Due to the positive feedback I received over the past two years (special shout-out to Michael Rapoport!), I decided to collect the best 60 of my columns and publish them as a book. The subtitle may be something like “Sixty Short Essays on Jewish Liturgy and History, the Hebrew Language, and the Holidays.” But I need suggestions for a clever title. I promise a free book to whoever gives me the winning suggestion! The humorist Mordechai Schmutter had such a contest for his book a few years ago. The winning entry: “A Clever Title Goes Here.” So that title is taken!
The bad news is that I will have to take a short hiatus (two to three months) from writing columns so I can focus on the book.
As long as I have your attention, I will now mention some interesting words that I never got a chance to discuss. The first one is the Hebrew word for “sneeze.” This word appears only once in Tanach. A little background is necessary. A few years ago, I went to a wedding of a niece in Israel. The wedding took place in Mitzpe Yericho. So what kind of dvar Torah is given at a wedding in this locale? The speaker wanted to show how close it is to Yerushalayim, so he pointed to Mishnah Tamid 3:8. Here is found a statement that Yericho is so close to Yerushalayim that the smell of incense from the Temple service could be smelled in Yericho. Then an individual Tanna mentions another site near Yericho and reports that the goats would even sneeze there due to the smell of the incense from the Temple service. For “sneeze,” the Mishnah uses the term “mitatshot.” The root here is “ayin-tet-shin.” It appears in Tanach only one time, at Job 41:10. So I had an entire airplane ride back to the U.S. to think about this word. At some point, I realized that the Hebrew “A-T-Sh” is really the same as the English “achoo”! (These are onomatopoeias—words that sounds like what they are.) (I realized that “A-T-Sh” =”achoo” when the person next to me on the airplane sneezed. Just kidding!)
On a related note, another interesting word is the modern Hebrew word for cough, “shiul,” which comes from the root “shin-ayin-lamed.” This root does not appear in the Hebrew of the Tanach or in the Mishnah. It seems to have entered the Hebrew language many centuries later, borrowed from the Syriac language. Scholars sometimes claim that if something is not in Tanach, then it did not exist in biblical times. As is evident, one must be careful with such arguments from silence. I have not consulted with any evolutionary biologists but I am sure that people coughed in biblical times.
I myself have made the observation that the root Mem-Chet-Lamed for “forgiveness” never appears as a verb in Tanakh. Obviously, it is possible that the verb existed, just that it never made it into Tanach. (In contrast, the root “S-L-Ch” appears fifty times in Tanach.)
(If someone is aware of a noun or verb for “cough” in the Hebrew of the Tanach or Mishnah, please tell me. It is possible I have overlooked something here. I would like to thank Rabbi Chaim Sunitsky for pointing out this interesting root “shin-ayin-lamed” to me.)
Another unusual word is “barburim.” We all know this word from the Mah Yedidut zemer for Shabbat. It only appears one time in Tanach, at 1 Kings 5:3, in a list of food prepared for King Solomon daily: “u-varburim avusim.” “Avusim” means “fattened.” “Varburim” (=barburim) is usually translated with the general word “fowl.” (But the Brown-Driver-Briggs dictionary mentions some more specific possibilities: “capon” and “geese.”)
Finally, I will mention my favorite unusual word (which I admittedly wrote about once before). The Rama writes (Shulchan Aruch, OC 603) that during the 10 days of repentance “yesh le-chol adam le-chapes u-le-fashpesh be-maasav.” We all know that those last two words mean “examine his deeds.” But where exactly did this root “P-Sh-P-Sh” come from?
It turns out that “P-Sh-P-Sh” is the word for bedbug! It is found in Mishnah Terumot 8:2 and in both Talmuds. (See Jastrow, p. 1248, entry “pishpash.”).
In his A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for Readers of English (p. 535), Ernest Klein writes that the verb “P-Sh-P-Sh“ most probably comes from the noun for “bedbug,” and that the original meaning of the verb was “he searched for bedbugs.” From this, arose the meaning “he searched in general.” Whoever would have imagined! (But note that Jastrow does not seem to connect the “search/examine” and “bedbug” meanings. He lists them in separate entries.)
By Mitchell First
Mitchell First is a personal injury attorney and Jewish history scholar. When not sneezing and coughing he spends his time searching for fattened barburim and for mistakes in his past columns so he can correct them in his forthcoming book, which needs a title. He can be reached at [email protected].
For more articles by Mitchell First, and information on his books, please visit his website at rootsandrituals.org.
