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 formהַאֻמְנָם 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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