Bari, in his opinion, derived from “choosing the best food to eat.” Modern linguists, however, say the two roots are unrelated.
Steinberg says that bara, “to create,” indicates the “removal” of something from nothing – i.e., creation ex nihilo. Could there be a connection to bara meaning “create”? Steinberg suggests that they both come from an earlier sense, which is connected to the root bar – “to set apart, separate.” This root gives us such words as barur – “clear, distinct” and baraita – the Tannaitic sayings not included in the Mishna. This is clearly a sign of an earlier era, when fatness was a sign of health. While starting in post-Biblical Hebrew the word bari began to mean “healthy,” in the Bible, the word meant “fat” (as in the beriot cows in Pharaoh’s dream in Genesis 41).
Heal synonym free#
Steinberg came up with the creative idea that during sleep, our ideas become strong and are therefore free of the rule of the intellect. It derives from a root meaning, “to become healthy, strong.” A number of attempts have been made to connect it to ḥ alom – “dream.” Some say that when you dream, you are sleeping “well.” Another theory is that having dreams is a sign of maturity, and as we mature, we become stronger. Haḥlama is the Hebrew word for “recovery” (from illness).
From here he derives the meanings of “strong and strength,” and storage is “something closed away from others.” Klein, however, says that the two roots have different etymologies, since “to be strong” has cognates in Aramaic and Arabic, and “to store” is connected to a separate Akkadian root. The nineteenth century Jewish linguist Yehoshua Steinberg connected the two meanings, saying they derive from an earlier common root meaning “to close, to stop, to hold tightly”. This comes from a root, ḥasan, meaning “to strengthen.” There is debate among scholars if this meaning is related to its homonym, meaning “to store.” This latter root gave us the words maḥsan – “storeroom”, and through Arabic, the English word “magazine” (a cartridge that holds ammunition as well as a periodical which houses multiple articles). The Modern Hebrew word for vaccine is ḥisun. In Biblical Hebrew this word can also mean “to be weak.” The linguist Menachem Kaddari in his Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew brings an opinion that the piel form of the verb from this root, ḥila, meaning “to entreat, to supplicate” (as found, for example, in Exodus 32:11, “But Moses implored the Lord his God”) is related to “weakness.” The explanation he mentions says that this sense derives from trying to “weaken the anger.” Kaddari also mentions a different opinion, which says that ḥila is cognate to an Arabic root meaning “to be sweet,” since the supplicant is trying to make the “angry face more pleasant.” If so, it would be related to the sweet sesame paste halvah, which derives from that Arabic root. The word for disease is maḥala, and an ill person is a ḥoleh. 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.”) 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. According to the linguist Ernest Klein, in his Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language, the word eres, “poison, venom,” entered Hebrew in the post-Biblical period and may derive from the Latin “virus.”Ī more common Biblical word for plague is dever. Both words come from the root n-g-f, which means “to strike, to smite.” (The post-Biblical word for boot, magaf, is from a different root.) In modern Hebrew, the word negif was coined to give Hebrew a word for “virus.” While “virus” comes from Latin, it does have a related word in Hebrew. It appears in the Bible 26 times, as does the related synonym negef, which is found seven times.
The word most commonly used today to describe the pandemic is magefa. It should therefore not be surprising that many Hebrew words relating to illness and health have very ancient roots. While the coronavirus has led to a crisis like nothing seen in over a century, humanity as a whole, and the Jewish people in particular, have experienced plagues and epidemics over the millennia.
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