SONSINO’S BLOG, rsonsino.blogspot.com
Rabbi Rifat Sonsino, Ph.D
It is noteworthy that many classical Hebrew texts contain a number of foreign words. Let’s start with examples from the Bible:
In the Hebrew Bible, in The Song of Songs, we have the word pardes (4:12), meaning “park,” or “garden” (our “paradise”) and egoz (6:11), meaning “nut-tree.” They are Persian loan-words, indicating that the Song was probably written during the Persian period (6th-4th cent. BCE).
It is well known that after the destruction of the first temple of Jerusalem in 586 BCE many Jews were exiled to Babylonia (today, Iraq) where they lived for a number of years, and many of them returned around 515 BCE to rebuild the Second Temple. One of the famous Jewish residents in Babylonia was the prophet Ezekiel (6th cent. BCE), a priest, who grew up in Judah but lived and prophesized much of his adult life in Babylonia. It is, therefore, not strange to find in his book a number of loan words taken from Akkadian, the language spoken in Babylonia at the time. For example: hashmal (Ez. 1:27) from elmeshu , meaning “a shining substance” (BDB). Or, eshkar (Ez. 27:15), from ishkaru, meaning “work assignment” or “gift” (BDB). Or, tsurah (Ez. 43: 11), from utsurtu, meaning “plan, design,” or “form” (Gesenius).
A large part of the biblical books of Ezra (c. 4th cent. BCE) and Daniel (c.2nd cent. BCE) are in Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Babylonian diaspora.
Similarly, many Rabbinic texts contain Greek words, because Greek was the dominant language of the many Jewish communities in the Middle East during and after the first century CE. For example, Midrash Rabba, a text composed around the 4th century CE, contains a number of Greek words written in Hebrew letters, such as (on Gen. 1) pedagogos, “nanny;” palatin, “palace;” matrona , “woman;” or astrologos, “astrologer.”
On the other hand, modern Hebrew has many English words written in Hebrew letters, such as “Hi,” “Bye,” “please,” “OK” or even using a verbal form, such as ledaskes, namely “to discuss.”
It is interesting to note that Hebrew has contributed a number of words to English, such as Mazal tov (“congratulations”), amen (“verily, “certainly”), behemoth (“beasts”), or hallah (“egg-rich yeast-leavened bread”). Similarly, Yiddish has added many words to our English language today, such as shlep (“carry”), schmooze (“talk”), bupkes (“least amount”), klutz (“clumsy”), or tchotchke (“trinkets”).
These examples show that Jews, wherever they lived, appropriated words prevalent at the time and contributed to society special words of their own vocabulary.
