Thursday 8 August 2019

Meanings of "Sanverim" and "Nefesh"

From RRW
Guest Blogger: Mitchell First

                                       The Meanings of “Sanverim” and “Nefesh”

                “Sanverim” (samekh-nun-vav-resh-yod-mem) appears only three times in Tanach: at Genesis 19:11 and II Kings 6:18 (twice). The first is when the men who pressed Lot were smitten with “sanverim.” The second is at II Kings 6:18, concerning the men who were with Elisha.   What is the meaning of this unusual word?
                 Rashi: blindness.
                 Rashbam: blindness and destruction.
                 Ibn Ezra: something that darkens the eye and the heart.
                 Radak: it is an abbreviation of “sonei reiah” (=hates looking); it means “blindness.”
                 Elijah Levitas: someone who sees but does not understand what he sees. He is called a sanor.
                 Malbim: some form of distorted vision but not actual blindness.
                 S.D. Luzzatto: it originally meant “hates light” (=sonei or).
                 Rabbi S.R. Hirsch: it is composed from “thorn”  (“sneh”) and “light.”
                 Rabbi Dr. J.  Hertz: temporary loss of vision.
                 Soncino: confused vision, seeing an object that is not there and not seeing one that is.
                 Evyatar Cohen: it derives from the Hebrew word for snow (=”senir,” see Rashi to Deut. 3:9). The light of the sun reflected by the snow can blind people.
                 Hayyim Tawil:  It is a loanword from the Akkadian verb “sunwurum,” “to make radiant, brighten.” In Hebrew, it developed into “a blinding radiant light.” He then quotes another scholar who connected it with a different Akkadian word that meant “night-blindedness.”
                 In contrast to all of the above, what is found in the modern day Koehler-Baumgartner lexicon? It means “illumination,” from the Hebrew N-R, “ner,” and it is used as a euphemism, with the samekh as a prefix.  (I do not recall other instances of samekh used as a prefix. If there are, please tell me.)
(For much of the above material, I would like to acknowledge Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, What’s in a Word?, weekly email of Oct. 25, 2018.)
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          The Arabic word 'awira or awar, is very possibly the source of a common English word.  The  Hebrew word,  “blind,” is from the same Semitic root as Arabic awar, “one-eyed,” hence “damaged.” The Arabic word may underly the English word “average.” “Average” seems to have originally referred to a tariff that had to be paid on imported goods, taking into the account the proportion of goods that would be expected to be damaged!

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           What about the word N-F-Sh?  The original concrete meaning was likely “throat, gullet,” the organ used for breathing and eating. Then it evolved into meaning “a living being, person.”       

           For example:
                Isa. 5:14: “Sheol has opened wide its gullet and parted its mouth to a measureless gap.”
                Jonah 2:6:  “Water envelops me up to my throat.”
                Ps. 69:2 and 124:4: “Water reached to the throat.”
                Ps.105:18: “His feet were subject to fetters, an iron collar was put on his throat.”

             N-F-Sh also developed into a verb: “breathe.”  I will discuss this root in a future column where I will finally explain the meaning of that difficult phrase in the Shabbat morning kiddush: “shavat va-yinafash” (a quote from Exodus 31:17).
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            Last week I raised the issue of why the liver has a name from the root Caf-Bet-Dalet (=“cabed”). Some had suggested that this was based on the concept of its “heaviness,” but I was a bit skeptical. My son Shaya had learned about shechitah in his semichah class at Y.U., with hands-on demonstrations. He read my column and then pointed out to me that the liver was indeed a very heavy organ in large animals. It is very dense and much heavier than it looks. I then saw that Wikipedia called it “the heaviest internal organ and largest gland in the human body.” So now I am much more open to accepting the connection between liver and C-B-D=heavy!

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Mitchell First is a personal injury attorney and Jewish history scholar. He can be reached at MFirstAtty@aol.com.   His vision is very good, and he breathes very well but he does not eat liver.

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