In Parashat Chukat, the Torah records a very public affair wherein Moses spoke and/or acted improperly at the Waters of Merivah, leading Hashem to say, “Because you did not believe in Me to sanctify Me in the eyes of the Children of Israel, therefore you will not bring this congregation to the land that I have given them” (Num. 20:12). This essay focuses on the different terms used in Hebrew to denote something occurring “publicly” by tracing the etymologies of these various synonyms and thereby highlighting the nuances between them. Those words include b’rabim, b’tzibbur, parhessya, pirsum, and b’pumbi.
A term that refers to “a mass of individual people” it tzibbur. Indeed, the term tzibbur in the Mishnah generally refers to the “general public” as a legal construct that can own things and appoint public servants. To that end, tzibbur is used in reference to “communal” sacrifices that were paid for by the Jewish People as a whole (Pesachim 6:5, 7:4, Shekalim 4:1, 7:5-6, Yoma 2:7, 3:7, 6:1, Sukkah 5:7, Zevachim 5:5, 14:10, Menachot 2:2, 4:5, 5:7, 9:4, 12:4, Temurah 1:6, 2:1-2, 3:4, Kritot 1:6) and to the concept of a cantor/chazzan who leads the prayers or otherwise discharges the masses of their Halachic obligations as the “messenger of the tzibbur” (Brachot 5:5, Rosh Hashanah 4:9).
Although the word tzibbur itself is never used in the Bible, its etymology can be traced to Biblical Hebrew, as the word clearly derives from the triliteral root TZADI-BET-REISH. That root occurs seven times in the Bible (Gen. 41:35, 41:49, Ex. 8:10, Hab. 1:10, Zech. 9:3, Ps. 39:7, and Job 27:16) and always refers to the act of “gathering/amassing” a collection. In it quite intuitive how an inflection of this term can be used in reference to the “public” at large which is — after all — an amassing of people.
Another two words in Rabbinic Hebrew that refer to something done in “public” are parhessya (sometimes pronounced farhessya) and pirsum. Rabbi Eliyahu HaBachur in Sefer Tishbi writes that these two words mean the same thing, but that parhessya is a noun used to refer to “publicity,” while pirsum is a verb that refers to the act of “publicizing” something or someone. Both of these words do not appear in the Bible or in the Mishnah, but they do appear in the Talmud. In fact, these two terms are quite common in the Babylonian Talmud, although the word parhessya only appears in one teaching in the Jerusalemic Talmud (Peah 1:1, Sanhedrin 10:1).
The consensus of philologists, linguists, historians, and other scholars is that the Rabbinic Hebrew word parhessya is actually a loanword borrowed from the Greek parrhesia (“open,” “frank speech,” “outspokenness”). That Greek word has been parsed as a shortened form of panresia, which is derived of the prefix pan- (“total,” “all,” “encompassing”) and retos (“speech,” related to rhetoric). In this way, parrhesia refers to the notion of being able to speak one’s mind, which might entail saying any and all sorts of things.
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