While on his deathbed, Jacob gathered his sons to offer them blessings before his demise. In doing so, Jacob prayed that the future territory of his son Judah will yield an abundance, saying that the Tribe of Judah should attain “redness of eyes from [an abundance of] wine, and whiteness (lavan) of teeth from [an abundance of livestock to produce] milk (chalav)” (Gen. 49:12). In this essay, we focus on the Hebrew words for “white/whiteness,” starting with the word lavan mentioned in this passage. In doing so, we will consider how lavan differs from its apparent synonyms chivar and tzochar. To do that, we trace the etymologies of these different words and compare them to various cognates to sharpen their nuanced meaning.
The word lavan in the sense of “the color white” appears many times in the Bible, with a majority of those instances clustered around the laws of leprosy (Lev. 13). Inflections of this root also appear as verbs that mean “whitening” (Isa. 1:18, Yoel 1:7, Ps. 51:9) and “elucidating” (Dan. 11:35, 12:10).
The classical lexicographers all trace lavan to the triliteral root LAMMED-BET-NUN, which means that lavan derives from the same root as the Hebrew nouns leveinah (“brick”), levanah (“moon”), livneh (“styrax” or “white poplar” tree), and levonah (“frankincense”). The former of those words appears twelve times in the Bible, with a plurality of its appearances in the Book of Exodus in the context of the enslaved Jews needing to produce their own “bricks” when working for the Egyptians. A verb form of that word which means “preparing bricks” also appears in the Bible (Gen. 11:3, Ex. 5:7, 5:14).
The three-letter string LAMMED0BET-NUN also makes appearances in proper names. For example, the personal name Lavan (Laban) appears multiple times in Genesis in reference to Jacob’s uncle/father-in-law. Later on, Jacob’s grandson Gershon had a son named Livni (Libni) who is mentioned several times in the Bible (Ex. 6:17, Num. 3:18–21, 26:58, I Chron. 6:2-14). It is possible that Livni was actually named after his great- great-grandfather Laban. A man named Levanah was listed as descending from the Netinim (mentioned in Ezra 2:45 and Neh. 7:48).
Several place-names related to lavan include Livnah (Libnah), also known as Lavan (Laban), one of the places to which the Jews travelled in the Wilderness (Num. 33:20-21, Deut. 1:1); Libnah, a Canaanite city-state near Lachish that was conquered in the time of Joshua (Josh. 10:29-39, 12:15); and Levanon (Lebanon), a mountain range north of the Holy Land, especially related to the often snow-topped Mount Lebanon. Nowadays, Lebanon is also the name of the country directly north of the State of Israel.
Since Hebrew and Arabic are both classified by linguists as Semitic languages, it makes sense that a word related to lavan would pop up in Arabic. Indeed, the Arabic word laban refers to "milk," but more specifically "sour milk." Either way, it relates to the Hebrew word lavan because its color is invariably "white. This Arabic term is actually the basis for the Yiddish and Modern Hebrew term leben (“coagulated sour milk,” “yogurt”).
While most grammarians and philologists see the word lavan as derived from the aforementioned triliteral root, Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim (1740–1814) takes a wildly different approach. He developed a system of Hebrew etymology wherein core two-letter roots may be joined with the letters HEY, ALEPH, MEM, NUN, TAV, YUD, or VAV to create three-letter roots. In line with that system, Rabbi Pappenheim offers an original way of understanding the word lavan by seeing the final NUN of its root as non-essential to its core, leading him to trace lavan to the biliteral root LAMMED-BET (lev, “heart”).
Chivar
Our next word for “white” is chivar. This word appears once in Biblical Hebrew in the verb that refers to the “whitening” of one’s face (Isa. 29:22). In Modern Hebrew, it likewise refers to somebody whose face has become “pale.” But looking more broadly, the word chivar actually just means “white.” It already appears in Biblical Aramaic in the phrase tlag chivar, which means “white snow” (Dan. 7:9). In fact, chivar is the standard word in the Targumim for translating the Hebrew word lavan. Some readers might be familiar with an inflection of chivar in the phrase chamar chivaryan (“white wine”) mentioned in the Pitum HaKetoret prayer, while other readers might recognize the Talmudic term michavarta to refer to an explanation which is deemed the “whitest”— that is, the “clearest,” or “most logically-sound.”
*To read the full article about the words lavan, chivar, tzachor and chalav, check out Ohr Somayach online: https://ohr.edu/this_week/whats_in_a_word/
