes "jeansim", "brakes" becomes "brakesim" and "chips" becomes "chipsim". Another example is the word burekas בורקאס, the popular puff pastry. Modern Hebrew borrowed it from the Turkish börek (perhaps via Ladino), and again made the plural form a singular one - so the plural in Hebrew is now bourekasim. This leads English speaking immigrants to refer to one pastry as a bureka - which certainly doesn't work in Hebrew. There might even be some Hebrew linguists who would prefer this form, but as Stahl writes, it's not terribly relevant - for who can eat only one?

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yam suf - red sea or sea of reeds?

I was in Eilat last week, and while there I got to thinking about Yam Suf ים סוף. What's a better translation - Red Sea or Sea of Reeds? Somehow I had always thought that "Red Sea" was a corruption of "Reed Sea", because suf is generally translated as "reed". However, during the trip, I couldn't help notice the red mountains of Jordan, originally belonging to the land of Edom (signifying "red"), and wondered if there was reason to call the sea "red" as well. (And of course, I was curious if this was the same Yam Suf that the Jews passed through on their way out of Egypt, but that appeared to be less of a linguistic question.)

After a little research, it became clear to me that there was certainly no mix up between "red" and "reed", as the name "Red Sea" goes all the way back to the Greek Septuagint, who translated Yam Suf as Erythra Thalassa, whereas suf meaning "reeds" in the Bible (Shmot 2:3) was translated as helos. Since English only came around centuries later, the similarity between "red" and "reed" is only a coincidence.

However, there are those that claim that the term "Red Sea" did originate in a misunderstanding - and that the Greeks thought Edom אדום meant "red", in the verses describing the sea near Edom. These scholars therefore prefer the translation "Sea of Reeds" (or "Reed Sea" or "Sea of Weeds"). They point out that reeds only grow in fresh water, such as in the Nile or in the lakes to the east. This fits in well with the assumption that one of those lakes was the sea parted by Moshe in the Exodus. 

However, this approach seemed difficult to me. Aside from the red mountains that I saw during my visit, it didn't appear likely that a poor translation in the Septuagint would affect how the entire Red Sea would be named - and Erythra Thalassa actually referred to a much larger area - including the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. (And this article claims that Herodotus used the phrase, and he preceded the Septuagint by centuries.)

I was therefore fortunate to find a fascinating new article by Rabbi Dr. Ari Z. Zivotofsky, "What’s the Truth about . . . the Translation of Yam Suf?" in the Spring 2010 issue of Jewish Action (here's a PDF of the printed article.)  The article is so comprehensive (and well written) that I was thinking of just linking to it without adding anything at all. And I would like you all to read it, so I won't go into too much detail. But in short, Zivotofsky shows how the tradition of using the name "Red Sea" is ancient and found in many Jewish sources as well. (He also quoted a number of sources that I had seen before I read his article, particularly Sarna's Exploring Exodus and Kaplan's The Living Torah. One source I don't know if he saw - he didn't quote it - but sheds some more light is this entry in the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament.)

In the end, there are many unanswered questions about the name (and location) of Yam Suf. Perhaps the best thing is for me to go back to Eilat and think about it some more. Anyone care to join me?

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firgun

I didn't mention it in the previous post, but pereg פרג (poppy / millet) isn't related to pargit פרגית (young chicken). Another unrelated word is the verb פרגן - "to take pleasure in someone else's achievement / success" - with the associated noun פירגון firgun. It's an unusual word in that a) it seems to be an Israeli concept, with no matching word in English, and b) it's frequently claimed in Israel that the concept doesn't exist (i.e. Israelis aren't likely to give firgun, but rather begrudge each other. For an extensive review of this concept, see this article.)

Firgun is a Modern Hebrew slang word, borrowed from the Yiddish farginen, which in turn comes from the German vergönnen or gönnen-  originally meaning "to grant, allow", which may have a cognate in the English word "own".

The concept can be found in Talmudic Hebrew as ayin tova / yafa  עין טובה/ יפה - "a good eye", or in the opposite - ayin tzara / ra'ah עין צרה / רעה - "a narrow eye". But Nesher ("Hebrew in Jeans") says those phrases are considered today "flowery language" and not commonly used. Avineri in Yad Halashon (p. 531) and Almagor-Ramon in Rega Shel Ivrit (213) suggest substituting the Hebrew root רתה for the verb and ריתוי ritui  for the noun, but I've never heard them used.

But why should we begrudge the word firgun its success? As this bumper sticker I've seen around (from Bank Discount?) says - "Fargen - why should you care?":

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pereg

We just dealt with some words for crops of debated identity - here's another one, but with a Purim connection. Early in this site, we discussed the Purim food hamentaschen, which literally mean "poppy pockets". The Hebrew word for poppy is pereg (sometimes parag) פרג. It is found in the plural - פרגין - in the Mishna (Sheviit 2:7, Chalah 1:4) and in the Talmud (Rosh Hashana 13b), listed together with other crops that aren't full grains like shumshum¹ שומשום - sesame and orez אורז - rice.

Most of the commentaries do identify pereg with poppy. For example, the Aruch defines it as the Latin papaver, and Rashi on Rosh Hashana uses the Italian word maco, whose cognates are found in a number of European languages. The Rambam on Sheviit translates pereg as khashkhash - the Arabic word for poppy. Many of the later European rabbinic works use the German (and Yiddish) word mohn.

However, some more modern scholars disagree with this assumption, and say it is a type of millet. Ben Yehuda quotes Hrozny (found here in the original German) as saying that pereg derives from the Sanskrit word priyangu, meaning "foxtail millet" (or "panic seed".)  Feliks has two more reasons to choose sorghum millet over poppy: pereg is mentioned in the mishna as a summer crop, and is used to make bread, both of which fit millet much more than poppy. And he also quotes Rabbi Natan Av Hayeshiva (one of the Eretz Yisrael Geonim, whose text was found in the Cairo Geniza) who identified pereg as dura דורה - sorghum, described here as a "summer crop of millet."

The above arguments seem pretty convincing to me, but it doesn't take away the Purim connection to poppy. Luckily the name hamentashcen was never Hebraicized to kiseipereg...

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1. However some European Jewish scholars did identify shumshum as poppy. See Responsa Melamed Le-Ho'il 1:87, Encyclopedia Talmudit "chametz" footnote 709, and Jastrow on שומשמא.

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shibolet shual and shifon

One of my favorite topics to write about is the change of meaning in words relating to food. We've already seen that a melafefon originally meant melon, now cucumber, and that botnim, while in modern Hebrew mean peanuts, meant pistachios in the Bible. However, these discussions, while interesting, don't have much practical impact. On the other hand, some debates have real halachic significance.

For example, in to Jewish law, there are five species of grain in the Land of Israel that have special laws relating to them - what blessing is made, can they be used to make matza (or do they constitute chametz), must one "separate challah" with bread made from them, and more. As described in the Mishna (Hallah 1:1), the five grains are:

החיטים, והשעורים, והכוסמין, ושיבולת שועל והשיפון

chitim, seorim, kusmin, shibolet shual, shifon

Chitim are wheat and seorim are barley. We'll discuss kusmin in a future post, but now I'd like to deal with shibolet shual and shifon (or shipon, more on that in a bit.) In modern Hebrew, shibolet shual means "oats" (although "kvaker" is the common term), and shifon means "rye". This goes as far back as Rashi, who identifies them as such in his commentary (Pesachim 35a). However, many modern scholars disagree with this approach, such as Immanuel Low, who writes that shibolet shual is millet, and shifon is oats (both Jastrow and Ben Yehuda mention this approach), and more recently Yehuda Feliks, who says that shibolet shual is "two-rowed barley" (compared to the four and six rowed barley for seorim) and shifon is spelt (which in modern Hebrew is kusmin). Feliks gives a number of reasons for his conclusions - primary among them is that oats and rye were not commonly grown in the Land of Israel at the time of the mishna (this post does a good job of summarizing his arguments and those that disagree with him, on the identity of shibolet shu'al).

Most of the proofs are based on biological or historical evidence - but I did find one etymological aspect: while many claim that the name "shibolet shual" comes the spike, shibolet, of plant looking like the tail of a fox, shual, (and we find the phrase "foxtail" with a similar meaning in English), Feliks believes that the name comes from the fact that foxes like eating the softer two-rowed barley more than other grains, in the same way that invei shual  ענבי שועל - "blackcurrants" (literally "fox grapes") are so called because foxes enjoy eating them.

While the etymology might not help us understand the identity of shifon, it should help with the pronunciation. Looking at vocalized editions of the Mishna and Talmud, I see that they are pretty much split down the middle: Steinsaltz and Artscroll have shipon (or shippon in the English translation), whereas Kehati and Jastrow have shifon. Ben Yehuda writes that the correct pronunciation is shifon, because the word comes from Greek - siphonion, which seems to be related to the word siphon, meaning "tube, pipe", perhaps related to the shape of the plant. (Klein, following Ben-Yehuda writes that, "The attempt of [Immanuel] Low to derive shifon from שוף [= to polish] is far-fetched.) I've found references to siphonion both as oats (avena) and rye (secale), so I don't think this helps us identify the original plant. 

However, Ben Yehuda goes on to complain that the popular pronunciation is shipon, and this is confirmed by Even Shoshan as well. The Hebrew Wikipedia article for שיפון says that it is pronounced shipon to distinguish it from the fabric "chiffon". However, from an (admittedly unscientific) poll I took of native Hebrew speakers - all of them pronounced the word shifon, and none had ever heard it pronounced shipon. While it is possible that a linguistic correction has taken place, I can't help wonder if they were all influenced by the popular bakery Shifon...

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parnasa

Yesterday I was discussing the word parnasa פרנסה on the new Balashon Page on Facebook (please join!). I quoted my post on "pras and prize", where I wrote:

The Hebrew root פרס means "to split, divide, break", and a pras therefore originally meant "a half of something", "a portion". Klein points out that there are scholars who derive the word פרנס - -"to maintain, support" and parnasa פרנסה - "livelihood" as coming from פרס, with an added letter nun.

A reader wrote:

You think "parnasa" comes from "pras"? It seems rather doubtful. There are no other words in Hebrew derived in this manner. The other way around, maybe, if both words were borrowed from another language.

I have to admit that I can't think now of any other Hebrew words where the letter nun was added to make a four letter word (resh, however, often is added). But it is what Klein claims. Let's look at what he wrote on the entry for the verb פרנס:

Aramaic פרנס ( = he maintained, sustained, supported), Syriac פרנס (= he cared for, provided; he appointed, distributed,; he took the oversight, managed, ruled). Of uncertain origin. Some scholars derive base פרנס from base פרס.

He then offers the derivatives parnas פרנס - "supporter, manager" (from where Arabic gets firnas - "governor", maybe the origin of the name Abbas Ibn Firnas, for whom the lunar crater was named) and parnasa פרנסה - "livelihood".

It is interesting that Klein only provides one possible etymology. He certainly saw Ben Yehuda's entry, who mentions the "pras" theory, as suggested by Hoffman and Brockelmann, based on the Syriac cognate (although this book quotes Brockelmann as giving it a Greek origin). But then Ben Yehuda says that etymology doesn't seem likely to him. He then says it seems to him more likely that this four letter root derives from Greek or Latin, particularly due to samech being the last letter (as in such words as טכס tekes).

From Greek he suggests pronoos - "careful". As mentioned here, related words are offered by the Musaf HaAruch: πρόνηος -  proneos and πρόνοιος -  pronoios, and by the Aruch HaShalem:
πύρνος -  purnos (however the Aruch Hashalem rejects the Greek origin, and prefers the Syriac theory.) These words all appear to be related to the Greek pronoeo "to consider in advance, look out for beforehand, plan before", associated with the Greek words for "provide" and "providence". It is made up of two Greek words, "pro" (before) and "noeo" (think, perceive). From here we get the term pronoia - the system of land grants in the Byzantine Empire.

An alternate theory offered by Ben Yehuda is a derivation from the Greek phronis - thought, prudence, related to the Greek word for mind, phren, as found in "schizophrenia."

In the end, however, Ben Yehuda thinks the most likely origin is from the Latin pensum, "payment" (and related to the English word "pension"), with a resh added in later. This is the also the only etymology suggested by Even Shoshan.

I agree with this book that the Latin origin doesn't seem very likely. We've noted before that there was very little borrowing from Latin to Hebrew, and here we've seen cognates in Aramaic and Syriac as well. And even Jastrow, who usually tries to avoid giving Greek origins to Hebrew words, says parnas is an "enlargement of paran פרן" - "dowry". Klein says paran comes from the Greek phrene, related to pherein "to carry". Jastrow says that this only a "phonetic coincidence", and that paran is actually related to paras. But in the end, Jastrow likely knew the Syriac theory, or could have come up with it on his own, and still thought it was more likely that the root of parnas was somehow p-r-n.

So I'm not sure which root to accept, but it's all Greek to me...

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tipul and tafel

In the post about pashtida, we mentioned how in the Talmud, the verb טפל meant "to paste, to plaster" (dough in the example we brought). But today that root is found in what appears to be unrelated words - for example tipul טיפול - "care, treatment" and tafel טפל - "of secondary importance" (as found, for example, in this halachic concept). How did the root end up with so many meanings?

While it doesn't appear often, the root טפל does appear in Biblical Hebrew: Tehilim 119:69, Iyov 13:4 and 14:17. The Even-Shoshan concordance says they all mean "to attach", but only in the metaphorical sense. Iyov 14:17 has וַתִּטְפֹּל, עַל-עֲו‍ֹנִי - "you would coat over my iniquity" (JPS), which seems to carry the meaning of "paste". Iyov 13:4 has טֹפְלֵי-שָׁקֶר, which the JPS translates as "invent lies", and other translations try to express the sense of "attach" or "paste" by writing "smear with lies" or "forgers of lies". However, the Daat Mikra writes that the pasting itself is not metaphorical, but the phrase is an allegory to builders who use fake plaster when building walls or paste plaster to cover defective walls or to doctors who spread phony medicines on their patients. In Tehilim the phrase טָפְלוּ עָלַי שֶׁקֶר זֵדִים is used metaphorically, and means "the arrogant have smeared me with lies".  This combination - טפל שקר - is found in the vidui (confession) prayer as tafalnu sheker טפלנו שקר. Most translations ignore the sense of attach or paste. Koren Sacks has "we have framed lies", and Artscroll uses "we have accused falsely." However, in their "Expanded Viduy Service" in the Yom Kippur Machzor, they point out that "literally the phrase means 'we have attached falsehood'."

But even with all that, we're still not closer to seeing the modern uses of the root. Klein writes that the original (Biblical) meaning was "to smear, paste plaster" and the Post-Biblical meaning was "to add, join, attach." From here he writes that tafel means "additional, subsidiary, of secondary importance." He also writes that the pi'el form of the verb progressed from "he plastered" to "he cared for, attended to" (maybe in the medical sense that we mentioned above.) From here we get tipul, metapel מטפל and metapelet מטפלת - "caregiver", particularly for children.

One confusing factor here is that in Aramaic, taflaya טפליא means "children", with tefel טפל meaning "child". However, Klein (and others) say that these words don't derive from our root טפל, but rather are related to the Hebrew taf טף, meaning "children". This leads to the strange scenario where metupal מטופל means both "having many children" (based on tefel) and the child being taken care of (related to tipul). According to Avineri (Yad Halashon p. 330) the former was the more popular understanding of the word, based its usage in that sense in Yiddish. He wrote that piece in 1960, but something likely changed, for I've never heard metupal with that meaning in conversational Hebrew.

Another related word is tapil טפיל - "parasite." Ben Yehudah writes that it was coined by the physician and linguist Aharon Meir Mazia on the basis of the Arabic tufayli - "unwanted guest". Even Shoshan and Klein connect the Arabic word back to the root טפל, but don't explain why (the parasite is attached to the host? the parasite is of secondary importance to the host?). But Arabic dictionaries such as this one connect it to the Arabic cognate of tefel (child), and this book, discussing pre-Islamic Arab culture writes that children were viewed as "nonproductive" and that:

the etymological connection in Arabic between tifl, child, and tufayli, parasite, party crasher, "sponge", is illuminating in this regard

And if all that wasn't confusing enough, there's another homophone out there. Klein writes that טפל is related to the root תפל also meaning "to smear, paste, plaster". However, there's an unrelated root, also spelled תפל, meaning "to be tasteless, be unseasoned" (this is the source of hatpala התפלה - "desalination"). Klein connects this second root with the Aramaic תפל ( = he talked silly things) and the Arabic tafala ( = he spat). A related Hebrew word is tifla תפלה - "folly" (this is entirely unrelated to tefila תפילה - "prayer".)

As you can perhaps imagine, תפלה as "folly" and טפלה as "of secondary importance" could be mixed up on their own, without even adding the fact that sometimes the tet and tav were switched in either direction. (For an example of the word switching meaning and spelling, see the play on words in Targum Yonatan, Sifrei and Rashi on Devarim 1:1). This page is meant to help Hebrew speakers tell the two roots apart, which isn't easy, particularly in the term emunot tefelot אמונות תפלות - "superstitions" (apparently coined by Krochmal).

Avineri wrote in Yad Halashon (page 216) that he suggested tefela טפלה as the Hebrew word for "by-product", but it was never adopted, probably due to the negative connotation of טפל (the word used today is totzar livay תוצר לואי). This probably also answers my question (in the pashtida post) as to why tefela was never adopted as the Hebrew term for pastry...

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pashtida

In the discussion of shibolet, we mentioned that the Radak described how the Eprhaimites pronounced the word improperly. Here's part of his explanation as to why:

אולי היה אויר ארצם גורם להם זה כמו אנשי צרפת שאינן מבינים לקרא השי"ן וקוראין אותה כמו תי"ו רפה

Perhaps it was due to the climate of their land, just as the people [Jews?] of France, who can't properly say shin, and instead read it as a soft tav ("th")

Avshalom Kor, on his radio program, claims that this French speech issue could explain the Hebrew word pashtida פשטידה - "pie, casserole". He says that pashtida derives from pasta, the "-da" suffix is like the suffix of "limonada" (lemonade), what's left is pashti = pasta. The Jews used "shin" to spell "s" - like Shaloniki שלוניקי for Saloniki. He understands the Radak as saying that the soft tav was "s" - like Shabbos. So he says that in general the French mixed up "sh" and "s", and that explains Rashi (in France) writing "pasta" as "pashti(da)".

I'm certainly a big fan of Avshalom Kor (I wake up to his program almost every morning), so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. But there are a number of things I don't really understand about his theory:

• Why does he assume that "da" is a separate suffix? According to this site,  "-ade", or the Latin "ata" means "product of an action" (lemonade from lemons). If pashtida means pasta, then what action is being described?
• Why does he assume that שלוניקי was pronounced Shaloniki instead of Saloniki (with a "sin")? That's how it's written in the Hebrew Wikipedia page.
• Is he saying that the switch from pasta to pashti happened because the Jews wrote "s" with a shin deliberately, or because the French Jews mixed up "s" and "sh"?
• The Radak says that in France they pronounced "sh" as "th" (or "s"). How does that explain a mispronunciation of "s" as "sh"?

As far as the etymology goes, there are certainly other opinions. Klein gives the following:

Probably from Middle Dutch pastede (=pie), from Late Latin pasta (whence also Italian, Spanish, etc. pasta), from Greek paste (=barleymash), which is related to pastos, paston (=sprinkled with salt), verbal adjective of passein (= to sprinkle), which is of uncertain etymology.

Other theories are that pashtida derives from the German (pastete) and Italian (pestette), from the Italian pasticcio (the source of pastitsio) or pastetta (according to Stahl) / pasteta (according to Even Shoshan) or even from the Polish word pashtet (or pasztet).

But I think to find the most reasonable etymology, we need to find the earliest source. Let's look at the Rashi that Avshalom Kor mentioned. The source is Pesachim 74b, which is discussing birds (pigeons, ducks) covered in dough (made of semida - solet ) and then roasted. Rashi (s.v. טפליה) says this is called pashtida פשטיד"א. Tosafot (s.v. טפלו ליה בר אווזא) disagrees with Rashi, saying the verb טפל means טיחה - "spreading", and therefore the gemara is describing something much lighter - they use a foreign word which Steinsaltz identifies as "crepes" (Stahl says perhaps related to the Yiddish kreplach). However, they are familiar with pashtida - they just claim pashtida is too thick to be the item described, and is baked in an oven, unlike the birds here, which were roasted on a skewer ("shipud"). So both Rashi and Tosafot see the pashtida to be fairly similar to its use today - a type of meat pastry, and in that light Steinsaltz says the word derives from the old French pastede, with the same meaning.¹

However, Rashi on Shmuel I 25:18 seems to give a different explanation to the word. The verse is describing the food that Avigail prepared for David, and mentions five "prepared" sheep - וְחָמֵשׁ צֹאן עֲשׂוּיוֹת. How were they prepared? Rashi writes:

תרגם יונתן תכברא ממולאות בשר דק ובצים פשטי"ץ בלע"ז

Targum Yonatan translates this as tachbera ["basket" - Jastrow]. They were filled with ground meat and eggs - pashtitz in Laaz [foreign language].

He then goes on to quote the gemara in Pesachim - one page earlier, 74a, where it describes the Pesach sacrifice being stuffed with meat (and according to some manuscripts use the word תכברא.) While the word pashtitz² is likely synonymous (or at least cognate) to pashtida, clearly this is not the pashtida described on the following page. Perhaps this why someone (who?) added the parenthetical comment to Rashi:

ע"ש היטב ברש"י ד"ה רבי ישמעאל קורהו וכו' ומצוה ליישב

Look closely at Rashi s.v.  רבי ישמעאל קורהו, there is an obligation to resolve it

Both this Rashi and the Rashi on Shmuel say that this explanation is by Rabbi Kalonymus ben Shabbethai, a rabbi who moved from Rome to Worms, where Rashi lived. (The Radak, who calls the stuffed meat פשטיצ"ו pastitsio, also mentions Rabbi Kalonymus as the source.)

It's possible that Rabbi Kalonymus is very significant to understanding the real story here. For he was responsible for introducing the Aruch dictionary (or parts of it) of Rabbi Nathan ben Yechiel of Rome to Rashi. And the Aruch, explaining the word mul'yeta מולייתא in Pesachim 74a offers the following definition:

כל דבר שממלא מבשר וצולהו היינו מולייתא כגון פשטידא
Anything filled with meat and roasted is mul'yeta, such as pashtida

Now while mul'yeta is referring to a lamb stuffed with meat, the Aruch's definition is wide enough to include the dough stuffed with meat found on the following page. However, the etymology of pashtida / pashtitz shouldn't have anything to do with pasta, dough, etc., but should somehow be associated with stuffed meat. Does anything fit that definition? I have a possible suggestion - the German pastete - ground meat, meaning (and cognate to) pate (which is still related to "pasta", but only via an earlier sense of "paste"). I admit that this is not fully researched, but it does seem important to disconnect pashtida from "pasta", at least regarding the Aruch's definition, and possibly Rashi's as well. Did Rabbi Kalonymus bring this meaning from Rome to Worms? If so, it would be nice to find an Italian word with the same meaning. In any case, clearly by the time of Tosafot, pashtida had found its place as "pie, casserole", since they use the word without needing to explain its meaning.

So today we find in the Israeli kitchen both pashtida and pasta פסטה, whether or not they are directly related. Another related food term is the Ladino pastel פסטל, which originally meant a meat pie ("Pastel de Carne"), but today usually refers to fried dumplings stuffed with potatoes, meat, etc.

One more word that has a similar origin is "pastiche", meaning "a medley of various ingredients; a hotchpotch, farrago, jumble." The word pastiche is the French version of the Greco-Roman dish pastitsio or pasticcio, which designated a kind of pie made of many different ingredients. All of the unanswered questions here make me feel like this post is a bit of a jumble. If you have any answers - please let me know!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. In Modern Hebrew, pashtida does not only refer to meat pies, but perhaps even more likely to dairy ones. However, in Rabbinic literature, as Raffi Sirkis points out in his appendix to Pashtidot Olamiot, the term for a dairy pie was fladen or fladon פלאדן / פלאדון, cognate to the English "flan".

Also interesting is that pashtida is a legitimate Hebrew word today (I would have guessed that the Hebrew version would be tefelah טפילה). Sirkis points out that Ben-Yehuda did not include it in his dictionary, but the Vaad HaLashon included pashtida פשטידא in their 1912 dictionary of cooking terms as the Hebrew translation of the Yiddish "kugel". By 1938, they were spelling it with a heh at the end: פשטידה, and became the official translation for the English "pie" and "pastry".

2.  This spelling can also be found in Tosafot Beitza 16b, s.v. קמ"ל קמחא עיקר, and Sefer Kolbo 145 s.v. דין.

Update: Shortly after publishing this post, I saw the Mikraot Gedolot HaKeter edition of Shmuel. I was very surprised to see that they had a rather different version of Rashi and Radak on our verse, with Rashi using the foreign word “פרשידש” and Radak providing “פרשירש”. These were both sufficiently different from any form of the word pashtida, that I thought it was important to research the point further.

From correspondence with Prof. Jordan Penkower and Daniel Fano, I discovered something very interesting. As Penkower mentions in his article, “גלגולי נוסח תרגום יונתן ופירוש רד"ק ליחזקאל כג, כ; לד, יח”, pgs 254-5 (in שנתון לחקר המקרא והמזרח הקדום יג), the Haketer version of Rashi (he has Radak using the same word) seems to be the accurate one. Other older manuscripts have similar spellings. What is the origin of this word? According to Fano, it is from the Old French farcid (farcides in plural). It means “to stuff” and is related to the English word “farce”. 
According to Penkower, the Venice edition of Mikraot Gedolot (which I had used for my post) had no justification to use a variation of the word pashtida. He doesn’t say why they did – but my guess is that Rashi having used pashtida in Pesachim, and with pashtida and farcides both referring to stuffed food, they simply became confused.

So all of this, together with the important comment on my post by reader Mike Gerver that in the Arukh “mul'yeta is defined as any kind of food stuffed with meat, and gives pashtida as an example”, leads me to believe that perhaps Avshalom Kor’s position has more merit than I assumed. Pashtida may really refer to specifically a kind of pie or pastry, and not just anything stuffed with meat.

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shibboleth

As I've mentioned before, William Safire was the first language writer I ever read, and a major inspiration for Balashon. Since his death earlier this year, I've been trying to think of a post that would be a worthy tribute to him. Hopefully, this one will fit the bill.

In his 1982 book, What's the Good Word?, Safire discusses "shibboleths" (page 246), which he defines as "those passwords that signal who is a native and who an outlander." Most of the entry contains examples of various American shibboleths, but he does provide the following background:

"Shibboleth," the Hebrew word for "stream," was used by the soldiers of Gilead to separate their neighbors from the Ephraimites, who pronounced the sh as an s; because they couldn't get it right, according to Judges 12:6, 42,000 Ephraimites were slain. In those days, pronunciation meant something.

However, this etymology was challenged in these two letters he received:

The Concise Oxford Dictionary states that "shibboleth" derives from the Hebrew word for "an ear of corn," not "stream," as you report. Perhaps you base your information on rabbinical authority that would eclipse Oxford.

~~~~~~~~~~

You state that "shibboleth" is the Hebrew word for "stream." That is not quite correct. It means the current of a stream, not the stream itself. It is used with this meaning in verse 2 of Psalm 69. The word, which is pronounced "shibolet" in modern Hebrew, also means "an ear of corn or a spike." It is also the Hebrew name for the star Spica.

He then prefaces the next letter, from David B. Guralnik (Dictionary Division, Simon & Schuster) with the note, "The current etymology is in the following letter from an eminent lexicographer":

The Hebrew word שבלת, from an Ugaritic root, has several meanings: flowing stream (as in Isaiah 27:12 or Psalms 69:2), ear of corn (as in Ruth 2:2 or Isaiah 17:5), or twigs or branches (as in Zechariah 4:12). The first meaning makes most sense in the Judges narrative precisely because the incident took place at a stream. Seems like a logical password.

So who's right?

First of all, let's look at the verses themselves (Shoftim 12:5-6):

וַיִּלְכֹּד גִּלְעָד אֶת-מַעְבְּרוֹת הַיַּרְדֵּן, לְאֶפְרָיִם; וְהָיָה כִּי יֹאמְרוּ פְּלִיטֵי אֶפְרַיִם, אֶעֱבֹרָה, וַיֹּאמְרוּ לוֹ אַנְשֵׁי-גִלְעָד הַאֶפְרָתִי אַתָּה, וַיֹּאמֶר לֹא.  ו וַיֹּאמְרוּ לוֹ אֱמָר-נָא שִׁבֹּלֶת וַיֹּאמֶר סִבֹּלֶת, וְלֹא יָכִין לְדַבֵּר כֵּן, וַיֹּאחֲזוּ אוֹתוֹ, וַיִּשְׁחָטוּהוּ אֶל-מַעְבְּרוֹת הַיַּרְדֵּן; וַיִּפֹּל בָּעֵת הַהִיא, מֵאֶפְרַיִם, אַרְבָּעִים וּשְׁנַיִם, אָלֶף

The Gileadites held the fords of the Jordan against the Ephraimites. And when any fugitive from Ephraim said, "Let me cross," the men of Gilead would ask him, "Are you an Ephraimite?"; if he said, "No," they would say to him, "Then say shibolet"; but he would say "sibolet," not being able to pronounce it correctly. Thereupon they would seize him and slay him by the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell at that time.

(An interesting discussion of how the words shibolet and sibolet were transliterated in various non-Hebrew Bibles can be found in this Philologos column and in this book.)

All of the classical Jewish commentaries identify the shibolet in the story as the "current of a stream", although I was surprised to see relatively little discussion of the linguistic nature of this episode (other than by the Radak, who we'll come back to later.) However, a number of scholarly articles in the past 70 years have done much to clarify the issue further.

One of the first was E. A. Speiser, in his 1942 article, "The Shibboleth Incident". Speiser doesn't put much significance in the meaning of the word, but does explain:

The meaning of the word is of minor importance. Elsewhere in the Old Testament it has the sense of "ear of corn" (Gen 41:5 ff.; Ruth 2:2; Zach 4:12) or, less commonly, "flood, torrent" (Psalms 69:3,16; Isa. 27:12). In out passage it is taken in the former sense by such versions as the Greek Codex Vaticanus and Aquila, as well as some modern scholars (Cf. Liebmann ZAW 25 (1905) 161). On the other hand, reference to flowing water is assumed by the medieval Hebrew commentators and a majority of the moderns, evidently because such an allusion would be more appropriate to the occasion.

Instead, he prefers to focus on the phonetic aspect of the issue. While we've been translating the words as "shibolet" and "sibolet" - are either of those accurate representations of how the word was pronounced in Gilad and Efraim? And why couldn't Efraim pronounce it "properly"? Who had the non-standard pronunciation? How were the various pronunciations represented with the limited letters available (and no dots available to indicate the difference between shin and sin)?A full discussion of these questions is beyond the scope of this post, but it turns out that the meaning of the word remains significant, even for Speiser.

He mentions a theory, foreshadowed by the Radak on Shoftim 12:6, and later developed by Joseph Marquart and Zellig Harris. According to them, the two meanings of shibolet have two separate etymologies: "ear of corn" comes from the root sh-b-l  שבל, whereas the meaning "flood, torrent" comes from a distinct root:  th-b-l. Therefore, the Ephraimites pronounced the word as "thibolet", which gave them away. Beeston (1979) thinks that the original root was sbl סבל (as pronounced by the Ephraimites, but agrees the two meanings of shibolet have two different origins:

If we assume that "ear of corn" was indeed *sblt in Proto-Semitic, then the Ephraimite, Arabic and MSA forms are adequately accounted for, and the problem assumes the shape, "Why did non-Ephraimite Hebrew show the shift to shblt?" The latter is a homonym of the word for "watercourse", but it is unlikely that the two words have a common origin. "Watercourse" is closely linked with the very common shebil "road, way", and both should probably be assigned to a PS root *shbl; but "ear of corn" is isolated in the lexicon, with no associated terms. This fact, together with the very close phonetic similarity between it and "watercourse" may have led to a confusion of the two words and the creation of a homonym.

He goes on to say that shevil שביל and shovel שובל (in Yishayahu 47:2, which he translates as "well, fountain") have an "underlying feeling of semantic association".

While Speiser agrees that the anomaly began on the eastern side of the Jordan, with the Gileadites, he does not accept either theory regarding the separate etymology, and instead writes that both of meanings of the word shibolet, along with its various Semitic cognates, derive from one root:

In reality, however, there is no reason for deriving the established homonyms for "ear of corn" and "flood" from two distinct roots. Arabic sbl may underline both "hang down" (whence we get sunbulat-, sabalat- "ear of corn") and "rain, flow." The two ranges are thus easily linked semantically, which accords fully with their apparent etymological identity.

(Yet another view can be found in Rendsburg, 1986, who agrees that the two meanings of shibolet come from distinct roots, but that the Gileadites, influenced by their neighbors the Ammonites, pronounced the meaning "torrent, stream" as thibbolet, which the fleeing Ephraimites rendered as "sibbolet".)

Klein agrees with Speiser, and connects the various words to one root. For example in the entry for shibolet ("ear of corn") he writes:

Formed from שבלת shubolet through dissimilation of the vowels u-o to i-o, related to Aramaic שבלתא, Syriac שבלתא, Arabic sunbulah, sabalah, Ethiopian sabl, Akkadian shubultu (= ear of corn). These words derive from base שבל (= to hang down, draw along, move along)

And for the meaning "flowing stream, current of a river", he adds:

Derived from שבל (= to move along), hence of the same origin as shibolet ["ear of corn"]

As far as shovel, he gives the more common translation as "flowing skirt, train of a robe", and says that it too derives from שבל, literally meaning "that which hangs down". Shevil - "path, way" - has the same origin, and literally means "that which runs along". (From here we get beshvil בשביל - "for", and literally means "in the path of".)

In the end, I find aspects of all the arguments convincing. Luckily for me, I don't need to decide who's right and wrong. But I am curious - shouldn't the meaning of the Biblical text be more obvious? Shouldn't the reader simply know what is meant without all of these debates and discussions? Perhaps it was left deliberately ambiguous, either to encourage study (and future Safire columns), or to allow the word play found with homonyms. That certainly seems to be the case in Yishayahu 27:12, as Hendel points out. The verse reads:

וְהָיָה בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא, יַחְבֹּט ה' מִשִּׁבֹּלֶת הַנָּהָר עַד-נַחַל מִצְרָיִם; וְאַתֶּם תְּלֻקְּטוּ לְאַחַד אֶחָד, בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל.

And in that day, the Lord will beat out [the peoples like grain] from the flowing stream (shibolet) of the River [Euphrates] to the Wadi of Egypt; and you shall be picked up one by one, O Children of Israel!

Here we have a wonderful play on words. On the one hand, we have the beating of the shibolet of grain (see Ruth 2:2,17) and on the other the shibolet of a river. Maybe understanding this is a sign that when it comes to Hebrew, we're natives, and not outlanders...

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shlemiel

There are many theories as to the origin of the word "shlemiel" - an unlucky, clumsy person. (I'll stick with this spelling over "schlemiel" - although there are as many spellings as there are explanations as to its origin. As Rosten writes in Hooray for Yiddish, page 286, "In Hebrew and Yiddish, the sing letter shin represents the sh sound; to begin an English word with sch is to call for the sk sound, as in 'school' or 'scheme'.")

First of all, it's important to understand how the word entered English. Despite some discussion to the contrary, it's clear that the word entered German from Yiddish, and not the other way around. It became popularized in German via the 1814 story "Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte" ("Peter Schlemihl's Remarkable Story") by Adelbert von Chamisso. However, English apparently adopted the word shlemiel directly from Yiddish, not via German. (It is still used in German, and even the name of the Sesame Street muppet Lefty is "Schlemihl" in the German version).

Now to the Yiddish origins. I'll admit from the outset that I don't know the "true" origin, and I doubt any of us ever will. But I will review the various theories and tell you which seem more or less likely to me.

1) Even-Shoshan suggests that it is a corruption of the similar Yiddish word shlimazel (or schlimazel). Schlemazel is a combination of the German schlim (= "bad, crooked", related to the English "slim" ) and the Hebrew mazal מזל (= "luck").

However, the two words seem to be distinct, and are often paired together, as in the famous saying, "The shlemiel pours soup on the shlimazel" (and in the opening song of "Laverne and Shirley".)

2) Klein (in his entry for the Hebrew equivalent shelumiel שלומיאל) writes that it is "probably a transposition of shelo mo'il שלא מועיל (= useless)."

But a number of objections have been raised to this theory. I found two on the "Mendele: Yiddish literature and language" list archives. One is that while the phrase shelo mo'il is found fairly frequently in Talmudic Hebrew (and later), it "is suited for situations, acts, attempts at correction -- but not people." Another writer points out that

we would expect shelo mo'il to give something like *shloyml or *shlemoyl (the asterisk is used to indicate a form that does not exist).  Since that is NOT what we find in Yiddish, the etymology in question cannot be accepted.

3) The most popular explanation is that shlemiel comes from the Biblical Shelumiel ben Tzurishadai שלומיאל בן צורישדי - the prince of the tribe of Shimon (Bamidbar 1:6, 2:12, 7:36, 10:19).  How did he become associated with the classic unfortunate bungler? There are a number of theories here as well:

a) One theory is based on the Talmud's claim (Sanhedrin 82b) that Shelumiel was one of the five names of Zimri, the prince of Shimon killed by Pinchas for sinning with a Midianite princess. Ignoring the fact that Shelumiel and Zimri lived a generation apart, Zimri doesn't seem "unfortunate" but "bad"! Why should the nickname come from him?

Rabbi Norman Lamm wrote an essay in 1974, called "The First Schelmihl". He claims that the shlemiel is not "hapless, luckless, a constant victim of conspiring circumstances", but rather is "sinister", "egotistical", and "will let no one and nothing stand in his way". While Lamm's homelitcal message is very powerful, it's hard for me to believe that the average person would make that jump, and understand that a real shlemiel is so evil. It just doesn't fit with the the way the word is used.

On the other hand, there are those that say that Zimri was unlucky, because while many were involved with the Midianites, he was the only one to get caught. But as Lamm pointed out, Zimri was clearly of a higher standing than the average person, and as the Talmud itself mentions, Zimri's act was as much of a rebellion against Moses as it was submission to passion.

Another question can be asked: if Zimri, for whatever reason, was the archetypal shlemiel, then why aren't we calling people zimris instead? One suggestion is that this was a private joke of the rabbis, to avoid recalling the improper nature of Zimri's act. Here too, I have difficulty accepting the idea that this kind of "conspiracy" would stick well enough to enter the popular jargon. In any case, the Talmud always refers to the culprit as Zimri, not Shelumiel, even such folksy sayings as "Their deeds are like those of Zimri, yet they ask for reward like Pinchas", so it doesn't seem likely that Zimri is our shlemiel.

b) A different theory suggests a connection between the unsuccessful fate of the tribe of Shimon (they were one of the smallest, didn't succeed in conquering their land) and "shlemiel". But again - it's a nice theory, but why use the name Shelumiel? (Rosten says in The Joys of Yiddish that Shelumiel was a general of Shimon who lost his battles, but then corrects himself in Hooray for Yiddish, choosing to follow the Zimri connection instead.)

c) Perhaps the most plausible Shelumiel theory that I've heard (first from my teacher Mitch Heifetz z"l) is mentioned here:

One suggestion relates to the arcane permutations of the Hebrew calendar. On Hanukkah a different section of Numbers 7 is recited daily, recounting the gifts of the tribal chieftains who each brought a daily offering at the dedication of the Tabernacle (mishkan). On the first day of Hanukkah, the first chieftain’s name appears at the beginning, on the second day the second chieftain’s name, and so on. (On the eighth day, the gifts of chieftains 8-12 are read.)

The exception is the Sabbath during Hanukkah, when the Torah portion is that of the regular weekly cycle and the added maftir reading from a second scroll is the Hanukkah reading beginning with the daily chieftain. Only one day of Hanukkah’s eight never falls on a Sabbath: the fifth day. And which chieftain therefore never stars on the Sabbath, when the synagogue is far better attended than on a midwinter weekday morning? Why, Shelumiel ben Tsurishaddai, of course. Who else?

While this does seem somewhat complicated, I can see how an average person might have noticed the fifth night's bad luck year after year (for a more positive take, see this Treppenwitz post.) However, Werner Weinberg (who taught us how to spell Chanukah here) writes in his Die Reste des Jüdischdeutschen that the first mention of this theory is in Halozebichel (Joke Book) of Rabbi Meir Ohnesorg, Prague 1864, p. 62. I couldn't find that book anywhere, but it seems possible that the whole etymology was just a joke.

d) The last Shelumiel connection isn't a real theory at all, but still is important to mention. Heinrich Heine in his poem "Jehuda ben Halevy" writes that he heard the following "version" of the story from his friend Julius Eduard Hitzig (who, incidentally, was also friends with Chamisso):

But a legend amongst the people
Has been orally transmitted
Which denies that it was Zimri
Whom the spear of Phinehas slew.

And maintains that, blind with passion,
Phineas slew the transgressor,
but another who was guiltless --
Slew Schlemihl ben Zuri Schadday

This is clearly not what the Torah is describing, nor does it appear in any midrash. But it seems to have a lot of influence, and perhaps the very association of Shelumiel and shlemiel began with Heine (or Hitzig).

4) The last theory is presented by Leopold Löw (the father of Immanuel, who I've quoted often) in his book Die Lebensalter in der jüdischen Literatur (page 54). But instead of relating to a somewhat obscure biblical character, he find someone much closer to the age of Yiddish. In the responsa of the Maharil (1365 – 1427), he finds mention of a Rabbi named Shlomil (or perhaps Shlomel, likely a nickname for Shlomo or Shalom) of Enns, Austria, who had an unusual story:

וכן העיד שמה"ר שלומיל מעיר ענש הלך פעם אחת ללמוד למרחקים, ויהי לתקופת י"א חדשים ליציאתו ילדה אשתו והכל מעידין מרוב חסידותה ברור שלא זינתה תחתיו.

"And so testified Rabbi Shlomil of the city of Enns, that he once traveled far to study, and eleven months after he left his wife gave birth. But all know, that due to her righteousness, she clearly did not cheat on him [but rather had an unusually long pregnancy as mentioned in the Talmud, Yevamot 80b]"

Now while the Maharil clearly did not bring this story to make fun of Rabbi Shlomil (he quotes the same rabbi as his teacher in a number of other cases), but it is very possible that others did not view him with the same level of respect. Perhaps he was the classic case of someone who was in "the wrong place, at the wrong time"...

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