Elul

The Hebrew month of Elul אֱלוּל begins this week, so let's look at its etymology. As with the other names of the months in the current Hebrew calendar, it was adopted in Babylonia, and therefore has Akkadian origin. Klein writes that it derives from an Akkadian word reflecting its function as the beginning of the harvest period:

Akka. ulūlu, elūlu (= harvest, harvest time; lit.: ‘the time when the produce of the land is brought in’). Related to Aram. עֲלַל (= he brought in), Aram.-Syr. אֲלַלְתָּא (= that which is brought in, produce, harvest), Heb. עֹל (= yoke), Akka. allu, ullu (= yoke, chain), Arab. ahalla (= he put in, thrust in), ghall (= iron ring round a prisoner’s neck at which his hands are tied.

This etymology connects Elul to the root עלל, which is also the origin of ol עֹל - "yoke." However, עלל provides two roots, which Klein (and others) claim as unrelated.

We've been discussing the second meaning (according to Klein) of עלל, which he defines as "to insert, thrust in." This meaning is actually unused in Biblical Hebrew, but it does appear in the Aramaic sections of the book of Daniel. (Kaddari also suggests that the appearance in Iyov 16:15 has the same meaning, and was influenced by Aramaic.)

The other (first) meaning of עלל does appear in Biblical Hebrew. Klein defines it as "to act, do, work" and notes that it is related to the Arabic ‘alla, meaning "to do something a second time." While at times עלל can have the neutral meaning of "to act," in some instances it can mean to act severely or harmfully. 

Here are some of the words deriving from this meaning of עלל:

• עָלוּל alul - "liable, likely, capable (of doing an action)." In 1944, the linguist Yitzchak Avinery (Yad HaLashon, p. 450) lamented that people are using alul in a positive sense, and not just the negative sense it should have. He wrote that the positive equivalent is asui עָשׂוּי. According to Morfix, today alul still has a negative connotation, and is used when something bad is likely to happen. But perhaps it's used more broadly, even in positive scenarios, because asui has another meaning - "made of."
• עֲלִילָה alila - This word has two meanings, the more neutral "act, deed" (now also "plot, story") and the more negative "false accusation, libel."
• עִלָּה ila - "cause, reason." 
• הִתְעַלֵּל hitalel - "to act cruelly, to abuse."

Klein also adds olela עוֹלֵלָה - "gleaning (of grapes or olives)" but doesn't explain the connection. BDB, however, does provide an explanation, connecting it back to the Arabic root that Klein cited. They define gleaning as "going over a second time."

The similar word עוֹלָל olal, meaning "infant," does not derive from עלל, but rather from the root עול - "to suck, nurse."

I should note that Gesenius connects all of the terms we discussed. The nursing baby "drinks again", and the "thrusts" we saw in the second meaning of עלל (the one connected with Elul), are a "second blow." However, since the scholarship of Gesenius is older than the other sources I looked at, I don't know if it's still considered accurate.

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kartis

Rabbi David Bashevkin (of the enjoyable 18Forty podcast) recently posted on his Substack an essay entitled "The Revival of Hebrew." It's an interesting review of the history of the renewal of Hebrew and the religious response. I won't cover all of my thoughts about it here (you can read on Twitter/X some of my initial thoughts), but it mentioned a particular word that I'd like to explore here.

Bashevkin wrote:

Growing up in New York, high school students must take the Regents, a state-wide exam. Nearly all Jewish high school students take the Hebrew regents as their language requirement. I did not go to an elementary school that spoke Ivrit B’Ivrit (classes using instructional Hebrew), so I was pretty terrified for my 9th-grade Hebrew Regent. I still managed to get a 99 on the exam—hold your applause—I got stuck on one word during the oral conversational part of the exam. In conversation with our Hebrew teacher, Rabbi Dr. Joseph Ozarowski, I was supposed to ask him for a replacement train ticket. Except I forgot the Hebrew word for “ticket.” Hence a 99 instead of 100. I will never forget my כרטיס again.

Then later in the post, he found support in a quote from Theodore Herzl's Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State):

“We cannot converse with one another in Hebrew,” Herzl said, “Who amongst us has a sufficient acquaintance with Hebrew to ask for a railway ticket in that language?” As someone who personally got a point off on his Hebrew Regent for exactly that word—a train ticket—I find great comfort in Herzl’s skepticism. “Such a thing cannot be done,” Herzl concluded—instead he advocated for German to be the language of the Land of Israel.

So to help him (and any of you) not forget the Hebrew word for "train ticket", let's take a look at its history.

The word for train ticket is כַּרְטִיס kartis, and in Modern Hebrew it can mean "ticket" or "card" (as in credit card, greeting card, membership card, etc.) It first appears in Talmudic Aramaic meaning "document" and sometimes has the variant spelling קַרְטֵיס. In that last entry, Jastrow notes that it can also mean "paper." That meaning reflects its etymology, as Klein writes:

כַּרְטִיס m.n. PBH card, ticket. [Aram. כַּרְטִיסָא (= document), a loan word from Gk. chartes (= a leaf of the Egyptian papyrus, papyrus, paper), which is of foreign, possibly Egypt., origin.]

The word kartis remained obscure until the dawn of Modern Hebrew, when it was reintroduced for "ticket" (presumably due to the similarity to words in European languages like the German Karte and the Russian kartochka of similar meanings.)

Its Greek origin chartes is also the source of many words in English. For example, Here's the Online Etymology Dictionary's entry for card:

early 15c., "a playing card," from Old French carte (14c.), from Medieval Latin carta/charta "a card, paper; a writing, a charter," from Latin charta "leaf of paper, a writing, tablet," from Greek khartēs "layer of papyrus," which is probably from Egyptian.

Other words with the same origin include: chart, charter, cartel, cartography, carton, cartoon and cartridge.

The Egyptian origin mentioned by Klein and Etymonline is not universally accepted. Professor Gary A. Rendsburg, in his essay "The Etymology of χάρτης 'Papyrus Roll'" rejects the theory, since no convincing Egyptian etymon (the word from which the later word is derived) has been found. He then writes:

If, after generations in pursuit of an Egyptian etymon for the key Greek word χάρτης 'papyrus roll', none has been identified, perhaps it is time to set our eyes on a different horizon for the source of this lexeme [...] If Egyptian does not serve as a source [...] then our eyes should be set to the other great source of cultural influence on ancient Hellas, namely, the Semitic world in general and the Phoenician sphere in particular.

He then goes on to note mention of a Phoenician word, חרטית ḥrṭyt, which was generally assumed to mean "sculptures," but he suggests could mean "writings" or "scrolls." Based on this, and other evidence, Rendsburg proposes that khartēs could be therefore cognate with the Hebrew חרט, which as we've discussed here, meant "to chisel, engrave" and had associations with writing. He goes on to explore the further development of kartis in Aramaic and other languages. It's a really interesting investigation - I recommend reading it in full.

One Hebrew word related to kartis that Rendsburg did not cover was luckily reviewed by Elon Gilad. (By the way, I highly recommend his YouTube / Instagram videos - short clips discussing the history of Hebrew words in English.)  Gilad discusses (in English and in Hebrew) the word khaltura חַלְטוּרָה - "side job, gig, part-time work."

After noting how the Greek chartes meant "page," he continues:

We move onto the Middle Ages, when the word chartularium, a diminutive meaning little page, came about. This medieval Latin word was used in churches for the list of people (usually donors and their family members) for whom prayers needed to be said every day, to facilitate their acceptance to heaven.

Somehow chartularium made its way into the Russian Orthodox Church in the corrupted form khaltura - and with a new meaning: the prayer that a priest says at a funeral.

Priests got paid extra for these private appearances at the homes of the deceased. But after the Communist Revolution in 1917, which discouraged the practice of religion, Russian theater folk commandeered the word for "moonlighting" - performances done outside the theater companies they worked for.

From this sense of "moonlighting" came the Hebrew meaning of "side gig." 

I hope Bashevkin can now remember chaltura as well!

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zonda

The Hebrew word for "feeding tube" (or more technically a nasogastric or orogastric tube) is זוֹנְדָּה zonda. This is clearly not a natively Hebrew word. In fact, the Academy of the Hebrew Language coined machder מַחְדֵּר (from the root חדר - "to penetrate, enter") as a good Hebrew alternative. However, I've never heard it used, whereas zonda is common. So where does zonda come from?

This site suggests it comes from the German Sonde (when pronounced, it sounds very similar to the Hebrew zonda). Sonde in German means "probe" or "tube," and can mean specifically "feeding tube." The German in turn derives from the French sonde, with the same meanings as the German, but also used to describe a tool to determine the depth of water.

English has the cognate word "sound". The most common meanings of "noise" and "in good condition" are not related to sonde. (The latter usage, originally meaning "healthy", finds a related root in the German gesundheit meaning "Health!".) But there are two other uses of sound that are cognate with sonde. The Online Etymology Dictionary first presents a meaning of "sound" as verb that relates to the French noun we saw above:

sound (v.2)

"fathom, probe, measure the depth of water" with or as if with a sounding line and lead, mid-14c. (implied in sounding), from Old French sonder, from sonde "sounding line," perhaps from the same Germanic source that yielded Old English sund "water, sea."

This last suggestion appears in the etymology for another meaning of "sound," this time a noun:

sound (n.2)

"narrow channel of water," c. 1300, sounde, from Old Norse sund "a strait, swimming," or from cognate Old English sund "act of swimming; stretch of water one can swim across, a strait of the sea," both from Proto-Germanic *sundam-, from a suffixed form of Germanic *swem- "to move, stir, swim."

The sound I'm most familiar with is Puget Sound in Washington State. There are many others you might recognize.

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chayil and chayal

Devarim 8:17-18 includes a well-known passage where the people are warned against attributing their successes to their own talents, instead of attributing them to God:

וְאָמַרְתָּ בִּלְבָבֶךָ כֹּחִי וְעֹצֶם יָדִי עָשָׂה לִי אֶת־הַחַיִל הַזֶּה. וְזָכַרְתָּ אֶת־יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ כִּי הוּא הַנֹּתֵן לְךָ כֹּחַ לַעֲשׂוֹת חָיִל...

A repeated word in these verses is chayil חָיִל. Since the word for "soldier" in Hebrew is the similar chayal חַיָּל, I assumed that the Torah here was talking about military success. And yet, the translations consistently offer a very different meaning. Here is a typical translation:

And should you say to yourselves, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.” Remember that it is the LORD your God who gives you the power to get wealth...

Chayil here is translated as "wealth." What is the connection between "wealth" and "soldier"?

To answer this, let's look at the various meanings of chayil in Biblical Hebrew. It appears frequently, with over 200 occurrences in the Tanakh. Kaddari breaks down the various appearances into these meanings:

1. Physical strength (e.g., Tehilim 76:6)
2. Spiritual strengths, such as bravery, virtue, quickness, aptitude (e.g., Mishlei 31:10, the famous Eshet Chayil, "woman of valor")
3. Military power, army (e.g., Shemot 14:28)
4. Wealth (e.g., Tehilim 49:7)

Even-Shoshan, in his Concordance, has a somewhat different division: 

1. Strength, bravery (either physical or spiritual)
2. Military
3. Success, wealth

(For an interesting comparison of those usages, see the various medieval commentaries on Shemot 18:21, who give different interpretations to the use of chayil in that verse.)

When we have such a variety of meanings, it's natural to try to find a common thread between them, and if possible, a shared origin. And linguistic sources do make those efforts. However, what I've found so far, I haven't found very convincing.

For example, here's Klein's entry:

חַֽיִל m.n. 1 strength, power. 2 wealth. 3 army, host, force. [Related to BAram. חַיִל, Aram. חֵילָא, Syr. חַיְלָא (= strength, army), Arab. ḥaul, ḥayl (= strength, force), Akka. ellatu (= army), Ethiop. ḫayl (= strength, army).]

I don't see an obvious connection between strength/power and wealth, other than a general sense of power including control over resources like wealth. BDB has a similarly vague entry, defining chayil as "strength, efficiency, wealth, army", and deriving from the roots חיל/חול meaning "be firm, strong." While it is possible that there's a general association between strength and wealth (as well as military might), from my experience, words like this typically move from a more specific meaning to the more abstract ones, and so this doesn't quite sit right with me. Ben Yehuda, at least, admits that the origin of the root is unclear.

I, however, propose (cautiously) another theory. To get there, we need to return to Ben-Yehuda.

I mentioned earlier that the word chayal means "soldier." Unlike chayil, this is not an ancient word, but rather was devised by Ben-Yehuda. As Klein notes: 

coined by Eliezer ben Yehudah (1858–1922), from חַיִּל (= strength, army), on the analogy of Arab. ḫayyāl (= horseman, rider) from ḫayl (= horses).

The linguist Reuven Sivan (pp. 194-195 here) includes this coinage as part of Ben Yehuda's move from clumsier multiple-word phrases (common in Hebrew from the period of the Haskalah) for a term to single words. Prior to Ben Yehuda, a soldier may have been  referred to as an איש צבא, איש חיל, איש מלחמה, etc. Ben Yehuda took an Arabic word (ḫayyāl), related to a Hebrew word which sometimes has military associations (hayil) and created the catchy chayal, which was quickly adopted.

But notice that Arabic word, ḫayl (or chail), meaning horses. There are cases in Biblical Hebrew where chayil is associated with horses as well, such as Tehillim 33:17, where horses are presented in parallel to chayil:

שֶׁקֶר הַסּוּס לִתְשׁוּעָה וּבְרֹב חֵילוֹ לֹא יְמַלֵּט׃

"The horse is a false [hope] for deliverance, neither does its great strength provide escape."

I would like to suggest that perhaps the earliest meaning of the root חיל is "horse." Later, it developed into the more abstract senses we've seen before.

Chayil meaning strength could certainly have come from horses. In English, we have the term "horsepower," which came about much later, but the association between horse and power is a very old one.

The military association is also not surprising, as the most powerful militaries of the ancient world were supported by cavalry on horseback.

But what about wealth (the original cause of my investigation)? Well, we've seen in the past here several words that associate horses (or cattle) with property:

• rekhesh  רֶֽכֶשׁ meaning "team of horses" (Esther 8:10) and רְכוּשׁ meaning "property"
• mikneh  מִקְנֶה - "cattle" and the verb קנה - "to purchase"
• nekhes  נֶכֶס - "wealth, assets" related to the Aramaic root נכס meaning "to slaughter" and so nekhes was originally "cattle (to be killed)
• segula  סְגֻלָּה meant both "herd of cattle" and "property, treasure"

So perhaps chayil can be added to this list as well, as another word where horses (and cattle) became associated with the more abstract concepts of property and wealth. There is even support from the very passage I quoted in the beginning. A few verses before the warning of claiming credit for the acquired wealth, the Torah describes the source of that wealth:

וּבְקָרְךָ וְצֹאנְךָ יִרְבְּיֻן וְכֶסֶף וְזָהָב יִרְבֶּה־לָּךְ וְכֹל אֲשֶׁר־לְךָ יִרְבֶּה׃

"And your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered" (Devarim 8:13)

While gold and silver certainly contribute to wealth, by placing the herds of cattle at the very top of the list, we can see the ancient association between the two concepts.

 

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emunah, amen, emet, and umanut

Someone recently asked me if I had written about the root אמן. I thought for sure I had already, but it turned out I only mentioned it very briefly as a sidenote in this post:

Jastrow and Steinberg connect ימין yamin to the root אמן, meaning "firm, steady".

There's no question that the root אמן deserves its own post. It's one of the most significant and meaningful roots in Jewish literature over the ages. If anything, that provides a challenge. One could easily write an entire book about the meanings, uses, and implications of the various words deriving from it. For now, at least, I can't do that. But I will at least try to cover some of the main words it produced, and discuss some of the more interesting developments in those words that I noticed.

The root אמן has several core meanings, all within a general spectrum. Klein suggests: "to be firm, trustworthy." BDB says "confirm, support." Gesenius suggests "to stay, sustain, support." TDOT has "faithful, reliable, secure."

Here are the verbs that it forms:

• אָמַן aman (kal form) - "to nurse, nurture, foster, bring up (a child)." TDOT notes that "it is used of men and women who are entrusted with the care of, or take it upon themselves to care for, dependent children." It also notes that even when describing women, it does not always refer to physically nursing. For example, in Ruth 4:16 it says that Naomi was the omenet אֹמֶנֶת of Ruth's son Oved, but she certainly did not nurse him. Rather, she was responsible for the child.
• נֶאֱמָן neeman (nifal form) - "was [found] firm, trustworthy, true, reliable." In modern Hebrew this same word, as a noun, means trustee, ally.
• אִמֵּן imen (piel form) - "to train, make skillful, coach." Unlike the previous two forms, this only first appears in post-Biblical texts (for example, Shabbat 103a). Ben Yehuda's dictionary notes that the kal version also means "to educate" - offering the example of Mordechai being the omen of Esther (Esther 2:7).  Therefore it seems that he claims that this piel form is an extension of that earlier meaning. On the other hand, the Hebrew Wiktionary site focuses on the transitive nature of the piel form, saying imen means "to make someone capable" or "to grant authority." That would imply that imen derives from a transitive use of the original root - i.e., to make trustworthy, reliable.
• הֶאֱמִין he'emin (hifil form) - "to believe, trust." While also used between people, it is commonly associated with one's relationship to God. In Biblical Hebrew its use meant that one trusted in God. In later times, it came to mean believing in God's existence (as opposed to His promises.)
• הִתְאַמֵּן hitamen (hitpael form) - literally "to train one's self." Today used to mean "to practice; to exercise, work out."

Many nouns and adjectives also derive from the root אמן, including:

• אֱמוּנָה emunah - over time this word progressed from "firmness, steadfastness" to "faithfulness, faith, fidelity, confidence" to "belief, dogma, religion." (For an extensive review of the changes in meaning, see this Hebrew essay by Rabbi Yoel Bin Nun.)
• אִמּוּן imun - "training, exercise, practice"
• מְאַמֵּן me'amen - "trainer, coach"
• אֲמָנָה amanah - "agreement, treaty, pact, covenant"
• אָמְנָם amnam - "truly, surely, indeed." When used as a question, it takes the form 

  הַאֻמְנָם ha'umnam - "Indeed? Is it true that ..."

Two words deriving from אמן are so significant that they deserve their own paragraphs.

One is אֱמֶת emet. Most commonly defined as "truth," Klein suggests that it had these meanings earlier: "stability, sureness; faithfulness; certainty." He writes that it probably derives from the unattested  אמנת amint, a noun form of אמן, but as often happens in Hebrew, the letter nun dropped out. Emet provides its own set of derived words, including the verb אמת - "to verify" and אֲמִתִּי amiti - "true, real, genuine." For a detailed exploration of the word emet, see the chapter "Emeth, the Concept of Truth" in Man and God, by Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits.

The other is the word אָמֵן - "Amen." As seen in Yirmiyahu 28:6, it means "May [God] do so." It appears in a number of Biblical books (I was actually surprised to see that it only appears 30 times in the entire Tanakh.) In the Greek translation of the Bible, the Septuagint, it was generally translated as "so be it."  However, in later Biblical books, such as Nechemiah and Divrei HaYamim, it was transliterated as "amen" instead of translated. In the Christian bible, the word appeared also in its transliterated form in Greek and Latin. As such, it entered every language where the Bible was translated, including of course English. Allegedly, this makes it the word found in the most languages worldwide. 

There is one meaning of אמן that I have not yet discussed. In the Tanakh it only appears once in the phrase מַעֲשֵׂה יְדֵי אׇמָּן (Shir HaShirim 7:2). The noun oman אׇמָּן in the phrase is variously translated as "the handiwork of a master," "of a workman," or "of an artist." In Rabbinic Hebrew, it was usually vocalized as uman אֻמָּן, and had more or less the same meaning.

Modern Hebrew distinguishes between the two, with uman being the artisan, and oman being an artist. Their fields are also likewise distinguished: אֻמָּנוּת umanut is craftmanship, and אָמָּנוּת omanut is art. 

But is there a connection between this use of אמן, and the one we discussed earlier, relating to "trust"? Some scholars say no, there is no connection, with the "craft" sense ultimately coming from the Sumerian language. For example, here is Klein's entry for oman:

Together with Aram. אֻמָּן, אֻמָּנָא, Syr. אוּמָנָא (= workman, craftsman, artificer), borrowed from Akka. ummānu, earlier ummiānu, which itself is of Sumerian origin.

A similar claim is found in Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible (p. 55).

Others do suggest a common origin. Horowitz (p. 26) defines an oman as a "master workman, as one who is firm and sure in his workmanship." Almagor-Ramon, in Rega Shel Ivrit (241) writes that an oman  is one strong and well-trained. And Gesenius, who as we noted earlier considers the basic meaning of אמן to be "to prop, stay, sustain, support", sees the development to oman going via a sense of "to build up" (which also applies to omen meaning "one who brings up a child.")

As I wrote in the beginning, there's still much more to say, but at least now I can point to this post when I get questions about אמן.

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bara and bari

The Hebrew root ברא has three distinct meanings. Two are very familiar, one much less so.

One meaning is "to create" and is found in the very first verse of the Tanakh: בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא - "In the beginning God created..." (Bereshit 1:1). The noun form of this verb is beriah בְּרִיאָה - "creation."

Another is related to healthiness, and is found in such words as bari בָּרִיא - "healthy" and beriut בְּרִיאוּת - "health." It is generally accepted that the original usage of this meaning was "to be fat, to grow fat." Klein suggests that the Talmudic term bari בָּרִי meaning "surely, certainly" is related to בריא meaning "healthy, sound."

The last usage of ברא is "to cut down trees," as found in Yehoshua 17:15 and 17:18, and in the more metaphorical sense in Yechezkel 23:47, where it means "to cut down people."

Are there any connections between those three meanings?

Gesenius, admittedly an older source, claims that they are related. He writes that the common meaning to all is "to cut, to carve out, to form by cutting." That leads to the sense "to create, produce, fashion." He then writes that the meaning "to eat, feed, to grow fat," comes from "cutting food." And the connection between "to cut" and "to cut down" is fairly obvious. Gesenius also adds another meaning: "to beget", from which the word bar בַּר derives, connecting it to "creation.". I haven't seen anyone else say that bar comes from ברא, so I won't discuss it further here, but I did discuss that meaning of bar in this post.

Klein, however, does not make any of those connections. These are his three entries, unrelated to one another:

1) ברא  to create. [cp. Aram., Syr. בּֽרָא (= to create), OSArab. (= to found, build), מברא (= building, structure), Mahri bere (= to bear a child). Arab. bara’a (= to create) is an Aram. loan word.]

2) ברא to be fat. 1 he made fat; PBH 2 he recovered (from illness), recuperated; PBH 3 he became fat; MH 4 he made healthy. [Arab. bari’a (= to recover from disease), JAram. בְּרָא, בְּרִי (= to get well, strong). cp. the related base מרא ᴵᴵ.]

3) ברא  to cut down (a forest). [Arab. barā (= he hewed with an axe).]

In particular, he notes that ברא as "to be fat" is cognate with another root, מרא, with the same meaning. This is due to the occasional substitution of the letters bet and mem (for example, נשב and נשם, as we mentioned here.) That relationship to מרא would not be found in the other two meanings of ברא.

Here is Klein's entry for מרא:

מרא ᴵᴵ to be fat.
    — Hiph. - הִמְרִיא he fed, stuffed. [Akka. shumrū (= to fatten), marū (= well-fed, fat), Ugar. mra (= to become fat), Arab. mari’a (= agreed with — said of food). Stem of מְרִיא (= fatling), מֻרְאָה (= crop).]

This root and its related words aren't common in Modern Hebrew. There is a homonym, המריא, meaning "to take off" (as in an airplane), which originally meant "to soar, fly" (found in the Tanakh only in Iyov 39:18). According to Klein, these two meaning of מרא are also unrelated. This is what he writes for the flight meaning of מרא:

Of uncertain origin. The orig. meaning was perhaps ‘to beat (the air) with the wings’, in which case מרא would be relative to Arab. marā (= he whipped or urged on a horse).

Back to ברא. There are scholars who do, however, connect some of the meanings. For example, BDB does not connect the meaning "fat, healthy", but does say the meanings "create" and "cut down" are connected. They write that the original meaning is "shape, create", and note an Arabic cognate meaning "form, fashion by cutting, pare a reed for writing, a stick for an arrow." 

The TDOT (entry ברא) writes that "the Hebrew root br' probably has the original meaning 'to separate, divide.'" This would mean that ברא might derive from bar (or both have a common origin), not the other way around as Gesenius claimed. It also notes a Punic cognate meaning "a sculptor," and while the entry doesn't cite the meaning "to cut down trees," I can see a connection between sculpting and cutting (down).

Kaddari quotes a theory that claims that the use of ברא in Bamidbar 16:30 implies a type of fissure:

וְאִם־בְּרִיאָה יִבְרָא ה' וּפָצְתָה הָאֲדָמָה אֶת־פִּיהָ...

"But if the Lord creates a new-creation and the ground opens its mouth..."

I found the connection there to "cutting" fascinating, but Kaddari rejects it, saying that the Arabic root mentioned above by BDB means specifically sharpening reeds and cutting trees, but not cutting in general.

There is also a theory suggested the Wikitionary editors for ברא, in which the two meanings - create and cut down - are contronyms, similar to חטא meaning both sin and cleanse. Unfortunately, they did not provide a source, so I can't give further information.

As a final note, I've often been asked, "Which is the correct pronunciaton of לבריאות said after a sneeze - livriut לִבְריאות or labriut לַבְּרִיאות?" Well, the Academy of the Hebrew Language has determined that both are acceptable. This blessing is of relatively late import (borrowed from the German gesundheit), and so isn't found in traditional sources which could determine the correct pronunciation. The livriut version is supported by other phrases like lichaim לְחַיִּים, whereas the labriut version (which includes the definitive article heh) finds support in similar forms in verses such as Iyov 36:11 and Tehilim 24:4. 

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halakha and charig

Halakha הֲלָכָה can refer to the system of Jewish law as a whole, or the set of laws dealing with a specific subject. Most etymologies connect it to the root הלך, meaning "to walk" or "to go". Here is a sample of those:

• "something to go by"
• "the way of walking"
• "to walk"
• "walking or path"
• "a path which a Jew chooses to walk on throughout his/her life"

Klein brings support for this approach by noting that the word sugya  סוּגְיָה also means walking:

סוּגְיָה, סֻגְיָה f.n. MH    subject for study.  [Aram. סוּגְיָא (= lit.: ‘walking, going’), from אַסְגִּי (= he walked, went). For sense development cp. הֲלָכָה (= law, rule, ‘Halachah’), which derives from הלך (= to go).]

I certainly thought that halakha was related to halikha הֲלִיכָה - "walking." This may have been supported by the well-known derasha found in several locations in Talmudic literature. For example, Megillah 28b:

תָּנָא דְּבֵי אֵלִיָּהוּ: כׇּל הַשּׁוֹנֶה הֲלָכוֹת, מוּבְטָח לוֹ שֶׁהוּא בֶּן עוֹלָם הַבָּא, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: ״הֲלִיכוֹת עוֹלָם לוֹ״, אַל תִּקְרֵי ״הֲלִיכוֹת״ אֶלָּא ״הֲלָכוֹת״.

 The school of Eliyahu taught: Anyone who studies halakhot every day, he is guaranteed that he is destined for the World-to-Come, as it is stated: “His ways [halikhot] are eternal” (Habakkuk 3:6): Do not read the verse as halikhot [ways]; rather, read it as halakhot.

However, another theory gives halakha an entirely different, less obvious etymology. Prof. Saul Lieberman (quoted here) and others suggest that it may be related to the Aramaic word halakh הֲלָךְ meaning “toll, tax,” and therefore הֲלָכָה ultimately has the meaning of “obligation.” (See a challenge to Lieberman in "Alaktu and Halakhah Oracular Decision, Divine Revelation" by Tzvi Abusch, as well as furhter discussion here.)

Halakh is found in Ezra 4:13, 4:20, and 7:24. In each verse, it is listed as one of three types of taxes:

מִנְדָּה־בְלוֹ וַהֲלָךְ

The three are minda, blo (which we've discussed before), and halakh. The NJPS translates them as "tribute, poll-tax, and land-tax." The 1917 JPS translation has "tribute, impost, and toll." The Talmud (Nedarim 62b) identifies halakh with arnona אַרְנוֹנָא (a word we discussed here).

We see a related word in Talmudic Aramaic, karga כְּרָגָא (Bava Batra 8a) also meaning a type of tax.  And a land tax called kharaj in Arabic is found in Islamic law.

Lieberman quotes Genenius-Buhl (the German dictionary, not the English one) here as noting that halakh derives from the Akkadian ilku. 

The collaborative dictionary project Wiktionary claims that this Akkadian root also is the source of the Arabic root kh-r-j:

From خ ر ج (ḵ-r-j) in the sense “to extract” or “take out” [...] on the model of Imperial Aramaic 𐡄𐡋𐡊𐡀 (hlkʾ /⁠hălāḵā⁠/, “tribute, tax, any public charge based on land property”), itself calqued from Akkadian 𒅋𒆪 (il-ku /⁠ilku⁠/, “corvée, tribute, any public charge based on land property”). Also attested several times in Biblical Aramaic הֲלָכָא (/⁠hălāḵā⁠/) but otherwise missing in Aramaic. 

I don't know the source of this entry, so I'm wary of making too many conclusions from it. But Klein write that the Hebrew root חרג is cognate with this Arabic root:

חָרַג he came out in terror, quaked. [Arab. ḫaraja (= he came out).]

That root is only found once in the Tanakh, in Tehilim 18:46:

בְּנֵי־נֵכָר יִבֹּלוּ וְיַחְרְגוּ מִמִּסְגְּרוֹתֵיהֶם׃

Foreign peoples lose courage, and come trembling out of their strongholds.

That meaning is not found in Modern Hebrew. Today it means "to deviate, to exceed; to digress, to diverge, to stray." Klein doesn't include that meaning in his dictionary, but he does include the words choreg חוֹרֵג - "step" (as in step-child), which he says literally means "born outside" and the Modern Hebrew word charig חָרִיג, meaning "execptional, unusual, irregular."

Klein doesn't connect halakh and khoreg, and I didn't see anyone else who did. And it's important to note that although the Wiktionary entries connect the meanings of the Arabic roots meaning "to extract" and "to exit", they might not be related. But if they are, it would be interesting to see that halakha and  charig are cognates.

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Nukhba and Nahbi

I was curious about the etymology of Nukhba, the Hamas special forces unit that carried out horrific terrorist attacks on October 7.

The root n-kh-b in Arabic means "choose, select, elect," and so nukhba is an elite military unit. It's a fairly common root in Arabic, appearing in many words related to elections. However, I couldn't fnd any Hebrew cognates. 

The Arabic Etymological Dictionary, while including words from that root, didn't provide any additonal Semitic cognates. It left it unknown with the entry (the etymology and cognates go in the brackets):

nachaba: choose, select [?]

I didn't see any entries in Stahl's Arabic dictionary, and a search of Klein's dictionary for related Arabic words also came up blank.

I was about to give up, when I found this brief mention in the Ben Yehuda dictionary:

נחב

ממנו אולי השֵם נַחְבִּי.

בערב' יש שני שרשים, נחב نحب במשמ' בכיה חזקה, ונח'ב نخب במשמ' בחירה ובררה.

This was a strange entry. It was for the root נחב nakhav for which the only word provided was perhaps the Biblical name "Nahbi". Nahbi, the son of Vofsi, appears only once in the Tanakh, in Bamidbar 13:14. He was one of the spies - the representative from the tribe of Naftali.

The Ben-Yehuda dictionary notes that in Arabic there are two (possibly related) roots. One is nahab which means "strong cry." The other is our nakhab, meaning "choice, select." 

I still don't exactly understand why this hypothetical root was included in the dictionary, which might have been the source of a name, and may have a connection to one of two cognates. But it does at least leave the door open that Nahbi is related to nukhba, which could make sense, considering he was a prince of the tribe.

Once again, I looked to see if there was support for this theory. I suppose I was surprised how little is written (or at least I could find) about the name Nahbi (even speculation). The Encyclopedia Mikrait (EM) and Daat Mikra both said that no convincing etymology has been found. The EM did note the scholar Martin Noth, who proposed it is related to an Arabic root meaning "coward."

Noth's suggestion is also mentioned by James Barr in his essay, "The Symbolism of Names in the Old Testament." (also found here). On page 23 (of the document), in footnote 2, he writes:

Noth, p. 229, n. 12, derives from Arabic nakhb with the sense "fearful"; but one could also consider the sense "choice" on the same Arabic basis, and also derivation from a quite different root, cf. Huffmon, Amorite Peraonal Names in the Mari Texts, p. 189.

So Barr does entertain the connection. He also points us in the direction of Huffmon, who mentions yet another Arabic root, nhb, this time meaning "vow, implore, lament" (perhaps the last of these words equals the "strong cry" mentioned in Ben Yehuda).

One other suggestion for Nahbi doesn't include the letter nun as part of the root. Rather it says the name comes from the root חבא, meaning to hide. Prof. Alexander Rofe quotes his teacher Umberto Cassuto as noting:

Sethur, derived from the root str (to hide), brought to mind the son of Vophsi, Nahbi, from the root hb', with the same meaning. 

Cassuto was pointing out that the name before Nahbi in the list of spies was סְתוּר בֶּן־מִיכָאֵל, whose name also indicates hiding. If that's the case, both names implying hiding would be fitting for spies.

That same theory is proposed by the BDB dictionary, as well as in a midrash in Sotah 34b:

אָמַר רַבִּי יוֹחָנָן, אַף אָנוּ נֹאמַר: ״נַחְבִּי בֶּן וׇפְסִי״, ״נַחְבִּי״ — שֶׁהֶחְבִּיא דְּבָרָיו שֶׁל הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא.

Rabbi Yoḥanan says: We can also say an interpretation of the name: “Nahbi the son of Vophsi” (Numbers 13:14): He is called Nahbi, as he concealed [heḥbi] the statement of the Holy One, Blessed be He, that the land is good, by delivering a distorted description of it.

All of these theories testify to the fact that other than the two spies who brought a faithful report of the land (Yehoshua and Kalev), the rest were soon forgotten and so their legacies are obscure. I hope that someday soon we can say the same about the Nukhba terrorists as well.

 

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fukes

I was curious about the origin of the Israeli slang term fukes פוּקְס, meaning "stroke of luck," referring to something positive that happened just by chance. 

My first thought was to look in Ruvik Rosenthal's Dictionary of Hebrew Slang. He said it came from the English "flux", and originated as a lucky shot in billiards:

But as hard as I tried, I couldn't find any connection between "flux" and the game of billiards.

I put the question aside for a while, and then came back to it again after a few weeks. A new search for the origin of fukes once again led me to Rosenthanl, but this time to his websites (he has a few). And this time, the answer was much more obvious:

For example here, he wrote:

And here: 

It turned out there was a typo in the printed book. The word wasn't "flux" but "flukes." He describes how Hebrew speakers during the British Mandate (in form of the language he calls "Finglish", meaning "Palestinian English") adopted the billiard term "flukes", and ignoring the plural form, and dropping the "L" sound, turned it into the singular fukes.

Proof of this comes from another slang term, hitfalek הִתְפַלֵּק, which is the verb form of fukes (meaning to do something unintentionally), but does preserve the "L" of "fluke" (and doesn't include the plural "S".)

Fluke is indeed a billiards term. The Online Etymology Dictionary has these entries for the different meanings of fluke, which may be related (our meaning is number 2):

fluke (n.1)

"flat end of an arm of an anchor," 1560s, perhaps from fluke (n.3) "flatfish," on resemblance of shape, or from Low German flügel "wing." Transferred meaning "whale's tail" (in plural, flukes) is by 1725, so called from resemblance.

fluke (n.2)

"lucky stroke, chance hit," 1857, also flook, said to be originally a lucky shot at billiards, of uncertain origin. Century Dictionary connects it with fluke (n.1) in reference to the whale's use of flukes to get along rapidly (to go a-fluking or some variant of it, "go very fast," is in Dana, Smyth, and other sailors' books of the era). OED (2nd ed. print) allows only that it is "Possibly of Eng. dialectal origin."

fluke (n.3)

"flatfish," Old English floc "flatfish," related to Old Norse floke "flatfish," flak "disk, floe," from Proto-Germanic *flok-, from PIE root *plak- (1) "to be flat." The parasite worm (1660s) so called from resemblance of shape.

Further discussion of the origin of "fluke" can be found in this post on the Inky Fool blog. 

Certainly fluke has moved from billiards to a more general sense of an unexpected or accidental stroke of luck, in both English and in Hebrew via fukes.

I must conclude with a quote from one of my favorite televison shows, The Office. In the episode Trivia, the generally bumbling character Kevin gives an answer in a trivia contest which brings his team to win the game. Everyone doubted him, thinking it was just dumb luck, and in response he gives this retort:

Look, I know it's easy to say tonight was just a fluke, and maybe it was, but here's a piece of trivia: a fluke is one of the most common fish in the sea. So if you go fishing for a fluke, chances are, you just might catch one.

Wisdom for the ages.

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dayal, doula, and degel - update

 I have a long list of words to write about. Today I started looking into one of them, and then only later did it turn out that I had already written about it. This happens occasionally - with nearly 700 posts, and often several words beyond the primary word discussed in each, I suppose it’s to be expected. I’m just relieved when I discover it before I write the whole thing. 

This time, however, I found some new information, so I thought I’d write a post that updates the earlier one.

I had intended to write a post about the words dayal דַּיָּל - “steward” and “doula.” I was planning on pointing out how they share a common origin. But I had already discussed it in my post on meltzar מֶלְצַר, another word meaning “steward”:

However, as Elon Gilad writes here, Ben Yehuda did not want the word meltzar used for "waiter" in Modern Hebrew. He preferred dayal דייל (feminine dayelet דיילת). He coined dayal on the basis of the Talmudic Aramaic word dayala דיילא - "attendant", which in turn derives from the Greek word for slave or servant - doulos. Doulos is also the root of the English word doula, which literally means "female slave".

However, as happened on more than one occasion, Ben Yehuda's plans did not win out, and people continued referring to waiters as meltzarim. But his word dayal was eventually redeemed - when El Al airlines was founded in 1948, they needed a specialized word for someone attending to passengers - and so a few years later, dayal became the Hebrew word for steward. Quite the journey for these words!

But as noted, I forgot that post, and began to research. I found Klein’s entry for dayal:

NH waiter, steward (on an airplane). [Nomen opificis coined by Eliezer ben Yehudah (1858–1922) from JAram. דַּיָּלָא (= attendant, waiter), which derives from Gk. doylos (= slave), a word standing for doelos and derived from Aegean doëro (= slave).]

As well as the Online Etymology Dictionary entry for doula:

"woman trained to assist another woman during childbirth and provide support to the family after the baby is born," by 1972, a coinage in anthropology, from Modern Greek doule, from ancient Greek doule "servant-woman," fem. of doulos "slave, servant," which probably is a word of Pre-Greek origin.

That last sentence was interesting. When Etymonline says “Pre-Greek,” it sometimes refers to a Semitic etymology. But could that be the case here?

It turns out that it just may be. The Wiktionary entry for δοῦλος (doulos) has this interesting etymology:

Related to Mycenaean Greek 𐀈𐀁𐀫 (do-e-ro /⁠dohelos⁠/),[1] possibly from Canaanite *dōʾēlu “servant, attendant” (compare Late Babylonian 𒁕𒀝𒂵𒇻 (daggālu, “subject, one who waits on another, does their bidding”), Aramaic דַּיָּילָא (dayyālā), Hebrew דייל (dayyal, “flight attendant, store clerk”)).[2]

According to Parpola,[3] the word δοῦλος is related to the ethnonym Dahae (found as Δάοι, Δάαι, Δαι or Δάσαι in Greek sources) and thus related to Sanskrit दस्यु (dasyu, “bandit, brigand”) and Sanskrit दास (dāsa) which originally meant 'demon' and later also 'slave' or 'fiend'. 

The first theory is the one that interested me - since it proposes a Semitic origin. However, it seemed rather mixed up, giving the anachronistic impression that the Greek doulos derived from not only the Aramaic dayala (which we had already seen is purported to derive from the Greek, not the other way around), but also mentions the Modern Hebrew dayal, which certainly couldn’t have influenced any Ancient Greek words. 

But I thought I’d try looking around a bit more. I couldn’t find anything of note about the Canaanite *dōʾēlu, other than websites quoting or referring back to this Wiktionary page. But the Babylonian daggālu had more promise. Since Late Babylonian is another word for Akkadian, I looked in Tawil’s dictionary of Akkadian. In the “Akkadian to Hebrew Concordance,” under dagālu, he points back to his entry for דגל. In that entry he writes:

Akkadian dagālu … to look (at) …

Akkadian dagālu in the G-Stem and S-stem has a wide variety of nuances and meanings, including “to own” and “to be a subject.” With the prepositions ana, pan, and ina pan, it means “to wait for.”

This fits what I wrote in an even earlier post on the Hebrew word דגל degel. I quoted Milgrom on Bamidbar 2:2

Hebrew degel possibly originally meant a military banner. This is supported by the Akkadian dagalu, "to look", and diglu, "sight"

But while dagālu could mean “to be a subject,” is there further evidence that it’s related to dayal and doula?

Sokoloff, in his Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, does make such a connection. In his entry for the Aramaic dayala דַּיָּילָא, he provides two definitions. A type of official (as in Yoma 18a) or a servant (as in Pesachim 86b). And for the etymology, he says it derives from the Akkadian dajalu - “inspector.” 

So Sokoloff says that dayala (the source of dayal) derives from dagalu. He makes no mention of the Greek doulos, but there’s nothing in what he wrote that would contradict doulos deriving either from the Akkadian or Aramaic.

Where then did Klein get his idea of a Greek origin for dayala? I assume this Ben Yehuda entry:

Ben Yehuda defines a dayal as someone who serves food (i.e., a waiter) and says it was common in Hebrew speech and also used in newspapers. In the footnote, after quoting Pesachim 86b (see above), it notes that there are those who say it is borrowed from Greek. 

I don’t know who are “those who say” but I imagine it’s possible that Akkadian scholarship at that point had not advanced to the level it later did, and so the dictionary editors weren’t aware of the possibility of an Akkadian origin. 

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