Vayeshev: Mercantile Man
The Bible reports that around the same time that Joseph was sold as a slave in Egypt, his older brother Judah met the daughter of a man named Shua and married her. Shua is described as an ish c’naani (Gen. 38:1), which typically would mean “a Canaanite man.” However, rabbinic tradition teaches that Judah’s father-in-law was not actually a Canaanite, but rather the word c’naani used to describe him means “merchant.” In this essay, we explore the three Biblical Hebrew words for “merchant” — socher, rochel, and c’naani — as well as the standard Aramaic word tagar. In doing so, we seek to clearly understand the various etymological bases of these words, and show in what ways these various synonyms differ from each other.
The Biblical Hebrew term socher in the sense of “merchant” appears approximately sixteen times in the Bible. For example, when Joseph’s brothers threw him into a pit, the Bible relates that Midianite “merchants” later passed by, implying that they bought Joseph as a slave and sold him to the Ishmaelites (Gen. 37:28). In that context, the term used for “merchant” is socher. Other Biblical Hebrew declensions of the triliteral root SAMECH-CHET-REISH from which socher derives include verbs for “engaging in trade” and nouns that refer to “merchandise.”
Another meaning found in words root derived from SAMECH-CHET-REISH is “around.” This meaning is seen in the Biblical word scharchar (Prov. 38:11), which refers to round-going moving (in Modern Hebrew, scharchoret means “dizziness” “vertigo”). In fact, the common word in Targum for the Hebrew saviv is s’chor (“around”). The Talmud similarly uses an expression that refers to what a person might tell a Nazirite (who is forbidden from drinking wine) who comes close to a vineyard: “Go go (lech lech), turn around, turn around (sechor sechor), do not approach the vineyard" (Shabbat 13a and more).
While Ibn Saruk and Ibn Janach seem to understand the “merchant” and “around” meanings of this root as two unrelated concepts expressed by the same root, Radak bridges the gap by explaining that a “merchant” typically travels “around,” so it makes sense why the same root would mean both “merchant” and “around.”
Another word in Biblical Hebrew that means “merchant” is the masculine noun Rochel (and feminine noun rochelet), which appears seventeen times in the Bible, mostly in the Book of Ezekiel. Rashi (to Arachin 23b) actually defines rochel as socher, thus showing that he saw those two terms as more or less synonymous. Interestingly, an adjacent term derived from the same root REISH-KAF-LAMMED, rachil, refers to “slander” (rechilut) and famously appears in Lev. 19:16 (as well as in five other passages such as in Prov. 11:13). This is because merchants who travelled from place to place were often seen as tale-mongers, because they would bring all sorts of news and rumors from one place to the next.
Rashi (to Lev. 19:16) comments that the CHET of the word Rochel is interchangeable with the letter GIMMEL, thus associating the word Rochel with regel (“foot”) and meragel (“spy”). As Rabbi Avraham Bedersi (in his work Chotam Tochnit) explains it, a merchant in some ways has to function like a spy, going from place to place to scout out the best merchandise to buy and sell. We may add that perhaps a Rochel would typically travel by foot to panhandle his goods, hence its associated with the word regel. This understanding bears similarities to the aforementioned explanation regarding socher, whose etymology hints to the idea of a merchant needing to go "around" to buy and sell his products.
*To learn about how all of this relates back to the word c’naani in the sense of “merchant,” check out the rest of this essay at the Ohr Somayach site: http://ohr.edu/this_week/whats_in_a_word/
Miketz: Say it Clear (Part 1 of 2)
Throughout the stories of Joseph interpreting the dreams of the Pharaoh’s butler and baker, and then of the Pharaoh himself, the Bible uses the verb poter (“interpreting”) and the noun pitaron (“interpretation,” “meaning,” or “solution”) exactly fourteen times (Gen. 40–41). These terms are inflections of the triliteral root PEH-TAV-REISH, but beyond this pericope, no others words derived from that root appear anywhere else in the Bible! Instead, the Bible and later Hebrew typically use a whole slew of other terms for “interpretation,” like pesher, beiur, peirush, and hesber — but not pitaron. This essay attempts to define the various Hebrew terms for “interpretation” with more nuance, and use that understanding to show in what ways they resemble and differ from one another.
Radak in Sefer HaShorashim looks only at the cases in which inflections of pitaron appear in the Bible as his evidence, and based on that evidence concludes that pitaron refers specifically to the “interpretation of a dream,” and not to all others sorts of interpretations. Rabbi Meir Leibush Weiser (1809-1879), better known as the Malbim, in his work Yair Ohr makes the same point, and explicitly uses that to differentiate between pitaron (which refers to interpreting dreams) and its near-synonyms peirush and beiur (which refer to interpreting other things, like enigmatic texts).
This usage of pitaron is also found in the Talmud (Brachot 55b), which teaches that at one point in history, there were twenty-four potrei chalomot (“dream interpreters”) in Jerusalem, using an agent noun (that is, a noun derived from a verb) based on this Biblical Hebrew term for dream interpretation.
Although until now we’ve only encountered inflections of poter that refer specifically to “dream interpretation,” the Talmud sometimes uses inflections of poter as if to say about a certain teaching, “It should be interpreted as referring to...” — even if that teaching has nothing to do with dreams.
