Hebrew Voices #201 – The Origin of Hebrew Words

Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

In this brand new episode of Hebrew Voices #201, Origin of Hebrew Words, Nehemia discusses with Israeli journalist Elon Gilad an ancient word for “bear” and a possible pagan connection between agriculture and Baal.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Hebrew Voices #201 – The Origin of Hebrew Words

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Elon: It was only important to the people in the process of nation-building, like, “We’re doing this.” Once it was done, the children that grew up speaking Hebrew as their native language, they didn’t need to prove anything.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m here today with Elon Gilad. He is a writer for Ha’aretz, one of the major newspapers in Israel, specializing in Hebrew and Jewish history, and he’s the author of a book called The Secret History of Judaism. His research focuses on the interface between Biblical and Modern Hebrew with a particular interest in uncovering the origins of traditions and words. Elon shares his linguistic insights through popular TikTok videos on Hebrew etymology. He has a BA from Tel Aviv University and is currently working on a master’s there. Shalom, Elon.

Elon: Hello.

Nehemia: Hey. So, I saw some of your TikTok videos, and, you know, it’s really interesting. I remember a few years ago when I first got on TikTok and people were like, “What are you doing on TikTok? That’s just teenagers dancing.” And already at the time it wasn’t. There were already deep theological discussions there. But now, actually when the war started last October, it’s where I was getting my news. I was watching the Israeli news live streaming on TikTok.

So, it’s really interesting. You’re doing these deep linguistic etymological discussions on TikTok. Let’s start with, what is etymology? Not to be confused with entomology.

Elon: Yeah. So, unlike entomology, which is the study of bugs, etymology is the study of word origins. In other words, why we call certain things the way we call them. And while it’s a field that doesn’t have much practical use and isn’t big in academia… it’s not something you can really do a doctorate in, it’s a really fun field because every word has its own story. And sometimes those stories are interesting and entertaining. You can learn about societies, about particular moments in history.

I fell in love with this subject close to 12 years ago. And I just started writing a weekly column for Ha’aretz, and I’ve been writing about one particular Hebrew word, where it came from, every week. It appears in the weekend magazine, and it’s been more than 10 years, so I’ve written hundreds of these. And it’s a good way to get around history and language.

Nehemia: Yeah. Well, I would disagree that you couldn’t do a doctorate on it. There’s the famous story of Gershom Scholem, who founded the field of Kabbalah as a scientific study, and he was criticized by the Talmudic scholars, particularly Saul Lieberman, who said, “You’re studying sh’tut,” or sh’tuyot, “nonsense”. And he said, “Sh’tuyot zeh sh’tuyot, aval cheker ha’sh’tuyot zeh madah.” “Nonsense is nonsense, but the scientific study of nonsense is science.” And here it’s actually not nonsense. In other words, for me this is a really important topic because language changes over time. And if you don’t realize that you’ll read an ancient text, which is what I do, and you won’t understand it. You’ll understand it in your own terms rather than in the terms it was originally written in.

A famous example from… this shows my age… from my youth. There was a President of the United States who was being charged with high crimes and misdemeanors, and there was a national discussion in the United States on, what is a misdemeanor? Because a misdemeanor in Modern English, in 21st century English, or even then, late 20th century English, is something that’s not a felony. It’s a minor crime.

Elon: A small…

Nehemia: Right. But when they talked about it in the constitution, or whatever that was, the high crimes and misdemeanors, it was like treason. It was a big deal. So, language changing over time could be really important, and could be very practical. It could be, do you impeach a President for some trivial thing? Or do you impeach him for a very big deal, for treason or something? So, it actually could have very practical… maybe more practical than half the things I do, which is studying ancient texts.

So, I would disagree with that. But what is the most interesting word that you’ve come across? One that’s appropriate for, let’s say, a young audience, because I’ve heard some of yours that are… There are, as we say, some pikanti things in Modern Hebrew, some “spicy” things.

Elon: Well, there’s all kinds of interesting stories, and Hebrew gives us some nice ones. But I think my all-time favorite, not word, but journey a word went through, very far, is the word for “popsicle” in Hebrew, artik.

Nehemia: Oh, I love that one!

Elon: Yeah. I wrote about this one years ago, and it’s surprising, because the word, if you trace it all the way back in history, you’ll find that it comes from a word that means “frightening” in Proto-Indo-European, which is a reconstructed language. In other words, it’s the language spoken by people who didn’t write, so we don’t have any record of the actual language. But we know this language existed because a lot of languages spoken today, and ancient languages, descended from it, and we can… well, not me, but experts in the field can reconstruct this language. And when they go back, they can reconstruct this ancient word which sounded maybe something like artikus. We don’t really know exactly…

Nehemia: Let’s back up. So, the Modern Hebrew word for popsicle isn’t “popseekul.” What is it, for those who don’t know?

Elon: It’s artik.

Nehemia: Artik, okay.

Elon: Artik.

Nehemia: Which sounds awfully like the word “Arctic”, like the Arctic Ocean, and it’s not a coincidence.

Elon: Well, that’s right. We could trace it… there’s two ways to tell the story. We can tell it from most recent and backwards, but it’s more fun if you tell it forward in this case.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: So, these ancient people living in the Steppes of Asia, I think the Caucasus or something like that, they were afraid, and they had this word that they used to describe being afraid. And what were they afraid of? Bears. So, they used this word for their word for bear. And this word for bear went into all kinds of languages. It became the word in Sanskrit, and in Modern Indian languages, and in Persian, et cetera, and in English it didn’t; that word disappeared. We replaced it with a word related to brown, but that’s a different story. But this word made its way into Greek as artikus, which was the Greek word for “bear”.

Now, because there’s the Big Dipper, which is the Big Bear, or Ursa Major, the constellation in the sky that points to the Northern Star, they started using that word to also refer to northern things. One of the Greek words for “northern” was artikus, hartikus, which made its way into Latin, also artikus, or something about that, and from that, it turned… Latin slowly devolved into French, and that’s where we get the word “Arctic”, which came from French.

So, the people who… flash forward to the 1950’s. A group of Jewish Belgian investors decided that they’re going to invest in the new State of Israel, and they build the first factory to mass produce popsicles. And they look for a name, and they think, “Oh, cold, northern,” so they call it Arctic. But Arctic doesn’t really work in Hebrew. Hebrew has a hard time with a lot of consonants together, so instead of arctic, artik. And that’s what they called the popsicles.

So, this is an example of what they call a generic word, a generic term that becomes a word. For example, you Xerox things. Xerox is the name of a company, but Xerox became generic. So, the same thing…

Nehemia: Or let’s say Kleenex. Kleenex was originally a brand.

Elon: Kleenex, that’s the name of a brand, but it became the word for the thing. So, the same thing happened in Hebrew with the word for artik. It’s not exactly true, I didn’t discuss this on the TikTok. And the next year after this factory called Artik was founded, somebody else founded a competitor, and they called themselves Kartiv, and a year after that, those two companies merged.

Nehemia: Oh, really?

Elon: They bought each other and they became Artik Kartiv.

Nehemia: Wow!

Elon: And a few years after that there was an investigation. It turns out that these people were stealing money, hiding money from the tax people, and they were arrested and imprisoned and the company eventually disappeared. But even after this company didn’t exist, people still call popsicles artik, and they also call them kartiv. Some people will use kartiv and some people will use artik, and there’s a distinction; it’s not universal. In other words, I don’t distinguish between an artik and a kartiv, but some people do, and they’ll use the artik for a dairy popsicle and a kartiv for one that doesn’t have any dairy, that is water based.

Nehemia: Interesting. So, it starts out as the name of a company that makes popsicles, and now it’s a generic word either for popsicles or a specific type. And it comes from this ancient word for “bear” or “frightening one”. Now, that’s interesting. So, now this opens up a bunch of different channels that maybe we can run down.

One of the… and I’m not sure where I want to go with this, but you had a video on TikTok, and I’m sure a column, I would imagine, that was behind it, where you talked about the cardinal directions; north, south, east and west. And you’re saying, in the Greek, one of the words for north was this word for bear because they saw a bear in the sky. So, talk to us about the Hebrew words for the directions because those are fascinating.

Elon: So, when we say a Hebrew word, there really isn’t one Hebrew. It’s the same way in English. There’s Old English, Middle English and Modern English. So, the same thing happens in Hebrew. In this case we’ll just talk about Biblical Hebrew, and then we’ll talk about Modern Hebrew. Now, they’re related; in other words, a lot of times words in Modern Hebrew will come from the Bible, that’s sort of the default. But in the Bible, we don’t have one system. In Modern Hebrew it’s tzafon, darom, mizrach, ma’arav, that’s it. We don’t have other words.

Nehemia: Say that a little bit slower for the audience.

Elon: Tzafon – north, darom – south, mizrach – east, and ma’arav – west. And all those words appear in the Bible, but there’s a lot of other words that appear in the Bible too, and they’re used interchangeably. There’s good questions about asking, “So what? The people walking around in King David’s time, did they use this word or that word?” It must have been confusing if different people used different terms, and the truth is, we don’t know how this exactly worked. There seems to be different systems for referring… and those could be from different periods, because we know the biblical texts were written in different periods. Or it could be geographical differences. Whatever it is, the systems they used are very interesting, and different other cultures used the same systems.

So, one of the systems follows the movement of the sun. So, you refer to where the sun comes up, and that’s where we get mizrach from. The east is where the shemesh zorachat, where the sun rises, so it’s mizrach.

Nehemia: So mizrach is really “the place of the rising.”

Elon: “The place of the rising”, “the rising.” It’s the rising of the sun. And then ma’arav, it’s really “the coming” or “the going away”. Imagine the sun goes in when it sets, because they had the idea of the sun going away into like a tent. You can see it in some poetic verses in the Bible.

Nehemia: Yeah. In the Tanakh we have, “The sun comes out like a groom coming out of his chupa.”

Elon: Yeah.

Nehemia: There’s this imaginary sort of room where he goes.

Elon: Like, the tent. The sun goes to sleep, and it comes up over there, which is nice. So, that’s one system that follows the movement of the sun. Then there’s another system; imagine the person standing and facing the east. So, you’re standing east, and then to your right, the south, that’s yamin. Yamin is right, your right hand. So, you say south; yamin, or teiman, those meaning “right”. And then north is left, s’mol. And west is achora, for example. The Mediterranean is called ha’yam ha’achori.

Nehemia: That means “behind you”.

Elon: Yeah, it’s behind you because you’re facing east, which is qadima, qedma.

Nehemia: Which is “straight ahead”.

Elon: Straight ahead, exactly.

Nehemia: Why did they do that? Or, what’s your explanation of why they did that?

Elon: Well, the truth is, we can’t know. We can try to guess. It’s arbitrary; they could have oriented themselves in any direction. The word “orient” by the way, that’s also itself… it’s to find your way towards the east.

Nehemia: Right.

Elon: So, we have that also in English. We use the same idea. One possibility, just off the top of my head, is that that’s where civilization was, the great nations where culture was. Because at the time, Judah, Israel, those are quite backwater regions of the world where backward people lived, and the great civilizations of Mesopotamia were in the East. So that might be the reason.

Nehemia: The explanation I’ve heard… and like you said, we don’t know, is that there were people who were traveling along the international caravan routes from Yemen to Damascus. You’d take a boat from India with your spices to Yemen and you offload somewhere. I don’t know what the port was back then. And then you go by land, maybe because of all the pirates, I don’t know. And then you’d travel along the caravan route. So, if you come from Israel and you hang a right, you go to Yemen, which is called Yemen, which means right. And if you hang a left, you go to northern Syria, and in Canaanite inscriptions and Pheonecian inscriptions they mention a land called Shamal or S’mol, we don’t know how it was pronounced, which is today in northern Syria, southeastern Turkey. So, that actually fits.

And then, if you think about it, if you’re coming by boat up the Red Sea, what’s on your right? Yemen. And what’s on your left? Somalia, which is from the word s’mol. So, it depended on where your trade route was orientated. If it was oriented on the Silk Road coming from Israel, there’s Yemen and Shamal, and if you’re coming by boat there’s Yemen and Somalia. Somalia is on your left. Which, by the way, this is something interesting; why isn’t Yemen on the left? Because whoever named it that was coming from the Indian Ocean or the Arabian Sea, whatever that’s called down there.

Elon: With Yemen, so Yemen is in Arabic. So, the people that named the southern part of the peninsula, the Arabs, the people of Yemen, some of them didn’t speak Arabic. This is an Arabic word for the people who live in the south. So, they’re still facing to the east and talking about the people on their right that are the Yemeni’s, the southern people.

Nehemia: Yeah, but how does that explain Somalia?

Elon: I actually don’t know the etymology of Somalia; it might not be related at all.

Nehemia: Alright, someone can check. Maybe there’s other explanations… and post it in the comments. So, it’s really interesting… so you have the directions which are front and back and right and left, and…

Elon: There’s another system that we didn’t discuss.

Nehemia: What’s the other system? Yeah, talk about that.

Elon: There’s important geographic signposts, important features of geography. So, we said that in Modern Hebrew, and also in Biblical Hebrew, there’s tzafon; that’s the north. Now, tzafon, that comes from the name of a particular mountain, Har Tzafon. This is a mountain currently on the Mediterranean close to the border between Turkey and Syria, so it’s very north from Israel. But this was like a Mount Olympus of the Canaanite gods.

Nehemia: Explain what you mean by “it was a Mount Olympus.” That’s interesting.

Elon: The abode of the gods. For many years, deep into late antiquity, even, there was an important temple there. And this was an important site; it’s where the gods lived. If you climb up you might meet Ba’al, and, I don’t know, maybe El. Ba’al, he’s the rain god, and the temples that were there were dedicated to him. So, he was a very important god. When you live in a place where it doesn’t rain all summer and your livelihood, your subsistence, is dependent on rain, the rain god is king. And Ba’al was a very important god in the region for many years. I doubt anyone worships him now, but he had his 15 minutes of fame.

Nehemia: Maybe they don’t call him Ba’al anymore. But that’s a different subject.

Elon: Yeah, in some respects, this is widely believed, that a lot of aspects of the Jewish God are taken from Ba’al. In other words, Ba’al may have a lot of… so sorry, our God, God, has a lot of Ba’al in Him. And then the poetic verses that we find in the Bible, Psalms et cetera, there’s a lot of poems that we can see are very similar to poems to Ba’al in the ancient city of Ugarit, which was where the ancient peoples lived, which is now Lebanon. So, there is something to that, that we may not call him Ba’al…

Nehemia: So, tzafon is north, where El Elion had his palace, and his son maybe came to visit him. And then what’s south in that system?

Elon: That’s the tricky one. For south, in Modern Hebrew and also a lot in the Bible, is darom. Now, darom, we just don’t know what that word means. It might be a site somewhere in the south and it’s just lost to us, because we don’t know of a site called darom. There is a route that might have to do with being high up; in other words it could be related to rom. This is a little difficult to explain, but it could be explained, and then it could be from the system of the movement of the sun. Because remember, we talked about the sun coming up, and the sun going down. The sun being high would be appropriate for the south, because when the sun goes through the south it goes in the high part of the sky.

Nehemia: That’s in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern hemisphere I guess it goes the other way.

Elon: I doubt the ancient Hebrews knew that…

Nehemia: I know, I’m just saying for the Flat Earthers there who are listening.

Elon: Hi guys!

Nehemia: Alright, so we have darom, which is the Modern Hebrew word. So, you have tzafon, and what was the opposite of tzafon in that alternative system?

Elon: That’s darom, which may have been, or not.

Nehemia: What’s another word for south that we have in the Tanakh? We have negba, right?

Elon: That’s right, there we go, negba, which refers to the desert in the south, the dry part.

Nehemia: So, if I said to an Israeli today, “Ani nose’ah negba,” “I’m traveling towards the Negev,” would they understand what I’m saying?

Elon: They would take it as you’re going south, but they wouldn’t take it as, “Oh, he’s using the word for south.” But if you’re saying you’re going to the Negev, unless you happen to be in Eilat…

Nehemia: Right, then they wouldn’t understand. If I was traveling from Eilat to Sharm-El-Sheikh, they wouldn’t understand. They’d think I was going north.

Elon: Yeah. But in 99% of your conversations in Israel, if you say you’re going negba, people understand that you’re going to the desert, which is in the south, and that would make sense.

Rarely, the word yam, which means sea, does refer to south sometimes, which means it’s referring to the Red Sea. But most of the time when the word yam is used for direction, it actually refers to the Mediterranean, so it’s referring to the west.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Elon: Now, how they could have the same word refer to south and west simultaneously, I do not know and don’t understand. But we have…

Nehemia: It could be very confusing.

Elon: Yeah, you, like, try to give somebody directions…

Nehemia: And in the Tanakh you have Ever Ha’yyarden, which usually means “east of the Jordan”, but I think there’s somewhere one verse where it refers to “west of the Jordan”.

Elon: Well, it depends. Ever Ha’yyarden is “the other side of the Jordan”.

Nehemia: Trans-Jordan, right.

Elon: Trans-Jordan. If you’re in Jordan, what we call Jordan today, Ever ha’yyarden would be Israel or Palestine. And if you’re in Israel/Palestine, and you’re using Ever Ha’yyarden, then you’re referring to Jordan.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, I want to go in a bunch of different directions here. I’m not sure which one first. I don’t know if you have a study on this or you wrote about it, but you mentioned Ba’al. The most surprising thing to me that I encountered in Modern Hebrew was when I was on a kibbutz when I was 17, and I was working in the gadash, gidulei sedeh, in the agriculture, and they used the phrase gidulei ba’al. And I was utterly shocked.

Elon: Yeah, what’s this foreign god doing in Modern Hebrew, right?

Nehemia: So, “Ba’al crops.” How did that come into Modern Hebrew? Did that come from Yiddish? I don’t know the answer.

Elon: As far as I know, it didn’t come from Yiddish.

Nehemia: I didn’t expect it to!

Elon: Maybe we should explain what a gidulei ba’al is. A s’deh ba’al is a field that isn’t irrigated. You don’t need to irrigate it; it gets its water from the rain.

Nehemia: From the sky, which the ancient Canaanites believed came from Ba’al.

Elon: Yes, the rain God. So sedeh ba’al is a field that is watered by Ba’al, the god of rain. We don’t artificially water it. I’m actually not sure specifically…

Nehemia: That could be your next column! You can investigate that, because I don’t know where it came from. I find it hard to believe it didn’t come from someone in modern Israel who said, “Ba’al is the god of rain. We need a term for non-irrigated crops. We’ll call them the ‘crops of Ba’al’ or the ‘fields of Ba’al.’” I have no idea. It’s hard to believe that’s not the case.

Elon: If I had to guess without looking at it, I would say there’s probably a precedent in Rabbinic literature somewhere.

Nehemia: It might be, yeah. If that’s the case, that’s even more fascinating, because that means there’s someone in Rabbinical literature who remembered that Ba’al was the god of the rain, which I don’t know was obvious from medieval sources.

Elon: Maybe, but it might have been used not as a technical term and not having to do with the same way we do today.

Nehemia: So, if somebody knows the answer, post it in the comments. And if not, you’ll read about it in Elon’s article in a couple of weeks, hopefully. I don’t know. Maybe you’ll find out, because I don’t know.

Elon: We have quite a bit of foreign gods and demons in the Hebrew language.

Nehemia: Give me a few examples of that, because that’s always fascinating.

Elon: So, for “nightmare”, we say chalom ballahot or siyyut. Both of these… siyyut is a demon from the Talmud.

Nehemia: Really?

Elon: And ballahot are demons from the Bible.

Nehemia: Demons from the Bible?

Elon: So, chalom ballahot… ballahot, they’re some kind of demons.

Nehemia: You said it was very rare to have a word that was Germanic of origin in Yiddish that came over into Hebrew, and I don’t know of any examples off the top of my head. Do you know of any examples?

Elon: Well, there are, like in slangy words that make it through.

Nehemia: Like what?

Elon: This is actually not Germanic, but it is Yiddish. We call cockroaches… there’s many words for this, but one of them is jūk, which would be the most common.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: Now, in Yiddish, a jūk is a beetle, and this is actually a Slavic word… a lot of Yiddish words are also Slavic, so this comes from Russian and Polish, or Ukrainian. So, that word did make its way in, but it made its way wrong. In other words, instead of referring to beetles, it’s referring to cockroaches.

Nehemia: Okay, that’s a good example.

Elon: And they tried to make that word… to stomp it out, but like cockroaches it was…

Nehemia: You can’t get rid of it! And what’s the Hebraic word for cockroach, then, that they tried to replace it with?

Elon: There’s a few. There’s also makak, there’s makak sefarim in Rabbinic literature, which is probably a “bookworm.” It was used. But the real, official scientific word is tikan, and that comes from the word tik, which is a bag or a backpack, actually a Greek word. Greek words that are used in Rabbinic literature… if they’re used in Rabbinic literature, they get a pass in the Hebrew. Like, “Oh, if the rabbis use this Greek word, then it’s fine.” And there’s many of those. So, ancient loan words are okay, modern loan words aren’t okay.

Nehemia: Well, they still end up in the language, right? Most people say fontim and not gufanim for “fonts”.

Elon: So, this revolutionary fervor that took place from the 20’s to the 40’s, and this process of, “Everyone needs to speak Hebrew and Hebrew needs to be pure, and we need to purify the Yiddish and make the Hebrew really convincingly Hebrew.” Once the State of Israel was founded, and that generation, that amazing generation that founded the State, gave way to the next generation, that generation already, and current generations, are just not interested in this at all. They stopped coming up with words, they just borrow words. It was only important to the people in the process of nation-building, like, “We’re doing this.” Once it was done, the children that grew up speaking Hebrew as their native language, they didn’t need to prove anything. They were already speaking Hebrew.

Nehemia: Wow.

Elon: It’s a language, we don’t need to do anything.

Nehemia: In some ways, you’re saying, like, that first generation that was trying to stamp out Yiddish… And they literally outlawed Yiddish theater, famously, and there were patrols that, if they heard people speaking Yiddish at a café, they would harass them. So, you’re saying they kind of had a chip on their shoulder, that generation, and maybe they felt threatened, like, “I don’t know if this is going to work, so we have to be very intense about it.”

Elon: Yeah, we know that this actually worked. They didn’t know that it’s going to work. There’s a famous story about Bialik, a true story.

Nehemia: Tell us who Bialik is. You don’t mean Mayim Bialik.

Elon: Not Mayim Bialik. Also, another comparably great Jewish person.

Nehemia: And they’re relatives, by the way. She’s…

Elon: Are they?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Elon: Wow, okay.

Nehemia: They’re relatives somehow. I don’t know exactly, but yeah, same family. Alright, so Chayim Nachman Bialik, yeah…

Elon: Chayim Nachman Bialik, he was a national poet. He was from Eastern Europe, a famous poet. He wrote in Hebrew, and he also wrote stories and coined many, many, many words, probably the second most words per person after Ben Yehuda. And the most famous person, once he moved to Tel Aviv… the city of Tel Aviv built a grand house for him to get him to come to live in Tel Aviv.

Nehemia: Really?

Elon: They built a street named after him, Bialik.

Nehemia: Even when he was alive it was called that?

Elon: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Elon: And at the end of that street named after him, they built a grand house for him, and that’s where he moved, into that house. There are actually two streets in Tel Aviv named after him. There’s Bialik Street and Shderot Chen, Chen Boulevard, Chen is an acronym for Chayim Nachman.

Nehemia: Okay, wow.

Elon: So, he was a very, very famous man, like a superstar of his time. Also, a womanizer, but that’s another story.

Nehemia: So, give me a time period of Bialik, because I’m really bad at that.

Elon: We’re talking here, when he was already living in Tel Aviv during the 30’s, late 20’s.

Nehemia: Okay. So, he got out in time, alright.

Elon: Yeah. And he’s walking down the boulevard, Rothschild Boulevard, and it’s beautiful, and there’s flowering jacarandas around. And he’s talking with his friend Ravintsky, who was a close friend and a publisher, and they were speaking with one another the language they spoke always; Yiddish.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: And then some young kid comes up, and he’s a member of the Gdudei Ha’safah Ha’Ivrit, “the Battalion…”

Nehemia: “The Hebrew Language Patrols,” basically.

Elon: Whatever. So, these are the people who were busting up theater productions in Yiddish. And he screams at Bialik, who is Mr. Hebrew Language, like, one of the leading figures in the academy… well, that was before The Committee of the Hebrew Language, and he screams at him, “Bialik, daber Ivrit!” And Bialik…

Nehemia: Oh, so he knew who he was!

Elon: Yeah. So, Bialik screams at him, “Lech la’azazel!” Which is roughly the equivalent of “go to hell”.

Nehemia: But it’s literally “go to Azazel”, which was the place where they sent, in Leviticus 16, what’s called in English “the scapegoat,” incorrectly, but yeah, go on.

Elon: Exactly. So, this kid actually sues Bialik in the courthouse.

Nehemia: What?

Elon: In the Hebrew courthouse in Tel Aviv. So, he takes him to court for insulting him, or something like that, and there actually is a trial. And Bialik gets out of it because he says that it’s actually not an insult, because Azazel is a beautiful place in Jerusalem where they used to throw the scapegoat in ancient times. This is one of the interpretations of Azazel. Azazel is really a demon god, Azaz-el. He appears as Azazel in Leviticus. But when we read some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we learn about an angel, Azaz-el, who’s the one who taught the women how to make jewelry, the men how to make weapons, he’s some kind of evil demon kind of thing. And apparently, according to Bialik, Azazel refers to the place where the be’ish beiti. This is during Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, there would be two goats, one of them would be sacrificed to God and the other would be walked out to the desert and thrown to its death by an appointed man as part of the custom. So, when Bialik said, and this is one of interpretations of what Azazel is, that Azazel was referring to the particular location where this is, and he didn’t say, “go to hell”, he said, “go to Azazel”.

Nehemia: “Leave Tel Aviv, get on Road number 1, and go to Azazel, east of Jerusalem” That was his defense!

Elon: “And that’s a lovely place, I only meant he should enjoy his trip there.” Obviously, nobody would find Bialik guilty, and this kid had to pay the court costs.

Nehemia: Wow, that’s a great story. So, we talked about Yiddish, and I don’t know if you have anything on this, if you don’t, we’ll just cut this out. But Ladino words… are there any Ladino words that you know about in Modern Hebrew? Because that’s… common language.

Elon: There are some. Do you want to say something about Ladino?

Nehemia: Please. You say something about Ladino.

Elon: So, Ladino, we use the word Ladino to refer to Judeo-Spanish. We said before, if you remember an hour ago, we said that…

Nehemia: In the previous episode.

Elon: In the previous episode, we said that in each area where Jews were living, they spoke a variety of the local language that was the Jewish variety. Somewhat different from the other language, the language of the Gentiles, but obviously very similar to that local language. So, in Spain there was a Judeo Spanish; likely there were several Judeo-Spanishes because Spain itself had different languages spoken in it, all descended from Latin, from Vulgar Latin. Now, in 1492, the year that Columbus sailed the ocean blue…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Elon: Also, the same people who sent Columbus on their way also sent the Jews of Spain on their way and they said, essentially, “Either you convert to Christianity and join us and party, or you can leave.” Many converted, many left. And those people who left, they took their language with them and settled in all kinds of places, in northern Africa, in Turkey, in the Balkans, in what’s today Greece, and throughout the Arab-speaking world.

Now, these people were somewhat better well-off. They were cultured, and often looked down on their lowly neighbors, and didn’t always mix with them. And they preserved their language. And this language still exists to this day, almost; there’s some native speakers. It’s likely that the language will die off as a spoken native language. Maybe it just did, I don’t know, but we’re at the end of that hundreds-of-years-long story.

Now, a big part of the community, say, at the time that World War II broke out, there were major concentrations of people speaking this Ladino around the world. The city of Saloniki, which is one of the biggest cities in Greece, maybe it was the second biggest city in Greece, it’s a major port in northern Greece…

Nehemia: And for the Christians, that’s where Paul sends a letter to the Thessalonians. That’s Saloniki, Thessalonia… Thessalonica in ancient times, yeah.

Elon: This is a major important city, and the most spoken, most common language in that city was Ladino.

Nehemia: More than Greek, you’re saying.

Elon: More than Greek, yeah.

Nehemia: Wow, that I didn’t know. Okay.

Elon: Most of the people there were Jewish, and they spoke Ladino. That was the community that lived there, and it was a giant community. And unfortunately, that community does not exist, because similarly to what happened to Ashkenazi Jews and Yiddish, those people either were murdered in the Holocaust or made their way to Palestine and took on Modern Hebrew.

Now, we said before, there were a lot more Ashkenazim than there were Sepharadim people. And there’s something interesting about the fact that we call people Sepharadim.

Nehemia: Which means Spanish, right?

Elon: Sefarad is Spain in Hebrew. It really is a biblical word referring to somewhere that we don’t know. But at some point in the Middle Ages, Jews began referring to Spain as Sefarad. The same thing happened with Tzarfat and France, and that is the Hebrew word for Spain and France. So anyways, those people who migrated from Spain to the Arab world, they became very important people in their communities. The communities adopted their way of doing things in the synagogue. They founded their own synagogue. So, when we say that somebody is Sepharadi, we’re saying that they’re Spanish. But it’s not that all these people were really descended from the people that were thrown out of Spain, it’s that the local communities, because these were the “better folk”, the local communities that already lived in those areas, they assimilated into the Sephardic community, the communities of the descendants of the people who left from Spain.

Nehemia: So, just so I understand. There were a bunch of Jews who left from Spain when they were expelled in 1492, and let’s say they came to Tunis in North Africa, and they became the dominant force in Tunisian Judaism. That’s what you’re saying.

Elon: Exactly. There were Jews in Tunisia from antiquity.

Nehemia: Probably from Phoenician times even, maybe.

Elon: Possibly, but definitely in Roman times there were Jews there. And it’s likely that there were Jews there throughout that time. I think there might be a few still today. But they consider themselves, and they pray, in the Sephardic tradition, and they might think of themselves as Sephardic, Sepharadim, because the people who settled during the expulsion from Spain, who settled there, they became the important people in the community. And they exerted their influence in a way that… Because they settled in the cities, once again… there were people living in the mountains, uneducated people, and the people who came from Spain knew how to read and write. There was that kind of imbalance.

So, this happened, and we can now call all those people from the Arab world, except for the Yemenites… well, I guess also Ethiopian Jews, the Sephardic expats, they didn’t make it all the way to Yemen, and the Jewish community of Yemen was disconnected from the rest of the Jewish world from the time of Maimonides until the Modern Period. So not them, but everyone else are considered Sephardic because those people mixed into those communities, very different communities, far away communities.

Nehemia: What are some examples of Sephardic words? Meaning, Ladino words that went into Modern Hebrew.

Elon: So once again, there’s very, very few. The influence of Ladino in Hebrew is small, because, once again, the people who founded the language and the Jewish community in Palestine, which would become Israel, were mostly Ashkenazi Jews, so there was more Yiddish influence than Ladino. But you can find a little. One of those is a pile of money, like a wad of cash, in Hebrew is a stefah.

Nehemia: Stefah? Okay.

Elon: This is a slangy term. That word comes from Ladino, and originally from Greek-Turkish.

Nehemia: Interesting.

Elon: So, it didn’t come all the way from Spain, because for the hundreds of years that Ladino speakers lived in Saloniki and other areas of Greece, also in the Balkans, they adopted many Turkish and Greek words. If you want a word that goes all the way back to actual Spanish and to Latin, you can say… this is a very slangy word. Something that’s really of poor quality, like it sucks, I don’t know… you could say it’s democulo.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: Which comes from an archaic form of Spanish meaning “from the ass”, like “from your behind”, your rear end.

Nehemia: Okay!

Elon: That came all the way from Spanish via Ladino to Hebrew.

Nehemia: Okay, wow! I read somewhere that Ben Yehuda’s wife coined the word chanukiah, and she claimed that she had heard Ladino speakers use it. And that iah ending is really not common in Modern Hebrew, not in that sense. So that’s interesting. There you have a word that obviously has a Hebrew origin, Chanukah, but then this particular formation of it supposedly comes from Ladino. I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s what she claimed.

Elon: Maybe.

Nehemia: And they may have been using it for centuries in the Ladino world, so, very interesting.

Alright, absolutely fascinating. Any final words that you want to share with the audience?

Elon: No. I very much enjoyed this, and look forward to talking with you again, and…

Nehemia: Wonderful. Thank you so much, alright. Oh, say one last thing maybe about the Hebrew word lehitra’ot. Do you have anything you’ve ever written on that? Because that’s a great word, “goodbye”.

Elon: Well, lehitra’ot literally means “to meet again”, I guess.

Nehemia: “To be seen again.”

Elon: And like, “seeing each other.” It’s like…

Nehemia: Ah, “to see one another.” It’s a reciprocal action. Yeah, okay.

Elon: Yeah, so it’s really saying, “that we may see each other again”.

Nehemia: It’s so beautiful. Have you ever written about that in your weekly column?

Elon: I actually haven’t. No, I haven’t.

Nehemia: I’d love to read that if you…

Elon: Maybe greetings could be something I can…

Nehemia: Alright, wonderful, lehitra’ot. Thank you for being on the program.

Elon: That may be the hardest part of my work at this point, is finding words to write about, because I’ve written…

Nehemia: We’ve brought up two in this conversation, lehitra’ot, and I forgot what the other one was.

Elon: Ba’al.

Nehemia: Oh, giddulei Ba’al! That’s a really interesting one! And s’dot Ba’al. Yeah, interesting. Awesome, wonderful, thank you so much.

Elon: Thank you. Thank you so much. I’ll look into those, I hope.

Nehemia: Wonderful.

You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!

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VERSES MENTIONED
Psalm 19
Leviticus 16
Enoch 8-10
1 & 2 Thessalonians

BOOKS MENTIONED
ההיסטוריה הסודית של היהדות (The Secret History of Judaism)
by Elon Gilad https://www.steimatzky.co.il/011562998

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices #197 – Nehemia on “Grotto in the Tar Pit”: Part 1
Hebrew Voices #198 – Nehemia on “Grotto in the Tar Pit”: Part 2

OTHER LINKS
Elon Gilad’s articles at Haaretz: https://www.haaretz.com/ty-WRITER/0000017f-da24-d494-a17f-de27cac80000

Elon Gilad’s Twitter/X: https://x.com/elongilad

The post Hebrew Voices #201 – The Origin of Hebrew Words appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.