Today I was thinking about the word teiva תבה. In the entire Bible, it only appears twice: as the word for Noah's ark and for the baby Moshe's basket.

Here is Klein's entry for teivah:

1 ark, box.

NH 2 Holy Ark (in the synagogue).

PBH 3 word.

[Prob. a loan word from Egypt. tbt (= chest; coffin). Arab. tābūt (= box, case, chest, coffer), is a Heb. loan word.]

I can easily understand how the word progressed from meaning 1 ("box") to meaning 2 ("Holy Ark in the synagogue" - although the word for the Ark that carried the Tablets of the Law in the desert is aron ארון.) But how did teiva come to mean "word"?

This was surprisingly difficult to research. First of all, the dictionaries that I thought would help me - Ben Yehuda, Jastrow, Klein, Even-Shoshan - all mentioned the various meanings, including "word", but didn't explain the shift in meaning.

Secondly, since the meaning is "word", searching online is really challenging. If I'm looking for a web page or article, I often search for the the term and include the various meanings. That will usually pull up something helpful. But since the meaning is "word" - well, that appears on probably every page. Not really beneficial.

So I had to try a little harder. I did find some discussion of it in the dictionary Aruch Hashalem by Alexander Kohut. He says that some claim that teiva meaning "word" comes from a different source - an Arabic root meaning "to cut."

I recently wrote an essay for the journal Tradition entitled "Words of Ailing, Words of Healing" where I discussed the origins of Hebrew words relating to illness and health, in the light of the current pandemic.

One of the words I mentioned was dever דבר - "plague." After discussing the word for pandemic, magefa מגפה, I continued:

A more common Biblical word for plague is dever. This word does not appear to be related to the very common word devar meaning “word, speech.” More surprisingly, it is not cognate with the word hadbara – “extermination.” That word comes from a third Hebrew root, which meant “to follow behind” or “to push forward.” This meaning led to the word midbar – “desert,” which was a place where cattle were pushed forward to graze. In the more intense hifil form of the verb, hidbir, “pushing forward” became “subdue, overwhelm,” and from there came the meaning “to eliminate, exterminate.” (“Yadber sonenu,” we recite in the Prayer for the I.D.F., asking God to “subdue our enemies.”)

I wrote that midbar מדבר in English is "desert". But another common translation is "wilderness." Which is correct?

Well, in some ways, this is more a question about English semantics than Hebrew. Let's look at what the two English words mean.

Today most people would say that desert is a barren land, likely arid, and probably hot and full of sand. A wilderness, on the other hand, is full of wild vegetation, but not settled by humans.

However, these were not the original meanings of the words. "Desert" was an abandoned place (think of the verb "to desert" = "to abandon".) Only in the 20th century did desert become associated with aridity.