In the Chazzan’s opening supplication of Shacharit Shemoneh Esrei on the first day of Rosh HaShanah, the poetic introduction reads: “I am scared as I open my dialog to extract [words from my mouth] / I have arisen to supplicate the face of the awesome (nora) and fearsome (dachil) One / I am small [i.e. lacking] from [good] deeds therefore I trepidate (azchil)... / Power me and strengthen me from weakness and fear (chil).” In these few lines, the Kalonymide poet Rabbi Yekutiel bar Moshe who authored this piyyut uses three different terms that refer to “fear,” and all three of them actually rhyme with each other — dachil, azchil, and chil. In this essay, we will explore the etymologies of these three terminologies and consider whether or not they are truly synonymous.
Let us begin our exploration of these words with the term chil, which is the most common of the three in Biblical Hebrew. The term chil, or chal, refers to “fear” and to “the bodily tremors resulting from fear.” A famous instance of these words in the Pentateuch appears in the Song of the Sea, which reads, “The nations heard and they were trembling [yirgazun] / a fear [chil] had taken hold of the inhabitants of Philistine” (Ex. 14:15). Similarly, in describing how the nations of the world began to fear the Jewish People after they successfully defeated Sichon, king of Cheshbon, the Torah says, "and they will tremble [ragzu] and fear [chalu] from before you" (Deut. 2:25).
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (to Ex. 14:15) explains that chil refers to a specific type of fear, whereby the old guard becomes scared of how they will be affected by a changing paradigm. He explains that this is why chil is a type of fear often associated in the Bible with childbirth (Jer. 6:24, 22:23, 50:43, Mic. 4:9, Ps. 48:7), as the mother is scared of what her place will be in the family after the birth of a new child — or perhaps, she even fears whether she will survive childbirth itself. In the same way, when the Philistines heard about the Jews crossing the Red Sea, they realized that the Jews were set to conquer the Holy Land. This led them to worry about what their situation will be in that new reality and how it will affect them.
The CHET-LAMMED string from chil/chal is sometimes doubled to produce the word chalchal, which denotes a physical reaction to an especially scary situation that causes a person to tremble or shake out of sheer fright (see Isa. 21:3). The prophet Yechezkel foretells of a time when the nation of Cush will experience such tremors (Ezek. 30:4, 30:9). Similarly, the Book of Esther relates that when eponymic heroine Esther first heard about Haman’s decrees against her people, her reaction was vatitchalchal — body spasmed and shook out of fear (Est. 4:4). Indeed, the rabbis (Megillah 15a, Esther Rabbah §7:14, §8:3) said about Esther that on the spot she either menstruated, miscarried, or defecated/urinated because she was unable to control her bodily movement in reaction to the terrifying news.
Now we can segue to the word dachil, which derives from the triliteral root DALET-CHET-LAMMED. That term does not occur in Biblical Hebrew, yet declensions of that root nonetheless appear six times in the Aramaic parts of Daniel (Dan. 2:31, 4:2, 5:19, 6:27, 7:7, 7:19). The most famous of those cases is when Daniel saw the Fourth Beast, which he described as dechilah (Dan. 7:7) — “scary.” Besides for appearing in Biblical Aramaic, inflections of dachil are typically used by Targum in rendering the Hebrew terms yirah (“fear”), nora (“fearsome/awesome”), and pachad (“fear”). For examples of this, I refer the reader to Rabbi Eliyahu Bachur’s work Meturgaman. For our purposes, it is pertinent to note that Targum Onkelos translates the word chil in the Song of the Sea (Ex. 15:14) as dachla, as he does with the word chalu used to describe the other nations fearing the Jews after the victory against Sichon (Deut. 2:25).
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