As we mentioned earlier, the Biblical Hebrew uses a few more term to express the concept of "here," each with its own nuances and contexts of usage. The term heinah in the sense of “here” appears when Joseph tells his brothers, "you shall bring my father down here [heinah]" (Gen. 45:13), emphasizing a distinct destination. Similarly, David is warned by the Jebusites, "you shall not come here [heinah]" (II Sam. 5:6), and Abraham’s descendants are promised a future return after their exile, "in the fourth generation, they shall return here [heinah]" (Gen. 15:16). Heinah also appears in poetic or descriptive contexts, such as when Elisha splits the water, causing it to divide "here and there [heinah v’heinah]" (II Kgs. 2:14), or when Jeremiah describes exiles seeking the path "here" (heinah) to Zion (Jer. 50:5). The word zeh has a broader meaning of "this," but is occasionally used to mean "here" (i.e., “this place”) in specific contexts. For instance, Balaam invites Balak’s messengers to "stay here [zeh]" (Num. 22:19), and Moses instructs the spies to "go up here [zeh]" (Num. 13:17). In another example, King Saul commands the people to slaughter their cattle "here" (I Sam. 14:34), emphasizing that action should performed on the spot and not elsewhere. Finally, koh typically means "so/thus" or "such/like," but occasionally functions as "here" in specific contexts. Examples abound: Jacob directs his household to "set here [koh]" the items before him (Gen. 31:37), and the Israelites travel "a day’s journey here [koh]" (Num. 11:31). Like heinah and zeh, koh also connects to broader meanings, illustrating its versatility.
As we will explain, these additional words, while overlapping in meaning, reflect different shades of "here" in Biblical Hebrew, shaped by context and connotation. Rabbi Avraham Bedersi (a 13th century Spanish scholar), in his book Chotam Tochnit on Hebrew synonyms, writes that while the words po and halom mean “here” in the strictly spatial sense, the word heinah differs in that not only does it refer to “here” in a spatial sense, it is also often borrowed to mean “here” (i.e., “now”) in a temporal sense. For example, when Hashem tells Abraham that after the Egyptian exile, his descendants will conquer the Holy Land, He says: "and the fourth generation will return heinah [here] because the sins of the Amorites have not been filled until heinah [now]" (Gen. 15:16). Although in that verse, the first time heinah appears it means "here" in the spatial sense, the second time the word appears it means "now," not "here." Hashem's point was that the Amorites' sins had not yet reached a critical mass that made them deserving of being removed from the Holy Land. Similarly, when Jacob said that he had not seen his son (Joseph) "until heinah" (Gen. 44:28), he means that the entire time since Joseph's disappearance, he had not seen him. Rabbi Bedersi also notes that the word heinah in this context should not be confused with its homonym heinah (found for example in Gen. 6:2, 21:29, II Sam. 17:28), which is a form of the word hein ("they/them" in feminine form).
To differentiate between the words poh and zeh in the sense of “here,” Rabbi Luzzatto draws a semantic distinction between a general term for a given place (qua) and a more specific spot within a general location (qui). Given that paradigm, he explains that the word poh refers to a more specific place. Examples of such usage in the Bible include when Abraham tells Eliezer before the Binding of Isaac to return "here" with the donkey (Gen. 22:5), when Hashem tells Moses to stand "here" with Me on Mount Sinai (Deut. 5:27), and when Moses declares that the Covenant at the Plains of Moab applies not only to those “here” but also to those who are not “here” (Deut. 29:14). In all these cases, poh is used to denote “here” because the antecedent refers to a very specific place. In contradistinction to this, he explains that the word zeh when meaning “here” refers to a less specific place, for example, when Judah wished to pay the “prostitute” that he visited, but was told “there was no prostitute in zeh [“this general area”]” (Gen. 38:21–22).
With this distinction in place, Rabbi Luzzatto offers an intriguing explanation of a word-switch in the Bible that occurs when describing Balak’s attempts to persuade Balaam to curse the Jews. At first, Balak sends a group of emissaries to Balaam to convince him to accept the devious mission, and Balaam seems open to their request saying "sleep over the night here [poh]" so that he may confer with Hashem in a nocturnal prophecy (Num. 22:8). When Balaam then decline Balak’s request, Balak sends another, larger and more prominent, envoy to Balaam. This time, when Balaam tells them to stay the night “here,” he uses the word zeh instead of poh (Num. 22:19). Why does Balaam switch from poh to zeh? Rabbi Luzzatto accounts for this change in verbiage by explaining that when the original emissaries arrived at Balaam’s home, he was able to host them and they were lodged within his home, so the more specific poh is used as the referent is a more specific place (i.e., Balaam’s home within the city where Balaam lived). However, when the second envoy arrived, they were too numerous and too posh for him to host in his own house, so they were hosted elsewhere in the city wherein Balaam lived. For this reason, the less specific word for “here” — zeh — is used in this context.
Rabbi Shlomo Aharon Wertheimer offers a similar explanation when sharpening the difference between poh and heinah, arguing that po denotes a more specific “here,” while heinah denotes “here” in a more general way. Moreover, he writes that the word po is more appropriate in dialogue when speaking to another person who is “here” with the speaker, while the word heinah is more fit to be used when the listener himself is not yet “here.” Rabbi Luzzatto further sharpens the differences between the words heinah, poh, and zeh when used to specify a location as “here.” He asserts — and offers various Biblical prooftexts to that effect — that heinah is only used when referring to “here” as the end-point of something that had travelled from elsewhere until it has reached “here.” It is often used when referring to somebody coming “here,” ostensibly from somewhere else (for examples, see Josh. 2:2, Jud. 16:2, II Sam. 5:6, II Kgs. 8:7, Ezek. 40:4, and I Chron. 11:5). By contrast, the terms poh and zeh refer to “here” in a more static context and do not necessarily imply any comparison or contrast with a different location. [It should be noted that Rabbi Luzzatto’s take on the words mentioned in this article is cited by the Malbim in his work Yair Ohr on Hebrew synonyms.]
As mentioned above, another word that sometimes means “here” in Biblical Hebrew is koh. For example, when Balam told Balak to stand “here” (near his burnt-sacrifices), he used the word koh (Num. 23:15, see also II Sam. 18:30). Rabbi Luzzatto claims that the Biblical koh differs from the other terms in discussion in that it does not quite refer directly to “here,” but to somewhere which is very close to “here” (seemingly based on the prefix KAF in the sense of “like/as”). Either way, the standard word for “here/now” in Mishnaic Hebrew is kan, which is understood to be a cognate of koh. Rabbi Chaim Yehoshua Kasovsky explains that the letter ALEPH in the word kan is simply there to differentiate it from the word kein (“yes/indeed/likewise”).
Targum often uses the word kah (spelled KAF-ALPEH) to render koh, while Targum uses the word halcha to render halom (Ex. 3:5, Jud. 18:3) and heinah (Gen. 45:5, Josh. 2:2, 3:9). A cognate of halcha famously appears in the Talmud (Bava Metzia 4a), when a person responds to the claim that he owes the claimant money by replying that he only owes part of the money claimed “and here [heilach] it is.” The discussion centers around whether or not this on-the-spot-payment constitutes a partial admission to the claimant’s initial claim.
Targum also uses the word hacha (which is also common in Talmudic Aramaic) as an Aramaic rendering of the Hebrew words poh (Gen. 19:12, 22:5, Ruth 4:1) and heinah (Gen. 15:6, Joshua 2:2). Interestingly, in his work Cheshek Shlomo, Rabbi Pappenheim writes that Rabbinic Hebrew collapses the two Biblical Hebrew words po and halom into one Rabbinic Hebrew word kan by using the word kan instead of po and l’kan instead of halom.
