When the miraculous occurrence of the Burning Bush piqued Moses’ curiosity and he approach the bush to get a closer look at the intriguing spectacle, Hashem called out to him saying, “Do not approach here [halom], remove your shoes from upon your feet...” (Ex. 3:5). In that verse, the Bible uses the relatively-rare word halom to mean “here,” instead of the more common word poh which also means “here.” In fact, the word halom is so rare that it only appears eleven times in the Bible, while the word poh is much more common as it occurs a total of 82 times. In this essay, we explore the synonyms halom and poh, as well as other Hebrew terms that mean “here” — attempting to trace the respective etymologies of these words and honing in on the unique connotations borne by each word.
In expanding on the Burning Bush incident, the Talmud (Zevachim 102a) explains that Moses wished that Hashem would grant him the “kingship” (i.e., a form of leadership that would be inherited by his children), but that Hashem denied that request by responding, “do not approach here [halom].” The Talmud buttresses its assertion that the “kingship” was under discussion here by postulating that the term halom always connotes something to do with royalty. This postulate is based on a verse in which King David wonders why he merited to be anointed king, saying: "Who am I, O Hashem the God? And who is my household that you have brought me until here [halom]" (I Sam. 7:18). Just as the word halom in the context of David refers to the kingship, so does that word in the context of Moses refer to the kingship. Maharsha (to Zevachim 102a) adds that this exegesis is also supported by the fact that in the Burning Bush narrative, the Torah uses the irregular term halom to mean “here,” instead of the more common word poh. A similar exegesis is also found in Bereishit Rabbah (§45:1) regarding the appearance of the word halom concerning Hagar's vision (Gen. 16:13).
Rabbi Shmuel David Luzzatto extrapolates from this Talmudic discussion that the word halom differs from its ostensible synonyms in that it connotes “here” as an important, special place — as opposed to the other words discussed in this essay which could also connote “here” as a more banal or prosaic place. (See Maharsha to Zevachim 102a and HaKtav VeHaKabbalah to Gen. 16:13, who go into detail in explaining different examples of how the word halom in the Bible connotes something related to “kingship” or something otherwise “royal/important” about the place referred to by the word “here.”)
In a similar vein, Rabbi Shamshon Raphael Hirsch (to Gen. 16:13) explains the word halom by comparing it to its semantic counterpart pa’am. Just the verb po’em refers to the rhythmic beat of a foot as one “walks” on the ground, and the noun pa’amon refers to a “bell” with the potential for a rhythmic sound (produced by the clapper banging against the shell), so does halmah refer to “breaking” or “beating” something as with a hammer.
Following that parallel, Rabbi Hirsch explains that just as a pa’am (“instance/time”) refers to a single step in the overall continuum of time, so does halom refer to a single step in the overall continuum of space, meaning halom marks a specific place to which one may be marching as finally “here.” As Dr. Lawrence Resnick fabulously sums up Rabbi Hirsch’s explanation of this word, “halom never means ‘here’; it means ‘hither’ (to here)... halom denotes a single spatial step forward, up to here." The truth is that, as my colleague Rabbi Eliezer Cohn has pointed out, Rabbi Hirsch actually follows his great-uncle Rabbi Yehuda Leib Shapira-Frankfurter (1743–1826) who already wrote in HaRechasim LeVikah (to Gen. 16:13) that halom always means “to here.”
While the classical lexicographers like Ibn Saruk, Ibn Janach, and Radak see the word halom as a derivative of the triliteral root HEY-LAMMED-MEM, Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim takes a different approach. He sees the final MEM as extraneous to the ultimate root, thus arguing that the word actually derives from biliteral HEY-LAMMED. He further explains the core meaning HEY-LAMMED as relating to "spreading out," leading him to a whole listing of words that derive from that root that relate to that theme. For our purposes, that list includes the word halah (“there/so forth”), which refers to a distant place that covers a wide region that could be viewed as “spreading out” over a large space. In a similar sense, Rabbi Pappenheim explains that halom refers to “here” as a narrower region that spreads from a single point (“you are standing here”) and encompassing only its immediate environs, but nothing farther away.
Rabbi Yosef Grayever of Ostrow (1808–1898) sees the core meaning of HEY-LAMMED as “separation,” and sees halom in the sense of someplace important as related to that because it is “separated” from the rest. To give Rabbi Grayever’s explanation justice, we will need to devote a full article to treating his understanding — something I hope to do in the future.
Let’s now turn our attention to the word poh. The funny thing about that fairly common word is that it is sometimes spelled PEH-HEY (as in most of its occurrences), sometimes spelled PEH-VAV (twenty times in Ezek. 41–42), and once spelled PEH-ALEPH (Job 38:11). Because of this, there is a dispute among the early triliteralist lexicographers as to the word’s root: Rabbi Yonah Ibn Janach (in his Sefer HaShorashim) and Rabbi Shlomo Ibn Parchon (Machaberet HeAruch) trace the word to the biliteral root PEH-VAV, while Radak (in his Sefer HaShorashim) traces it to the biliteral root PEH-HEY. Menachem Ibn Saruk in Machberet Menachem takes a third approach, tracing poh to the monoliteral root PEH (as that letter is the lowest common denominator among all spellings of the word.
Like Radak, Rabbi Pappenheim traces the word poh to the biliteral root PEH-HEY, whose core meaning is "mouth" (peh). The way he explains it, the place denoted as "here" is metaphorically similar to a mouth in that it is an opening or means for one to reach another place, just as the mouth is an opening by which things can enter or exit the body.
