Some scholars have suggested that Hebrew words sometimes have two opposite meanings. I would like to closely examine this claim in the context of Biblical
A theme of the holiday of Shavuot is the number seven (i.e., seven weeks). A child of a friend once asked me if there was
Decades ago, I noticed that in the acrostics in the book of Eichah, the letter pe preceded the letter ayin in chapters 2, 3, and
The 33rd day of the Omer comes out on the 18th of Iyyar. When one looks at the sources prior to the period of the
Now is the appropriate time to discuss the root ayin, mem, resh, which is (hopefully!) on everyone’s mind nightly. The word omer appears in only
Herut The root H-R-T only appears one time in the Tanakh (Ex. 32:16) and means “engraved,” so we have to look elsewhere for the origin
Since it is the month of Adar, this is a good time to discuss the interesting root Z-Ch-R. As we all know, the letters zayin-
Every Shabbat morning before the prayer Yishtabach, we recite the phrase: le-hodot, le-hallel, le-shabeach, le-faer, le-romem, le-hader, le-varech, le-aleh, u-le-kales… Anyone who knows Tanach should
Parshat Mishpatim uses the unusual word gadish —stacks of grain. This gives me the opportunity to discuss an issue related to this word that arises
The giving of the Torah in the midbar gives me the opportunity to address this interesting word. It is very easy to intuit that the
This week’s parshah uses the term navi. (See Ex. 7:1). This gives me the opportunity to explore the meaning of this unusual word. In English,
At the beginning of this week’s parshah, the word milchama is used. This gives me the opportunity to answer the question that has surely been
