My recent column on the names of some of the holidays prompted a lot of questions about the Hebrew word for "holiday" itself: hag.
By DR. JOEL M. HOFFMANHebrew Hear-Say logo(photo credit: )
My recent column on the names of some of the holidays prompted a lot of questions about the Hebrew word for "holiday" itself: hag. (There are other words, too, like mo'ed. We'll cover them another time.) The word hag comes from the root het.gimel.gimel, and while it means "holiday," it has traditionally referred specifically to the three "pilgrimage" holidays: Succot ("the festival of booths"), Passover and Shavuot ("the festival of weeks"). For this reason, some translators prefer "festival" for hag.
Increasingly, though, the word denotes any holiday, so hag same'ah is heard in Israel for Succot, but also for Independence Day.
As I pointed out a few weeks ago, the three traditional hagim also enjoy the name r'galim, literally "feet," or so it seems. The word for "foot" is regel, and it has two plurals. One is raglayim, a plural form that, like yadayim or einayim, reflects the anthropocentric observation that feet tend to come in pairs. We see the other plural, r'galim, a handful of times in the Bible, first in Exodus 23:14: "Three r'galim shall you celebrate for Me each year." But even though "three pilgrimage holidays shall you celebrate for Me..." would make sense, the word r'galim almost certainly means "times," as in "three times a year shall you celebrate..."
We see the same word in Numbers 22, where it certainly means "times." Curiously, there too the number of r'galim is three (referring to the three times that Balaam hits his donkey), raising the interesting if remote possibility that the word r'galim has a peculiar linguistic preference for "three."
The word hag also means "turn," as in Saul Tchernikovsky's stunning poem about an eagle, in which the eagle "hag ilem b'or tzorev," "circles mutely in searing light." Even though this second meaning seems related to the first - after all, holidays, hagim, are cyclic in nature, coming around every year - the word hag meaning "turn" doesn't come from the root het.gimel.gimel. Rather, it's a so-called hollow verb, from the root het.vav.gimel.
Because both double letters and vavs weave in and out of Hebrew spelling, it's common to mix up doubled-letter roots (like h.g.g) with hollow ones (like h.v.g). Perhaps surprisingly, it's not even so uncommon for these completely different roots to overlap in meaning.
The common Hebrew word hug, variously "club," "activity group," "university program" and others, comes from this root and ultimately reflects the same metaphor as "circle of friends" in English.
Also from the root h.v.g is the noun mahog. It's a clock hand, that is, something that goes around. (If you're of the newer generation, ask an elder what I mean by clock hands that go around.) In fact, the word refers to any needle that rotates or turns to indicate a value, such as on a speedometer or compass. (The English word "needle," too, may have its roots in turning, coming from the Latin nere, "to spin," as in, "to spin thread," from which it became the Old English word for that which is used in connection with spun thread.) Perhaps relatedly, the word mahog is also a fancy Hebrew word for "gesture," maybe having roots along the line of the English "contort," which is ultimately from the Latin torquere, "to twist." A gesture is a particular contortion of the face or hands or what have you.
The verbal form of h.v.g is hiyeg - the vav becomes a yud for complicated reasons that we'll go in to another time -- and it means "to dial," as in dialing a phone. Once again, young readers, for whom dialing a phone a consists of pushing buttons, may not immediately understand the connection, because they may not know that numbers were once arrayed in a circle on phones, and a rotating disk used to provide the mechanism for transmitting a number. Moving the disk was calling "dialing," - l'hayeg, in Hebrew - and then the word came to mean more generally "indicating a telephone number." Words are like that, morphing in meaning, frequently preserving arcane facts about the past and every so often demonstrating that what goes around comes around.
The writer teaches at HUC-JIR in New York City.http://www.Lashon.net
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