Seemingly unmentioned in the back-and-forth in the Letters to the Editor, and in humor columns, about the propriety of eating Hamantaschen, named after Haman, is the true etymology of the name. These were originally man-taschen, poppy-seed pockets, and Haman-taschen is a playful renaming. We aren’t really commemorating Haman.

This takes us to the fascinating article by Mitchell First, channeling Dr. Steiner, regarding the difference between Saadia Gaon and Rashi in their approach to words (“The Difference Between R. Saadia and Rashi in Their Approach to Words” March 4, 2021). While Rashi assumes that a word has one central meaning, Saadia Gaon assumes multiple meanings for words. The article presents theological and exegetical motivations for Saadia’s position, and the reader is left with the impression that Rashi’s approach is the more scientific.

I would consider Saadia Gaon’s approach scientific as well. Should we regard Biblical Hebrew as a natural language, like all other human languages, or a Divine language? If Divine, we expect it to be perfect and mechanical in its elaboration. There should be only one central meaning per word, and there should be no true synonyms (two roots with precisely the same meaning). If a natural human language, then it develops organically/messily across time. Polysemy (multiple meanings for a single word) can indeed be created, as mentioned, by multiple original letters mapping onto a single letter in a reduced alphabet (shemen/shemonah with different shins). But, there is also borrowing of words from surrounding languages. And, there are millions of small decisions by people across centuries, which cause words to take on new or shifted meanings. In English, the word “awful” had a meaning of awe-inspiring, while now it has a meaning of terrible, and “josh” means to joke because of the American humorist Josh Billings. “Tattoo” is both a drum beat and an indelible mark on skin, from two different language origins. “Went” is the past tense of “go” rather than “goed” because there were two separate roots, and people decided to use different roots in different contexts. And there is the aforementioned example of man-taschen transforming to haman-taschen. See also Shabbat 36a-b, about the shift in the meaning of several words including shofar and aravah. This is an organic process.

Saadia Gaon establishes and asserts that it is this natural aspect of human languages in general that guides him. He writes:

“Since … in every utterance there must inevitably occur unambiguous and ambiguous elements (אלמחכם ואלמתשאבא) (for every language is built that way, and the Torah is similar, since it was revealed in one of the languages), it is incumbent upon anyone who interprets [Scripture] to take that which agrees with knowledge…and tradition…to be unambiguous and that which contradicts either of them to be ambiguous.”

That is, because Hebrew is a natural language, it will contain ambiguities, and a scientific approach should include accepting that these are ambiguous. It need not only be the “frum” approach to shift to a different meaning in light of tradition or understanding of the world or theology. My linguistic “tradition”/masorah can include knowledge about the older meaning of words (“awful”) or idiomatic phrases (“an eye for an eye”). “That which contradicts knowledge” includes a realization that words can take multiple meanings and that context, rather than mechanical insistence on a single meaning, could guide us in selecting a meaning or proposing a meaning outside our previous assumptions.