Words from this week's reading, traced to their roots by David Curwin, the Hebrew Language Detective. Each begins with the verse where the word appears and continues in his own words.
teruah
וּתְקַעְתֶּ֖ם תְּרוּעָ֑ה וְנָֽסְעוּ֙ הַֽמַּחֲנ֔וֹת הַחֹנִ֖ים קֵֽדְמָה׃
And when ye blow an alarm, the camps that lie on the east side shall take their journey.
Rosh Hashana is coming up this week, and I thought I'd look at some of the words associated with the shofar sounds heard on that day. Since the biblical name for Rosh Hashana is Yom Teruah יום תרועה (Bamidbar 29:1) or Zichron Teruah זכרון תרועה (Vayikra 23:24), lets start by looking at the word teruah תרועה.
In the section of the Torah detailing the laws of the trumpets (Bamidbar 10:1-10), a distinction is made between the tekiah תקיעה - "the long blast" and the teruah, "the short blast". The tekiah is used for gathering the camp together and happy occasions, whereas the teruah indicates the camp should move, and is used at times of war. However, the verse (10:5) uses a combination of the roots to describe the blowing of the teruah: וּתְקַעְתֶּם תְּרוּעָה (ut'kat'em teruah). Milgrom, in his JPS commentary there, explains as follows:
short blasts: Hebrew teru'ah, verbal form heri'a, in contrast to "blow long blasts," taka'. It should be noted that the term "blow long blasts" is expressed simply by the verb taka' (vv. 3-4), but "blow short blasts" requires the compound expression taka' teru'ah (vv. 5-6). The reason for these distinct forms is twofold.
(1) The term teru'ah and its corresponding verb heri'a refer elsewhere to a vocal shout by warriors (e.g. Josh. 6:5,10, 16, 20) and worshipers (e.g. Pss. 47:2; 95:2), whereas the sole verb signifying the blowing of a horn is taka' (e.g. Josh. 6:13). Hence when the text wishes to express the idea of blowing the teru'ah signal on the trumpet it must either use the verb taka', signifying blowing on an instrument, and the object teru'ah to indicate the appropriate signal, or, if it uses the verb heri'a, it must specify that the sound was produced by a trumpet (v. 9).
shlemiel
וְעַ֨ל־צְבָ֔א מַטֵּ֖ה בְּנֵ֣י שִׁמְע֑וֹן שְׁלֻֽמִיאֵ֖ל בֶּן־צוּרִֽישַׁדָּֽי׃
And over the host of the tribe of the children of Simeon was Shelumiel the son of Zurishaddai.
There are many theories as to the origin of the word "shlemiel" - an unlucky, clumsy person. (I'll stick with this spelling over "schlemiel" - although there are as many spellings as there are explanations as to its origin. As Rosten writes in Hooray for Yiddish , page 286, "In Hebrew and Yiddish, the sing letter shin represents the sh sound; to begin an English word with sch is to call for the sk sound, as in 'school' or 'scheme'.")
First of all, it's important to understand how the word entered English. Despite some discussion to the contrary, it's clear that the word entered German from Yiddish, and not the other way around. It became popularized in German via the 1814 story "Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte" ("Peter Schlemihl's Remarkable Story") by Adelbert von Chamisso. However, English apparently adopted the word shlemiel directly from Yiddish, not via German. (It is still used in German, and even the name of the Sesame Street muppet Lefty is "Schlemihl" in the German version).
Now to the Yiddish origins. I'll admit from the outset that I don't know the "true" origin, and I doubt any of us ever will. But I will review the various theories and tell you which seem more or less likely to me.
1) Even-Shoshan suggests that it is a corruption of the similar Yiddish word shlimazel (or schlimazel). Schlemazel is a combination of the German schlim (= "bad, crooked", related to the English "slim" ) and the Hebrew mazal מזל (= "luck").
shaka, shkiah, and sheka
The Hebrew root שקע shaka means "to sink [down], submerge, depress." It only appears six times as a verb in the Tanakh, and once more as the noun מִשְׁקָע mishka in the phrase מִשְׁקַע־מַיִם, meaning "settled [literally 'settling/sinking of'] water" in Yechezkel 34:18.
However, the uses, forms, and derivatives expanded in Rabbinic, Medieval, and Modern Hebrew. Let's take a look some of them.
While the primary meaning of the kal form of the verb שָׁקַע is physical sinking, we already find in the Torah a more figurative sense. Bamidbar 11:2 says וַתִּשְׁקַע הָאֵשׁ - that the fire subsided, died down.
In Rabbinic Hebrew we find the verb used to describe the setting of the sun - שקע השמש (or שקע החמה). From here we find in Medieval Hebrew the familiar term שְׁקִיעָה skkiah - "sunset" (an abbreviated form of the longer term שְׁקִיעַת־הַחַמָּה, which is found in earlier Talmudic literature).
This is also the origin of the modern word שֶׁקַע sheka. It originally could mean depression, indentation, or hollow recess, but today it means electrical socket or outlet, presumably because of the recession it's formed by.
The piel form of the verb, שִׁקַּע, isn't used frequently today. It can mean submerge, but I think הִטְבִּיעַ is more common. However שִׁקַּע does have a scientific use - "to precipitate" and the noun form שִׁקּוּעַ means "precipitation", in the chemical sense of the "sedimentation of a solid material from a liquid solution". But the meteorological version of precipitation - "water that forms in the atmosphere and falls back to the Earth's surface" - is rendered into Hebrew as מִשְׁקָעִים miska'im. That's a form of the biblical word miskha we saw earlier, which in Modern Hebrew now means "sediment, residue, deposit."
More from Balashon on Beha'alotcha
At the table
- Read Numbers 10:5 aloud. Now that you know where תְּרוּעָ֑ה comes from, what do you hear in the verse that you didn't before?
- Why might the Torah say שְׁלֻֽמִיאֵ֖ל in Numbers 10:19? What would be lost with a more ordinary word?
- Which of this week’s words do you use in Modern Hebrew? Has the meaning moved since the Torah used it?